And so it begins... (for @TomHarrisMP) #equalmarriage

I think this is the first time I've noticed the start of a Fabian twisting of our language.

While I'm all for teh gayz having the right to fuck up their lives with marriage, I now see that we're not allowed to talk about gay marriage. It's "equal marriage".

No, it's not equal. There are different constraints that apply to gay marriage, one of which is that gays can have affairs and it's not grounds for divorce. That's a pretty weird form of exclusive monogamous commitment right there. There are other differences, a lack of consummation is not grounds for divorce either. So, you can have a gay marriage, never touch your partner, fuck around as much as you want and your partner just has to put up with it.

What kind of marriage is that, then?

But somehow, this has become "equal marriage". I'm pretty sure there's loads of people in straight marriages who would like the same perks, frankly. There are probably more straight people fuck around in their marriages and would like to do so without any prospect of sanction than there are gays who want to get married. What about some "equal rights" for them?

And what happens if a transgender gets married as a straight and then converts? Does their "conventional" marriage now become an "equal" marriage or are they a same-sex couple who have to be faithful?

This is just another badly-drafted, ill-considered bit of law that is going to fuck things around more. But mostly I'm annoyed about the abuse of the language.

It makes me wonder how much other "equality" law is a load of shit.

Oh, go on then ... #trafigura

Some people just don't know when to quit, do they?

Update: Censored report here.

Gosh!

Was there ever a politician who wasn't a total cunt?

In his book The Cigar, Barnaby Conrad III writes that before John F. Kennedy signed the trade embargo in 1962 banning Cuban cigars he had his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, get him 1,000 cigars. Once Salinger had secured 1,100, the president said: “Now, that I have enough cigars to last awhile, I can sign this.”

More smiting

Everybody is banging on about the Gaza fucking around, so I might as well add my tuppence worth. Broadly speaking, I'm on the side of Israel, largely because I grew up with a lot of Jewish friends, which is probably not sufficient reason at all, really, but from reading some of the comments over at Mrs Dale and Old Felcher I don't think it's any less reasonable than some of the utter crap that I'm reading there.

There have been times when I have absolutely disagreed with Israel's response to provocation or the fact that they appear to have provoked violence. But in this case, I am comfortable in my own mind they're perfectly entitled to go in there and kick the fuck out of Hamas, who really don't appear to be doing anything useful in making Palestine into a viable state. Lobbing amateur rockets at a heavily-armed neighbour is suicidal, and the Israelis were never going to put up with it. Even though the Palestinians voted them in, Hamas can hardly be accused of putting the cause of Palestine first. Frankly, I'd hope that the Israelis wipe out Hamas completely and a more useful Palestinian authority gets elected and they start rebuilding the Gaza strip.

Although I suspect I'll still be blogging about this shit in 2035.

If Andy "Hoon" Burnham doesn't get his fucking way.

The cunt.

It's all a con ...

It's not a credit crunch, it's just rent-seeking:

The credit crunch is not nearly as severe as the U.S. authorities appear to believe and public data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well, a report released on Thursday says.

As a result, governments are pumping masses of public money into the economy across the world because of the difficulties of a few big, vocal banks and industries such as car manufacturing, which would be in difficulty anyway, according to the report published by Celent, a financial services consultancy.

"It's just stabbing in the dark with trillions of dollars," Octavio Marenzi, report author and head of Celent, told Reuters in a telephone interview where he questioned the depth of the analysis that preceded numerous fiscal stimulus packages.

The report, much of which is based on U.S. Federal Reserve data, challenges a long list of assumptions one by one, arguing that there is indeed a financial crisis but that, on aggregate, the problems of a few are by no means those of the many when it comes to obtaining credit.

"It is startling that many of (Federal Reserve) Chairman (Ben) Bernanke and (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson's remarks are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead," said the report.

Perhaps the U.S. central bank and treasury department, and authorities in other countries by extension, know something they are not telling anyone and which is far more worrying than the public data shows, the report says.

Or, more plausibly, they were generalizing erroneously from the bad experience of a limited number of big banks and companies that are in any case in difficulty.

"I don't think they're fabricating stuff but what I think they are doing is taking the situation of a handful of institutions and generalizing that to the market as a whole, incorrectly," said Marenzi.

The picture appeared to be broadly similar in much of Europe and Japan, said the report, based on publicly available data on trends in bank lending to industry, households and among banks themselves in the so-called interbank markets.

So, really, what's going on here is that a couple of well-publicised business failures due to bad practices have not been allowed to be punished by the market and now governments are making it worse by actively throwing tax money around at anyone who asks.

And still the socialists claim that this was a market failure?

Stop the planet, I need to get off.

Cheese eating surrender monkeys they may be ...

... but at least the French don't just sit there watching "Rue de Coronation" when people start fucking with their civil liberties:

Opposition to a new security database is gaining momentum in France as people return to work after a summer break during which the government authorized the state to store personal information on people as young as 13.

The decree creating the "Edvige" electronic database appeared in the official gazette on July 1, when the country was winding down for the summer, but news of its content has been gradually filtering out and is now stirring fierce criticism.

Doesn't that remind you of someone?

President Nicolas Sarkozy came to power last year promising tough action against crime, a major theme in his campaign, and critics say Edvige is part of the government's drive to woo voters at the expense of personal freedoms.

And that?

"With just a few clicks of the mouse, any government official or civil servant will have access to intimate data," said opposition politician Francois Bayrou earlier this week.

How about that?

It seems to me very much that politicians are worthless scum around the world. They all need a fucking good kicking.

Cunts.

(PS I've got first dibs on the Widow Sarkozy!)

Another great reason not to windfall tax energy companies ...

Who do you think owns those obscene, greedy profits? Well, via your pension, you do.

The End of an Era

I was very sad to read this, after all my years in IT:

After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and countless contributions to computer science and technology, it is the end of the road for Bell Labs' fundamental physics research lab.

Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic science, material physics and semiconductor research and will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software.

The idea is to align the research work in the Lab closer to areas that the parent company is focusing on, says Peter Benedict, spokesperson for Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent Ventures.

"In the new innovation model, research needs to keep addressing the need of the mother company," he says.

That view is shortsighted and may drastically curtail the Labs' ability to come up with truly innovative discoveries, respond critics.

"Fundamental physics is absolutely crucial to computing," says Mike Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society. "Say in the case of integrated circuits, there were many, many small steps that occurred along the way resulting from decades worth of work in matters of physics."

I agree with the critics. The provision of labs and funding to do truly left-field research was one of the areas where I felt large corporates really could give something back to society in a way that smaller organisations and individuals couldn't.

Click here for a fairly complete list of achievements, but for me, these stand out:

* 1937 Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter
* 1956 John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the first silicon based transistor

During its first year of operation, facsimile (fax) transmission, invented elsewhere, was first demonstrated publicly by the Bell Laboratories.
In 1926, the laboratories invented the first synchronous-sound motion picture system.
In 1927, a long-distance television transmission of images of Herbert Hoover from Washington to New York was successful.
During the 1920s, the one-time pad cipher was invented by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne at the laboratories; Bell's Claude Shannon later proved that it was unbreakable.
In 1931, a foundation for radio astronomy was laid by Karl Jansky during his work investigating the origins of static on long-distance shortwave communications. He discovered that radio waves were being emitted from the center of the galaxy.
In 1933, stereo signals were transmitted live from Philadelphia to Washington, DC.
In 1937, the vocoder, the first electronic speech synthesizer was invented and demonstrated by Homer Dudley.
In 1947, the transistor, probably the most important invention developed by Bell Laboratories, was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley (all of whom subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956). As for the spectacular side of the business, in 1956 TAT-1, the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid between Scotland and Newfoundland, in a joint effort by AT&T, Bell Laboratories, and British and Canadian telephone companies.
A year later, in 1957, MUSIC, one of the first computer programs to play electronic music, was created by Max Mathews.
In 1958, the laser was first described, in a technical paper by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes.
In 1960, Dawon Kahng and Martin Atalla invented the metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET); the MOSFET has achieved electronic hegemony and sustains the large-scale integrated circuits (LSIs) underlying today's information society.
In 1962, the electret microphone was invented by Gerhard M. Sessler and James Edward Maceo West.
In 1969, the UNIX operating system was created by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.
In 1970 Dennis Ritchie developed the C programming language as a replacement for the interpretive B for use in writing the UNIX operating system (also developed at Bell Laboratories).
In 1976, Fiber optics systems were first tested in Georgia and in 1980, the first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor, the BELLMAC-32A was demonstrated;
In 1983, the C++ programming language was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension to the original C programming language also developed at Bell Laboratories.
In 1988, TAT-8 became the first fiber optic transatlantic cable.
In 1990, WaveLAN, the first wireless local area network (LAN) was developed at Bell Laboratories. Wireless network technology would not become popular until the late 1990s and was first demonstrated in 1995.
In 1991, the 56K modem technology was patented by Nuri Dağdeviren and his team.
In 1997, 50 years after inventing the original transistor, the smallest practical transistor (60 nanometers or a mere 182 atoms wide) was built.
In 1998, the first optical router was invented and the first combination of voice and data traffic on an Internet Protocol (IP) network was developed at the Laboratories.

That's a lorra, lorra fucking clever stuff right there: transistors, UNIX, C, C++, 56K modems, WiFi, transatlantic cables, VOIP ...

Think how much worse off we would all be if it hadn't been for all the geniuses at Bell Labs, and let's raise a glass in their memory ... and in the memory of a fantastic research organisation.

Cunt of the nanosecond

I fully support Jenna Delich's right to express her opinions, however odious they may be. However, she has no right to use legalistic bullying to shut down Harry's Place, even though they're a bunch of wankers that I never read.

So, Jenna, accept that the intermong is full of people who might disagree with you, and take that criticism with good grace.

Cunt.

A Basic Requirement for a Libertarian Government: THINK!

The papers are full of this:

A stark warning that Britain’s worsening economy will cause “difficult social issues” heaped fresh pressure on Gordon Brown yesterday, as more members of his Government broke ranks to demand a windfall tax.

The Prime Minister faces the prospect of the resignation of at least one ministerial aide if he fails to impose a new levy on energy companies’ profits, The Times has learnt.

There are just so many things wrong with this, I can't be sure I'll get them all:

1. What did the government expect to happen to energy prices in their quest for green-ness? The whole idea of their green taxes are to make energy more expensive so that people use less of it. So why moan when the price goes up? What did they expect was going to happen?

2. The government has already already netted more than £1 billion in extra taxes due to the increase prices. It seems a bit fucking churlish to demand some more.

3. The windfall taxes will steal from the businesses' capacity for investment in other things that might help energy costs, such as research into alternative energy sources, exploratory drilling, etc., etc.

4. Windfall taxes damage business confidence overall. Why would I execute on this brilliant new business strategy when all it's going to do is wind up getting the arse taxed off it?

5. The "outrageous profits" are not really outrageous at all. As a Return on Investment percentage, they're pretty shit, really. It's only because there are so many consumers that the number looks big. The costs are commensurately eyewatering, indeed, more so.

6. The government already takes more tax out of the energy companies than the energy companies take profits. If it were at all possible, I'd be looking to move my business elsewhere, where the tax regime was sane.

I swear, these people really do seem to think there is never an unintended consequence and there is also an infinite supply of cash for their latest wizard wheeze. Bunch of wizard's sleeves, more like.

BoJo: WTF?

I must admit that I was, briefly, a fan of Red Ken. Not because I had any affiliation with his rather barmy politics, but because he'd managed to stick it to Tony. Back then, I was so desperate to see Tony get fucked over, I took an "enemy of my enemy" position. But with the advent of Kengestion charging, the LEZ and all the right-on cocktrumpeting, I soon tired of the newt molester.

So when BoJo came storming in, I thought: good-oh, here's a decent egg, got a bit of worldly experience, he'll sort things out.

The first warning bells came with the banning of boozing on the Tube. This baffled me. People actually drinking on the Tube are incredibly rare and in no way a problem. Drunks on the Tube, that's a whole 'nother thing right there. They're a complete pain in the cunt. But of course, you can't ban that as easily, can you.

So we staggered out of that, and then he parked the increased congestion charge and sacked a bunch of Trots, had a bit of a black moment and then just seemed to be getting on with it. But now he's back in the press with something that made me weep: he has appointed Rosie Boycott, former editor of the Incontinent on Sunday, as a "food czar". I then read the rest of the article and started keening, excuse me while I compose myself.

Ok, I think I can face it again:

Young people with anti-social behaviour orders could be made to work in allotments, Boris Johnson's new food czar said today.

Oh, for the fucking sake of fucking fuck, woman. What is this cuntwaftery? This sounds like a fucking Gorgon relaunch initiative. Mind you, what would you expect from someone who ran the IoS? Sense?

Former newspaper editor Rosie Boycott said the move would benefit the environment and give young people a sense of pride.

Or it might lead to vandalised allotments and spate of spade thefts, you never know.

Ms Boycott has been appointed by the Mayor to chair the London Food Board, which aims to improve access to healthy, locally-produced and affordable food. She said she would also support local markets and encourage families to eat together.

Oh God, my brain is trying to escape through my ears and strangle me to stop me from reading this shit. Boris, please do us all a favour and fire this totalitarian cunt now. If we wanted some irritating fuckwit telling us all how to live our lives, we'd have voted for Ken. We voted for you because we wanted something different, not more of the cunting same!!

"I want to advocate the use of allotments and growing our own food," she said. "We can lean on councils to release more land and kids on Asbos could be put to work on them. If you've grown your own food you feel prouder of it and appreciate it more. We also want to limit food waste and eat more locally. If everybody grows more of their own food we have a greener city and help climate change."

Rosie, where the fucking fucking fuck do you think the councils are going to get more land from? Carve it from their cocks?

Ms Boycott, a former editor of the Independent on Sunday, has her own small organic farm and writes about the importance of food in improving health and in reducing the carbon emissions which cause climate change. She has also written a book about her experiences on her farm.

Oh great! Just what we need, another bossy, nannying, hectoring, clumsy-beekeeper-faced, chatterati dilettante telling us how we need to live our lives. And she's not exactly unbiased, with that pedigree, is she?

Boris, sack the bitch and stop fucking about with this trendy lefty shit. London has more important things that need sorting out.

Rosie Boycott: fuck off and die!



Update: Bishop Hill's take on it: journalists are idiots.

Update 2: Dave's Part shows a sexist side. Snigger.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ... again

On our side. Getting on with the job. Difficult economic times. Look to the government to sort it all out.

In a simultaneous speech, the prime minister insisted his government was "on the side of the people of Britain".

"We understand and we hear people's concerns," Brown said at the Labour party's national policy forum at Warwick University.

Earlier, he brushed aside Cameron's call to hold a snap general election, insisting he would "get on with the job" following Labour's defeat.

Brown said the government would address public concerns about rising fuel and food prices as the scale of voters' discontent with the his administration became clear.

The PM said: "I know that people look to the government to take the action that is necessary.

"We are looking at everything we can so that, in what is a global problem, we can in Britain help people through these difficult times.

"I think my task is to get on with the job of taking us through these difficult economic times."

Asked about the prospect of a leadership challenge, Brown said: "I'm getting on with the job."

Senior cabinet minister Des Browne admitted the result was "a bad night" for Labour, but he insisted Brown was the right man to reverse the party's fortunes.

The defence and Scottish secretary said: "Clearly, this has been a bad night for us and we will take it seriously … We do need to listen."

He told a press conference this morning the party "would not lose its nerve" in the face of last night's verdict.

Browne blamed the 22% swing to the SNP on fears about rising food and fuel prices.

"What we won't do is hide either from the people or economic circumstances," he said. "Nor will we turn inward and start talking to ourselves when what we need to do is face outward and engage with voters."

The Scottish secretary sought to quash speculation that Labour MPs now fearing for their seats at the next election would move to oust Brown.

He said: "In Gordon Brown we have a leader who is uniquely well placed to take us through these difficult times. He has led us successfully through two economic shocks in the last decade and I believe he will do so again."

Jesus, you fuckwits: this kind of mindless moronic mantra-mouthing works when times are good and people don't really care about what you're doing to them -- but it sure a fuck does not work when we're all on the bones of our arses.

A thousand words of warning to our Brown(e)-shirted government: