Archive for WTF?

Red Audi L311 XPV, you’re a wanker

About 4 weeks ago, I was walking #2 to cubs with #4 in tow when some wanker in a red Audi, registration number L311 XPV, came tearing round the perimeter road at 60mph+.  The speed limit – on account of the road being around the outside of a housing estate with houses and junctions on both sides of the road – is 30mph and has those stupid speed blisters.  If this kidney donor had hit one of the speed bumps at the wrong angle at that speed he could have been off the road and up the pavement and if he didn’t kill himself doing it, I’d have ripped him a new arsehole.

I heard him coming up the hill and got my phone out to record him.  From cresting the hill to disappearing round the corner took 4 seconds.  This is an unbelievably dangerous speed.

To my amazement, the Police have said that they won’t do anything about it because they can’t see the number plate on the video, even though I read it out on the video as he screamed past.  You can’t see the number plate because he was driving too fast for the camera to catch it.

Anyway, seeing as how it won’t be used as evidence, here’s the video on YouTube.

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One rule for politicians, one for the rest of us

A policeman from Newcastle has been convicted of causing death by dangerous driving after hitting a 16 year old girl who walked into the road in front of him.

The policeman was doing 94mph in a 30mph limit without his blue lights and sirens, hence the dangerous driving charge, but he was on duty and accelerating to catch up with a car that had been flagged up on his ANPR.

PC John Dougal has been remanded until the 1st of May when he will be sentenced and the judge has already told him that he’ll be going to prison.

While it was a serious error – and evidently a criminal error – to not use his lights and siren, he was a qualified advanced police driver and the girl stepped into the road in front of him.  Contrast this case with the unqualified, non-advanced driver, Lord Ahmed, who ran over and killed Martyn Gombar whilst texting from his mobile phone at 70mph – Lord Ahmed was given a 12 week sentence and served only 6 weeks.

Will PC Dougal be back home halfway through June?  Will he bollocks.  There’s one rule for politicians and one rule for the rest of us.  PC Dougal will be made an example and locked up for a couple of years while Lord Ahmed walks free after committing the same crime under far worse circumstances because he’s a Liebour politician.  Ahmed even went on to threaten a terrorist attack on the House of Commons and still he’s not behind bars.

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Value for money, isn’t it?

HM Court Service introduced the Libra computer system in December last year 7 years late and £260m over budget but it went live without the ability to issue a summons in Welsh, which has been a legal requirement since 1967.

The service says it intends to add the functionality in by September this year at a cost of around £4m and in the meantime it is having summonses translated by the Ministry of Justice.  So far the MoJ have spent £425 on translating summonses meaning it will take 1,569 years to recoup the £4m cost of automating the translations.

Talk about pissing money up the wall.

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You must be 945 years old to read this

What’s the point of legislation imposing age limits on buying certain products when retailers clearly know better?

I’m sure we’re all quite used to seeing signs in supermarkets telling you that it’s an offence to buy alcohol unless you’re 18 and then another sign telling you that if you look under 21 you’ll be asked for ID.  Some shops even say that they’ll ask for ID if you look under 25.

There are signs telling you that you can’t buy cigarettes without ID unless you look over 21 but the legal age to buy them is 18.  Then there’s knives – you have to be 18 to buy a knife but the signs in the shops tell you you have to be 21 or 25.  And not forgetting glue and solvents of course, you have to be 18 to buy them but shops won’t sell them to you if you’re under 21.

I appreciate that retailers are held responsible if they serve someone under-age but the signs often say they won’t serve you if you look under 21 or under 25, not that they will ask you for ID.  I don’t have a problem with the ones that say they will ask you for ID, I do have a problem with the ones that say they won’t serve you.

This rant isn’t random, there is a point to it.  I went to get petrol today and I noticed a new sign on West Mercia Police headed paper attached to the petrol pumps.  It says that you can’t use the pumps unless you’re 21 years old.  Bearing in mind that you can legally ride a motorbike at 16 years old and you can drive a petrol powered invalid carriage at 16 if you’re registered disabled and the law says that you only have to be 16 to buy petrol, why are the police putting up signs telling you that you have to be 21 to use a petrol pump?  The job of the police is to enforce the law, not make it up as they go along.

Edit:
West Mercia Police have replied to an email I sent them earlier about this saying that they’ve done it elsewhere to try and cut down the availability of fuel for people riding mini-moto’s and off-road bikes illegally.  They say that it only applies to sales of fuel in cans and that most people riding illegally are under-age.  Mini-moto’s are a pain in the arse, especially when they’re ridden on footpaths around the estate but it’s still not the job of the police to make up laws as they go along.  Besides, the biggest motorbike problem around here is the two grown men who ride their road-legal quads around at breakneck speed.  The police know who they are but they’re still doing it so presumably they haven’t had a visit.

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Bah Humbug

Although I’m looking forward to Christmas more this year than in the past, I’m starting to remember just why it is that I detest the run-up to Christmas.

BBC Breakfast had carol singers on this morning.  Carol singers.  A month before Christmas.  But it gets better.  Someone at work bought a Christmas chocolate log the other week and the best before date …

xmaslog.png

Out of date a week before Christmas.  That really is taking the piss.

Bah Humbug.

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Open up, I’m from the Ginger Protection League

A man in Perthshire has been jailed for assaulting a police officer, singing Spider Pig at them and calling another one “ginger”.

Best go through all those posts and find the references to ginger strawberry blonde people before the anti-terrorist squad come knocking on the door.  Is there anything that can’t be used as “aggravation” in a crime nowadays?  Racially-motivated, gender-motivated, disability-motivated, ginger strawberry blonde motivated.  When will it stop?

Hat-tip: Axel in the comments on this post.

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Parliament “too white”

Harriet Harperson, the Minister for Women and Equality (there is no Minister for Men, of course, making it one of the most ironic job titles in the history of modern politics) has decided that the British government is “too white” and they must make efforts to make it more representative of the general population.

She’s even intending to launch an inquiry into why there are more white men in parliament than women or ethnic minorities and “positive discrimination” has been mooted again as a way of cheating the system to fulfill arbitrary quotas.

The last thing we need in these troubled economic times is an expensive inquiry so I’ll save the taxpayer some money by telling Harriet Harperson the answer myself, free of charge:

Dear Ms Harperson,

I read, with interest, your comments on the “too white” British Parliament and wished to offer your my support.  I appreciate that words are of no use to someone with so many jobs and so much inequality to stamp out so I will offer you some practical support.

I note that you are intending to launch an inquiry into why there are so many white male MPs in parliament.  As luck would have it, I have previously investigated this and discovered the cause of this democratic defecit.  There are a number of factors involved:

  • More white males want to be MPs
  • More white males put themselves forward for selection
  • More white males are voted to be candidates by their party
  • More white males are voted for in elecions

I hope this helps with your investigations and saves you launching an expensive inquiry into how you and your colleagues became MPs.  I look forward to reading your proposals for ensuring that parliament has adequate quotas of ethnic minority, female, disabled, homosexual, trans-gender and other oppressed sections of society.

Kind Regards,

Wonko

If anyone else wants to send the findings of their own investigations, you can contact Harriet Harperson by email at harmanh@parliament.uk.

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Public Health Warning

“The authorities” in the West Midlands are appealing for possible victims of a HIV-infected man who has been knowingly having unprotected sex with women for a couple of years to come forward and get tested so they don’t unwittingly pass the infection on to others.

Unfortunately, the man can’t be named for legal reasons even though he’s been convicted so they’re advising any women who think they might have slept with a man they can’t name, describe or show a picture of after being picked up in a club in the West Midlands in the last couple of years to get themselves tested.

What a fucking joke.  Name the bastard, put his picture on the internet and on billboards around the West Midlands and then handcuff him to a lampost in Broad Street in Birmingham for a couple of hours.

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It’s time to tighten those belts

The governer of the Bank of England has said that we might be entering into recession which is don’t panic the plebs code for “shit, how am I going to keep up the payments on my yacht”.  Of course we’re in a recession, we’ve known for months that it was starting and that things were only going to get worse.

All of which means we need to tighten our belts and when I say “we” I’m including the state.  We can’t afford to throw billions at banks but Alistair Darling has done it anyway.  But it might not end there – El Gordo told the world that they’d look at letting banks that have had taxpayers money paying dividends after 12 months after investors told him what a crap investment a bank that can’t pay dividends for a couple of years is.  But then Federal Europe poked its nose in and said that the banks can’t pay a dividend for 5 years otherwise they’ll class the money the banks have had as state aid and then the British government will get fined and the banks will have to pay the money back as a penalty for having been given the money before Federal Europe decided to move the goalposts.

But it’s not just bailing out banks by the Treasury that has got to stop – local authorities spend billions collectively and they need to do their bit to save cash as well.  There was a story in the Shropshire Star last night, next to the story about Daisy the cow going missing (don’t worry, she was later found in farmer Jones’ field), was a piece on Telford & Wrekin council’s accountants warning the council that they’re facing a funding gap fo a couple of big projects.

Telford & Wrekin have committed to part funding a rail freight terminal to the tune of £3.6m.  They intend to fund this by selling council-owned property.  It’s a lot of money but they can comfortably dispose of £3.6m worth of property, even though the property market has fallen on its arse.  But they’re also ploughing ahead with a massive “regeneration” programme from the Borough Towns Initiative which requires an investment from the council of £21.4m to be funded almost entirely from selling property and topped up with a load for about one and a half million.

You can see where this going can’t you?  Shame the council doesn’t seem to be able to.

There are several large house building projects under way in Telford and they’ve all scaled back building to almost nothing.  The council owns lots of land and property that’s ripe for housing or commercial development but the housing market has dried up and companies aren’t splashing out on new buildings because nobody has got any money.  To raise that kind of money through property and land disposal is going to mean selling a damn sight more than they would have done as little as three months ago and in doing so they will have sold assets at a cut down price that will, in all likelihood, return to their previous value in a year or two.

I’m all for regeneration and god knows some parts of Telford desperately need it.  I expect the promised regeneration of the estate I live on is all hanging on this Borough Towns Initiative money but we simply can’t afford it.  The previous Labour administration pioneered the scorched earth policy they seem to have adopted nationally increasing spending, cutting council tax and spending a third of the council’s cash reserves once they realised they were going to lose the next election.  There is very little money in the kitty, the economy is on its knees, the cost of borrowing is high and committing the council taxpayers of a borough with a mere 160,000 residents to £25m of spending on the day the governer of the Bank of England admits we’ve entered into recession is bordering on criminally irresponsible.

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Give me a fucking break

Sony has issued a worldwide recall of its new game, LittleBigPlanet, in case it offends muslims.

They were warned by a beta tester that one of the backing tracks, written by a Somali muslim, contains two phrases that are in the Koran and might be considered offensive by fundamentalist muslim nutjobs.

Sony release a game last year with a scene where you could shoot people up in Manchester cathedral but they didn’t withdraw the game after they got complaints.  Yet here they are, without even getting a complaint, withdrawing a game because it’s got some words out of the Koran in it.

Apparently putting bits of the Koran to music is offensive because they’re words of god.  But Jesus was supposed to have been one of Allah’s prophets so his words were the words of god as well so why is it that muslims don’t start jumping up and down when they puts Jesus’ words to music?  Or any part of the Old Testament which is one of the holy books of Islam?  Why?  Because it’s not offensive, it’s just an excuse to have a fucking whinge and take the piss.

Manzoor Moghal, of the Muslim Forum think-tank, explained that words from the Koran should not be set to music because the words are seen to have come directly from God.

He added: “We must compliment Sony for taking decisive action by withdrawing these games immediately, and releasing a version that is not offensive to Muslims.”

Yeah, well why don’t you just fuck off and live in a cave somewhere if you’re that bothered about being offended by the infidels?  If you don’t want to listen to the soundtrack of the game, don’t buy it.  If you hear it and it offends you then go somewhere where you won’t hear it.  Or alternatively, get a fucking life.

Someone remind me why we constantly pussyfoot around these people instead of depriving them of oxygen.

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Only in America …

… could someone not only consider suing god but actually manage to get a judge to hear the case.

Senator Ernie Chambers of Nebraska brought a law suit against god to get a permanent injunction to prevent “death, destruction and terrorisation” caused by him.

He says he has done it to expose the ridiculous legal system in America that lets you sue anyone for anything and may appeal against the judge’s decision to thrown out the case because god has no address so papers can’t be served on him.  Senator Chambers says that the judge has acknowledged the existence of god which means they accept that he’s omnipotent and therefore knows about the law suit.

And this is supposed to be the most powerful country in the world?

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Iceland now wants to join the EU!

The Bank of England is loaning £100m to the UK arm of Landsbanki so that it can repay its UK customers.

Landisbanki was nationalised by the Icelandic government last week and its UK arm closed down leaving customers here unable to access their money.

The Icelandic foreign minister has responded to the economic problems there – national debt at 500% of GDP and their top 3 banks nationalised – by saying that their long term goal is now to join the EU and the Euro and get bailed out by the European Central Bank.  No, that’s not a joke.  He said:

In the short term, out defence is co-operation with the International Monetary Fund and in the long term EU membership, adoption of the euro and backup from the European Central Bank.

So what he is, in fact, saying is that the English taxpayer will be bailing out one of their now state-owned banks and then bailing out the entire country if it joins the EU and becomes a net recipient of EU funding.  Not what I would call a good deal for the English taxpayer and if they do go down the route of joining the EU, not a good deal for Icelanders.  Their economy is up shit creek now but if they join the EU their paddles will be confiscated and given to a French farmer to use as kindling to set fire to his fields.  The Icelandic economy was, until recently, reliant on fishing, banking and services.  Banking is a no-brainer from now on, services are looking a bit dubious but fishing will at least let them feed themselves.  But not with an EU fishing quota though – they’ll end up throwing more back in the sea than they take home and that’s assuming the Spanish don’t get the quotas first like they did in our waters.

I wonder if the Icelanders have an equivalent phrase for “out of the frying pan and into the fire”.

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Darling loans banks 50% of GDP

Alistair McDarling has announced details of his master plan to save the banking sector.  He’s going to loan them 50% of the GDP of the UK.

I kid you not.  The taxpayer is stumping up £50bn now for the eight biggest banks and building societies and another £200bn is being given to the Bank of England for short term loans.  That’s a quarter of a trillion pounds in cash now.  Then a company is going to be set up – presumably along the lines of the DTI’s Small Firms Guarantee – to offer guarantees on £250bn of loans to banks and building societies.

Half a trillion pounds.  In 2006, the purchasing power parity GDP of the UK was $1.93 trillion – just under a trillion pounds at todays prices.  The Chancellor is loaning 50% of the Gross Domestic Product of the whole country to the banking sector.

Official national debt is £512bn.  The Centre for Policy Studies says that if Northern Rock liabilities and state pension liabilities (they’re taking money to pay into the state pension, it should be reasonable to expect it to be paid out) are added to the official figure then it’s more like £1.3 trillion or 103.5% of GDP.  Add this half a trillion on top and national debt is more like £1.8 trillion.  Count the zeroes – 1,800,000,000,000.  That’s 180% of GDP, 22% higher than Japan at the height of recession when banks were failing every few days and they were knocking zeroes off the Yen every couple of months.

What was it El Gordo said about not magicking money out of thin air?

But you know, when it comes to public spending you can’t just wave a magic wand to conjure up the money – not even with help from Harry Potter.

Quite.  So where the fuck did you find half a trillion pounds to give to the banks, eh?  Just to put a piggy bank-raiding session into perspective – half a trillion £1 coins weighs 2,090,000,000lbs.  That’s a seriously big piggy bank.

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JK Rowling donates £1m to Liebour

JK Rowling has donated £1m to the Liebour Party, saying that poor and vulnerable people would fare better under Liebour than the Conswervatives.

For fucks sake.

Did she not notice the 10p tax band being abolished? Of course not, the hourly interest on her £560m fortune is far and above the amount a poor and vulnerable person was allowed to earn before having to pay the normal amount of income tax.

Mrs Sane has been instructed not to buy any more Harry Potter tat for the spawn.

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PC gone mad…der

An Englishman’s Castle has been kind enough to reproduce a list of words and phrases that are now considered offensive by the British Sociological Association.

The list of racist, disablist and sexist terms include:

  • Old Masters
  • Immigrants
  • Developing nations
  • Black
  • Patient
  • The Elderly
  • Special Needs
  • Civillisation
  • Seminal
  • Disseminate
  • Chinese Whisper

I’ve checked the list and there’s quite a lot of words missing that were previously offensive, such as:

  • Jihadi
  • Rag Head
  • Golliwog
  • Nignog
  • Puff
  • Arse Bandit
  • Old Fogey
  • Bint
  • Bird
  • Old Dragon
  • Ball and Chain
  • Spick
  • Wop
  • Trouser Press

On balance it looks like we’ve made a net gain.

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Greenpeace green light for criminal damage

The Greenpeace ecoterrorists that broke into Kingsnorth power station during a protest against the proposed building of a new, cleaner coal powered station on to replace the current one, have been acquitted of charges of criminal damage.

The ecoterrorists broke into the power station and climbed the chimney during their protest causing the power station to be shut down and £30k worth of damage.

Their defence was that the law says you can cause reasonable damage to property to prevent greater damage being caused and that a new power station would cause greater damage to the climate than the damage to the power station.

Holy.  Fucking.  Shit.

This is going to open the floodgates for similar action, safe in the knowledge that a jury has just given the green light to ecoterrorists to cause tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage to private property if it’s in the name of fighting climate change.  Please, nobody tell Greenpeace and lets hope they don’t figure out that they’ve now got carte blanche to go around terrorising anyone and everyone in their fucking dipshit hippy crusade.

Oh shit, we’re too late.  Here’s one of the pale faced fuckwits talking to reporters outside the court:

This verdict we think marks a tipping point for the climate change movement when 12 normal people say that it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal fired power station because of the harm that it does to the planet then one has to ask where that leaves government energy policy.

Normal?  They broke into a power station, climbed a fucking 650ft chimney, shut down a power station and caused £30k of damage.  Fucking normal?  They’re fucking retarded hippy terorists that need locking up.

Where will it stop?  The ecoterrorists want to stop us driving cars because they say they’re damaging the environment so how long will it be before we can expect gangs of feral, dreadlocked ecoterrorist hippies roaming around housing estates trashing cars?

Won’t somebody do the decent thing and shoot these fucking retards?

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How long until Darling resigns?

I’m in the strange situation of feeling sorry for Alistair Darling.  Yes, he’s a fucking cretin.  Yes, he looks like like he’s got two caterpillars on his face.  Yes, he’s one of the English-hating jocks who signed the Scottish Claim of Right and then done what they can to make sure that England gets screwed over.

But putting that aside, he’s not in a very good position at the moment is he?  El Gordo spent a decade selling the family silver, cleaning out the bank accounts and borrowing the gross domestic product of a small African nation every year to make ends meet.  Now the One Eyed Wonder of Wankistan has got the top job, Darling is left with a set of accounts that would make an Enron executive shake his head and tut in disapproval.

And to top it all off, McBroon is still trying to spend money like it’s going out of fashion in a desperate attempt to bribe people into voting for Liebour.

This week Darling told us, in a roundabout way, that the economy is up the shitter and we’re not to expect things to get better any time soon.  El Gordo then went on to announce that it would be a jolly good idea if local authorities were to spend taxpayers money buying houses that are being reposessed.  This is in addition to their plans to offer cheap mortgages to people who are struggling to get on the property ladder or pay their mortgages.

So where’s the money coming from?  I don’t think Darling has a clue and El Gordo certainly doesn’t care.  The housing market has fallen on its arse, banks and building societies are announcing record losses and we’ve just entered a recession.  Yet the British government is still spending like there’s no tomorrow.  The 2012 Olympics were supposed to cost just over £3bn but the cost has now risen to over £9bn.  The war in Irag and Afghanistan is costing billions with no end in sight.  Federal Europe is fleecing us for billions of pounds every year and the price goes up every year.

There isn’t enough money to support the spending that El Gordo is committing.  Mother Hubbard has just had a quick look in the cupboard and it’s bare.  We’re fucking broke and the Goblin King is still coming out with all these batshit ideas without giving so much as a second thought to the cost.  All those people who nicknamed him the Iron Chancellor must be looking in the mirror every morning and thinking what a dick they sound now the shit is hitting the fan.

I can’t see Darling putting up with this for much longer.  The number two job has turned out to be a steming pile of number two and it isn’t going to get any better.  Assuming they aren’t cancelled in the interests of national security, there will be elections either next year or the year after.  Liebour stand about as much chance as a ghosts fart in a force ten gale of winning the next general election so Darling has two options – either tough it out and firefight as best as he can until the next election or resign before things get much worse and let someone else dodge the bullets.  My money is on the latter.

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Liebour double standards

Nuruzzaman Hira, a former candidate for the frankly bizarre Respect party and the equally pointless spin-off, Left List, has defected to the Illiberal Dumbocrats.

This wouldn’t be newsworthy in the slightest if it wasn’t for the response by the local Liebour nutters who said it showed a “lack of principle”.

Strange that because a lefty liberal defecting from a lefty liberal party to another slightly less lefty liberal party means that you can keep your lefty liberal principles with your new party.  Not so for Quentin Davies, the right wing capitalist Tory toff who defected to the nominally left wing socialist Liebour Party.

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Gordo planning to bail out the entire financial sector

No Mandate Brown has a master plan for reviving the housing market and turning round the market.  You’ll like it, it’s a stroke of genius.

What he’s planning on doing is allowing high street banks and other mortgage lenders to sell their mortgages to the Bank of England who will pay them in guaranteed government bonds.  The banks, having irresponsibly and unsustainably loaned money at up to 10 times the borrowers salary, will then have a guaranteed income from the taxpayer instead of billions of pounds of high risk debts.  The liability will, instead, pass to the Bank of England where it is underwritten by the taxpayer.

This will make the liabilities the nationalisation of Northern Rock has left the taxpayer with look like small change.

The man’s a fucking lunatic.

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Toe Knee Heart

You would be mistaken for thinking that I had just scanned in the latest wax crayon masterpiece by my 3 year old daughter but no, this is the work of a grown man.  He does come from Milton Keynes, though, which might explain a few things.

This is 60 year old John Yates’ proposed new British flag, the answer to 30 years of agonising over the exclusion of Wales from the butchers apron.

I had struggled with the idea of a new Union Flag for over 30 years but it was at the Eisteddfod that I saw someone selling the St David’s flags. It was like an answer to a maiden’s prayer.

Someone needs a hobby I think.  Or a new one, at least.

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