Smile of the decade blog

The Pope is due to visit the UK this coming year and has announced his desire to see women locked up and enslaved as was the tradition within the Catholic church for many of its centuries of abuse of power.

Archbishop Nichols, the great British drag queen and ring kisser in charge of "Catholics for regression to the dark ages" said that the Pope was not trying to meddle in party politics, "...but he wants his reasoned voice - formed by the treasures of the Christian heritage which is deeply embedded in our culture - to be heard."
Ahhh....
bless his little perverted brain.
The very idea that the Pope, and this archbishop, or their Christian heritage, with its history of the inquisition, inequality, torturing, abusing bastard of a hierarchy, designed to comfort the rich and take from the poor, can have a "reasoned voice" is beyond a bad joke.

If people with Islamic names can be put on no fly lists as suspected terrorists, then surely these threats to our hard won secular freedoms should be simply banned from entering the country?

Of course, they will argue that they have said sorry about the centuries of female subjugation but this latest assault shouting about going against natural laws (as if child abuse was within those same laws)...is about being forced to allow those horrid gay people to be allowed to teach in their faith schools.

Why any gay person could be seen to be so desperate for a job as to want to work under the strictures of these homophobic Neanderthals is beyond me, but the law is there to create equality of opportunity ...
this is clearly a concept beyond the Pope's understanding.
This is also not surprising.
What is surprising is that we are still offering deference to something way beyond religious freedom in the fact of state support for any of these faith schools. Funding them in any part from general taxation is anathema to a modern free democratic society.

Maybe, just maybe, this will be the test, and create a rising up of public opinion that shows the government that its time to stop feeding these predatory priests their delusions with this gravy train of public funding.

The TV, Radio and paper news may tell us the non news of what Mr Right or Mr Left of centre is going to say today, but occasionally they illustrate a different aspect of politics...

I have a serious issue with our political system that I know is widely shared - the way that the two main parties vie for electioneering points "in the period leading up to a general election".

Our politics, as a species, appears hopelessly short term, and designed to encourage people to think that all planning should be for four years ahead at most.
While I can enthuse about the idea of individuals living as if they are going to die tomorrow - this is not what governments are supposed to do.
They are supposed to take the other half of
that little homily and "Plan like they are going to live forever".

I would like to see someone in the Labour camp - but they would probably have to be a friend of Mandy's - make people understand the truth in Einstein's saying about the insanity of believing that doing the same actions as you have always done can bring about a different result.

In this case the context is shaping your politics around winning an election when the world doesn't care about your anti-Tory sound bites or glazed eye promises of what you will do in 3 years time - you clearly have no idea of how obvious it is that you are not expecting to be in government in 1 or 5 years time.

And..EVEN if this was serious hope, how better to convince the public that the Labour party deserves to have another four years in power than by ignoring the electioneering completely and revealing, instead of Michael Foot's suicide note - a coherent vision of the next twenty years (as many local authorities work on, as well as private sector businesses and quangos).

But don't do this as "Approaching the general election" - do it as something you plan to work on whether in opposition or in power, to bring people together to save the planet from its short-termist, expansionist, growth obsessed political classes and their leaders' pathetic studio glossed images of themselves as celebrity idiots.

The way the government is working now is more like Jones and Fraser in Dad's Army - far too far removed from the war time message the rest of us seem to want on our walls, and T shirts:
"Keep calm and carry on".

Don't you just love it when the rich and privileged lecture the poor on how badly they have been treated by government...?

Mr Cameron - (aside: apart from having his pre-announcement of what he was going to say as another example of this annoying non-news in the morning radio headlines), went on to say yesterday how, under Labour, Britain has become "Broken" - echoing the campaign of the Daily Wail editor, who really wishes those disgusting impoverished people would just buy his rag and not keep walking on his gravel drive.

All around the country now there are the wonderful posters featuring Mr Cameron's smoothly made-up mug. I'm not so convinced it is airbrushed but everyone thinks it is, presumably because it just reeks of deceit, to me that just goes with his nature and that of his job.
The poster carries the tag line, "We can't go on like this" - prompting optimistic thoughts that he and his cabinet might be about to help each other with suicide or mercy killings.
But no, he says he wants to fix Broken Britain, support the NHS and...
reward marriage via the tax system...
and you thought Gordon Brown was dumb.

He went on to quote the recent terrible assault by two young boys in the Yorkshire area, and the Jamie Bulger murder as a typical sign of how Britain is broken under New Labour - perhaps forgetting that the Bulger murder happened on John Major's watch back in 1993, presumably Bulger's killers were a product of how Thatcher made sure there was no such thing as society (too young to remember that David?).

Perhaps he felt he was on safe ground saying this in Kent, after all these horrific crimes happened "where its grim" up north. But of course while the Gillingham fox hunting society may like it, his speech plays to the whole country, and secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne, was quick to pick up one difficulty with this speech content:

"What Mr Cameron appears to be trying to do is seizing on one absolutely horrific crime and almost tarring the people of Doncaster, if not the people of Britain, with the same kind of standards and I think that people will recoil from that."

The other major problem with this Cameron/Daily Wail logic is that the crime figures, released the same day, show that crime generally, has fallen by 8% over the year. Perhaps Cameron was confidently predicting (as others have) that the recession would mean that they would rise and he would be able to follow up and keep the story alive on the back of his editor pal, Paul Dacre's wail of anger...

the fact remains that the rates of these horrific crimes by young people against young people has remained fairly low and constant for over 100 years. It is pathetic to see a party leader heading toward a general election trying to make capital out of such a knee jerk reaction to a genuinely appalling crime.
Shame on you and your nicely blushed cheeks and mascara-lined eyes David.

P.S. - I am happy to report that this poster on site in Gloucester where I drive past it regularly, is not defaced by graffiti artists, just looking depressingly washed out and faded in the heavy rain we've been having - it really works well

After TV's right wing "Christians for torture" leading spokesman, Pat Robertson, suggested that the Haiti earthquake might be "a blessing in disguise" as far as wiping the slate and being able to create a new infrastructure, right wing Republicans have been queuing up to try and prevent any new Obama bail out to this nation, which they say is the poorest example, ever, of how to look after your bankers and investment portfolio.

"Surely the failures of Haiti can be put down to the French" said Robertson, who once voted to torture babies of single parents in order to promote the sanctity of marriage.

Other leading Right wing spokesmen agreed with the spirit of Robertson's creed of eating the poor, "We have had this incredible interfering socialist government, handicapping our wonderful free market bankers with Billions of unwanted dollars - merely because they have had a temporary blip in making profits from poor people's money", said Rush O'Donnelfox,
"Now we are being asked to bail out a whole country, that has no respect for Laissez Fairness and the rights of rich men to make millions more each, and why? - just because their ground has moved a bit, and a few thousand non share holders have suffered some portfolio downturns. As a result of these normal market conditions they want us to give them... GIVE mind you, cash, and our time, for the simple things like water food and electricity... I mean theses commodities are their core business, we should not have to be bailing them out with these things, no sir".

Mr Robertson's spokesman, Mr Fatperson, went on to back track a little on his more extreme colleague's views, "We don't mind spending some money on the Haitians, not at all - we just think that it should be conditional on them all investing in our church, (call 1-800 donatepatrobertson, just $49 can help Pat do his work with downtrodden women) and abandoning those dubious voodoo practices. These vile practices have clearly created the earthquake in the first place - so it could be seen as the wrath of God, for not worshiping the one true God in the right way."

Mr Fatperson then added, "We need to learn from history, and I have to doubt the wisdom of supporting this island, which has never been a supporter of the Episcopalian or Baptist Churches... besides, the crushing heel of the French was involved there, and that means we shouldn't be involving ourselves, or this could become another Vietnam all over again".

The snow has been severe, by British standards, and the most severe since 1981 in any case. The reports in the papers listed the deaths caused by the snow - 15 in car crashes and one person who froze, though stupid behaviour other than driving may be to blame for that one.

Fifteen people died from car crashes - how terrible...
some will say.
But...
hang on, that's over a 3 week period. The average number of car crash deaths over any 3 week period is 170...
This begs the question - there are obviously 155 people alive today because of someone not driving in the snow - are you one of them?
Did you decide that the conditions were just too bad to drive the four miles to work and walk in instead? - It could be you!
Did you lie about the snow blocking you in and sit with your feet up watching Loose women, and thus avoid the sideswiping lorry that would otherwise have smeared you into the next world?
not so stupid or lazy now eh?
and here comes some more right on cue...

Is your journey to the graveyard really necessary?

Ridicule... that would be my weapon of choice. Ridicule and laughter.
This particularly small group of madmen with beards must be delighted with the seriousness with which the media and the powers of government have taken them...

Not only do they look almost as stupid as a bunch of Hasidic Jews mumbling at a wall - with those uniformly bad beards and finger wagging habits - they manage to hold up signs saying...

"Freedom can go to Hell"...

(I almost pissed myself when I saw it on the news)
I just love the comic potential here!
Can we not give them what they want? by the simple expedient of deporting them, in such a way that inevitably they get to be in a prison in the most oppressive regime in any Muslim country...?
This time they really did ask for it.

The real culprit of all the fuss here is the media - there were about fifteen idiotic Islam4UK demonstrators at that "silly-soldiers-coming-home" parade in Luton, but the media played it up as if a thousand or more had just said something important.
They gave it more air time, and more again now, than they ever did to the million people marching against the Iraq war (but who were not stupid beardies but normal law abiding folk of all ages and backgrounds).

The media have got people in the USA and UK believing that our Islamic population is all over us like a rash, and are all like this tiny group of loonies with their desire, but complete lack of power, to trample over our rights and freedoms and take us back to a pre-civilised age (like in Yemen).

If it was someone like this guy (right) leading a group of hardened mafiosi bent on taking over the UK and raping our children, I'd be worried.. I could hear their laughter and sense their seriousness. But people who spend their days reading the Koran, getting sad about lack of virgin availability, and end up wagging their fingers like scared teenagers, with sad little signs saying "Islam will take over the world - Freedom can go to hell"
...they do not worry me.

No apologies for being irreverent to a reverend - to me all men are equal, and those who dress themselves up as more than that do not deserve to avoid any ridicule coming their way, especially if they believe they are a select group who will go to heaven...

After the paradoxical disappointment of the pandemic flu failing to kill off large chunks of the political class, the signs of other diseases proving to be life shortening or otherwise dangerous are suddenly apparent.

There is a particularly nasty, treatment resistant infectious disease that comes from getting the splinters from a greasy pole embedded in your vital organs after you have lost your grip and been the victim of a fast slide to the ground. It goes by various names, from Exministeritus, blinkered-suicide syndrome and Hooning cough, to Clarke's Palsy.

The main causes of these diseases are, "spending too long in parliament, with delusions of adequacy", over exposure to Blairite shining teeth, and successive heavy blows to the head from a TV camera, radio microphone or rolled up newspaper. Traditionally the treatment is a course of loyalty tablets, several doses of whipping, and a kind of physiotherapy whereby the victim is shown pictures of others, from the past fifty years, in terminal states of decline from the same disease, in a desperate attempt to introduce the notion of the real world to people who have spent too long as Governing party MPs.

Unfortunately, after 10 years of such treatments that now appear no longer able to cure, or even suppress the symptoms, we have the latest mentally impaired sufferers stepping out...Hoon and Hewitt - the most recent sad victims of this very depressing illness do have names that are somewhat onomatopoeic of their plight - the sounds made whilst hugging a toilet bowl and trying to shout at God.

The great irony is that this blinkered self-destruct-button pushing has come at a time when the general public were just beginning to get used to the beige Brown life again - yes, we could all still laugh at his anti-charisma, his fumbling with PR, his jaw clicking and glass-eyed vulnerability - and in this dull world the shallow transparency of David Wisteria-removal Cameron was beginning to become clear.

The general public... HELLO? (see us knocking on Westminster windows trying to distract them from their infighting stupor)... yes us, the voters, were seeing the chance that Boy David might not be swept into power by the anti-social anti liberal pro Eton tide supported by the SunTimeMailySkyTelegraph ... and then the self-referential self-serving, sensationally short sighted and stupid sufferers from this suicidal tendency decided that it was time to give those Tory boys a big new year's cricketing metaphor present...

This game is surprisingly swinging back to the labouring fielding side - the opposition's best batsmen is bowled a tax break on off stump and edges a dolly to Hewitt at slip, "Oh! well dropped that fielder", shout the batting team, laughing in the pavilion, that could be the test match decider...