Sim-O

BBC:

A new hand held device which checks fingerprints is being used by police in Derbyshire, it has been confirmed.

The Lantern, which is roughly the size of a small shoebox, can check the identity of an individual against police records in two minutes.

More worryingly

“Secondly, in normal circumstances if a person stopped is unable to verify who they are they are arrested, taken to a police station and have their fingerprints taken in custody

Via

On a nursery wall:
[[image:goals.jpg:nursery boards:center:0]]
“[[popup:goals2.jpg:Achieve economic well-being:aiming high:1:left]]”? A little bit over confident, me thinks.

The Mail:

In an extraordinary six-month campaign of legal threats, Northern Rock has been pursuing Andrew Kirkland, a 26-year-old systems analyst, claiming he is responsible for leaking details about the huge bonuses secretly awarded to its bosses along with plans to close branches and freeze assets.
…
MP is demanding a Parliamentary debate into why Northern Rock, which was nationalised in February, has spent at least £130,000 of taxpayers’ money pursuing
a junior employee on charges he denies, but which in any event involve matters of public interest.

Kevan Jones, Labour MP for North Durham, told Parliament last week the bank had no business attacking a ‘whistleblower who exposed the outrageous bonuses the previous management were paying themselves’.
…
Mr Kirkland, who worked for the bank for four years, has always denied he was the source of these articles.

But since January, he says Schillings has bombarded him with phone calls, letters and emails aimed at making him accept an agreement.

In the proposed deal, the bank said it would drop disciplinary proceedings and waive damages if Mr Kirkland would be potentially liable for its legal costs of £130,000 which, it warns, could increase at a later stage.

He would have his resignation accepted, but would have to keep the terms of the agreement confidential.
…
In May, Mr Kirkland made a formal complaint to Northern Rock that its legal pursuit of him while he was signed off sick was unjustified.

He says he has now received a High Court writ from Schillings claiming the cost of all legal proceedings brought against him and damages done to the bank’s reputation.

Northern Rock is likely to know Mr Kirkland is currently homeless and has minimal assets.

His starting salary in 2004 was only £10,100 per annum although it had risen.

Mr Kirkland is unable to find a solicitor to take on his case but the bit that shows the level that these guys operate at is this one [my bold]:

Mr Kirkland claims he has been left a psychological wreck and, after being told he was not allowed to write to MPs asking for help

Via

[D’oh! Republished but in a different catagory so it shows in main column rather than the side column – Teh Management]

The Guardian:

By now, there were police officers on all four floors of the building, kicking and battering. Several victims describe a sort of system to the violence, with each officer beating each person he came across, then moving on to the next victim while his colleague moved up to continue beating the first. It seemed important that everybody must be hurt. Nicola Doherty, 26, a care worker from London, later described how her partner, Richard Moth, lay across her to protect her: “I could just hear blow after blow on his body. The police were also leaning over Rich so they could hit the parts of my body which were exposed.” She tried to cover her head with her arm: they broke her wrist.

In one corridor, they ordered a group of young men and women to kneel, the easier to batter them around the head and shoulders. This was where Daniel Albrecht, a 21-year-old cello student from Berlin, had his head beaten so badly that he needed surgery to stop bleeding in his brain. Around the building, officers flipped their batons around, gripping the far end and using the right-angled handle as a hammer.

And in among this relentless violence, there were moments when the police preferred humiliation: the officer who stood spread-legged in front of a kneeling and injured woman, grabbed his groin and thrust it into her face before turning to do the same to Daniel Albrecht kneeling beside her; the officer who paused amid the beatings and took a knife to cut off hair from his victims, including Nicola Doherty; the constant shouting of insults; the officer who asked a group if they were OK and who reacted to the one who said “No” by handing out an extra beating.

This wasn’t Gaza or Iraq, but Italy.

Read the rest of it, it’s horrific.

Via

Nosemonkey has a post about Romas being persecuted in Italy.

But what struck me as strange was one quote about a couple of gipsy women being accused of trying to kidnap a child (my emphasis):

two Roma women were accused in Lecco for trying to steal a child. Both of them declared they were begging with no intention whatsoever of kidnapping. In order to avoid being sentenced both of them accepted the suggestion of their lawyer and pleaded guilty. Accordingly they were sentenced to 8 months and 10 days in jail. As expected the sentence was suspended. Their lawyer acknowledged publicly that the women told him they never tried to kidnap the child but they agree to follow his advice in order to avoid prosecution for begging…

You fucking what!?
A lawyer advised his clients to plead guilty to something serious they didn’t do inorder to avoid being presectuted for something very fucking minor? I’m speechless.

8 months for attempted kidnap is preferable to being done for begging. The Italians must fucking hate beggars.

The Provisional BBC:

The Provisional BBC is a paramilitary organisation which split from the BBC in October 2006 in protest at its toleration of poor writing and Liberal Democrats. The Provisional BBC regrets any civilian casualties resulting from posts contained within, but lays the blame squarely at the foot of the Tories. It is our duty to resist them, by any and all means necessary.

Go have a look it’s quite funny. I would post a few excerpts, but they’re only short post and so if I posted them here you’d have no reason to got there, would you.

There’s a piece on CiF titled “Ban the word ‘Chav'”.

The authors of this piece reckon we should all stop using the word ‘Chav’, because it is offensive.
Well, that is the point. It isn’t about class hatred or racism or white bashing. It’s about pissing off irksome cunts who think it’s ok to be cunts.

Would we get away with saying “faggot” on the BBC? No – there are very few circumstances where that would be acceptable. Would the Guardian print the word “pikey”? Well they have done five times this year (three times were earnest discussions about the word’s racism, and the other two were, well, a bit racist). Can you use the word “gay” as a general derogative (as in “those trainers are really gay”) on Radio 1? Well yes, it turns out that you can, according to the BBC Trust. Could we use the n-word in the Fabian Review? Well probably not,

These guys have completley missed the point, all the references in the above quote (I presume the ‘n-word’ is nigger and what the fuck is the Fabian Review?) are to inalienable qualities of a person. That person may go up or down the social ladders from posh to homeless, lower class to aristocracy, but they will always be homosexual or black. Being a chav is not dependent on where you are or where you were born into society. It’s about your attitude.

It is deeply offensive to a largely voiceless group and – especially when used in normal middle-class conversation or on national TV – it betrays a deep and revealing level of class hatred.

Voiceless? The white working class? Maybe. Maybe not. Being white and working class is probably the start point of identity politics in this country. When you want to identify a white Briton, you just call them a Briton, everyone else has other monikers added. Just because there isn’t a small group of people who claim to speak for all white working class people, doesn’t mean they don’t have a voice.
And it doesn’t betray a deep level of class hatred, it reveals a hatred of wankers.

The phenomenon of the word has grown over the last five years. Initially it was purely a term of abuse

It still is a term of abuse. It’s a term of abuse in the harshest form when used to describe proper chav fuckers and mild mocking when used to describe people like Daniella Westbrook.

We have heard it increasingly used in conversation over the last year, invariably to casually describe people “not like us”

It’s used to describe people who’re “not like us” because it’s easier to say than “ostentatious, self-important, thieving, workshy cunts”. I also say it so I don’t get a slap from my mum for swearing.

middle classes have always used language to distinguish themselves from those a few rungs below them on the ladder – we all know their old serviette/napkin, lounge/living room, settee/sofa tricks

And they always will use that kind of language. Should we stop using ‘working class’, ‘lower classes’ and ‘upper classes’? After all, even if you don’t use ‘lower classes’, purely by using the ‘middle class’ tag, you’re implicity stating there is a lower class, an under class, dare I say untermenschen? By using the word chav, you’re not describing the working class, you’re describing some of the working class as well as some of the middle class.

Let’s not replace the racist or bigoted language of the past with a new set of words that are just as hateful.

Chav is not replacing any racist or bigoted words. Anyone can be a chav.

It’s no more bigoted than using the term ‘lazy, Nova driving, fag blagging, tea-leaving shit’.

I have just updated the Pivot software, so any problems let me know.

Thanx

Teh Management.

BBC:

The race’s traditional home is owned by the British Racing Drivers’ Club, who had been in talks for a new deal with Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone.

“We wanted a world class venue for F1 in Britain, something that the teams and fans could be proud of,” he said.

“Donington’s development plans will give us exactly that, a venue to put British motorsport back on the map.”

Ecclestone said he was disappointed that the government had not intervened to help Silverstone retain the race.

Silverstone and Donnington are both privately venues. Why should the government help one or the other? If Silverstone isn’t upto it, and franlkly it’s a shite track then it shouldn’t get the deal.
I just hope the development of Donningtons’ track doesn’t fuck it up for the bike racing.

Via email:

Hello, my name is Billy and I suffer from guilt for not forwarding 50 billion f***ing chain letters sent to me by people who actually believe, if you send them on, a poor six-year-old girl in Scotland with a breast on her forehead will be able to raise enough money to have it removed before her redneck parents sell her to a travelling freak show.

And, do you honestly believe that Bill Gates is going to give $1000 to you, and everyone to whom you send ‘his’ email?

How stupid are we?

Ooooh, looky here! If I scroll down this page and make a wish, I’ll get laid by a model I just happen to run into the next day!

What a bunch of bullshit.

Maybe the evil chain letter leprechauns will come into my house and sodomise me in my sleep for not continuing a chain letter that was started by St Peter in 5AD and brought to this country by midget pilgrim stowaways on the Endeavour.

F**k ’em!!

If you’re going to forward something, at least send me something mildly amusing.

I’ve seen all the ‘send this to 10 of your closest friends, and this poor, wretched excuse for a human being will somehow receive a nickel from some omniscient being’ forwards about 90 times. I don’t f**king care.

Show a little intelligence and think about what you’re actually contributing to by sending out these forwards. Chances are, it’s our own unpopularity.

The point being?

If you get some chain letter that’s threatening to leave you shagless or luckless for the rest of your life, delete it.

If it’s funny, send it on.

Don’t piss people off by making them feel guilty about a leper in Botswana with no teeth who has been tied to the arse of a dead elephant for 27 years and whose only salvation is the 5 cents per letter he’ll receive if you forward this email.