Vote Ken Or The Puppy Gets It.

Dear Sir,

We the undersigned have begged, pleaded and ordered Londoners to vote for Ken over the last few months. We have blown the lid on how Boris Johnson's past words could be viewed as racist if they had appeared in a completely different context to how they actually appeared. We have exposed how it is possible that if Boris Johnson is elected he will close down the tube and ban buses even if there is no evidence that he will do so. We have explained to Muslims that he will ban the Koran even though he will have neither the power nor the inclination to do so. We have explained that he is a neocon/Zionist Bushite who will not sign Kyotu even thought that is not within his remit.

And yet it appears that many Londoners are still intending to vote Boris.

Up to this point we have had patience with dealing with you suburbanite troglodytes but there comes a point where a line has been crossed. If you won't even respond to our explaining how Boris Johnson's decision to be amusing whilst on a television comedy show disqualifies him for the job then it is hard to see what will get it through your thick skulls, it is Ken's right to be mayor.

It pains us as members of London's vibrant cultural community, although many of us actually live in Dorset, to see London being taken hostage by a right wing posh Tory. Did we mention that he went to Eton, on a scholarship that many of our Daddies had entered us for? Posh Bullingdon Boy Boris is in no position to understand what the London Mayor is supposed to do. In contrast most of us have received several hundreds of thousands of pounds from the mayor's
office in recent years, so our expertise really should count for more than the likes of the Evening Standard reading nazis in the outer suburbs.

In light of this we feel that we have but one course of action left open to us. If Boris Johnson is elected mayor we shall eat this adorable and tasty puppy for dinner on Friday evening. The choice facing Londoners is stark they can vote for Ken and elect a mayor who cares about puppies or they can elect Boris who is still trying to pursue a course of action that will mean that a poor puppy will be served in a casserole.


Should this puppy die to satiate Boris's neocon, racist, buffoonish, Bullingdon Boy selfishness? It is your decision (unless you have a postal vote in which case don't sweat it, we'll sort it out for you.

Yours Desperately,

Guardianistas:

Polly Toynbee,
Seamus Milne,
Richard Gott,

Race Baiters:
Lee Jasper,
Doreen Lawrence,
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown,
Simon Wooley,

Islamists:
Sheikh Al Qaradawi,
Azzam Tamimi,
Osama Bin Laden,

People Who Were Famous In The 1980s:
Tony Robinson,
Billy Bragg,
Vivienne Westwood.

Jews:

Labour MPs:

Anon Entity,
Whohe,

Assorted Twats:

Phil Jupitus,
Hugo Chavez,
Damon Albarn,
George Galloway.

A Really Embarrassing Body.

I've just been looking at the television pages to see what to watch tonight. Is it me or is Channel 4 being a little bit insensitive in their scheduling, because let's face it, there can't be many bodies more embarrassingthan one found floating in your pool with evidence of a sexual assault:

21:00- Embarrassing Bodies.
22:00- Michael Barrymore: What Really Happened


{ Original post edited for typos}

A 'Daily Nuclear Strike'

Polly Toynbee, with her usual sense of proportion, writes:

Associated Newspapers, the owner of the Daily Mail, has used the London Evening Standard as a daily nuclear strike in the city's mayoral campaign. Its billboards across London every day claim spurious "scandal" after "scandal" involving Ken Livingstone. Few read the paper, but all London sees the newsstands.

Thankfully the Guardian shows how a proper newspaper should cover the London mayoral race:

Today:

• Dave Hill, "here are the 10 reasons to vote Ken".
• Polly Toynbee, "A vote against this effete and frivolous Tory is a no-brainer". No brainers are Polly's area of expertise I guess.

Yesterday:

• Richard Reeves on the dangers of 'progressives' splitting the vote.
• Martin Jacques declares that Livingstone is a demigod and asks of Boris Johnson "Does anyone really think that Johnson has any serious commitment to public transport or knows what it means? Does anyone believe that he can represent the 40% of Londoners who are non-white when his own racial prejudices have been made so apparent?". Perhaps Ian Wright could represent them.
• Dave Hill (again), "Livingstone has acquired the expertise that comes with experience whereas Johnson cannot tell us who his transport specialists are going to be. Which of the two would you prefer in charge?"
• John Carvel on Ken, "He is the same witty, articulate, self-deprecating, stubborn, leftwing pragmatist that he was then."

I may expand this article into last week's Grauniad and beyond, later today. I'm sure I could find well over a hundred articles scaremongering about a Boris Johnson victory.

Health & Politics.

The link between autism and the MMR vaccine has been pretty comprehensively discredited. I realise that it is hard to imagine that a study published by the Lancet would turn out to be such complete crap but there you go.

In politics however the empirical reality is that facts matter much less than public perception, and seeing as the anti MMR lobby is organised and motivated whereas the supporters of MMR are generally apolitical this means that all three of the remaining candidates for US president are willing to pander to the scaremongers.

The scientific evidence here is pretty clear yet the controversy has caused levels of vaccination to fall off and by not challenging the supposed MMR autism link all the candidates have demonstrated that they are willing to endanger the citizens whom they seek to serve and lead in order to get elected.

Where the political backlash against vaccination is even greater in some parts of world than in the West, it has enabled diseases that were on the cusp of being eliminated, like Polio, to make strong resurgences and it has left a lot of children severely disabled for life. For the three main aspirants to become the most powerful person on the planet to fuel this backlash for votes is disgusting.

Claiming The Mantle Of Victimhood

Obama pastor: I had death threats

I'm willing to bet that no evidence of these supposed death threats will see the light of day, and he certainly won't call in the police. This is the classic maneuver of a far left demagogue who has been caught out, pretend to be the victim of a violent hate campaign.

Striking Teachers.

With teaching unions trying to blackmail the government into giving teachers a further inflation busting pay rise (they are up 19% in real terms since a decade ago), by striking as pupils are preparing for their exams it is clear that the power of the Unions has grown too great once more. Seeing as the Unions are willing to wreck the life chances of the children in their care it is important for pupils and parents to be able to assess how at risk they are from this. So how about making it compulsory for schools to publish information pertaining to the trade union affiliation of their staff?

I'm not talking about naming individual teachers but just a brief summary of how many unreliable teachers a school has, so that if one school has 10% NUT affiliation and a second suffers from 50% NUT affiliation then the children and their parents are able to choose the school least likely to suffer from maliciously timed stoppages.

As someone who was at primary school 20 years ago when the last wave of teaching strikes was underway I can clearly remember that the most militant teachers were generally also the most dim, useless and bullying, one of the militant teachers told my mother that she became a socialist when she failed the 11+ which figures. I doubt that much has happened in the intervening two decades to change that.

A Request.

Is there any readily available online resource that gives a list of how much each government department is spending? I'm particularly interested in how much the Department of Work & Pensions spends. I've seen figures given for the department of around £7 billion but that cannot be including the amount that they pay out in welfare and pensions, as that is obviously over £100 billion. Any answers in the comments please.

Update: It's okay this is what I'm looking for.

Quote Of The Day.

Remember the World Conference Against Racism (and Jews) that was held in Durban during the week prior to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks? You remember the one where holocaust denial literature was being peddled, where Robert Mugabe received a standing ovation whilst the representatives of Western countries were denounced. Where the countries that still practiced slavery demanded compensation for the slave trade that the West abolished more than a century earlier. Yeah that one.

Joy of joys there is going to be a sequel! In the National Review Anne Bayefsky reports on some of the preliminary events:

The United Nations opened an “anti-racism” meeting here Monday. First up on the agenda? Anti-Semitism. Not anti-anti-Semitism but actual anti-Semitism

It appears to be the Iranian government that is particularly active in trying to ban Jews from the event. Rather incredibly the Iranian government's commitment to antisemitism is so great that even Al Qaeda have been upset by it, sort of.

A Race Nut Watches Match Of The Day.

Dumbjon is unimpressed with the latest Martin Jacques racism-in-sport article that he churns out regularly. This time it's about Ian Wright's resignation from Match of the Day complaining that he was being treated like a 'comedy jester' for reasons that escape me. There's not much to add about this particular one.

So how does he manage to detect racism so frequently? Normally he will find a relatively small number of non whites in a particular field and then expand from there. Sometimes his methods of doing this are a tad unscientific.

In a column about Lewis Hamilton he observes:

Apart from the Japanese, virtually every face in the paddock, let alone on the starting grid, was, until recently, white. This is hardly surprising. The more expensive and/or exclusive a sport, the whiter it tends to be: the fact almost has the force of a law. That is the main reason why the Rugby World Cup, the Pacific islands excepted, was so desperately white, the Springboks included.

If you ignore the non white participants then the ethnic make up of the participants does indeed seem overwhelmingly white. Who knew?

Food Glorious Food.

Gordon Brown's "Food Summit" to discuss the food prices crisis seemed a bit insensitive to hold so soon after John Prescott's hilarious shocking bulimia revelations. As a political gimmick though promising to tackle the food crisis is probably a clever and cost free idea. Nobel winning economist Gary Becker explains here:

The second reason for optimism relates to the lower productivity of food production in the poorer parts of the world relative to the United States and other developed countries. Higher food prices will induce an increase in productivity in developing nations by encouraging greater use of machinery, fertilizers, and other forms of capital. It will also encourage consolidation of some agricultural holdings into the hands of more efficient farmers.

In other words the crisis will resolve itself soon enough without actual intervention by politicians, so they may as well position themselves to claim credit for it.

Quote Of The Day.

On Newsnight there was a debate between the founder of a new anti-Islamist Muslim group the Quilliam Foundation, whose name unfortunately escapes me, and the supporter of Hamas and founder of the Ken Livingstone supporters group "Muslims for Ken", Azzam Tamimi who denounced the new group for being at war with Muslims because they:

"Have something in common with the Israelis and the zionists"

No One Expects The Sith Inquisition.

A small sect is being viciously persecuted in Wales.

Coming Next: Stress Bricks.

I always wondered how stress balls actually relieved stress:

George Galloway has been left dazed and bruised after being pelted with a rubber stress ball while out campaigning in central London.

Yeah, that would work.

Quote Of The Day.

Most artists aren't very smart. They like shiny stuff"

Quite.

What Would I Do Without The Internet.

I'm really not sure whether this is supposed to be serious, comic or kinky, but I happened across the Christian Domestic Discipline site and it is er compelling.

Obviously if it is for real, and they do seem to be very deadpan, then I shouldn't be finding it so funny as it would be rather sinister, but it can't be serious can it?

Pinning a rebellious wife's inside leg also prevents assuming a mulish *ironing board* position - with the legs extended - since it is almost impossible to do with one leg. As the spanking withers any rebellion, the woman's legs will naturally relax as her resistance fades and she accepts her fate

If it's satire then they have been quite effective in winding people up.

And in case you are wondering, no I didn't come across the site whilst googling anything to do with spanking.

The Undead.

Darling: I Can't Rewrite Budget.

Well obviously not, because that implies that he wrote the original budget himself. I've got a theory that Alastair Darling is actually a ghost and therefore cannot touch anything so he can't hold a pen or touch a keyboard in any case. It was when the cameras filmed him walking along Downing Street on Budget day that I noticed how he just appears to glide down the street making no contact with either the ground or his colleagues, in short he appears to be insubstantial and incapable of making an impression on anyone. It is likely that he is unaware that he's been dead for a couple of centuries.

One of his ex colleagues who could never be accused of being incorporeal is John Prescott who made the hilarious shocking revelation at the weekend that he had been bulimic when he was Deputy Prime minister. Actually he suffered from Bulimia by proxy, a rare condition in which the sufferer stuffs his face and makes the rest of us throw up.

Maoists & Gurkhas

Daniel Hannan MEP is in Nepal, presuambly observing the election, and he reports that Nepal's newly elected Maoist* government wants to stop the recruitment of Nepalese men into the Gurkha regiments of Britain ( along with those of India and Singapore).

They have been serving in the British Army since the end of the Gurkha War ( 1814-1816), a conflict which was concurrent with the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. Not to be jingoistic, but fighting three wars on three continents simultaneously and achieving the desired objectives in all three is a pretty impressive feat!

Anyway hopefully the prospect of losing the Gurkhas can encourage the British government to treat them correctly.

* Hopefully their Maoism is about as deep as that of peace protesters who wear Mao T-shirts and 'Free Tibet' badges together.

Subsidy Junkies

Australian PM Kevin Rudd is having a luvvie fest, or whatever the Australian equivalent of 'luvvie' is, which looks a lot like Tony Blair's infamous 'Cool Britannia' Downing Street reception for the likes of Noel Gallagher a decade ago. Actress Cate Blanchett is thrilled with the new direction of Australian government/luvvies relationship. The Australian film industry is already over subsidised and uncreativel and it looks like this will be exacerbated. Much like our own in fact.

I've quoted this before:

The director Stephen Frears recalls meeting him soon after he had announced a big increase in money for films. "Do you know what you've done?'' the movie man asked. "Created a rush of absolutely terrible British films?'' the benefactor replied, laughing.

Fair play to Gordon Brown, he does at least realise that subsidies are anathema to good movies. Sure he does it anyway in order to but publicity but at least he knows that it is wrong. There is a pretty decent correlation with the level of subsidy a country offers and the paucity of it's actual cinematic output.

Quite often after watching a few good films from one country I try to look up
details of their subsidy regime and almost always they have relatively low subsidy regimes, so for example Germany which has produced numerous excellent films in recent years and sure enough they spend less than half of what France spends and far less the the UK shovels out. So whilst we make tedious gangster movies the Germans are producing masterpieces such as 'The Lives of Others'. Similarly I've noticed a lot of good Brazilian films in recent years and sure enough their government drastically reduced subsidies in the 1990s.

The ironic thing about government film funding is that whilst the rationale is to preserve and promote the indigenous culture, once film makers are freed from competing on a level playing field with Hollywood, they tend to make low grade pastiches of Hollywood productions. In the absence of subsidies they are pushed to find niches that Hollywood doesn't fulfill and actually begin to reflect a distinctive national culture.