Oh, what a glorious morning!

Well done Boris, well done James, well done all 3154 (ish - Sky has it at 3156) of the councillors, new and old. Well done everybody who voted for them (actually, well done everybody who voted.)

Matthew Parris, constrained by the politesse of the "Times of London", considers voters telling the monocular spiv and his cronies to "push off". I don't think so.

There is some vaguely appalling film^* being advertised on the Underground at the moment with a picture of a large club with rusty iron spikes driven through it - a common man's mace (no, this not this). What voters have told the bunch of statist control freaks is to fuck off, right now, or we will anally rape you with as close as we can make to such a device before the (new-traditional) candiru fish, spectacular group bondingage exercises, quick trips to France, or, bluff old traditionalist that I am, the piano wire comes out.

* Updated to add: "Doomsday" - apparently made with £300k of public money. Nice 'work' if you can get it.

Somewhat Surprising

H/t to the Fat Nurse, via Dr Crippen, for this mildly entertaining waste of a few minutes:



A brief look around the block gave me some surprising results:

Devil's Kitchen hardly lives up to his hard won reputation for profane vitriol with a mere:



TerryWatch is really quite polite, despite the endless provocation:



al-Beeb maintains the Reithian tradition in at least one (tiny) aspect of its modern incarnation:



Mr E is surprisingly mild mannered:



Shotgun, on the other hand, appears to have confused the widget:

Populist Fool or Statist Cunt?

The question is being asked of Kenny MacAskill today, who has demanded that the UK government, in the form of Ruth Kelly, never a body corporate nor a person slow to shit all over the liberties of us mere peons, reduce the legal blood alcohol level for drivers from 80mg/100ml^* to 50.

It has to be said that this is not a new SNP policy - so they are, at least, consistent in their shit-headery.

"What's your problem?" you may be asking. Do I really want more deaths on the road? After all:

Drink driving remains a constant thorn in the side of efforts to make our roads and communities safer. The fact that 1 in 9 road deaths in Scotland were alcohol-related shows we need to do more.

Aaaargh. You utter fucking imbecile. If you want to educate people that drink driving is bad, then educate them - you're in charge of the entire Scottish education system for fuck's sake. You have an enormous PR and media budget. Prioritise the spend. But no, you are trying to change the law. You need (well, okay, you don't, you should have) a reason. A simple change of question for you.

It is not "How many road deaths are alcohol-related?", it is "How many deaths were attributable to the legal alcohol limit being 0.8g/l not 0.5g/l?"

Just one hint. Don't believe the BMA's figure of 65 UK-wide. They, just like our politicians, are another bunch of "Do as we say, not as we do", hypocrites.

* Science pedant here - what, exactly, is wrong with properly labelling this 0.8g/l? Maybe because that seems really small? Cunts.

Oh, for fucks sake!

Can the turkeys at HMRC not stop embarrassing the country for a couple of weeks, at least? Now, losing a couple of CDs is relatively easy - I have no idea where mine of the Berlin Philharmonic performing the 1812 overture is. They're not big and they're weren't being handled "securely". But this:

Contraband seized by customs officers has gone missing from a secure depot close to Coventry airport.

Police have been called in to search for the goods which disappeared from the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) store before last weekend.

A HMRC spokesman refused to comment on claims drugs, firearms and passports may have gone missing.

Utterly useless cunts. The mind boggles. Let me see, perhaps, "A junior official forgot to lock the door". Still, no chance of any minister resigning over this, or any other, fuck-up.

Tagged and Bricked

Well, I have finally been caught with the 10-bricks meme. And I have been thinking about it. I could, relatively easily, jot down 10 left-of-centre politicians or political commentators and all of my reader would have been content - not exactly intellectually exercised, but content. So, here is a slightly more thoughtful list. Please feel free to assume that there are plenty of poli-scum that I would include given a little more venom and a larger supply of bricks.

10. John D Morris. President of the "Institute for Creation Research". For a lifetime of labo(u)r to convince America that stupid children are better than skeptical ones. Your brick, Dr Morris.

9. Dalia Grybauskaitė. You probably won't have heard of this lady from Lithuania but she is the "European Commissioner responsible for Financial Programming and Budget". That would be the European Union that hasn't even managed to get its internal auditors to sign off its accounts for 13 years on the trot: "errors of legality and regularity still persist in the majority of EU expenditure." I will admit that it isn't all Dalia's fault - she has only been there since 2004 but, my dear, you are in the chair so the brick you get.

8. Terry. Come on, you know who. The fattest moron in Paisley. A brick unto thy face, foul beast.

7. Tom Cruise. Just stick to acting. I want to hear about your nut-job religion even less than I do Jamal's. A brick for you.

6. George "Pussycat" Galloway. Splitter :) Just for showing that ridiculous though the British political class are, there is always some cretin who can drag them further into disrepute. Here's your brick (at para 8.)

5. Nadine Dorries. Not for her opinions on abortion, or even for the errors in her minority report (see 7.) - I am happy for people to have beliefs different from mine and to make mistakes, honest or otherwise. No-one's perfect. This is for making a mistake, realising it and then running away to hide - you are an elected MP, you utter, utter scum. And all of those of you who get their knickers in a twist about blog comments policies can award yourself an honorary brick here too. Then grow up.

4. Michela Morleo. You've not heard of her either, have you? Well, just in case you thought that because it was il-liberal statist bollocks, it was the work of nu-Labour (Dawn Primarolo, honorary brick just for existing) or Professor Mark Bellis, or even Karen Tocque, this young lady is the "Alcohol Research Manager and Press Lead Club Health" at the North West Centre for Public Health, Liverpool John Moores University, who produced this crap. You are the worst sort of joyless statist, an evangelical commissar of the Brownite Soviet. Just learn to shut the fuck up and take your brick.

3. Mohammed Al-Fayed. Look, I'm not going to say much here because you've got almost as expensive lawyers as this crook (no, not Tim). Shut up about Diana. It was a car crash. You're driver was drunk. It was an accident and, for those who actually knew her or your son, a tragedy. Have two half-bricks.

2. The Great Clunking Fist. After painfully raping us in the wallet for 10 years, he is now trying to rape our minds and, if he could, our souls. To paraphrase Trixy: Fuck. Off. Right. Now. And. Die. You lying, evil, lapsed-Presbyterian cunt. Here's your brick.

1. David Cameron. For concentrating on being trendy instead of making the Tories electable. For not realising that your policy of scaled dis-engagement from Europe cannot work. For letting Brown get away with it. For just being so smug. Get a back-bone and take your brick.

And as Trixy wanted to be tagged, wasn't, so went ahead anyway, consider yourself post-article anointed. And RFS, please.

Cumbernauld College Cnuts

I didn't think that spending my lunchtime yesterday helping Mrs S-E with the messages would be quite so damaging to my piece of mind (Ed notes: Sorry about the pun. Originally a typo but left for, albeit limited, amusement value.) and equanimity.

Well, this bunch of nu-Lab led statists are in charge of this creep, who can't be bothered to run Cumbernauld College (am I being overly picky when I object to their website title being "Cumbernauld College, Glasgow, Scotland, UK"? Yes, it's got a Glasgow postcode but then Blair Atholl has a Perth postcode. Cumbernauld College is in sodding Cumbernauld, next to the Tesco Extra car park.)

Anyway ...

Cumbernauld College flies 3 flags. One is the saltire. Nothing much wrong with that. National flag of Scotland and all.

One is the Cumbernauld College logo. You might think nothing of this, especially if you are English, but it is actually illegal in Scotland. If you are going to fly any sort of logo, it needs to be registered with the Lord Lyon King of Arms and be in accordance with the rules of Scottish heraldry (which I doubt would permit 2 'C's or white on grey - the actual flag was grey on white IIRC). The cost of the registration is seen as a tax, hence you are defrauding Her Majesty's Revenue, with all of the draconian penalties modern democracies seem to feel appropriate for that most heinous offence.

CORPORATION BANNERS

These are the equivalent of personal banners for companies or other corporate bodies, trusts and local authorities which have been granted arms by the Lord Lyon. The flag shows the coat of arms filling its whole rectangular shape, as for personal banners. The extent of its usage depends upon the corporate body, whether it is only flown over the headquarters building or at all the corporate body's sites. Its use as a car flag is restricted to the head of the corporate body when acting as such. Its proportions are 5:4.

Then they had the EU bollix which, frankly, should only be flying in this country (and you can take that to mean Scotland, the UK or whatever) from EU buildings. Through sheer incompetence though, they got one thing 'right' - it was flying about 8 inches lower than the other two.

And no fucking Union Flag? It's not even an SNP led council. WTF?

Update: this appears to be the highest (27 Dec 2007) non-official return on a Google(.co.uk) search for "Cumbernauld College". Hah! Cnuts.

And they came in, two by two

It's fuckwit journalist time, again. Johann Hari and Neil Clark (what a surprise, I hear you snigger into your Gs&Ts).

First, we have a slightly-passed-its-best CiF excretion from Neil, in which he opines:

Let's not forget that the Nuremburg judgment held that to initiate a war of aggression was "not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". Allowing Blair and his fellow warmongers to get off scot-free for the illegal, murderous attack on Iraq would put us - the British people - in the same moral category as the Germans who stood by and watched as Jews were herded on to trains bound for the concentration camps.

No, you utter, utter dribbling moron. Even accepting your assumptions, which I don't, it puts us, the British people, in the same moral category as the Germans who stood by and watched as German troops marched on to trains bound for Poland or the Siegfried Line. The treatment received in the concentration camps (rather than internment itself) would have been illegal regardless of who started the war.

You would also have to question, if you were actually bothered about the cretin's piss-poor rhetoric, whether only Germans who knew what conditions were in the concentration camps (however many or few this may have been) would be guilty of a crime of omission?

Then, Johann at his metro-socialist worst:

The US troops cannot be an agent of anything positive in Iraq, after using chemical weapons in cities

Sorry? What the fuck? I seem to have missed the nerve agent pouring from US planes and shells into Sadr City. What is he talking about? Depleted uranium or white phosphorus? Both of those are controversial but neither are, despite this military legal opinion from George Monbiot, chemical weapons or otherwise banned.

For the pedants, I would note that merely being toxic does not a chemical weapon make, or lead would be banned from bullets. Look at the Schedules of Chemicals to the "Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction". Schedule 3, the one regarding chemicals you can produce because they have other uses, lists:

• Phosgene: Carbonyl dichloride
• Cyanogen chloride
• Hydrogen cyanide
• Chloropicrin: Trichloronitromethane

These are really nasty chemicals with a history of use as weapons (the last, in addition to being used to make dyes and disinfect grain, is used in tear gas).

Interestingly, neither DU nor WP are banned as incendiaries under the 1980 UN "Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons", either. WP gets a pass as it is WP-Smoke under Article 1, para 1(b) of the Third Protocol, with DU getting permitted as an armour-piercing projectile under para 1(b).) (Ed note: this is not to say that improper use of WP as an anti-personnel weapon might not be a military offence or, even, potentially, a war crime. It just means that WP is neither banned nor a "chemical weapon.")

Oh, and not that I have heard of any being used, but any use of riot agents would illegal use of chemical weapons if they were being used against troops. But, with the exception of the Iraqi military, the Coalition forces and the Iranian Republican Guard, there aren't any military in Iraq, therefore, if the Yanks did used riot control agents to put down an (armed) civilian riot, they would not be in contravention of international humanitarian law.

Cunt of the Day

Is an American, by name of Andrew Georgitsis, who

has led an expedition to the wrecks/war graves of HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales off Malaysia. Far from showing due respect to what is, after all, the tomb of several hundred sailors, his team penetrated into the area of the engine room and took pictures of human remains contained within:

www.shutterfly.com/pro...amp;idx=25

Incredibly, it appears this fcuking trumpet is offering the above print (among other images of the wreck) on fridge magnets, mouse pads, cards, etc. as can be seen from this link:

www.shutterfly.com/pro...=slideshow

Given the public reaction, not to mention legal proceedings, that would result from a similar dive on, say, Royal Oak, or even better the Arizona, the insensitivity and pure cheek of this guy is quite dazzling. If you want, you can, um, politely email him your...feelings, as I just have.

ag@5thd-x.com

With all of the political mongs, religious nutters and cretinous journalists who inhabit this blog, you'd think society would be pushed to come up with something that so utterly tops it. But no.

I am reminded of the probably apocryphal quote:

We have no more than fifty years experience in designing fool proof systems, nature has millions of years of producing fools.

H/T Cohaagen at ARSSE.

Update: This shit shows the same sort of "one rule for me, one for you" attitude that makes Jamal such a fascinating specimen:

This is nothing but a troll as you have been harassing me over the last few years, including 4 phone calls in the middle of the night wanting to debate this. So now you have found this forum and are trying further harass me, including the remarks about my personal photographs. Quite frankly I do not feel the need to answer your questions AGAIN, but will do so in hopes you will drop the phsyco babble.
...
Clearly, this is a subject we have different perspectives and opinions on. I understand it is a personal matter to you, but I should not be accused of anything other than documenting a wreck and the story of those who died on her.

Clearly the concept of "designated war grave" is clearly alien to the rights of the lesser-spotted American cretin.

More Euro-Cnutery

Via the British Computer Society:

'These survey results underline Europe's need for proactive online media education,' commented Viviane Reding, European commissioner for information society and media.

So the kids know what they are doing (actually, a survey indicates that ...), which means more EU involvement is required to screw it up? I am also not sure whether what she said is actually meaningful in English or any of the other 22 official languages of the EU. And why the fuck do we pay to have a "European commissioner for information society and media"?

Polly Hari

How can a person be so consistently wrong? Easy, be an over-paid left-wing polemicist in one of the nation's less discriminating viewspapers. (Interestingly, I am not sure Tony realises it is an insult?) So, taking on, as he has, this mantle of cretinous metro-socialism, channelling the very witch-queen herself, let's have a look at his latest ouvre:

One of the most gnarled and disingenuous clichés about Britain is that while our cities are coddled, the countryside is forgotten. The semi-feudal writers at The Telegraph and other temples of right-wing opinion proclaim incessantly that in the national distribution of resources, London always trumps Cumbria, and Glasgow always trumps Dorset. Now that foot-and-mouth disease has somehow seeped out of an American pharmaceutical lab and into the animal population, this complaint is poised to become the casual received wisdom once again.

Apart from the not-nearly as casual as it looks ad-hominem attack, we have one of the usual evidence free clichés of lefty journalism - attack the Americans. Everything must be their fault. Apart from the fact that this is a government laboratory and, even if the point source was their American tenant, the government would be responsible both for setting the biohazard containment levels and for verifying their effectiveness ...

But far from taking our cities too seriously, we treat their fate with a glib and casual self-assurance. By contrast, every single rural worry, no matter how unjustified, is given a wildly disproportionate weight in the national debate. If you want evidence, there are two fat examples this summer. If foot-and-mouth disease has carried beyond the initial Ground Zero, we will swiftly proceed - as we did in 2001 - to kick a hefty dent in our second biggest national industry, tourism, to rescue a tiny and economically worthless beef export market.

Olympics 2012, which will starve funding from the whole of the UK to dump benefit where, exactly. Hmm, London. But, I digress.

And, at the same time, we may be poised to hand the mayoralty of our biggest city to a reactionary rural clown.

Better that than a jihadi-embracing racist newt-fancier but that's just my opinion.

There is a simple solution to foot-and-mouth, followed by many South American countries: vaccinate all hoofed animals at birth. It hardly costs anything, and, as a result, no animals get sick or die. There are none of the periodic panics about the disease we suffer, and none of the pyres of burning animal corpses broadcast across the world, proclaiming to potential tourists your country is dangerous and closed for business. The only drawback to vaccination is that our beef would no longer be available for export, because most countries are still trying to fend off foot-and-mouth rather than accept it as a reality and vaccinate.

Yes, this would be a viable solution. Except for one tiny, little missing point. Her or, to be honest, the legions of bureaucrats who work for her. In Brussels, Strasbourg and in the UK. They won't let us. For excruciating amounts of detail on this from the last outbreak, see here. So don't blame British farmers, don't blame Boris, it is the EU you fuckwit. Can we leave yet?

But you only have to look at the figures to see why this really isn't that bad. The British beef export market brings in £700,000 a year, and employs fewer than 40,000 people. Almost none of that money is real profit: it comes from the £5bn of direct subsidies that we city-dwellers hand to the countryside every year.

Via the EU, you complete gibbering moron. The "Common Agriculture Policy". Can we leave yet?

For too long, we have allowed romantic ideas about ruddy-cheeked farmers to make us underrate and underfund our cities. Far from going to small farmers, most of our subsidies go to vast agribusinesses and millionaires: Tate and Lyle has received over £233m in subsidy in two years, and Charles Windsor and his mother are handed over £1m annually for their farms.

Errm, Johann, the EU - remember them? It's not the fault of the UK political right (although the Cameroonies seem to be heading in that awful direction) that the EU haven't engineered their market-destroying subsidies to support small farmers.

Now we seem poised to react to foot-and-mouth with the same tourism-trashing mania, and perhaps even to elect a shootin'-and-huntin' rural toff to run London. So remind me again - what were you saying about how we "ignore" and "neglect" the countryside?

1. We? Nope, the British Government doing what it is told by the EU. Can we leave yet?

2. Boris is a London political journalist, when he isn't in the marquee with the rest of the clowns. He represents the constituency of Henley. Henley is rural? A mere 2.2% of the jobs are in agriculture. To look at it another way, less than 8 times as many people are employed in "agriculture, hunting and forestry" than work in private households - nannys, cleaners etc.

An Irritation of Idiots

Yesterday Sorry, on Saturday, Katy asked:

There just seem to be a lot of stupid, parasitic, pointless, dense, unpleasant people around. Is this a new thing, or have they always been around and did I just not realise?

Thanks to KitchenWitch, we know that the appropriate collective noun for this form of the dross of humanity is "an irritation".

I should have seen the discussion as the omen it truly was. Mrs S-E had got us tickets to see the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, to see, amongst the others, some friends of hers who are in the Middlesex County Volunteers.

Unfortunately, an irritation of idiots (simpler than "SPPDU people", and somewhat more evocative) had arrived on a coach from Epsom (except one, who had apparently extremely irritated an Edinburgh taxi driver and had been taken by them to a police station) and sat behind us. And proceeded to whitter, endlessly, throughout the entire prelude to the performance (mildly irritating but hey) and then the cunts continued, in exactly the same fuckwitted way, for the entire sodding hour and three-quarters of the actual performance, including during the sunset hymn and last post. About the only time they were not gibbering in our ears was during the brief respite when they were failing miserably to sing the national anthem.

Their utter lack of knowledge of matters military or ceremonial, coupled with their complete inability to read the programme, made this all the less entertaining. To give you some idea of how pointless, mindnumbing and otherwise distracting this all was, their key topic of conversation during the performance of the Band of the Blues and Royals was whether the horses would crap on the Esplanade ('though, of course, being from Surrey, they were pointlessly irritating rather than crudely succinct). (Ed's note: Just in case anyone is interested, one did, but the irritation were already too busy discussing some other triviatics to spot this or the clean-up crew from what appeared to be the Tayforth OTC.)

Thanks a whole fucking bunch, you utter irritation of pointless scumbags.

You are asking the wrong people :)

We live in a civilised society, do you really have to swear? Surely you are capable of writing without recourse to foul language (sic)

Errm. Which part of "swearblogging" don't you fucking get you pathetic anonymong excuse for a castrato's jockstrap? Capable, yes. Willing, certainly, albeit not always. Having fun - we are, what about you?

S-E

Fuck off, Jowell

From Dizzy. This (and the original article here. The Gruniard. What a fucking surprise.)

Dear M(r)s Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport, with the extremely dodgy ex-husband, can I please make this clear? This is not "your-space"; it is not the "British Government's space"; it is not, contrary to your suggestion, "ourspace"; it is not even, with apologies to Dizzy, "my space". This is blogger (or blogspot, or whatever) and it belongs to Google (both my bit and Dizzy's). As long as we don't breach their rules, we can do what ever the fuck we want to, you egregious statist control-freak (and, of course, if Google asks us to cease and desist, we can go elsewhere. The joy of the internet.)

I don't care if Tim O'fucking'Reilly made his abortive puritan attempt to force some sort of Vanilla middle-Americanism on the net (and Jimmy Wales is another control freak of almost Nu-Lab proportions.) He is a private citizen (if, in certain circles, one whose opinions are considered of some weight.) You are an elected servant of the British public. Fuck off out of our lives, our thoughts and our expressions. Go home and weep into your empty house and leave those of us with real lives to get on with them.

You disgust me but, unfortunately, do not surprise me in the slightest. Oh for politicians of reason, sense and honour.

S-E

Shock News: Scots Tories are smug useless gits

It may come as a bit of a shock to denizens of this benighted socialist worker's paradise of Caledonia but there are Tories amongst you. I am one (head above parapet) and there are others about. There is even, supposedly, one representing us at Westminster but nobody has seen him for years.

Actually, that is demeaning our august presence in the (cough) glory fucking expensive waste of your and my money that is the Scottish Parliament. There are 17 amongst the vermin infesting the Holyrood debacle who, according to their website:

work for their constituents and hold the Executive to account, arguing for change and reform to our public services and standing up for Scotland.

Bollocks. What a bunch of utter (and soapless) tit-wank. These people are the biggest waste of political energy since Arthur (and don't I thank Larry and Sergey for that link.)

We also have a couple of poltroons at Brussels, Strasbourg or whichever Michelin-starred restaurant is currently being patronised. They clearly are orbiting nowhere near Planet Cameron because they claim to:

fight to bring some powers back to Scotland and Britain, arguing for a new Europe of freely trading sovereign nations.

Then show some fucking spine for once in your pathetic lives and join up here. It's the only way it is going to happen. And once it's happened, you can go and get a real job.

(Interestingly, the index page on their website is explicitly titled "Untitled Document", which says a lot about Scottish representation at the Eurocratic Federation. I am not kidding - I thought they had just failed to set the title attribute, but look at this:

< !-- InstanceBeginEditable name="doctitle" -->
<>Untitled Document< / title>
< !-- InstanceEndEditable -->

I don't presume that you write your own web-sites - you are politicians therefore you clearly haven't got real world skills - so get more competent staff. Smug euro-federalist cunts.)

Well, back to the point. Despite having fewer voting members than that other well-known bunch of weasels in a sack, the Scots Tories have fallen out with each other. On the face of it, this one called the rest of them a bunch of useless tossers (why this was news, I don't know - hardly required lengthy investigation and profound insight. Politician writes divisive memo, subsequently leaked to press ain't news either.)

If we are ever going to get these cunts out, without letting either of these two members of the Presbyterian fun-police in, the Tories are going to have to do some fairly difficult but basic things.

• Get some sensible policies backed by hard evidence and economic fact.
  
• Convince the electoral sheep that the hard lessons of the 1980's were necessary, otherwise our economy would look like this (right down to the bit about fishing.)
• If you can't get on, keep it to yourselves. Crap like this is a gift to the Nu-Lab spin-meisters.

Remember, it is about getting people out to vote for you so you can form the next government and undo the looming economic disaster that is the legacy of Bliar (not to neglect Prudence herself), not scoring petty points off each other. You utter bunch of useless twats.

S-E

Another day, another media "disaster"

Well, yet another Tory racist. What a beautiful gift to the Trots.

Patrick Mercer's downfall has been blogged about fairly endlessly. From the political point of view, it is clear this is on a par with a typical Donald Findlay karaoke moment and he had to go. The media would have just crucified Cameron. Hopefully, DC has had a quiet chat with Patrick and said something along the lines of "Look, we know what you said was honest and not intended as racist. You are going to have to go but the media have the attention span of a gnat on acid and you are an asset to the party. You will be an asset to the next, Tory, government. Mandy came back twice, and he was a crook!"

Let me look at the realities of the situation, however. The fact is that everybody in the military, at some point in their career, gets the piss taken out of them (more on Rachel's blog.) This is generally not the witty repartee of a polite dinner party - more the snap-back gratuitous vileness of the playground or, say, Terry. Now, the overt insult can be about many things - it can be about a fuck-up you have just made, about the hideous bird you pulled last night, or about something you can do nothing about.

"Effing short-arse git", or "speccy twat" is a lot easier to deal with than "You fucking moron, you do something that effing stupid again" ... I, and I am not the tallest person in town and I wear glasses, can do nothing about either of those - therefore I, at least, find that sort of mindless insult easier to take. Often it is about whatever makes you stand out from the rest: place of birth (especially, Geordie, Scouse, Welsh, Scots, or anything seen as "posh" amongst the troops), hair-colour, as Mr Mercer pointed out or, especially with their lack of representation, ethnic origin.

There is direct racism in the military, as there is in every large organisation - political parties (of whatever hue) not excepted. This needs to be actively discouraged and, where detected, punished. Drill sergeants or training staff yelling nearly-random insults is not direct racism.

Not promoting a soldier to Company Sergeant Major because of his ethnic origin would be direct racism - but this appears to have been something that Mr Mercer was clearly not guilty of.

On a slight tangent - the "British Commonwealth Soldiers' Union". I am sure that there is direct discrimination against servicemen of foreign origin - just look at the way our government treats the gurkhas. There will also be some direct racism - the KKK incident, if true, is despicable. I suspect, however, that most of the course selection and promotion issues would be the same for, say, a foreigner serving of European ethnicity (along the "not really one of us" lines) - needs to be stamped out, certainly - but not "just cause you is black." Also, I would have pointed them here, or here or here. I seem to remember there is a harassment and bullying help-line as well, there usually is, now-a-days.

Update: Actually, there seem to be at least 3 relevant helplines (a search on "helpline bully" on www.army.mod.uk revealed) - Equal Opportunities Helpline (0800 731 4880), The Confidential Support Line (0800 731 4880) and the Army Welfare Information Service (01722 436569 or email).

S-E

Terry Watch

Be part of the most sarcastic political movement since the founding of "Private Eye".

Capture in one place the true glory of the "Sage of Baronscourt".

Be incisive, be bold, be plain fucking rude.

Have your comments published immediately, rather than waiting for days ...

Join the team - your country needs you.

S-E

It's happening again ...

Oh god, I hope it isn't. I hope this is just an early April Fool.

We should be so lucky - we have seen the statist tendencies of the bunch of mendacious fools currently pretending to be our government - this is just the sort of cretinous idea they would come up with. I particularly like the "Citizens' Panels" - what bets these will be paid and stuffed with the "friends and relations" of the aforementioned fools.

Okay, so what's wrong with it? Well, it is probably illegal (but then they don't bother with the Freedom of Information Act, so why would they bother with the Data Protection Act); there is no way that it is going to work - government projects of this size so rarely do; and it is bound to make EDS (or somebody similar, the precise bunch of profiteers doesn't really matter, I just picked the most egregious lot) far too much money for producing ineffective crud (as an aside, what exactly do you think effective crud would do? Office of the Deputy Prime Minister?)

Oh sorry, the swearing: this is the most fucking stupid idea I have heard this (admittedly fairly new) year and the cretin who thought this up should be lowered ...

Actually, I can't think of anything quite bad enough - they are probably quite likely either to get a life peerage (if in the civil service, or private sector) or be made Deputy Leader of the Labour Party (if an elected criminal). Frankly, the latter could certainly be considered a punishment but I think we should just cut our losses and go for humane termination. Given the current sucking up to the jihadist tendency, we could always build a new wall on Abingdon Street Gardens and invite members of the public to push it over on them. Not that that is humane, of course, in the Western post-Reformation tradition, but then I am probably inciting religious hatred by the mere suggestion.

Oh fuck, that ruined my Sunday morning.

S-E

Government Incompentence (and Bad Law)

On the day I discover one of the least pleasant people I have ever taken a telephone call from was anointed Spectator "Brutish Thug Politician of the Year", I want to have a little rant. I do keep promising myself that this is not going to turn into a swear-blog, but it is getting a little difficult.

Many of you will not be aware that the "Police and Justice Act 2006" received Royal Assent on the 8th of November. Amongst the many, many things that this typical piece of Nu-Lab gimmickry does are some significant amendments to the Computer Misuse Act 1990. The amendment to the Section 1 offence is technical (legally, not computery). The amendment to the Section 3 offence to make explicit that conducting Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of Service attacks is covered is welcome.

The creation of the new Section 3A offence - to do with making, supplying and obtaining articles which may be used in the commission of a Section 1 or 3 offence (what has poor Section 2 done, I ask you), was, last time I saw the draft words, bad, bad law. I have numerous tools available on various computers, including the one I am using to write this, that could be used to assist, commit or prevent (the latter being my job) the commission of various CMA90 offences. These tools may no longer be legal.

Why am I so fucking annoyed? Because I don't know what is legal and what is not. Because the incompetent fucking morons who preside over ever-increasing aspects of our endlessly monitored (it's to protect the kiddies / grannies / you, you know) existences cannot be bothered to deign to shift their fat arses away from their self-congratulatory face-stuffing awards dinners to publish their fascist (or Stalinist, this is Reid we are talking about, but the effect on us is the same) commands to the ever-so-humble peasantry they deem us to be. It may be available here by the time you are reading this. Or it may not. You can see lots of stuff here, but that is not designed to be readily parsed by us peons and it still doesn't tell me what exactly they made Her Majesty sign us all up to in what I can only assume is still Section 42 (but may not be - somewhere around there, probably.)

Thanks ever so fucking much, Dr Reid. Yes, this arrant incompetence does concern a piece of what even you admit is the "not fit for purpose Home Office" legislation. I hope you enjoyed your dinner.

Oh, and readers, I apologise to you, but not to the pols, for the language. I will try not to let it happen again.

S-E

Update (25 Nov) - it is here now. It isn't Section 42 - it's now Section 37. For those too lazy to wait for the OPSI site:

37	Making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in computer misuse offences
	After section 3 of the 1990 Act there is inserted-
	"3A Making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in offence under section 1 or 3 (1) A person is guilty of an offence if he makes, adapts, supplies or offers to supply any article intending it to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3. (2) A person is guilty of an offence if he supplies or offers to supply any article believing that it is likely to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3. (3) A person is guilty of an offence if he obtains any article with a view to its being supplied for use to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3. (4) In this section "article" includes any program or data held in electronic form. (5) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable- (a) on summary conviction in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both; (b) on summary conviction in Scotland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both; (c) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or to a fine or to both."

Cunts. Utter, utter cunts. John "PhD in Stalinist Hypocracy" Reid, the sanctimonious gits at the Home Office, the egregious toads that put this through Parliament, the whole fucking lot of them. I am off to hit something and then get cross about the National ID Register.