Sim-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.

[[image:intermission1.gif::center:0]]

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.

I listened to Thought for the day on Radio 4 the other morning and just remembered to blog about it now.
It was Rev Dr Alan Billings and some bits are just plain wrong. Not counting the bits about god. That should go without saying.

We have all helped ourselves to the fruits of their [the financial markets] activities and shut our eyes to the risks.

First off, ‘we’ haven’t all helped ourselves to the fuits of their labour [labour? Ha!]. Some have benefited more than others, and some have done even worse, but I wouldn’t call having to get a mortgage of 5x your salary to be able to afford half a house inconjunction with a housing association a fruit of which many people would relish.
As far as shutting our eyes to the risks, that is absolute bollocks. It’s not the shutting of eyes that’s been the problem, it’s the wool being pulled over them.

Some of the politicians who now decry the money-men are the same politicians that previously lauded their boldness and creativity. Some of the clergy who denounce them were quite happy to accept the better stipends they made possible. If we are to learn from our mistakes we need to turn from moralising to morality.

And you won’t get a moral business environment without regulation.

Despite the turbulence and the risks, it’s hard to see any alternative system with the same capacity as capitalism to lift the world’s poor out of poverty – which is surely what any social ethic demands.

Because caitalism has done such a wonderful job of getting the poor in Africa out of their mudhuts and the utility privatisations that capitalism required in Argentina (or was it bolivia?) and the neo-liberal experiment, by Thatchers’ friend Pinochet, in Chile worked wonderfully in converting those countries to a land of luxury.
We’ve hardly had a good go at any alternative systems to capitalism, have we. As far as I can see there’s been various forms of capitalism, from the fairly strict laissez fair to what most people would call socialism. There’s also been tries at various forms of dictatorships too, the corrupted form of communism in the Soviet Union and state capitalism of the Chinese to dictators proper, all over the place.
Surely social ethics, and your religious ‘be nice’ morality, would be interpreted a ‘nicey nicey look after everyone’ way of doing things, not you cut and thrust of capitalism.

However, this crisis has revealed that we have all become less motivated by that concern for common good commended in that book of Prayers and Hymns. It is a sharp reminder that while ethics without capitalism may be impotent, capitalism without ethics can bring ruin on us all.

Capitalism and the common good are incompatible. If a company starts doing things for the common good it will soon go out of business.
Ethics without capitialism we’ve yet to see on a grand scale, capitalism with or without ethics will bring ruin on us all

Scrapping the SATS for key stage 3, or 14 year olds to you and me, is undoubtedly A Good Thing.

But listening to Ed Balls, the schools secretary on the Today program on Radion 4, he couldn’t actually give a proper reason for the decision.

Said that 15 years ago when they were introduced it was The Right Thing and now these tests were Wrong and could go. The reason he did give was that the SATS weren’t needed because the GCSEs at age 16 were the best signifier of how pupils/school were doing.

And how is that different from the last 15 years?

Also, concerning the different parts of the UK and England being the only country that still has SATS for the 7 & 11 year olds. When Mr Balls was asked about that and why that is, he waffled on and to paraphrase, “it is A good Thing”.

Well, fucking tell us why then! Why can’t any cunt answer a fucking question properly anymore? Don’t they listen? Are they fucking stupid are has everyone got a hidden agenda.

Answer the question. It’ll be ok, everything’ll be alright in the end. I promise.