Jennings on the Madness in Syria

Been neglecting the cartoons on here of late.  Been neglecting the whole thing to be honest.  Anyway, first up, a dose of terrifying reality, brilliantly rendered by Ben Jennings in the Indy.

My favourite cartoon of the moment really...and one for the ages.

Naughty or Nice Doesn't Come Close

I would not have believed even seven months ago that I would feel as strongly about this man as I do today.  Now, I'm long past making any excuses for him.  He is the face of all the evil his party has wrought and continues to wreak.  May a likely non-existent God have mercy on his soul.

Oh, and a premature Happy Christmas* Ev'ryone !...


* Fuck political correctness now and forever.  Fuck Starbucks, regardless of how they decorate their cups.  And fuck 'Merry'...it's Happy dammit.

Schrank: Justice Delayed

Dave Brown on Xi Jinping's Visit to the UK*

* Sorry, make that the overseas province of the PRC formerly known as America's Bitch.  Sorry, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Your Completely Insane Baseless Headline of the Day

Courtesy, of the Independent no less...

The changing nature of the British jobs market has broken the link between unemployment and crime, according to new research.

The phenomenon – which saw rising joblessness matched by increased burglaries, thefts and robberies during the Thatcher years – ended in 2005, according to an analysis of crime and employment statistics.

The latest research suggests that growing trend of employers to adopt part-time working and zero-hours contracts has meant that communities are less blighted by mass unemployment and less likely to resort to crime.

The findings explain in part why Britain was not hit by a crime epidemic following the 2007-8 financial crisis which led to unemployment rising above eight per cent for the first time in more than a decade but saw a continuing long-term decline in crime.

Here's the link to the full story.  See if you can find anything there to support that supposition.

The story does mention the likely role in preventitive technology in reducing crime, though that only addresses the question of means.

Here's a hint from the other side of the Atlantic at a more likely causative factor:

But no-one seems to want to take that line of enquiry seriously, and we're going to be still debating this shit for decades to come, and still pushing Dirty Harry-style get-tough rhetoric on crime even as London sinks into the Thames and DC & NYC into the Atlantic.


Quick Update: Oh yeah, here's this from the Independent in 2007: Ban on leaded petrol 'has cut crime rates around the world'

Banning lead in petrol is responsible for declining crime rates in Britain, the United States and other countries, startling new research suggests.

The astonishing conclusion threatens to overturn current thinking on crime and punishment....

Published in the peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Research, the study reports a "very strong association" over more than 50 years between the exposure of young children to the toxic metal and crime rates 20 years later when they are young adults.

And it says the association holds true for a wide variety of countries with differing social conditions, law and order policies...

Britain – one of the last to get rid of the toxic metal – is one of the latest to enjoy a decline in crime.

But, someone seems to want to tell a very different story today, and link falling crime-rates to zero-hours contracts of all things.  Ladies & Gentleman, your Independent newspaper.

Speechless

Saudi Arabia has reportedly responded to the growing number of people fleeing the Middle East for western Europe – by offering to build 200 mosques in Germany.

Syria’s richer Gulf neighbours have been accused of not doing their fair share in the humanitarian crisis, with Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the UAE also keeping their doors firmly shut to asylum-seekers.

According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which quoted a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al Diyar, Saudi Arabia would build one mosque for every 100 refugees who entered Germany in extraordinary numbers last weekend

Not Funny

Forget Corbyn.  This is truly terrifying

Suddenly, the prospect of Boris as PM seems strangely re-assuring by comparison.  And in the meantime, perhaps spare a prayer for Cameron's health...  Because there sure are some scary fascist fucks waiting in the wings.

Adcock on those Immigration Numbers

Gave me a chuckle.

Religious Certitudes

Rowson is frankly a fuckin' god in terms of his visual skills...but he can't be everywhere at once.  And with Bell struggling with that obsession with a certain condom, there may be room for a new number two...somewhere

Dave Brown on Chilcot

Perhaps there's an honourable leaker who could do the right thing.

The Indy on the Madness that is TTIP

Not that it seems any amount of warning will interest or engage our citizenry over the outrageous extra-judicial anti-democractic monstrosities that are TTIP & TPP, and their related cohorts.  But, one can but try, futile as it may be.

Corporate vampires have tried to suck $4 billion out of Romania, and with TTIP the UK could be next

TTIP's opponents may be accused of speculation, but the impact of similar trade deals abroad is terrifyingly real

When it dared to halt the production of a gold mine, the government of Romania found itself facing a massive lawsuit from a corporate mining giant in a secret "court". There's nothing about the case that makes any sense – the corporation has said it may seek up to $4 billion in "compensation", which is half of Romania’s annual public healthcare budget.

How awful for Romania to be subject to such a corporate assault, you may think. However, under a controversial trade deal between the UK and America known as TTIP, such cases could become common in Britain. So why is our government one of the biggest cheerleaders of these "corporate courts"?*

What's happening in Romania is a terrifying sign of what could happen if TTIP is passed. The corporate vampires are out for blood, and won't rest until they've drained a sovereign state of its money, and destroyed large parts of its land. The mining giant Gabriel Resources originally wanted to develop an enormous gold mine that would involve flattening four mountain tops. There were fears that this would would leave behind a behind a toxic waste lake containing dammed water and cyanide. But in 2014 a critical environmental document that was required for the project to go-ahead was annulled in a Romanian court. In the face of mass protests inside and outside the country, Romania’s parliament decided not to push through a law that would have allowed the project to continue.

Gabriel Resources has recently admitted that they've lost hope of ever building their mine. But at the same time they submitted a request for arbitration at the World Bank, demanding compensation for all the gold and silver that they were unable to extract. The company is using a Jersey subsidiary to bring the case, so it can make use of a UK-Romania investment deal, even though it's based in Canada. The company claims they have spent nearly $500 million on the project, yet in an interview the company’s CEO claimed he was seeking up to $4 billion in "compensation".

This is exactly the kind of case which that TTIP would promote throughout Europe. Through something called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, foreign corporations get access to a secret arbitration system to sue governments for "damaging" their profits. These cases are taking place with an alarming frequency using a variety of existing trade deals, but TTIP would massively expand the possibility of this taking place. It would do this by allowing all US corporations to sue EU member states and all EU corporations to sue the US government.

...

Yet despite all of this, the British government is fully signed up to the corporate courts. Last year it signed a letter that made clear that the secret court system shouldn’t be removed from the trade deal under any circumstances.

Sovereignty, who needs it ?  Says a 'Conservative' government that rants and raves about the European Union, and, to a lesser degree, the UN, but is more than happy to put unaccountable multi-national corporations above the law or oversight of any government, itself very much included.  Are the UN-'New World Order' nuts paying attention ?


* As with the question of why Osborne is selling off the taxpayers' stake in RBS at a loss, the answer is simple.  Whether you are naïve enough to think otherwise, or even stupid enough to vote for the bastards (not that the same couldn't be said about many Labour-supporters), the fact is, they don't work for you.  If they ever did, they certainly haven't for the last few decades.  And the longer it takes for the general public to wake up to that fact, the less likely it is that our circumstances will ever change.

Maybe They Should Just Tow the Whole Island to the Caribbean

What with the United Kingdom turning into a tax-haven, foreigners buying up swathes of London as investment-property, and Cameron & Co. seemingly determined to turn Britain into a banana republic.

The Government is reviewing the Bribery Act after business leaders claimed it was making it difficult for British firms to export goods.

The Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, is inviting companies to comment on whether the tough anti-corruption measures are “a problem”.

Critics fear it is a way of weakening the law at a time when the Government should be clamping down on existing loopholes, and supporters of the Act say they are surprised by the move.

They warn that any attempt to water down the Act will seriously damage the UK’s credibility on corruption. They also claim it is undermining David Cameron’s tough personal anti-bribery message, which he reinforced during his visit to South-east Asia to drum up business for Britain.

Simply shameless.  Too difficult to do business without being able to more easily bribe people ?  In Britain ?  Oh, and what was that about a visit to South-east Asia ?

An investigation into alleged corruption worth hundreds of millions of pounds at Malaysia’s national investment company threatened to overshadow David Cameron’s arrival in Kuala Lumpur on 30 July.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Najib Razak, has been forced to deny allegations that he has personally benefited to the tune of $700m (£447.5m) from the investment fund that investigators have traced to what they allege are his own bank accounts.

...  

Mr Cameron, whose stop in Malaysia is part of a tour of South-east Asia, during which he hopes to open new markets for British business, said recently that “the wind of economic change is blowing east. “We still do more trade with Belgium than we do with Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam combined,” he said.

The Sarawak Report, an investigative website run by the sister-in-law of Gordon Brown, Clare Rewcastle Brown, which has reported on the allegations, called on Mr Cameron to cancel his visit.

“The British Prime Minister has made the issue of rooting out global corruption one of his key platforms as a world leader,” the website said.

Doesn't sound like it to me.  Well, maybe that's why Cameron was so eager to talk up the merits of doing business with countries with problems of corruption prior to the trip.  So glad British voters voted in the grown-ups in the last election.

A Tale of Two Tours

Here's the Indy's latest daily cartoon online:

And the day before:

I don't know if this was a editorial choice or a coincidence, but it is somewhat unfortunate, and doesn't exactly put the more recent publication in a great light.  Both 'toons are themed almost identically, even to the degree of Corbyn turning to his left.  But the earlier work spares us the labels for 'Left' and 'Right', spares us the actual labelling of the bicycle as 'Labour Party', and spares us the cliché of riding off a cliff.  Instead we get the socks up over the trousers & the old-fashioned bike with the basket, versus the Blairites in their spandex.  And yes, we also get a labelled Das Kapital, not that that really hurts the piece overall.  And I'm assuming that's Prescott rooting Jezza on besides an apoplectic Blair.

To juxtapose two such similarly themed, but unequally executed works side-by-side is just cruel really.  Oh right, I just did that myself, didn't I ?  Whoops.

Funny 'cos it's True

Don't care that often for the Indie's cartoons, but...  Assuming this to be the work of Dave Brown, based on the signature.  Not sure why the Independent doesn't properly attribute its 'toons online.

I'll Say It Again: Cameron Killed the Union

This thing with EVEL (English Votes for English Laws) is just stupid and petty.  With English MP's already making up the vast majority of seats in the House of Commons, it isn't likely to have any practical impact, and is essentially just a sop to English nationalists* and Tory MP's, as a sort of 'revenge' for the degree of powers devolved to Scotland, and as an attempt at placating the anger at the concessions that were desperately made during the last minutes of the referendum for independence.

More than petty, it's childish.  And it was utterly insane at the time to start talking up EVEL when the votes of the referendum had scarcely been counted, but the Tories could have quietly dropped the matter after the election, were they serious about maintaining the union, which increasingly, it would seem they are not.  And were they a party of grownups, which also, clearly they are not.

And to push it through by simply changing the rules of parliamentary procedure, when this is something of such constitutional significance is disrespectful not just of the Scots, but of the entire nation.

But I'll let the Indy speak to the matter, in this Q&A from an article which they have headlined 'Nicola Sturgeon threatens second independence referendum over 'English votes for English laws', which is the way everyone seems to be framing it, though I haven't seen an exact quote to support the assertion of a threat, beyond that she suggested it would increase support in Scotland for another referendum.  Which it obviously would.

Q&A: English votes for English laws

Q. So is that it – the West Lothian riddle, finally solved?

A. Not quite. Grayling has merely restructured Westminster’s political games  rather than deliver a  genuine solution. The Tory MP Martin Vickers asked where Grayling’s “stumbling” was heading towards. The answer is either a federalist UK, or Scotland leaving the UK.  No democratic chamber where there are two classes of members is likely to endure.

Q. Surely the government has thought hard on this?

A. No they haven’t.  After the panic-ridden deployment of the “vow” to keep Scotland in the UK club, it took Downing Street only a couple of hours to wreck any post-referendum unity. William Hague was quickly despatched to sketch out a plan to placate English Tories angry at the concessions Scotland was about to be handed. John Redwood offered a plan strikingly similar to what Grayling told the Commons, suggesting not much more thought has gone into this.

Q. The SNP members in the Commons, all 56 of them – they’ll be furious?

A. Furious at what?  The SNP have a vested interest in seeing the union fail, and Pete Wishart  is entirely correct in forecasting Grayling has helped the nationalists’ cause. Extend the consequences of what this means and it’s hard to see how a Scottish MP can ever again become prime minister, or indeed hold many of the top ministry jobs. Limit the ambition of members of any club, and they’ll take their business elsewhere – in this case out of the union.

Q. Is the change really that big?

A. There will be three new legislative grand committees: one for English MPs, one for English and Welsh MPs, and one for English, Welsh and Northern Ireland MPs. They will dictate what a lot of the full House gets to vote on.

Q. So where are the Scots?

A. Exactly.

Q. The SNP MP Ian Blackford asked why the Conservatives are bothering with all this - why not just create an English Parliament ?

A. Good question. Scotland already resembles a one-party state.  The nationalists have tight control of Holyrood.  Labour, the LibDems and the Tories all have only one MP north of the border. This isn’t an English Parliament, but it’s close.

Hundreds of years of unity destroyed in such a short space of time.  And peoples who have intermingled (genetically, culturally, linguistically) for generation upon generation upon generation, now likely to be artificially divided along the lines of ancient arbitrary borders that haven't held that much significant relevance for centuries.  And David Cameron's party would seem to have destroyed it in the course of just one electoral cycle.


* And it still seems a little bizarre to me that there could even be such a thing as English nationalism.  The degree to which a truly Welsh or Scottish identity exists separate from a British identity is vastly overstated, never mind the degree to which one could separate out an English identity.  Other than geography, what does it really mean to be 'English' and not 'British' ?  No-one seems to know.

I Guess The Indie Really Wants to Make Sure I Read This Story

Not really interested...  <Scrolls>

Still not...  <Scrolls>

WTF ?  <Scrolls>

C'mon, dammit !

Clickbait

I do love me some original clickbait...

These are the 10 most creative first names in Britain

Do tell !  Do tell !

Stay Classy, JPost

What ?  We're just sayin'.  And if you click on the link, the Title specifies 'Not Just News.'   I'm willing to bet that a large part of JPost's readership wouldn't even see or acknowledge what is so very fucking wrong with that shit in the middle of the image above.  I try to keep an open mind.  I really do.  And then I see shit like this.  And I just give up...

Felix Kiprono is in love, and the young Kenyan lawyer is aiming high.

According to the daily newspaper Nairobian, the object of Kiprono’s affections is none other than President Barack Obama’s daughter, Malia.

Just how far is Kiprono willing to go to snatch the girl of his dreams? According to the Nairobian, he is prepared to offer the leader of the free world a dowry of 50 cows, 70 sheep, and 30 goats.

"People might say I am after the family's money, which is not the case. My love is real," Kiprono told the Nairobian newspaper.

Just how smitten is Kiprono with Malia Obama?

"I got interested in her in 2008," he said. "As a matter of fact, I haven't dated anyone since and promise to be faithful to her. I have shared this with my family and they are willing to help me raise the bride price."

He said he plans to deliver a letter to the US Embassy in Kenya to officially declare his intention.."

Ours will be a simple life. I will teach Malia how to milk a cow, cook ugali (a starchy dish) and prepare mursik (a sour milk) like any other Kalenjin woman," he said

Update: Apparently CNN & The Indy. also 'reported' on this non-story.  Which I guess, makes it okay...er, No.  No, it doesn't.  Our modern news-media is such a fucking disgrace.

No. 1, No. 1 !

The UK is the most unequal country in the EU, according to a new report.

The Dublin foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, the EU’s agency for life at work, found that the UK had the worst Gini coefficient of any EU member state.

The Gini is one of the most widely used measures of inequality and calculates how income is distributed among a nation’s residents.

According to the results, the UK’s GINI rating is 0.404, a rate that has soared since the financial crisis in 2008. The result is well in excess of the EU average which is 0.346 and even exceeds the United States’ rating of 0.4.

Well sure.  Keeping in mind of course that the UK is really made up of at least five different countries, one of which, 'The City,' is to the British economy what California is to the US economy, were California several times wealthier, exponentially more plutocratic, almost completely devoid of any actual human residents, and the size of my toilet.*

*These comparisons are of course completely made-up, and any seeming resemblance to actual reality is purely a product of your imagination.

The Independent Informs...

So apparently, 

• Guinea pigs jump for joy (at getting food usually).
• Cats don't actually give a shit about those stupid circle things you're posting on the internet, and just sit in them because it gets your attention.
• Turning your rabbit over to calm them is actually deeply traumatising.
• Dogs humping your leg is an entirely non-sexually motivated behaviour.  Yeah, right.
• And goldfish can tell the difference between Bach and Stravinsky.

Aren't you glad you know all that now ?