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Category Archives: General
6 things
Tagged by the Chaplain with the 6 things meme, the rules of which are:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random, arbitrary things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
After doing 1 and 2, I’ve gone straight to 4, already stumped by the problem of picking 6 blogs that won’t have already been tagged or won’t like it. But I obviously can’t do it at all without the dreaded 6 things. And I am pleased that the Chaplain has tagged me. Her blog is really good. She always says wise things in it and makes wise and funny comments here.
My problem is that – although I’m anything but humble – I really can’t think of 6 things about me that are both
(a) interesting and
(b) that I’d feel Ok about sticking on the internet.
(If I didn’t think feel like that, I’d have a MySpace or Facebook page, rather than a withering sense of disdain for almost anyone who has one when they aren’t trying to sell records.)
Killing 2 birds with one stone seemed the way to go. I’ll look at some blogs and if they have been tagged, I’ll respond to their content to make my 6 things. No, too much effort.
So I’m going to spew out a a stream of consciousness response and then stick in random numbers…..
Suppress instinctive yawn. The brain mists over at the words “stream of consciousness” Oh Loki forbid, am I going to talk about consciousness? Am I actively trying to discourage readers? (Might as well discuss French structuralist anthropology and have done with it. ) OK, there will be no more messing about with the concept of consciousness.
No, must make this at least marginally more entertaining. (Sadly, this week, I feel as witty as someone who’s just put in a long day’s work shovelling wit in the witmines and just can’t face dealing with emptying their own withouse.)
What are these memes for?
A few of the Good things are
- Helping to create a community;
- Getting a few more links and finding a few more blogs you might be interested in;
- Getting to know each other better as real humans rather than representations of character strings a in pixel format;
Oh my void, it seems as if I’m going to write a list of Bad Things and turn this into some form of meme SWOT analysis*. Must put a stop to that now. Will skip straight to the Threats then:
Mapping social networking is a big growth area in the ongoing projects to map all our lives and connections. There seems something of a turkey willingly lining up for a Christmas cull in setting out all your social network connections in an easy to gather format. The instinctive rebel in me makes me think “Why make it easy for the buggers to draw up their endless connectedness maps? Let them at least do a bit of work.”
Too late. The instinctive conformist in me has already joined in the meme.
I like the thought of Good Thing number 3. If I find people interesting online, I do want to know more about the real human being.. But, I’m not often interested in what size gloves they were or the name of their first pet or who is their favourite musician. Apart from anything else, this can really put you off someone: Person’s X’s favourite tv programme is the X-Factor? Person Y’s favourite shirt colour is orange? Person Z believes Titanic was the best film ever made? How can I possibly have any respect for them?
Infinitely too superficial a basis on which to decide whether to assume someone is an idiot. But, I’ll do it. And I’m always trying to keep my superficiality in check. I’m already too superficial in real life. I decide how I feel about people on the basis of completely absurd judgements – mostly aesthetic. But, in the tangible world, I can see a lot more of someone. I can put (what I see as) the repellent stuff in context with the wonderful things about them. And they can do the same to me. (For example, they can decide whether having the most fantastic coat in the world makes up for being a really arrogant know-all or makes it even worse.)
Knowing someone only as from reading their blog is like meeting people in a speed-dating venue. They have a couple of minutes to impress you with their layout or humour or kindness or wisdom or intelligence or seriousness or recipe for shortbread or capacity to attract comment-acolytes or their grasp of web 2.0 standards in a *nix environment.
Noone would to turn up and tell you that they admire GW Bush as a peacemaker or that Elton John’s tribute to Princess Diana brings tears to their eyes. Because they’d quite rightly expect you to run a mile, or press the buzzer for the next one in line (I’m imagining it must be like speed chess but less fun. And I can’t play chess) If you discovered things like that, after you’ve got to know them and found out that they run a homeless shelter and are developing a cure for cancer, you might be a bit more forgiving.
So now, you know at least half a dozen random things about me. (1) I’ll sidestep anything I see as potentially intrusive. (2) I’m pretty superficial. (3) I’d rather talk about ideas or “people in general” than about actual people. (4) I can produce an opinion at the drop of a hat. (5) I’m probably pretty much like you in some ways and in some ways not at all like you. (6) I have now got a shit hot coat.
Tagged:
My first impulse is to tag the blogs that we always tag, like those in the WhyDontYou top ten but that seems lame. (And reminds me that the Top Ten needs some updating and expansion.) Most of them have been tagged anyway. (If you haven’t, please consider yourself tagged, if you’re in our top ten. Or, even if you aren’t.)
My next thought is to tag people whose blogs I don’t like at all, but that seems completely stupid. So I’m going to pick the names from blogs where I have no idea what to expect from the meme answers.
I am going to tag recent commenters here. Sadly, most of the recent unfamiliar names seem to be people without a blog link and tinned-industrial-meat-product blogs that slipped past Akismet, so I’ll skip them. (It’s too much of a challenge to credulity to believe that “Prefinished Flooring” or “Trauma Scene Clean up” or “Payday Loans” adopted those noms de blog as an obscure ironic joke.)
Here are some which are – pretty definitely – humans.
Dino Delellis
1 minion’s opinion (nice blog)
Atheist blogger
Ungodly cynic
K rad eleet
Mahalia
(Yes, I know i have to tell them now. Point 6)
* SWOT analysis: Monstrous grid of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It is a compulsory part of any business plan. I don’t believe any funders or lenders ever read them, so you can probably list the names of your favourite or least favourite Star-Trek-spin-off characters.
Moron Alert
Aside
Moron alert. Bah, it turns out to be me. I have had a few goes at uploading the Stewart Lee video. I think I’ve finally cracked it.
Cats are dangerous
When all else fails, blame the Internet
On this morning’s bus journey, I read in what appears to be yesterday’s Metro, from the date on the Metro website version of this article, (although I can’t believe the Metros has a Sunday version.)
Web vengeance on Baby P couple
The identities of the mother and stepfather of Baby P have been posted on the internet – along with messages urging convicts to attack them.
The baby P story is a truly mind-numbing story, involving the torture and murder of a baby, at the hands of his mother, stepfather and the lodger. The child was listed by social services as being at risk, The police had already been involved and had sought a prosecution. No one seemed able to save the lad’s life. It’s one of those stories that push the boundaries of your capacity for rage.
The visual presentation of this story has been disturbing, even for those who can’t bring themselves to read the court statements. The police released a 3-d rendering of a baby’s head with a catalogue of injuries. The next day, the papers followed this up the image with pre-injury pictures of an angelic-looking little blonde boy.
Every one involved – which now means most of the UK population – has been looking to find someone or something to blame. The almost inconceivable stupidity of the social services staff seems a fair target. The government has set up an enquiry. A BBC Panorama programme tonight will investigate claims by police and a senior social worker that they recommended that the child be taken into care. (Hindsight is 20/20, as teh saying goes.)
But, the actual culprits have already been found guilty. The visceral response is to want to execute them. Of course, faced with these backward and depressed people, no doubt themselves abused as children, the quality of mercy would get the better of this instinct, for most people. After all, that’s why most of us are not murdering simpletons.
Understandably, many people expressed their natural fury on the Internet. Intemperately, yes. Still, it seems quite bizarre to see that now this means that the Internet has got to take the blame. As usual.
There was already a half-hearted attempt to blame the Internet in the trial reports when it was reported of the mother that
When she was awake, she spent much of her time on the internet, gossiping in chatrooms and playing online poker.
I am no fan of either moronic chatrooms or online gambling. But, I find it hard to draw any connections between either of these activities and child murder.
Similarly, I can’t see that venting rage on the Intenet is much of a crime either. The argument seems to be that internet rage is bad because it will find its expression in attacks on the guilty three.
Late last week Facebook shut down pages carrying threats and abusive comments about the mother, including one entitled: ‘Death is too good for [the mother’s name], torture the bitch that killed Baby P.’
Another was added yesterday and had been viewed by at least 6,000 people last night.
The mother’s profile page on Bebo was removed after abusive messages were added.
The postings demonstrate the ease with which the law can be breached online.
How odd that writing (richly deserved) insulting comments on a website can be a crime. Indeed, unless, the web access in x prison is much more generous than in my (non-custodial, though it sometimes feels otherwise) workplace, I don’t even see how the mother will get to read the comments.
I am most baffled by the idea that identifying these people and saying vicious things about them is somehow equivalent to instructing fellow prisoners to injure them. And that such orders – from people unknown – will be followed to the letter.
Are there people in jail who assume that behavioural instructions on the internet have the force of law? Well, more than the force of law, apparently, because they may not be too responsive to the force of law, given that they are in jail.
Would a random cheque-fraudster who finds him or herself sharing a cell with one of these disgraces to humanity think “Oh, we’ll get on really well” but then read the undisobeyable internet instructions and be obliged to torture and kill the said disgrace to humanity?
Getting climate change and asbestos wrong
You’d think that there had been enough pop science articles about climate change for even the thickest journalists to have grasped that “global warming” is
- short-hand for complicated climatic processes, more accurately referred to as anthropogenic climate change, which don’t necessarily involve warming in any given place. (For instance, the diversion of the Gulf Stream could make the UK colder.)
- not specifically identifiable in any given day’s or year’s temperatures in any particular place. Climate is not necessarily the same as weather
I assume that Christopher Booker is not a complete fool. He’s expensively educated, and he studied at Cambridge. So, it’s hard to see why he’s spreading ideas as confused as those in his Telegraph article, where seems imply that climate change is pretty well only “global warming” and the fact that some Russian measurements are wrong makes it all false anyway. (I paraphrase)
The world has never seen such freezing heat
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.(from the Telegraph)
Oh dear, Christopher, the point really isn’t whether a given month is “hot”.
How can you explain this to someone who believes that it is somehow discrediting Al Gore’s arguments to mention Al Gore’s name in the context that someone he knows has been misled by being supplied with a handful of duff numbers?
The science is too difficult for me to understand, but I’m pretty confident that it rests on millions of different types of observations, over many years and all parts of the world. And the work has been analysed and peer-reviewed by legions of climate scientists.
So, it’s not actually proven. (And, granted that my own assessment that the climate has changed dramatically over my lifetime, let alone Christopher Booker’s, is anecdotal.) But there seems to be such a serious weight of evidence to support it, it would be pretty dumb to imagine it is contradicted by one month’s error figures.
Pretty well as dumb as this complete misunderstanding of the evidence on asbestosis, for example, on the basis of some spuriously-qualified scientist :
Booker’s articles in The Daily Telegraph on asbestos and also on global warming have been challenged by George Monbiot in an article in The Guardian newspaper
Booker’s scientific claims, which include the false assertion that white asbestos (chrysotile) is “chemically identical to talcum powder” were analysed in detail by Richard Wilson in his book Don’t Get Fooled Again (2008).
Wilson also highlighted Christopher Booker’s repeated endorsement of the alleged scientific expertise of John Bridle, who has claimed to be “the world’s foremost authority on asbestos science”, but who in 2005 was convicted under the UK’s Trade Descriptions Act of making false claims about his qualifications, and who the BBC has accused of basing his reputation on “lies about his credentials, unaccredited tests, and self aggrandisement”.(from the Criticism section of Brooker’s Wikipedia entry)
Windmill aesthetics
Buildings don’t get much more attractive than traditional windmills. More or less anyone will agree on that. It even comes as a bit of a shock to remember that windmills were industrial structures, not landscape beautification projects.
So, what is it about modern wind turbines that sends some people into a rage? In the Times, Charles Bremner claimed that the French countryside was becoming ugly because of the spread of wind turbines.
Windpower blights “la belle France”
His argument is basically that France doesn’t need the “ugly” windturbines because it has loads of nuclear power. What? Has he ever seen a nuclear power station?
The UK’s only remotely attractive one, as a building, was Trawfyndd – of which the architecture bit of the Guardian showed a flattering photograph a couple of months ago. The photo doesn’t come with the online story but here’s an extract from the text.
The tradition continued into the early nuclear age with the appointment of Basil Spence, architect of Coventry cathedral, to design Trawsfynydd in Wales. Like Scott, Spence went down the route of unabashed monumentality to reflect the awesome technology at work within. Never mind that his 20-storey monoliths in the middle of Snowdonia stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs. At the time of Trawsfynydd’s construction, in 1959, this treatment was entirely appropriate: symbolically, nuclear power was one of the few things that told Britain it was still Great. That triumphalism would soon fade, as the implications of the Windscale fire in 1957 became apparent, and environmental and peace movements started to campaign against nuclear.
One need only look at the industrial-looking nuclear eyesores built in the 1970s and 80s, such as Hartlepool or Dungeness, to see the change. Having furnished Britain with some of the ugliest buildings ever seen, British Energy took a renewed concern in the appearance of Sizewell B in the 90s.
Note, “Ugliest buikdings ever seen.”
You can see a selection of postcard views of nuclear carbon-friendly power plants on an odd site that google found, and you’d have to admit that, despite the stunning landscapes they are set in, the kindest description of them would be “darkly foreboding.”
OK, the concepts of beauty and ugliness are relative and individual. Let’s assume that those elegant wind turbine blades are uglier as huge concrete slab monolithic powerplants in the eyes of some beholders.
Pretend that a miraculous new way of generating energy (from fusion or electrolytic transformation or any star-trekky energy source you can imagine) has been discovered. So, the working life of a wind turbine is over. What happens to it? You just take it down. I think that’s it. (You might cause some localised pollution by dropping it in landfill. Pretty small beer compared to what we dump every day, but still, I’m trying to be fair.)
Not quite as easy to take down all the carbon-neutral new nuclear power plants is it? You need a decade or more for decommissioning. You’d still have to protect it to within an inch of its life (from accidents and terrorists) for that time. Then you’d just have to store and guard the materials for, oh I don’t know, a few thousand years.
Or, let’s assume that the star-trek energy breakthrough doesn’t happen. The turbines just spin around, collecting energy that – as far as I can tell, on recent form – is increasing, if anything. They break and can get replaced. The land, sea and air around them are as clean, or otherwise, as they would be in the absence of a turbine.
There is no reason, except aesthetics, for not siting them in the centre of big cities. If they break, they just break. They don’t go critical.
A really unlucky person might find that a broken one landed on their head. This doesn’t quite compare with Chernobyl.
(There’s a REALLY ugly power generator picture – of the post-explosion Chernobyl plant – on the Wikipedia page. I didn’t pasted it here because I’m baffled by the fair use clause.)
Imagining for one minute that you share the aesthetic sensibilities of Charles Bremner and the couple of French aristocrats he reported, it’s still a very small price to pay.
Onward, Christian soldiers
This is the best headline that I’ve seen for a long time:
‘Bless me father for I have chinned’
The whole Guardian story is quite entertaining. The sub-heading says it all.
Row at holy shrine in Jerusalem sees police having to break up mass brawl between two sets of Christian monks
This isn’t exactly a new story. There’s a Youtube video link, if you want to see boxing monks that don’t come from Shaolin. (I didn’t bother. KungFu films will do for me. No one really gets hurt, except by accident.)
Teaching “the controversy”, again
Almost a third of teachers think creationism should be taught on a par with evolution, according to the Times.
Of the 1,200 questioned, 53 per cent thought that creationism should not be taught in science lessons, while 29 per cent thought it should.
OK, a third is some serious rounding up from 29%, but the 29% figure itself is quite scary. It suggests that 29% of teachers are either stupid or batshit crazy, which isn’t encouraging. After all, these people have made their way through years of school and higher education to get to become teachers.
It’s certainly evidence for how far ID /creationism has penetrated the UK.
Hoping to find that the poll was conducted by AIG in a few church schools, I am shocked to find that this comes from Teachers TV (to which the Times added an ill-advised pedantic apostrophe, not used by the station itself.)
As you might expect from the name, Teachers TV is mainly worthy but dull (Key stage x in subject blah) but it sometimes has some fascinating content. (I’ve accidentally caught programmes on neuroscience and Turkish tiled architecture, when randomly clicking through the cable channels.) They are currently featuring “Evolution week” on their site. So these poll results don’t seem to be skewed in favour of a creationist agenda.
Which makes the 29% depressingly possible. Worse 18% of a sample of 248 science teachers (albeit a small sample, skewed by respondent bias) thought evolution and creationism should have equal status
Teachers TV interviewed Dr Adam Rutherford (podcast editor for Nature)
Dr Rutherford says that science teachers with those views need retraining or should be taken out of the classroom if they refuse to change their opinion.
That seems as uncontroversial as saying that a domestic science teacher who can’t boil an egg should be retrained or sacked.
However, it brought up quite a furious response in some comments on the Teachers TV site (among the rational ones, that said that phrenology and astrology weren’t taught in science classes either.)
For example, edinburgh4 said that his/her creation group had PHD-qualified speakers and:
the idea that unintelligent design (naturalism) can be falsified while at the same time intelligent design cannot is logically untenability [sic] and morally dubious. If a design did not come from an unintelligent source there is only one conclusion left. Excluding special creation from discussion leaves evolution as the only option this is hollow victory. More and more the public are seeing it as such.
oeditor replied, disputing the “qualifications” of these speakers:
Professor McIntosh may talk about birds but he is an engineer, not a biologist. Nor is he a geologist, as can be seen from his claim that the Grand Canyon was formed by Noah’s flood – “probably in matter of hours”. He isn’t a historian or a linguist either, despite having produced a DVD claiming that the Chinese ideographic script provides evidence of the Tower of Babel.
What he is – and he proclaims this proudly – is a committed Christian who believes that the biblical account of creation in Genesis is to be taken literally and that it happened about 6000 years ago. Everything he and his fellow creationists claim stems from that one premise and nothing else.
Nullius in Verba said
The issue is not whether Creation should be taught in science lessons. The issue is how genuine scientific thought and debate should be encouraged. Stifling the debate as Adam Rutherford suggests is a recipe for tyranny and there is a great danger of insisting that atheism is the only paradigm in which to conduct science (patently not true when one considers the greats like Faraday and Boyle of earlier centuries).
It is even more disturbing that teachers don’t seem to have a basic grasp of logic than that they think it’s reasonable to teach creationism in science classes.
This “stifling the debate” is a common but deeply flawed creationist argument. There are a million to the power of a million possible theories about the nature of life.
Indeed you could produce alternative theories about anything. I could try to get a cup of coffee by standing on one leg, putting a cat on my head, facing magnetic north and chanting “Ding McChing.” It probably wouldn’t work but who knows if they haven’t tried it? If I was undergoing barista training for a chain of coffee bars, I wouldn’t expect them to allow that as an alternative to switching on the machines, grinding the beans and so on. Or if there was really relativist manager who’d let the trainee baristas discuss their own theories, wouldn’t they have to try out the sacrifice of a young goat with a silver knife, if someone else liked that idea? of course, you might have to wait a few millenia for a double espresso.
I can’t see the difference here at all. Some theories have been proven to work through experiment. Until there are theories that work better, it would be slack not to teach people the ones with the empirical backup.
I think Terry Pratchett has at least one (science?) degree. In his Diskworld books, a flat earth is carried on the backs of giant elephants standing on the back of a turtle. What if some of his readers don’t understand the concept of “fiction”? (Not unlike the average fundy) Surely this theory should be discussed in science classes? Respectfully, as a legitimate alternative to geography, in case any of the students’ parents believe it, of course.
*************
Update
Read more about this on the excellent Opinion of a Minion blog
Please, Jacqui, can I have an ID card now
Message from Bizzarro world: People in the UK can’t wait to get their hands on ID cards. They are constantly bothering the Home Secretary, badgering her to hurry up and introduce them.
Well, she says so, anyway.
Jacqui Smith says public demand means people will be able to pre-register for an ID card within the next few months.
The cards will be available for all from 2012 but she said: “I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don’t want to wait that long.” (from the BBC website)
Are there enough smileys and ROTFLMAOs in the world to do internet justice to this idea? I doubt it but here goes anyway.
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 ad infinitum
More from our Home Secretary:
“I now want to put that to the test and find a way to allow those people who want a card sooner to be able to pre-register their interest as early as the first few months of next year.”
She told the BBC: “We’ll see where that interest is, and then we’ll see if we can issue some cards to those who’ve expressed an interest by the end of next year.”
People applying for cards and passports from 2012 will have to provide fingerprints, photographs and a signature, which Ms Smith believes will create a market worth about £200m a year.
And in changes to earlier plans the Home Office is talking to retailers and the Post Office about setting up booths to gather biometric data.
A plan to have booths all over the country collecting biometric data is going to create a “market.” A market in what exactly? The economy must be in an even worse state than we’ve been told.
Estimated costs for the ID scheme have been revised upwards yet again to £5.1 billions. Even if the – how can I put this? – fiscally optimistic figure of a new “market” in selling our own biometric data back to us is worth £200 million a year, it’ll take a good few years to recover £5.1 billions. And that’s without taking into account the costs of setting up the booths and taking out the profit margins for those PFI companies that are unwary enough to sign up for the opportunity.
I suggest that anyone who’s been badgering the Home Secretary for an ID card – momentarily assuming such people exist outside the Land of Porkie Pies- get a driving licence or a passport. Problem solved.
Or here’s my alternative instant identity document. Just fill it out and carry it round. OK, it’s only half-thought out but then I’m saving you loads of time and money.
Instant ID card
Now, stop bothering our busy Home Secretary with your whining demands for something to show you who you are.
Oh, you want it to be stored on a database, do you? Just as cheap and easy. Type all your personal details into any database or spreadsheet program on your PC (or send it to me to store in PHPMyAdmin, if you must be all formal about this) then copy it to a memory stick, get on some public transport and leave it down the back of the seat.
Of course, if you want it to be really secure, find a big overseas-based subcontractor and pay them a lot of money to send it offshore first, before the random jettisoning bit, but I’m just thinking of the savings you’ll make by cutting out the middle man. Read the papers, we’re all supposed to be belt-tightening you know. Do it yourself.
Atheist Blogroll
Status
Quick question: Is the atheist blogroll broken on everyone else’s site? It has been about a week or so since I have seen it update here and show what blogs have new content. Is this a general problem? Of the sites I have checked today, all show the blogroll as static but with a different sequence of newly updated blogs so I cant for the life of me work out where the break is.
Money for nothing
Question: What’s the difference between an “oligarch” and bog-standard “billionaire”?
Answer: Well, nationality for a start. Russians get called “oligarchs”. Rich and powerful non-Russians like Murdoch are just “billionaires”.
My print Chambers Dictionary defines an oligarch as someone who holds power in an oligarchy, which is a mite too self-referential to be truly instructive. Wikipedia defines oligarchy as rule by the few:
a form of government where political power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society distinguished by royalty, wealth, family, military powers or occult spiritual hegemony.
Sorry, I still can’t work out the distinction.
A senior Tory, George Osborne – the Shadow Chancellor, no less, is currently in trouble for allegedly trying to get a donation from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska. Note, he’s not in trouble for hitting on a very rich chap for £50,000. The trouble is just because the potential donor doesn’t have the right to vote in England.
Anyway, Osborne is “sorry”, he “made a mistake”.
That’s OK, George, we’ve all been there. Holidays with the mega-rich. Invitations to parties on billionaires’ yacht in Corfu. The sea, the sand, the sun, the free and easy holiday atmosphere. Maybe too much champagne. What happens in Corfu, stays in Corfu…. Easy mistakes to make.
No wait, my mistake. WE haven’t all been there. I must have been temporarily channelling Peter Mandelson. He was there at the same time. And he’s also been a bit annoyed by the churlish attention that commentators with no romance in their souls have been paying to his own flirtation with the same oligarch.
This row is putting Parliament in a rather embarrassing position, as the major parties increasingly look – how shall I put this, a little slack, when it comes to their sources of income.
The move comes as the Conservative party faces allegations that it took tens of thousands of pounds from an associate of a Ukrainian oligarch and accepted a £1m loan from a dormant company owned and run by Lady Victoria de Rothschild, a member of the banking family.
The Guardian revealed on Saturday that Robert Shetler-Jones, a British associate of Dmitry Firtash, has been funding the office of Pauline Neville-Jones, the shadow security minister. Shetler-Jones also funds Conservative Central Office through Scythian Ltd, which he chairs and part-owns. It has been described as a “non-trading company” and its accounts are overdue.
The firm’s position had already caused concern to the commission because non-trading companies cannot give donations to political parties, although the Conservatives produced a letter from its auditors saying it was still trading.
The Observer revealed yesterday that a £1m loan was given to the Conservative party by Ironmade Ltd, which is owned and controlled by Lady Victoria de Rothschild. According to the newspaper, Ironmade was set up to avoid her identity being revealed.
(from theGuardian)
How impressed am I by all these people with riches so far beyond the dreams of avarice that they can hand over lottery-win-level sums of money to political parties? Anonymously. Indeed, so anonymously that they even work out complicated barely-legal ways to hide their identities. And they want nothing in return…..
Blimey, Osborne wasn’t even trying, if his (alleged) request was for a relatively humble £50,000.
Like his Tory counterparts, Mandelson is aghast at the very suggestion that there is anything remotely shady about hanging round with the Russian mega-rich, either when he was EU trade commissioner, or now that he was (unaccountably) brought back by Brown when the economy started to tank. (Despite having had to resign over business dealings twice before)
He flatly refused to elaborate on the his meetings with his oligarch chum.
Lord Mandelson today rejected fresh calls for him to reveal the full extent of his relationship with Oleg Deripaska, insisting that no conflict of interest arose during his meetings with the controversial Russian billionaire. (from the Guardian)
For instance, he certainly wouldn’t comment on the absurd suggestion that Deripaska may have benefited from the lowering of EU tariffs on aluminium, when his yacht-buddy Mandelson was EU Trade Commissioner.
But Mandelson, who is leading a four-day UK trade delegation to Russia, refused to confirm the number and nature of his meetings with Deripaska, or the length of time he spent aboard the oligarch’s yacht off Corfu in August.
Look, can somebody please introduce me to these Russian oligarchs who are happy to throw around invitations to their yacht parties? I had naively assumed that you don’t get to be a billionaire without demanding something quite lucrative in exchange for huge sums of money. But I was clearly wrong. So I’d like to be one of the first to join in the parting-a-fool-from-his-money fest.
Photo Gallery
Aside
In addition to viewing my wonderful pictures on Flickr ( 🙂 ) you can now check them out on the Why Dont You Gallery. In addition to this, Heather is currently working hard to create a gallery / ordering system where you can buy prints or purchase digital rights to a wide selection of images. If all goes well the Ogum site should be up and running in time for Christmas. Feel free to purchase some huge prints to hang on your atheist walls 🙂 .
Mind-boggling politics
From this distance, the McCain campaign seems to have become so demented that you wonder if they are deliberately trying to lose. For instance, they’ve spent the equivalent of several yearly minimum wages to dress a woman (whose entire USP is supposed to be that she’s just an ordinary Mom, you betcha) as a Vogue businesswoman.
And Sarah Palin then numbed the mind further by claiming that opposition to this Olympic-standard rate of expenditure is “sexist”. (No, Sarah, how can I explain this… Where do I start? Beauty queen contestant. Pitbull with lipstick. Hockey mom. Cute winks. I suspect you know what pandering to sexist stereotypes is, anyway.)
Plus, she claimed – in some travesty of self-defence – that she hadn’t worn most of them anyway. 🙂
“The whole thing is just bad!” she said. “Oh, if only people knew how frugal we are. It’s kind of painful to be criticised for something when all the facts are not out there and are not reported.”
Indeed. Like this:
It was disclosed today that she paid a make-up artist $22,000 in the first fortnight of this month, following the revelation earlier this week of a $150,000 spending spree on clothes
Oh, that awkward “sexism” again. Twenty two thousand dollars on make-up in two weeks? Thats $1571.43 a day. Assuming that the person who applies it earns $1000 a day – which is insane – that still leaves $500 worth of materials to be squeezed onto the small surface area of a human face. Even the ugliest pit bull in the world couldn’t need that much coverage to look like the Mona Lisa. How can she physically lift her head if it has to support the weight of 20 kilos of nanosome pentapeptides?
From sexism to racism. The Republicans have really pushed the boat out here. Who could even imagine anything as weird as the Republican-supporting girl – with a backwards B (that seemed to be drawn in lipstick) on her cheek and the apparent black-eye makeup – who made the patently ludicrous claim she’d been robbed by a black man in pursuit of an Obama victory?
So the deeply troubling violent attack in Pittsburgh on a McCain campaign worker by a “tall black man” who carved a letter B onto her face, telling her “you’re going to be a Barack supporter”, turns out to be a deeply troubling racist fantasy invented by someone we’ll charitably describe for the time being as disturbed (from the Guardian)
Blogspam that’s not funny
Idly deleting the blogspam in Akismet I see that this blog appears to have got spam from… itself.
admin | info@www.whydontyou.org.uk | whydontyou.org.uk | IP: 85.153.7.194
Your investigation have been helpfull for me. I wish everybody writes article as this.
WTF? Well, I suppose it’s always possible that I am suffering from a brain disease that makes me both send out spam at random and forget that I’ve sent it.
Plus removes any native-speaking familiarity with the English langauge.
Not to mention that it seems that I’ve been absent-mindedly visiting Turkey without realising it. Because this host is what that IP resolves to (assuming, for no good reason, that the originating IP isn’t spoofed)
Turkey
City: Istanbul
Latitude: 41.0186 Longitude: 28.9647
Host: barbaros.turkbilnet.com
IP: 85.153.7.194
This really pisses me off. If the spammers are so prolific that they’ve spammed the blog they were using as a pretend source, how many other blogs have got spams that seem to originate from here?
Does anyone have any suggestions about what to do about this?