Sim-O

The Sun and the Daily Mail got bollocked telling porkies about the Tamil chap that was on hunger strike last year.

New posts are at The Sun Lies, by Septicisle, and Mailwatch, by me.

Electronic Intifada…

Blair is close friends with Bernard Arnault, the chairman of the luxury goods conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy Group (LVMH), and has refused to publicly disclose whether or not he accepted a paid post as adviser to Arnault, as reported in the media. LVMH has been implicated in benefiting from Israel’s occupation through its subsidiary, the cosmetics retail chain Sephora.
…
Blair’s friendship with Arnault, LVMH’s chairman, dates to his time as UK Prime Minister. Arnault is one of the richest men in France, with an estimated net worth of more than $27.5 billion. Blair’s three eldest children studied in France while he was prime minister, and often stayed at Arnault’s mansion in Paris. Indeed, the Daily Mail reported in February 2007 that Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament Norman Lamb warned Blair “It is very dangerous to take hospitality from very wealthy individuals who may be seeking to wield influence” (“Cheri’s pride graduate girl”). Blair’s friendship with Arnault continued after he stepped down as premier and accepted the position as Quartet envoy.

In January, the Daily Telegraph revealed that Blair was to be appointed as Arnault’s personal advisor. Although the announcement was repeated by Agence France Press, neither Blair nor LVMH have officially confirmed or denied the appointment. When asked for clarification in a written request from The Electronic Intifada, the office of Tony Blair remained silent. The lack of transparency on Blair’s position stands in stark contrast to his portfolio as Quartet envoy which tasks him with teaching Palestinians how to build up transparent government institutions.

There’s too much to just excerpt, so just go and read the whole thing and be reminded, if you need to be, why Tony Blair is a shister.

Just for my records, this post. A new innersting site from the government.

legislation.gov.uk

What it’s about…

Legislation.gov.uk carries most (but not all) types of legislation and their accompanying explanatory documents. For a full list of legislation types held on legisliation.gov.uk see Browse Legislation. For further details of how complete our data set is for each type, click on a legislation type from the Browse Legislation page and see the colour coded bar for each year.

• All legislation from 1988 – present day is available on this site (see ‘What legislation is missing’ for details of any known legislation we do not carry)
• There are no secondary legislation items (e.g Statutory Instruments) available before 1988 as they are not available in a web-publishable format.
• Most pre-1988 primary legislation is available on this site. In some cases we only have the original published (as enacted) version and no revised version. This occurs if the legislation was wholly repealed before 1991 and therefore was not included in the revised data set when it was extracted from Statutes in Force. In other cases we may only have a revised version if the original (as enacted) version is not available in a web-publishable format.

The Perfect Storm.

What a crock of shit.

Am I supposed to feel something towards the characters?

These cunts go fishing in an unseaworthy trawler and then ignore the weather reports about a once in a generation storm and then, guess what? They fucking drown!

Yeah, what fucking heroes.

My shiny new MP on the axing of Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme…

Miss Blackwood said she sympathised with the disappointment of the schools which had been promised funding.

But she added: “It was a flawed programme and an enormous amount of money was wasted on bureaucratic processes, rather than the schools they’re supposed to help.

An enormous amount of money may have been wasted on the admin of it, but does that justify the stopping the funding? Have bloody big shake up of bureaucracy, which rightly should be blamed on Labour, and make some savings that way.

“At a time when we have to deal with the horrendous financial legacy of Labour’s Government, we couldn’t justify continuing the programme.”

Couldn’t be arsed thinking how to keep improving schools whilst not spending a shed load on admin, more like.

There is a story in the Guardian about some Gypsies and travellers that are going to be evicted from thier homes.

I feel a bit dirty writing this post as it feels very right-wing to me, but there are themes that keep coming up when this happens. This isn’t a comment on this specific case.

A number of Gypsies and Travellers have lived at Dale Farm entirely legally since the 1960s.

Gypsies have been there since the sixties or some specific individual Gypsies have been there since the sixties? Either way, if they have been there for forty-odd years, why are they being evicted now? Surely the legal process isn’t *that* long winded.

But the land the newcomers bought at Dale Farm is protected greenbelt, making development on it illegal. After a five-year court battle with the council, bailiffs have been appointed to evict nearly 90 families from the unauthorised plots.

First of all, if there have been Gypsies there since the sixties, they’re hardly ‘newcomers’.
It’s greenbelt, nobody is allowed to develop it. although others are probably subtler at getting round the planning laws. How long has the area been greenbelted? When was the land bought? If the Gypsies were there before is became a designated greenbelt area, surely they can be exempted or at least given some sort of leway.

a 69-year-old grandmother who has lived at Dale Farm with her family for eight years.

Eight years on one site? Isn’t she supposed to be a traveller?

The Travellers say planning laws are biased against them, and that they have nowhere else to go. “There are some really sick people here who can’t go back on the road,” McCarthy says. “Without an address you can’t get doctors, our kids can’t go to school. The camps we used to pull in to have been closed and barricaded up. Travelling life is finished for Travellers.”

Are planning laws really biased or do gypsies just pick unsuitable land? If a housing development isn’t allowed in a greenbelt area, why should an estate for travellers be allowed? I’m not going to generalise and say *all* the sites where gypsies settle are turned into housing estates, but some are, with bungalows and mobile homes.

You can get a doctor without an address and if you travel around your kids will miss school. If you want your kids to have a good education and you’re not up to home schooling (this isn’t a slight, god knows I couldn’t do it) then maybe you have to sacrifice something, perhaps not travelling might be an idea.

Unfortunately the loss of pitches is very real, due to the loss of common land and possibly land owners, due to the behaviour of a small minority, not wanting to risk being unable to get travellers off the land again or the devastation that they leave behind when they do move on.

Just one square mile of land would be enough to provide all Gypsy and Traveller families in the UK with a place to stay, according to a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but there is a shortage of authorised pitches. The government, however, has just cut £30m of funding for new sites.

If you choose to move around and not settle in one place, you put yourself at the risk of whoever owns the land you want to stop on, unless you own the land yourself. Even then you have to abide the law. Is there any difference between a traveller buying a plot of land on a greenbelt to develop and a non-traveller that buys a plot of land to build a house on? Not really. In fact, non at all.
I am not going to say anything about the government funding of pitches as this could be equated to the provision of council housing.

“They’ll just keep moving us on from other places, so what good will they have done anyone by putting us out of here?” McCarthy asks. “Everybody has to have somewhere to live, somewhere to go. Why can’t we be left to stay in peace and quiet on land we bought and paid for?”

Yes, everyone has to have somewhere to live, but if the plots bought for development were picked with a bit more thought or research maybe developing them wouldn’t be a problem and the gypsies wouldn’t get into such confrontations.

This is getting fucking ridiculous.

Surely an opinion is not legally fucking actionable? Calling someone or something stupid is subjective and so not a fact.

When Councillor John Dixon called the Scientologists stupid, that was his opinion. If you put Scientology up against, ooh, I don’t know, any religion I could come up with, then it doesn’t look quite such a stupid thing to be dicking around with. Compare it to atheism and yes, it’s fucking stupid.

The same goes for design. The old addage of beauty being in the eye of the beholder is true. Take a look at this site. It’s Gordon Browns’ place on the web. Y’know, the ex-prime minister.

What do you reckon to it? I think it’s a bit shit and agree with this chap, Luke Bozier…

I apologise if I’m blunt, but this website is not befitting of a former Prime Minister. It has an unprofessional feel to it, and doesn’t portray the image of a statesman and one of Labour’s biggest figures.

Some other people think differently, like Tangent One who make the template for it. In fact they like it so much they are threatening to try and find a judge that likes Gordons’ site and fuck Luke for all he’s worth in a libel suit.

What the fuck has happened to make these people and entities think that a subjective opinion is actionable? Isn’t libel supposed to be about the mis-representation of facts? How can a design be factually good? Like hasn’t tried to present Tangent as trying to con Gordon Brown or any of they’re other customers, he’s just stated his opinion that they’re website template isn’t suitable for an ex-prime minister. Luke even states that Tangent make “some brilliant websites for the likes of Levi’s, Channel Five, Cadillac & Borders…”.

Tangent PLC’s executive director…

I really don’t like the prospect of either a public slanting match or legal action, but if I need to protect my company’s business and reputation, I will.

May humbly suggest two ways of protecting Tangents reputation, and hence business…

1. make better websites
2. do not threaten spurious legal action over opinion, especially on the internet. It has a habit of er, not going as planned

Without mentioning any names (cos I’m a chicken shit and Mrs-O would kill me if I got a nasty-o-gram) why would an organisation, officially recognised as a religion or not in the UK behave in an aggresive way?

The whole point of such organisations, benign or otherwise is to increase membership. Whether that is to spread ‘the word’ and save all the unfortunate souls or to accumulate wealth for the people at the top, litigation is the wrong route to take and self-defeating.

Sueing people or organisations for the slightest er, slight is just going to make it look aggressive, a bully, insecure and have alterier motives that it wants to hide.

Which is probably why the ‘religion’ isn’t officially recognised as a religion.

1. Did ITV2 have a hand in Peter Andre and Katie Prices’ split?

   Think about it. The couple have a successful (for ITV2) fly-on-the-wall documentary series on ITV2. ITV gets it’s revenue from advertising. Why have the audience watching one programme about these two muppets when they could be watching two?

2. Why does the hair on your head (and face if you’re a bloke) just keep growing?

   Why does the hair on your legs/arms/pubes have hair that grows to a certain length and then stop?

I’m terribly sorry, but here’s another post about a Daily Mail story.

Nurses are being given spa breaks, casino gambling lessons and cocktail-making master classes simply for turning up to work.

As usual it’s not quite as simple as that and the Mail debunks it own story in the next few paragraphs.

The Department of Health agency NHS Professionals, which supplies shift workers to about 80 NHS trusts, is giving away these and other activity breaks to encourage nurses to sign up for work and attend.

But the taxpayer-funded scheme has attracted criticism at a time when the public sector faces savage cuts.

Nurses aren’t being given freebies just for turning up for work, that would be ridiculous. In case you didn’t know, NHS Professionals is an employment agency. It supplies nurses, doctors and admin personnel to the healthcare ‘industry’.

These freebies aren’t being given away to every nurse. The nurse has to sign up to, and actually do, 10 shifts a month goes into a prize draw. Nurses aren’t given casino classes “simply for turning up to work”. These are incentives to get nurses to want to do shifts, with an obligation to fulfil before one is elligible to be considered for the prize draw. It’s not like the nurse is contracted to do the hours and they’re being given this offer, NHS Professionals are trying to get staff in to fill empty shifts.

Nadine Dorries, being the only ex-nurse rent-a-quote in the commons worth speaking to, chips in with…

To offer incentives when we should be watching every penny is madness. Just give the nurses a decent wage.

Which is saying stop spending money on nurses and spend more money on nurses.

The thing that Nadine, and to be honest most of the comments below, seem to miss is that this is to get nurses doing shifts that they don’t have to do.

Looks like mission accomplished for this article then.