Let us end the year on a positive note

Say what you like about J. Corbyn, his leadership has allowed a lot of deserving characters to be shunted to the political sidelines, like the Balls-Cooper woman, who was famous for not being able to make her mind up when a government minister, and A. Burnham, who was the Health Minister at a time when patients were dying of neglect at Stafford hospital as a direct result of Labour party policies.

Scurrilous gossip

President O’Bummer has ejected 35 Russian ‘diplomats’ to show how pissed off he is over the hacking and publication of Democratic party emails, which he believes cost the appalling Hillary Clinton the presidency. And if Vlad the Putin had been in the US, he’d have been gone, too.
    O’Bummer thinks Vlad was personally involved in the hacking operation because he has personal reasons for hating the appalling Hillary (like everyone else).
    President Putin has trumped O’Bummer’s ace by opting to do nothing. He let his underlings post pictures of a lame duck on antisocial meeja and he announced that he was postponing a reaction until after he had spoken to his good pal the future President Trump. Which means that nothing will happen before the end of January 2017 at the earliest.

Yeah, I dunnit. Well, maybe.

Having bragged that he chucked a man accused of rape and murder out of a helicopter, President R. Duterte of the Philippines is back-pedalling suddenly. Why? Surely the leader of one of the crime hell-holes of the galaxy isn’t worried about a local PC Plod taking him seriously and trying to jam his ass in gaol?

Mind Games

Trumponomics is boosting the US stock market for an extraordinary reason. The experts say that there is no proof that his policies will work, but there is no counter-proof that they will not. As a result, the market is expected to remain optimistic for at least a year. So, totally out of touch with the real world, as usual, and it’s all down to what the “experts” believe at that particular moment.

Missed by a mile

“The NHS is clearly underfunded,” said the chief executive of the Patients’ Association. Which is utter tripe. No matter how much money went into the NHS, there would always be some politician or representative of a vested interest saying the same.
    The big problem with the NHS is the failure of its management to get value for the taxpayer’s money, particularly from drug companies, the failure of managers to chase up cash owed by foreign health tourists, money wasted on minority frills, which should be paid for by the current recipients,  etc., etc., etc.
    Only when the NHS is under competent management will anyone be able to make a sensible assessment of how much money it is getting compared to reasonable demand.

Proportionality & lifestyle

We’ve heard rather a lot about how 2016 has been a ‘brutal’ year for celebs. But let us not forget that some of them were kamikaze pilots. They scoffed non-nutritional comestibles and (non-)prescription pharmaceuticals by the ton, and rather than trying to avoid being noticed by the Grim Reaper, they spat in his eye on a daily basis and challenged him to do his worst.
    So, in some cases, it’s not so much a case of ‘taken so shockingly early’ as ‘how did he/she manage to last so long?’

In your dreams, mate!

President O'Bummer has lost the plot totally if he really believes that he would have beaten Donald Trump if he'd been allowed to run for a 3rd term as the Democrapic candidate in preference to the appalling Hillary Clinton. He's a busted flush, exposed as a man who said, "Yes, we can!" but then did nothing.

It's just a fair question.

The Queen asking, "Why can't we just get out (of the EU)?" is a question about the degree of political entanglement and obtuseness. It's not an opinion for or against Brexit. Except on a slow- or no-news day, of course.

Another way to take cash from mugs?

Watch NFL Network in HD on your phone? On a 2-inch screen? What the hell difference is HD going to make on a phone? Sheesh!

How cheerful!

It was Xmas day, so what did the Syfy TV channel have on offer? A series of disaster films all to the theme of a big freeze global disaster. Well, we know where Mr. Grumpy works now.

Global warming? Bring it on!

It’s Xmas day, there’s no snow, the sun is shining and it’s a bit windy. If this is the product of man-made climate change, what the hell is wrong with it? More, I cry, give us more.

Believe it or what!

When Nicola Sturgeon, the self-appointed queen of Scotland, was at college, her nickname is alleged to have been “Seaweed” – because not even the tide would take her out.
    Whilst that’s a wonderful put-down; and oh, that it were true; I can’t help but think that it sounds a tad contrived well after the event.

Spend, Spend, Xmas Spend

Guess what I’m not doing today; or tomorrow, or what I didn’t do yesterday – sitting at my computer, scanning websites looking for alleged bargains. There were lists of these so-called bargains in the Daily Mail on Friday and it looked like someone had been barrel-scraping for gadgets I’d never be interested in acquiring to fill up the boxes.

Statistics you can really get behind. Not.

According to a CIA estimate, there are 35,000 Islamic State insurgents in Iraq and Syria.
According to a CIA estimate, 50,000 of them have been killed.

Wipe-out

The government’s plan to tackle the crisis in the care of the elderly seems to be working. The Office for National Statistics has reported an increase of 10% in the national death rate this year compared to the same period last year, and this is despite a lack of widespread illness or bad weather, which are the Grim Reaper’s traditional helpers.
    Most of the additional deaths were of people aged 65 or over, and around 40% were of people aged 85 or over. If this trend continues, the problem of the elderly will have gone away long before the Chancellor gets government spending under control.

Neddie Seagoon rides again

Prince Charles is in danger of being dismissed as a tool of the sneerocracy Establishment following his decision to equate the popular democracy that created Brexit and President Trump with fascism and extremism. Then again, not taking Prince Chazzer seriously is something of a national pastime. And so if he offered the nation a Thought For The Day on the steam wireless, few people were surprised to hear that it was a daft one.

Guilty, but so what?

The figurehead of the International Monetary fund, C. Lagarde, has been found guilty of criminal negligence in a public office. But as she’s French and entitled, she won’t lose her job. Because corruption is the norm for international organizations?

Nasty is as nasty does

There are some evil people in the world. After the news that Sergeant Blackman has been refused bail for Xmas, and that Britain’s aid to the most corrupt regimes in the world has gone up by 30%, it would appear that the most evil of them are to be found in the British judicial system and working for the Department for Overseas Development.

Practicality v posturing

The Crown Post Office strike foundered on the rock of Xmas. Most of the staff decided that they could not afford to give up most of a week’s wages with the holiday to pay for.

No room to talk

It might be fashionable to pretend that Nigel Farage is the worst person in the world, but when it come to vile bigotry, there’s certainly no shortage of it spouting from Captain Underpants and other members of Labour’s luvvie rent-a-gob set. Let us not forget that Mr. Bryant’s opinion and a bar of soap will let you wash your hands.

How’s this for subversive?

One of my acquaintances has just told me that the Putin regime engineered the elimination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey. His theory is that the Turks were starting to get a bit too comfortable after the recent thawing of relations and Putin, who never liked the guy, decided to make the Turks uncomfortable and put a better mate into the vacant job.

A bit like “under advisement”

Telling someone: “That opinion plus 59p will get you a 59p pack of chocolate-chip cookies at my local Aldi,” can be a good way of telling them they’re talking tripe.

Insanitary bastard!

RMT policy, as expressed by their president, is to drown the bastards in spit. Which bastards? The Tory government and its supporters. Which confirms that all the fine words about passenger safety during the Southern Rail strike are just hypocritical bullshit.

A revival of the candle industry?

One of the top bods at Ofgem, the energy regulator, expects a 2-tier tariff structure in the future. Those with plenty of cash to spare will form an upper tier and get as much electricity as they need. The rest, the nation’s paupers, will just have to get used to sitting in the dark or watch their day shrink to an hour either side of sunrise and sunset at the end of the year.
    This is an inevitable result of successive governments’ obsession with closing down “always on” power stations in favour of wind farms, which don’t product all that much power when the wind don’t blow; or, indeed, when it blows too hard.
    No sign of Mr. May and her crew doing anything to address the insanity precipitated by Red Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act (2008), of course.

Intimidate, Intimidate, Intimidate?

J. Mercer, MP, has reported that stooges at the Ministry of Defence are sending middle-of-the-night text messages to try to persuade him, or coerce or threaten him, into not telling the country, in a report to be published in January, that the Iraq Historical Allegations Team is a monster, which needs to be put down. Exactly why they think this tactic will work remains to be explained. As does why the Prime Minister is letting it happen.
    There seems to be no appetite in the government for discarding the Historical Enquiries Team in Northern Ireland, which is now being run on behalf of the IRA and intent on putting British troops in gaol whilst ignoring Irish terrorist killers. Something else for Mrs. May to explain.

Yawnworthy Republicans

The reason why the gangs of Russian hackers released only Democratic party emails during the US presidential election period has been revealed. The Democrat ones were full of bile and sleaze and the Republican ones were too bland and ordinary to be damaging or worthy of notice.

Practical presents

What are dog-lovers in Finland rushing off to buy their pets for Xmas? A vest which will protect the animal from an attack by a wolf, which is a serious problem there, apparently. The vest releases a blast of hot chilli power into the wolf’s face when punctured, so it’s a good aversion therapy.

Political flim-flam

We’re being told that the nation will become wonderfully better off if perks for millionaire pensioners, like the Winter Fuel Allowance and free bus passes, are cancelled. But this is just picking an easy target instead of doing anything useful.
    By the time the DWP has done an annual survey to identify millionaires and cut off their WFA, the chances are that there will be little or none of the “saving” left. And on an average day, how many millionaire pensioners are travelling around for free on buses?
    There are lots of real savings still to be made before the government is reduced to pandering to those with political grudges.

Lots of Xmas cheer around. Not!

Railways, Post Offices; aircrew, both pilots and dinner ladies; airport staff – all leaping out on strke for Xmas. All we need now is the buses and the bin men for a Full House.

They don’t call them looneys for nothing

Those lovely Russian hackers got the blame for debunking Hillary Clinton and keeping her out of the White House. Now, a Labour MP is trying to tell us that they were behind the Brexit vote. However did we ever manage without Russian hackers to blame everything on?

What are they hiding?

The World Meteorological Organization is claiming that a weather buoy logged a record-breaking wave, which was 62 feet high. The wave was detected in the North Atlantic between Britain and Iceland on February 4th, 2013. Which leaves wide-open the question of why the WMO kept quiet about the wave for nearly 4 years.

The UN to the rescue of these delicate flowers?

Bremainers seem to be trying to set records as the world’s worst Moaning Minnies. In fact, their response to articles in the Daily Mail and elsewhere seems to be that it was extremely rude of the newspapers to notice their habit of sneering at people who voted for Brexit and upset the Bremoaners’ delicate sensibilities by putting it in print. It can’t be long before the kind hearts at the UN feel obliged to step in and declare them a protected species.

Rail passenger safety or padding union membership rolls?

It would appear that driver-only trains are largely small ones with 3-4 carriages and that Southern Rail wants to extend this to 12-car commuter trains, into which 1,500 people are packed. This is the sort of grass-roots detail which builds a convincing case one way or the other. It’s certainly more useful than the crapola we get from union leaders and politicians.
    But then, in real life, we’ve got some guy with a sinecure job, who sits in his guard’s compartment between stops, messing with his phone. In a 1% case; or is it really a 0.0001% case?; the chances are that by the time the guard realizes anything is wrong, there will be 1,500 customers on their phones, complaining about the hold-up or taking selfies with the remains of the idiot who stuck his head out of a window and got it knocked off.
    When the guard leaves his safe zone, he’ll be confronted with the task of working his way through a jam-packed train full of hostile customers wanting to know what the hold-up is, blaming him for the delay and demanding to know what he’s doing about it.
    In the circumstances, it sounds like he’ll be a big help.

Sometimes, the old ways are okay

We keep being told that we’re getting “policing for the 21st century”. But can you imagine Dixon of Dock Green getting pissed at an official police do and getting his tits (or anything else) out to wave at a colleague?

Just a reasonable response

Russia’s ambassador to Britain thinks we’re ‘overly hostile’ to his country. But why would we be anything else as long as Russia keeps sending its warplanes and warships into our space?

Pot, kettle, game, set and match

Sacked minister N. Morgan had a go at the PM for being photographed wearing a grand’s worth of brown leather Oxford bags – even though she herself has been photographed lugging around a shopping bag which cost £950. Which just reinforces the old adage that the only thing worse than a bitch is a hypocritical bitch.
    Oh, fuc*! Trousergate? How could they?

It was a by-election

All the BIG conclusions spun out of the Richmond by-election are bound to be tripe when there was a derisory turn-out and both the Liberal and the Goldsmith party candidates got 25% of the vote. Past voting history here was irrelevant. This was a straight by-election protest vote to tell Mr. Goldsmith he wasn’t wanted, and even then he did about as well as the Liberal.

Well, that’s that sorted out

The police obsession with dragging the late Sir Edward Heath into their hysterical child abuse fantasies has been explained by The New Statesman. One Eddie Heath, and employee of Chelsea FC, was accused of abusing young footballers in the 1970s and the police obviously think he went on to become the nation’s prime minister.

Hidden messages in advertising

For some reason, I’d failed to hit the mute button during a commercial break in something I was watching on TV last night, and I heard someone boast that a product was “made with 4% recycled batteries”. My first reaction was: “Big deal!” And then I got the hidden message, which has to be something along the lines of: “Don’t even think about complaining about this product if it turns out to be crap because we’ve pushed the recycling button and we’re virtuous and fireproof.”

It had to happen

Dave the ex-leader Cameron, now in the Unites States hoovering up some cash, is getting his alibis in place. He didn’t make a bog of the EU referendum with Project Fear and all that, he was stabbed in the back by an ungrateful electorate, which he is now accusing of the confected crime of “populism” in the hope that no one will think he’s to blame for his own demise.

Politeness is an effective weapon

Unfortunately, there are a lot of sad bigots around, who jump up and down ranting, “Racist! Racist!‡ Ban it!” when they see something that doesn’t agree with their narrow prejudices. But we more tolerant people are as generous as we are broad-minded, and we just murmur, “Nurse, he’s/she’s  out of bed again,” in the face of provocation and make sure that the poor unfortunate comes to no harm before being shunted back to his/her safe zone.

‡ or some other hate-crime accusation

Neither an exact nor a fair science

After all the departures this year; Greg Lake of King Crimson and ELP being the most recent, it’s getting to the point where you assume everyone you’ve ever heard of is now dead and you’re pleasantly surprised (in some cases) to find that they’re still around. And pissed off that the Grim Reaper has neglected certain others.

Is the PM going to do anything about this?

The idiots in charge of the Northern Ireland police farce have decided to reopen every single “fatal incident” involving British troops in Ulster when the IRA was on the rampage, killing and maiming people. Strangely, the Legacy Investigation Board is not at all bovvered about the thousands of murders committed by Irish terrorists.
    There’s clearly a political agenda involved and it stinks to high heaven that the British taxpayer should have to pay for the “investigators” to get their perverted jollies. The prime minister needs to get a speedy grip and ditch this nasty scheme for giving aid and comfort to terrorists. And whilst she’s ditching things, getting rid of the morons who hatched the scheme would be a good idea.

Not exactly secure security

I made an online payment of several thousand pounds yesterday using my debit card, and at the MasterCard verification stage, I got a panel inviting me to fill in just about all the card data except the 16-digit number; that’s security number, expiry, the bank’s sort code, my account number and my name “as it appears on the card”.
    While I was doing all this, I started thinking that none of the information I was supplying wouldn’t be available to someone who’d managed to steal my card and use it online before I noticed the loss. No secret MasterCard password for big payments, which wouldn’t be available to the thief, for instance.
    I was being given nothing more than a façade of security; and I did not find that at all reassuring.

It’s an ambition

School careers officer: “What’s your ambition in life, son?”
Pupil: “To become old enough and dotty enough to become a High Court judge on £200K, sir.”

According to the Daily Mail’s ‘On This Day’ feature, American football enjoyed its first instant replay during a live TV broadcast today in 1963. When a touchdown was replayed, the TV station’s switchboard was jammed with callers wanting to know if the player had just scored for a second time.

Well, this should put an end to migration

The current Gov. of the Bank of England has announced his plans for when he is evicted from the job in 2019. This Canadian clown is going to build an army of robots to put 15 million Britons; one-half of the workforce; out of work. His robots will take over all administrative, clerical and production jobs, and put bus, train, taxi and aeroplane drivers on the scrap heap. Oh, brave new world . . .

What was the Richmond by-election really about?

The only question on offer was: “Who do you want for your MP?” The message from the electorate was: “We don’t care as long as it’s not that ass-clown Goldsmith.” Thus about one-quarter voted for an air-head Liberal, a slightly smaller quarter still voted for Goldsmith and one-half of the electorate decided they didn’t care at all and stayed at home. Nothing about the EU or Brexit. Just straight: “Dump Goldsmith”.

Nobody loves a whinger

President-elect Trump was right not to be impressed by China’s attempts to bully him after he had a 10-minute phone chat with the president of Taiwan, one of America’s biggest customers for military hardware; mainly for defence against China. The Chinese regime is known not to be one of Mr. Trump’s favourites. Confected outrage is not likely to improve that situation. Thus Mr. Trump recognizes that it is vital to let the Chinese know very early on that he has no intention of taking any crap from them.

By Liberal rules, the Richmond by-election result was a vote for Brexit

In June, the area voted 70-30 (of those who could be bothered) for Bremain. In the December by-election, the Bremoaner Liberal candidate took 49% of the vote leaving 51% for the rest. So it was -21% for Bremoan and +21% for Brexit.

Pointless cash shuffling

My Sunday Post tells me that London Underground has been fined £500,000 for an accident to a maintenance worker at a disused station. Which means that the government has just moved taxpayers’ money from one pocket to another. And wasted a lot more on the court case, of course. What’s the point of that?

PC pillocks

East Cambridgeshire district council has banned the word ‘satisfactory’, which means ‘doing okay’, from staff appraisals on the grounds that it is not a pleasing word and workers would prefer to be classed as ‘good’, even if they aren’t.

So much for the truth

SNP MP A. Salmond offered fellow MPs a chance to bring Tony B. Liar back to the Commons to put the record straight over all the lies he told before the Iraq War of 2003. The House voted 439 to 70 against holding Mr. Liar to account.

Wobbly continuity

Zillionaire Zac Goldsmith threw a wobbly over a new runway for Heathrow airport, put his seat in Parliament up for grabs . . . and lost it to the Liberals. The victor in the by-election promptly threw a wobbly when she was asked if her keenness for a second referendum on EU membership means that her election should be repeated to let the voters have second thoughts, and she flounced out of the press conference.
    Her win was ‘a triumph for intolerance, fear and division’, according to her party. Or something like that.

Did you know . . .

. . . that allegedly ‘smart’ gas and electricity meters contain an internal cut-off switch, which is electronically operated? This is present presumably so that the company can cut off a non-paying customer without requiring access to their premises.
    But did you know that these cut-offs can be activated for no apparent reason? Certainly not a reason which the companies are willing to share with their customers, who are expected to sit in the dark whilst the contents of their fridge and freezer spoil, and/or shiver with no central heating, until an engineer arrives to reset the rogue meter.
    Sounds like the people who designed and built these meters are a lot less smart than they needed to be.

Fair’s fair

That former Chelsea footballer who was paid £50K hush money – is he going to have to pay it back, plus interest, now that he has reneged on the deal?

There’s a lot of it about!

There was always an air of the dilettante about Nico Rosberg. Retiring a few days after being handed the Formula One drivers’ title confirms it. He can’t hack it at the sharp end. After all, can you imagine Vettel, Ricciardo, Hamilton, Raikkonen or any of the others not going on for another title?

Je suis rubbish et je le sait

President Hollande has seen opinion polls forecasting that he will be lucky to win 7% of the vote in the first round when the presidential elections in France begin next year, and he has decided not to be humiliated further. Thus he will not be asking the electorate to give him a second terms.

Mouth open, brain not engaged

Apparently, there are over 30 million dead Facebook clients, and the existing ones are croaking at a rate of 8,000 per day, and FB makes no attempt to weed out the non-active members. “One day, there will be more dead users than live ones,” and ‘expert’ has declared. But given that dead people can hardly be called ‘users’ of anything, the statement is bunk.

What’s behind the grand conspiracy story?

It gives the luvvie left an excuse for a total abrogation of responsibility. If we live in a world controlled by non-dom newspaper proprietors, whatever happens, it’s never anything to do with the luvvies. Because they are completely powerless and irresponsible and blameless. It’s the ultimate “Not me, Gov. I'm fireproof and a victim of a conspiracy.”
    Right.