Sim-O

Guardian:

A charity X Factor song raising money for injured service personnel received a financial boost from the government today.

Alistair Darling in effect axed VAT on the single, Hero, sung by the 12 X Factor finalists.

The chancellor said the Treasury would make a donation to the Help for Heroes campaign equivalent to the tax revenue collected on the song.

What a fucking wanker.
Fuck them cunts from X Factor and fuck the cunts at the Sun, whose campaign it is.

It’s all good and well the Chancellor wanting to support the troops, but instead of ‘recognising the efforts’ of the X-Factor fuckwits and a campaign that is designed to raise the profile of a, frankly nasty, newspaper, why not, I don’t know, raise their pay maybe.
Ooh, ooh, an even better idea, give them the fucking equipment they need. Or how about not sending them to their, or anybody elses, death for spurious lies and the whim of foreign leaders.
Just a thought, you know.

Via

Bored with golf? Can’t hit that little ball with that stick? Fed up of being the last one to get to the green because, well, you’re shit? Want to go hunting but enjoy the golfing atmosphere?
Well now there is *drum roll*…

The Golf Ball Launcher!! Yay!!
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The Golf Ball Launcher is an all-new concept, making golf accessible to everyone!

Some of you have stopped playing golf because of mobility difficulties or lack of time to practice your game. Some of you have never played golf because of a physical handicap or because the game never appealed to you. But now EVERYONE can enjoy the great outdoors and the camaraderie of golf with the amazing new Golf Ball Launcher!

So if you can’t/don’t want to play golf, buy this fucking huge gun that looks more at home in Iraq, and still not play golf!
I can see 20 year olds running round the greens firing golf balls at each instead of paintball. It’ll be Extreme War Games. With a nice plush club house to go to for pint and to compare wounds.
That gun is fucking huge!

I hate golf, but this, it looks mental. I think I might add one to my Christmas wishlist for Mrs -O.

I sat down at my desk at work this morning after my journey in, listening to how the Daily Mail had had it’s fill of the twitching carcass of the BBC and was sloping off to the nearset cave feeling smug.
There was a conversation going on about this and that and one of the women made the comment

If that girl had kept her legs shut, this wouldn’t have happened.

I wasn’t sure that I had heard her right, but yes she was actually apportioning blame for this whole sorry affair on Georgina Baillie.

What sort of twisted logic is going on there? There is no way that Georgina can be blamed for this. She may have slept with Russell, and you can debate the decision making process involved in that choice till you’re blue in the face, but it was Russell and Johnathon Ross that decided to put in a radio show and someone elses decision to broadcast it. The blame for this incident lays fairly and squarely with 3 people. Ross, Brand and the person who cleared it for broadcast (the buck stopped with Lesley Douglas, but it might not have been her that took the decision to air it).

There is no difference between blaming Georgina for this whole debacle and blaming rape on the rape victim.

Liberal Conspiracy (Anton Vowel):

Have a look at Antons’ post on Liberal Conspiracy and see why the BBC is getting it’s head kicked in over the Ross/Brand bollox.

Yeah the BBC fucked up, it was a joke that a) wasn’t funny b) probably shouldn’t have been broadcast but Ross and Brand have apologised/and resigned, Andrew Sachs seems quite cool about it, so have a look at the process for clearing material before broadcasting and leave it there.

It’s hardly like there was malicious intent or similar.

You may not like having to pay the ‘tax’ that is the TV licence, but look what you get for the money, fuck load of channels, terrestial and digital, radio, a website big enough to live in.
The key point though is something for everyone. Something of the size of the BBC is not going to be perfect and will always have room for improvement, and need the costs watching, just like it’s impartiality and you won’t like everything it does. But you will like some of it, because the other channels won’t want to/can’t afford to make some of the types of programmes that it does.
And most of it is better quality than the bullshit served up by the Murdoch empire.

So stop the hysteria and lets put things back into perspective, please. It’s only a childish joke that went wrong.

Reuters:

Royal Dutch Shell beat all forecasts with third-quarter current cost of supply (CCS) net profit up 71 percent at 6.5 billion pounds, as high oil prices and asset sales outweighed a 7 percent drop in oil and gas production.

71 per-fucking-cent! No, of course you’re not profiteering, you robbing bastards.

Telegraph:

“I liked the whole fear factor,” he said cheerily when explaining what had attracted him to the Hirst shark which he bought for $8 million four years ago.

The fear factor is something Mr Cohen, and around 100 other hedge fund managers, are experiencing, like never before, as SAC Capital and others collectively lost a staggering £24 billion with a doomed gamble on Volkswagen shares, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The biters have been well and truly bitten, and in a week full of ironies it was Porsche, manufacturer of the hedge fund managers’ transport of choice, which was to blame.

While “hedgies” bet on VW shares falling because of the global economic downturn, regarded by some as “the safest play in town”, Porsche had been secretly building up a 74.1 per cent stake in VW through intermediaries.

When Porsche showed its hand, it sent the VW share price rocketing and exposed the hedge funds to breathtaking losses.

“I have had hedge fund managers literally in tears on the phone,” said one London-based analyst yesterday. Others likened the Porsche disclosure to a “nuclear bomb going off in our faces”, describing the resulting losses as “a bloodbath”.

heh!

I’m off on my summer holiday today. Back next week.

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NY Times:

“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants.

In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.

Via

Peter Beresford (Guardian):

The banks, we are told, so distrust each other that only unprecedented injections of state money may make it possible for them to do business together again. For years the Daily Mail and the Sun have run poisonous campaigns against asylum seekers and people on income support to reclaim an imagined few millions. Governments promote campaigns to snoop on welfare claimants. These campaigns rarely generate enough money even to pay for themselves. Yet now we are encouraged to spend hundreds of billions of public money to bail out the banks and private sector that preached the mantra of independence and individual responsibility.

Are we really going to pretend that all this hasn’t happened, carrying on as before as if the market hasn’t now faced its equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall? Will we still be looking to bright young management consultants at £1,000 plus a day, few of whom have even run a corner shop, to teach central government, local authorities and primary care trusts to be ‘business-like’?

BBC:

Britain’s financial services watchdog has apologised for the failure to spot banking problems which led to the massive government bail-out.

Sorry? Oh, That’s alright then.

Hector Sants, chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, said it had not done its job adequately.

You don’t say?

He said it had not ensured banks were properly protected against risk but he claimed lessons were being learned.

Not quick a-fucking-nuff.

Mr Sants told BBC Scotland: “We have said sorry and I am saying sorry for our supervisory failings. But this now is a global crisis and you have to ask if a national regulator alone could have taken sufficient action to ensure all UK firms survive this crisis untouched – and I doubt it.”

Translation: It was going tits up anyway.

“People expect the regulator to challenge and engage with directors to make sure they were properly managing those risks, and when we look back on our track record, prior to that summer, we were not doing that to a level I find acceptable.

What the fuck were you upto then? Sat in your office, feet on the desk, flicking spitballs at each other with your rulers, or schmoozing with the bosses you’re supposed to be making sure know what they’re up to?

“The question is – did anybody understand the consequences of all the inter-linkages between these products?

No, they fucking didn’t!

“It needs to be recognised that management, the buyers and sellers of these products, need to take a lot of responsibility for what has happened. Many people forgot the golden rule: do not sell or buy things you do not understand.”

It’s a golden rule for a reason, fuckwits.