The game's up

In the world according to Hitchens & Littlejohn I believe I find myself as a card carrying member of the liberal elite. I've yet to look into the benefits afforded to me by this membership but assume that they include some sort of discount on organic tofu and the right to wear sandals with socks in public; without hindrance from the fascist-fashion police. Also I've yet to receive my card, which is probably down to the work-shy communists busy stealing birthday money from cards in the post office.

Anyway even without my card I am fully aware of all the conspiracies we've currently got bubbling under; global warming, endangered species, mass immigration projects, human rights / health & safety for everyone and the scrapping of sports days across europe.

These strategies to achieve whatever it is we want - I'm only a silver member and so don't have access to the aim of my brothers & sisters, that's only accessible to gold members and I need to collect another 43,000 loyalty points before I'm upgraded - are determined by a top secret cabal of secretive leaders. Top secret, that is, until now.

American author Ben Shapiro has outed the politburo in his tome "Primetime Propaganda" and, according to his well thought out research, at the head of the table sits Big Bird.

Telling people what to do through their kids is the prime weapon in Big Bird's armour and he (or is it actually a she? Hard to tell) has successfully exported the technique to Blighty.

My own social and political views were cultured in the nurturing garden provided by Geoffrey, Bungle, Zippy and George. Their apparently chaotic and colourful escapades, while seemingly innocent to the casual observer, were in fact secret messages stressing the importance of fiscal and political cohesion through the European Economic Community and encouraging homosexuality for revolutionary purposes.

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Fat Geordie loses job

The Mail's exclusively revealed today that the reason poor old Cheryl Cole lost her job in the States, patronising deluded singing wannabies, wasn't because no one can understand a word she's saying but actually 'cos she's chubby.

Like a chump she'd been working hard on this in the traditional manner of good diet and hard exercising. This offered the paper a delightful opportunity to publish a picture of her all sweaty and flouting a sports bra. Unfortunately it was all for nought, she obviously ran out of time.

Lacking a sports bra!

If only it was two years in the future, she could have popped a pill and Bob's your aunty's live-in famine victim.

Although to be honest I'm not too sure Fiona Macrae knows what she's talking about, she promised the exact same thing would be available in months back in 2007??

Then in 2008 she asks...

A good rule of thumb is that any headline in the Daily Mail that asks a question should be met with a polite but firm NO.

We don't want to encourage them now do we. Tweet

Banksy is back

After reading my own and the DM's critique of his work earlier in the week it seems Banksy has bounced back with some aplomb.

Vandals or tortured genius'?

Please take the time to really study the intricacies of his most recent work an excursion away from his normal stencil format but still a tour-de-force of the medium.

Note if you will the sexy swish put on the tail of the burkah, those toned (some might say popeye-esque) upper arms - no infidel bingo-wings here - and yet the come hither eyes still draw you in.

And what do they draw you into? A bargain that's what. £3.99 for a bikini top that uses three square yards of burlap is a steal, you'd be robbing yourself blind if you didn't buy one. Tweet

Please don't interrupt...

Pity the poor Home secretary she's had a hard day. As anyone who's ever been young and sat on a wall at night knows the police can be complete bastards.

Fancy giving her the silent treatment like a 14 year old in a strop just because they all get paid too much, that's just not on is it? To make things even more humiliating for the fancy-shoe-loving politician she was heckled! This wasn't a stag do at a sweaty comedy club in Walsall, this was the Police federation conference and, while I wouldn't expect a lightening response of rapier wit to deal with the foul mouthed drunk, I think in this case she may have had time to rustle up a memorable response.

PC Rathband didn't leap from his seat and scream incoherent abuse at her. He didn't shout out a clever or salient point that would stop her in her tracks, he didn't even put his hand up and wait to be invited to make his point. No, the officer in question took heckling to a new level - something that may well have put the fear of God into professional comedians the land over.

Having set up his video recorder and television beforehand he had an accomplice lay in wait and poised with his finger hovering over the pause button to unleash the heckle on the poor unsuspecting minister. At the given signal his helper (an experienced supply teacher) wheeled out the TV/Video trolley onto stage, aimed it towards the victim and let loose - after adjusting the tracking.

It's the surprise factor that probably troubled her the most there's no way she could have seen that coming. She should have learnt from this guy. Just wait and something will come to you in the end...

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Clear as mud

Putting up posters of nearly nudey ladies to flog knickers is bad and wrong. David Cameron says so.

"Cameron warned: 'More and more today, sexually provocative images are invading public space – space shared by children.

'In the Tube station, at the bus stop, on the billboard – there’s the creeping sense that we’re sleepwalking to a place where "porn is the norm"."

Unless you do something about it...

 ...and then it's all "nutcase Muslims off on another attack on our way of life" or as the exotic Lee tells us:

Although maybe I'm being unfair. Graffiti is a big bugbear of many many people, it could be the spraypaint job just looks unsightly. It's not very neat, they've missed a bit on the top of the leg and you can clearly still see the left boobie.

The quality of graffiti nowadays is significantly worse than it was in the olden days. I remember when Banksy was raw and his talent shone through and so does the DM. Critiquing street art does not feel like the normal territory of the Mail but they have taken to it like a penguin to Brent crude.

That's quite a roller coaster of issues so, just to check our understanding.

Bare women adverts are bad if you run a country, and complaining about them is normal. Taking action about them is evil makes you a religious nutjob and / or a bad graffiti artist. Graffiti as an art-form isn't what it used to be.

Any questions?

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Jesus Loves Ya!

Stephen Hawking's tapped out interview responses in today's Guardian have caused a lot of rage to the God botherers in the Mail's copy and paste of the story.

Prof Hawkins believes Time travel is
a real possibility.

The Prof. thinks it's very unlikely he'll be running towards a big hug off Jesus the minute they turn off his machine and because of that the Son of God's devotees have attacked him. It's probably one way of turning the other cheek that he's not spiritual enough to understand, maybe they teach it on the Alpha course?

Just take a look at love on offer from these lovely lambs here:

Unfortunately people will alway believe what they read and, in the case of religious texts, interpret it the way that best fits their world view. This means that they can read any message or commandment into whatever text they so choose; Bible, Qur'an, Torah or (in Paul from Blackpool's case) Dan Brown's 'The Lost symbol'.

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Shipman's Soviet Republic

I've been lucky enough to spend the last week enjoying the sun on the continent. Unfortunately as it was work I spent a lot of time sitting on my own reading BBC news on my phone and then comparing their stories with the nut-jobs over at the Mail and the tree-huggers at the Guardian.

One of the big stories was a report by David Cameron's numero uno think-tank Policy Exchange that indicated Public Servants are hideously overpaid and probably steal pens from work. (Might have mis-remembered that last bit).

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Mail's comments how these wealth drainers in the public sector should be set upon by big dogs and then beaten with chairs until the higher rate of income tax is reduced. Very little thought given to the poor toilet cleaners of Sodexo who get bollock all money to wipe last night's vindaloo from the seats of hospital toilets up and down the land every Saturday morning. Not a care that maybe it's worth more than £140 a week to put up with that sort of shit - literally. Of course if that was the case then it's unlikely Sodexo would have managed to scrape together £6.5bn in revenues last year.

This isn't the opinion of the Mail's chief news-hound Mr Tim Shipman. The premium salaries and gold-plated pensions of these bone idle scroungers are keeping Tim's chinless offspring out of private education with their excessive demands on his declared salary, and he makes sure the blighters get both barrels in his critique.

However that might not be enough, so to ensure the point's wormed it's way into the soft grey matter of all his readers he resorts to Derren Brown style psychological trickery. Look closely at the header of this screen shot from the article;

God damn Ruskies everywhere

Soviet UK?? Really? Outsourcing low paid jobs to foreign companies, who then pay peanuts to the same people who've always done them, in order to make attractive dividend payouts to shareholders wet-slapping each other's thighs in the country club spa. This is what Wolfie Smith was fighting for is it? Well maybe it was, he was a Cockney from south of the river, but I doubt it's Karl Marx's idea of a socialist utopia. Or maybe I'm wrong and if that's what was going off behind the iron curtain then Reagan was right, they were a particularly evil empire.

"You are stealing my wages"
says Tim

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Starkey - I don't believe it!

Historian David Starkey - who I always think is the one who believes Hitler was an OK kinda guy who meant no harm to those liars the Jews. He isn't though, although it would explain why he's writing opinion peices for the Mail - offers his reasoning as to why you should vote No tomorrow.

It's all to do with celebrities it seems.

Yes have a bevvy of right on super cool guys and No has Richard Wilson, famous for being a miserable old get.

However they don't do they. Richard Wilson was the voice of a vote Yes advert last night and is an ardent supporter of the Yes vote.

Next time he's on TV telling me about Henry VIII's 9 wives and penchant for Harley Davidsons I'll have to check. He seems to be making it up as he goes, bloody chancer.

I've just noticed another point that makes no sense. David Starkey states:

"I happily concede that AV and other forms of multi-round voting can work well when there are several candidates for a single important post"


Isn't this the definition of an General Election? Aren't we voting for our constituency MP to represent us at Westminster. Perhaps he doesn't think that's an important job, well not as important as some bloke banging on about the olden days on BBC2 anyway.

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Littlejohn - political heavyweight

 Eddie Izzard is campaigning for a yes vote

Littlejohn has heaved his bulk into the firing line and laid out his reasons for voting No. He's also (maybe for comic effect) misunderstood how AV works (Like the PM on the Today show this morning) and then peddled out some made up stuff to take up page space.

Let's look at the fatman's ramblings below

Just say No to those Alternative comedians

I've tried not to bore you with the arguments for and against the Alternative Vote system.

Because he doesn't understand them, but after jizzing over the killing of Bin Laden he still had a couple of hundred words to fill.

The only reason it is being put to a referendum on Thursday is to keep the Lib Dems happy.

Otherwise there wouldn't be a coalition government. We'd be preparing for another general election.

Adopting AV would be a disaster. At best it would be a recipe for permanent coalition government.

Why? That's not happened in Ireland and other countries it's used, why would it occur in the UK?

This Lib-Con pantomime horse was the only way to go last May, given the size of the deficit and the imperative to get rid of a clapped-out and cynical Labour administration.

But we can live without the puerile bickering and political sclerosis coalition inevitably creates.

Coalition governments occur when no one's popular enough to gain the majority of MPs, it's nothing to do with the  issues of the day.

Under AV you can end up with your third choice candidate eventually coming first. That’s how Labour got lumbered with Ed Miliband.

And the Torys got lumbered with David Cameron, what's the point?

At worst AV could produce freakishly large majorities, another bad plan. Governments with slender majorities tend to behave better.

So it's landslides only now is it? Two sentences ago it was permanent coalitions.

Finally, if we’d had AV  last May, Gordon Brown would still be in Downing Street, propped up by the Lib Dems.

I'm pretty sure he's thoroughly investigated this claim and not just banged it out off the top of his great big heed.

Since the principle of  any strong democracy is the ability to kick the bastards out, I’ll be voting ‘No’ and would urge you to do the same.

And what exactly does this last sentence mean? Where does FPTP let you kick out the bastards? How does AV stop you kicking the bastards out? Who are these bastards and why is there so much kicking happening.

What's he talking about?

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Those crazy Welsh voters

Gently appended to the end of a story about Chris Huhne going ballistic over David Cameron's casual use of lying (Yeah, and then Pippa Middleton says to me 'Prime Minister - you is looking buff man. Has you been down the leisure centre?' But like no one heard or nuffink 'cos there was these loud planes from the Vietnam world war or somethink innit.') is a little snippet of anti-AV propaganda placed to give people 'facts' they can casually throw in an argument.

"Candidates who came third in 137 seats at last year’s election could have ended up becoming MPs – overtaking those who came first and second – under the ‘confusing’ AV system, according to Conservative research. Incredibly, in one seat the eighth-placed candidate – an independent called Richard Turner-Thomas in Torfaen in Wales – could have won, researchers said"

This is obviously the working of some spoddy work-placement gimp at Conservative HQ who's been let loose on Excel and not given sufficient reality boundaries. He's managed to count in how many seats it is mathematically possible for the first round of voting to give no clear winner and then what's the lowest initial ranking someone could hold before being elected as the most popular candidate with 2nd, 3rd and more preferences.

These are just mathematically possible cases, not likely cases. Just like it's mathematically possible when the placement fella finally marries his sister their children will be normal. It may be possible, it's not likely. We all know they're going to end up as six-fingered mouth-breathers.

The point's driven home with the shocking revelation that Torfaen constituency candidate Richard Turner-Thomas could have finished eighth in the first round and yet still ended up being returned as the Pontypool MP.

Mr Turner-Thomas - one day all MPS will
wear Central American national costumes

What they don't mention is that the winning Labour MP received 16,847 votes compared to Richard's 607. This would mean he'd have to take 16,241 second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh preference votes off the other candidates. Now as he lost his deposit,  his daughter could only get 43 of her 280 facebook friends to agree to vote for him and his policies seem to revolve around a working knowledge of asphalt specifications it seems unlikely he'd have been stealing votes off of Plaid Cymru, UKIP, Liberals and Conservatives.

Unfortunately it's now too late. This 'fact' is out there seeping doubt and uncertainty into the minds of undecided voters. Maybe this is the new politics we were promised before the election, biggest and bestest liar wins.

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He's not a trained scientist but...

Mr Hitchens asks the questions science has already answered.

Today he attacks the Icelandic elephant in the room:

I think this might be it Peter. Oh, or this.

Not a computer simulation - a real ash cloud.

Of course non of this would never have happened if were 1953. Oh if only we were living in the hacylon days of TB, polio and extreme poverty. A pathetic imaginary ash cloud wouldn't have stopped the airlines in those days.

They were made of sterner stuff.

Propellers. Tweet