Oh, what a surprise!

Words fail me. In the light of the Savile row, we are now blessed with the delightful prospect of paedo allegations, even if they are unproven, dogging you for the rest of your life.

Our saintly Prime Minister casually let it slip in PMQs yesterday that even if the Cunt Persecution Disservice decide that there isn't enough evidence to support a prosecution, allegations will definitely be shared with "relevant organisations".

Just stop for a moment and think about that.

Because of a culture of matey mutual back-scratching amongst pillars of the establishment, any allegation of being a paedo no longer needs to be proven for you to be dogged by them for the rest of your life.

Pretty cool, huh?

And of course, once the children are protected, why, then ... why would you need ANY allegation to be proven before it trails behind you for the rest of your life?

This shortly after the decision to tag "habitual criminals" indefinitely to make sure everyone knows where they are.

Where are these fuckwits going and why the cunting fuck are they no less authoritarian and no less determined to snoop than the last fucking cockmunchers?

Cunts.

THEY ARE ALL CUNTS.

The poor in Britain (for @jearle and @woodo79)

Apparently, there are LOADS of poor people in Britain. And in order to fix that, we need to tax the rich more to feed the starving, shivering masses.

I, on the other hand, have been to and lived in places where there is actual poverty. I'm not seeing any shanty towns in the UK (and I've been to Leeds, Birmingham, Liverpool AND Newcastle!)

The problem is the way that poverty is defined: "This is based on a low pay rate of 60 percent of full-time median earnings". The problem with this is that by this definition, some people will ALWAYS be poor.

As a thought exercise, imagine this scenario: some economic miracle occurs and the minimum income is £1,000,000 per annum (with current purchasing power). And I think we can all agree that if you're earning a million pounds a year in today's money, you'll be OK, right?

However, some people are doing exceptionally well, what with billionaires and stuff, and so the median income is £10,000,000 per annum. This means that using the definition that we currently use, anybody who earns less than £6,000,000 a year in today's money is a hard-done-by basket case who deserves lashings of money from those better off.

Does that make sense to you? Because it doesn't make any sense at all to me.

I'm sure that there are individual cases for poverty and other help needed to be made. But this kind of blanket, uncritical stupidity makes it harder to justify the cases that actually need it, because there is so much lazy justification of something that isn't a problem.

The futility of financial regulation

Via the excellent and amazing Gresham College.

Border Bollocks

I went abroad last week. For work, natch, I don't have the readies to swan off for jollies in 5-star hotels for fun.

And I was reminded again of what a fucking miserable business it all is. From the moment you start queueing for checking, through the several pointless and unpleasant "security checks" where bored cunts are clearly just seeing how far they can go and keep a straight face.

Take your belt off (It's leather and has a tiny buckle), take your shoes off, take out your laptop, do this, do that, stand over here, have you got your toothpaste in a bag, blah blah blah. It's all fucking bollocks. I'm bloody sure if I put my mind to it, I could find a way to subvert it, and I'm the least devious, most open person I know.

So I'm amused to hear that not only has Theresa May had to defend herself because someone at the UK Borders Agency decreed that people should be waved through to reduce queues, but that there is also an immigration debate (I caught the tail end of the exposé on the idiot lantern and there was the predictable bollocks that they had let through some people who were claiming benefits and weren't entitled to them - why is this UKBA's problem and not the problem of the FUCKING WELFARE DEPARTMENT?)

Now there has been a 100,000-signature e-petition which means that the government needs to debate tightening up border controls. This is fucking bollocks. Most of the migration coming into the UK is from the EU and there's nothing that anyone can do about that. And the vast majority of immigrants who come here, add something to the UK.

Yes, there are dole-bludging cunts and murderers and rapists, but fuck knows, we have more than enough home-grown of all of the above. I'd rather have a hard-working Somali cock-washer than a dole-bludging Northern gimp any day of the fucking week.

This is just more pandering to people who won't or can't think about what is going on here, or are just old-fashioned bigots. And conclusive proof that even the most direct democracy is just a festering pile of cock. Just because the majority or a significant minority believe some horseshit, doesn't give them the right to force it on the rest of us.

The professionally aggrieved

This bloke had a disagreement with his girlfriend. He went to the pub and stayed out all night while his girlfriend stayed home sobbed her eyes out.

Now click here.

Plausible?

Or was your first thought "This shirt excuses domestic violence"? Like twitter did?

The professionally aggrieved saw this shirt and immediately started seeding twitter with "Look at this shirt, it makes domestic violence into a joke". Now if you look at the shirt again, thinking about domestic violence, it also makes perfect sense.

But crucially, it would make sense in almost any relationship dispute, violent or not. The frame of mind you're in when you first see the shirt has a massive impact on how you take it.

Needless to say, of course, that TopMan have pulled the shirt.

REAL Progress came from capitalism #ukuncut

I saw this tweet:

Most of Human History #haiku: Toil toil toil toil toil. Eat, make a baby, sleep, toil. Toil toil toil toil toil. http://wcti.us/0060

And I thought about the various recent anti-capitalist demonstrations and those still to come. You fuckers really don't know you're born. The greatest actual progress in the human condition, the greatest leaps in health care, in welfare, in charity in pretty much everything came when capitalism broke the link between toil and survival.

All the dipshits calling for a return to Gaia and a more rustic lifestyle have no idea how fucking grinding and soul-destroying an agrarian lifestyle is.

And there are no iPads.

So shut the fuck up and fuck the fuck off.

Oh, how I laughed ... again

I see the NHS (which also has a militant "climate change" secretariat) is pleading for 4x4 owners to help them get medicines and staff around.

I wonder if the beardie scruffs will be campaigning against 4x4 owners in 2011 again?

Fucking cunts.

Dear Mr Huhne

Do us all a favour and stick to fucking your current whore of choice and stop fucking us.

You imbecilic utter cuntstain.

Anti-smokers are fucking stupid

Update: This video was pulled for some reason. Pity really.

Oh, well DONE, Nanny!

Fuck's sake!

"This has got so much public attention that we will have to be outside with her for the foreseeable future because now everyone knows there is a seven-year-old standing on the side of the road every morning.”

Well fucking done, chaps.

Well fucking done.

It's not getting any better

Sorry Kingbingo, but whatever you're doing is not fucking working. I just got my local rag through the mailbox and the front page is plastered with how fucking disastrous boozing is and how much it's costing the saintly fucking useless shower of shite that is the NHS.

Not a fucking word on the fact that smoking and drinking are nett contributors to tax. Just more of the same old nannying, hectoring, we-know-better-than-you shit that filled our fucking ears while the cunts who wore red ties were in charge.

To all you authoritarian bastards, gearing up to tell us some more about how wicked and dissolute we are, I have three simple words to share with you:

Just. Fuck. Off.

Shut the fuck up ...

... you fucking motherfuckers.

(I can't add anything to that.)

Shocking, I tell you!

Shocking!

Last week, Thames Valley Safer Roads Partnership said a roadside camera on the A44 in Woodstock had seen an 18.3 per cent increase in speed offences since the switch-off compared to the average number caught this year.

At the same time a radar inside a second camera in Watlington Road, Cowley, registered an 88 per cent rise in offences when compared with figures in 2008 and 2009.

The partnership said the figures for 2010 were not available, as the camera had been switched off due to roadworks.

When the Oxford Mail requested 2008-9 data for the Woodstock camera – to make an equal comparison to the Watlington Road camera – the partnership said the figures were not readily to hand.

Now, the Oxford Mail having obtained the information, the figures actually show speed offences fell by four per cent when comparing the figures since the switch-off to offences in 2008-9.

The fucking police and the fucking scamera operators keep trumpeting all these fucking claims about how much scameras save lives and what utter fucking bastards motorists are.

Well, all I can say is: "Fuck off and die painfully, you lying cunts!"

A spiffing example of why regulations are bad

Here's a thing:

California is having massive budget problems. On an unrelated note, a $578,000,000 school is unveiled in Los Angeles. On another completely unrelated note, the district has a shortfall of $640,000,000. The school comes complete with murals, marble memorial, swimming pool, and public park. This will be the most expensive public school in American history.

Dude, WTF? More than half a billion fucking dollars on a fucking school? Does it have gold plated shitters or what?

And given that the district has an enormous shortfall, was that the best fucking use of taxpayer funding? Of course it fucking wasn't. But guess what? This fucking abortion was a direct consequence of cast-iron regulations created for situation A, that completely fuck up situation B:

By law, these funds could not be used to fund teacher salaries or to back fill budget shortfalls currently being experienced by the District and its [sic] meets the Board goal of relieving overcrowding in all our schools.

So, they couldn't use the funds for a useful purpose because they came with some arbitrary strings attached, and the district has a regulatory requirement to reduce overcrowding. So they pissed out over half a billion US on a fucking school, instead.

Jesus wept.

In which I agree with a Labour supporter

The tribalist cunt:

Meanwhile, Tory Treasury spokesman Philip Hammond blasted ‘superficially attractive thinking about means testing benefits that go to people who apparently don’t need them, but once you start introducing means testing you get perverse incentives’. Anybody fancy a game of ’spot the progressive’?

Less than a year later, coalition thinking is drifting in the opposite direction, with winter fuel allowance and child benefit seen as possible victims of the October spending review.

Labour’s work and pensions spokeswoman Yvette Cooper has been quick to condemn the government’s ‘shocking attack’ on OAPs, and rightly so. But it is a shocking attack that Labour itself was prepared to contemplate less than 12 months ago.

The fact of the matter is this: there is a huge welfare dependency in this country. Means testing is simply a way in which the welfare dependency is increased. I would far rather everyone had a basic citizen's income and a simple tax relief taper, something that could so easily be implemented today.

But of course, that wouldn't keep the fucking DWP in fucking jobs, would it?

Cunts.

It's not fucking rocket science

Really?

Fears have been raised that plans to hike the price of alcohol in Rochdale could lead to cheap 'booze cruises' into surrounding towns.

Bloody hell, surely not! Stop the presses, we have an economic genius here. If you live on the margins of somewhere cuntish, you may go somewhere less cuntish to do your self-harm.

And of course, when you've got an industrial-size bottle of vodka that you're carrying around the town centre, that's going to lead to a vast improvement in yobbish behaviour, isn't it?

So what will happen is that Manchester will lean on the surrounding towns and eventually it will spread because a bunch of prodnose council CUNTS think that the answer to any problem involves banning, taxing or both if at all possible.

Motherfucking scumbags.

Getting rid of "consumer protection"

Intriguing post from the ASI here:

If we are throwing quangos into the bonfire, I'd like to fuel the flames with a couple of 'consumer protection' bodies. I figure that government agencies that aim to protect us from faulty goods and inadequate services do no such thing – and indeed, leave us more exposed to them because they tend to reduce competition in consumer markets.

And, by and large, I agree. Regulation does little to protect the consumer, because we already had lashings and lashings of bank regulations and yet the "credit crunch" somehow still happened.

My own experience of dealing with the Advertising Standards Authority where I had a demonstrable, provable case left me wondering a) why I bothered and b) why I was funding these cunts.

We've all seen how useless Ofcom and the PCC and the IPCC, etc., are. So why have them?

In the comments, someone raised the tale of the Ford Pinto, where Ford's boffins allegedly worked out that the cost of fixing the Pinto's design flaw was greater than the cost of paying for a couple of hundred people to get fried to a crisp. So they went ahead with an unmodified design.

And that kind of concept genuinely is a concern.

But the truth of the Ford Pinto design flaw case is not quite as clear cut as our commenter would have us believe:

the number who died in Pinto rear-impact fires was well below the hundreds cited in contemporary news reports and closer to the twenty-seven recorded by a limited National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database. Given the Pinto's production figures (over 2 million built), this was not substantially worse than typical for the time

No company wants to get caught hiding such a thing, the coverup always does the damage. The internet now massively improves the ability of people to get such information into the public domain.

In the main, most businesses also want to retain customer loyalty. It costs roughly five times as much to get £10 off a new customer as it does to get £10 off an existing one. That's why mobile phone companies spend so much time and effort analysing churn. And you're not going to retain a customer if you are seen to be doing things like selling cars that are significantly more dangerous than those of your peers.

Regulation always closes the stable door after the horse has bolted, by the time the business or industry has already learned the lesson and has no intention of repeating it. Regulation also prevents competition, which is one of the best ways of actually regulating bad business practices.

In this as in so many other things, regulation and regulatory bodies do not help us at all.

They only protect the players in the industries concerned.

Is this just regression to the mean?

I hope that it's obvious that I'm not a fan of speed cameras. I regard them as pointless, thoughtless enforcers of a stupid law. But I wonder if people aren't setting themselves up for a fall here:

Accident data shows that in the first nine months after the devices were scrapped in Swindon, there were 315 road casualties in the area as a whole, compared with 327 in the same period the previous year.

In total there were two fatalities – compared with four in the same period previously – and 44 serious injuries, down from 48.

And the fact of the matter is, this is no different from the equivalent falls crowed over by advocates for speed cameras when the cameras are put up. At some point the numbers will crawl up, and then they will fall again. Put a camera up, take it down, the real thing to remember is: shit happens.

As if by magic

*snigger*

So much for localism.

Why government doesn't work

This article ridicules government-issue brownies:

The Pentagon’s brownie recipe is 26 pages long. Among the ingredients: water that conforms to the “National Primary Drinking Water Regulations (Copies are available from the Office of Drinking Water, Environmental Protection Agency, WH550D, 401 M Street, S.W., Washington, DC 20460),” eggs in compliance with “Regulations Governing the Inspection of Eggs and Egg Products (7 CFR Part 59),” and baking soda “which meets the requirements of the Food Chemicals Codex.”

Wondering about adding nuts? Simply consult section 3.2.5.3: “Shelled walnut pieces shall be of the small piece size classification, shall be of a light color, and shall be U.S. No. 1 of the U.S. Standards for Shelled English Walnuts. A minimum of 90 percent, by weight, of the pieces shall pass through a 4/16-inch diameter round hole screen and not more than 1 percent, by weight, shall pass through a 2/16-inch diameter round hole screen. The shelled walnuts shall be coated with an approved food grade antioxidant and shall be of the latest season’s crop.”

And that, in a nutshell, is why government doesn't work. Somewhere along the line, someone baked brownies using dirty water. So, instead of relying on everyone working to the assumption that dirty water doesn't make good brownies, we need a regulation for it. Then someone made brownies using old nuts. Most people wouldn't anyway, but now we need a regulation for that.

And so on and so on.

My daughter bakes brownies quite often. The recipe (including the ingredient list) is less than half an A4 page. They're delicious and no-one has died from eating them yet, nor do I think they ever will.

In this small microcosm of bureaucratic life, we find how government fucks everything up. All that extra regulation burdening (for example) banks now is because someone learned a lesson somewhere and the government wants to enforce that lesson on everyone. The fact that the banks have learned that lesson pretty well, thanks very much, and certainly won't be making that mistake again in a hurry.

But no, that's not good enough, the government has to add another rule to the book, with all sorts of unforeseen consequences and catastrophes. And simply complying with all these rules makes it more and more difficult to enter that market and provide effective competition. Existing banks already have compliance teams and know where the bodies are buried, so it's no real hassle for them to comply with more rules.

And so, in brownies and in banking (and, indeed, in every aspect of life) the government does lots to protect incumbents and does nothing worthwhile to protect you.