Sim-O

Tim Ireland: Still getting shafted by Conservatives

September 8th, 2010 § 0

Since Tim Ireland uncovered that the source for a front page Sun story about a muslim hit-list was the very same chap who posted the idea on a muslim forum, whilst pretending to be a muslim, Tim has had his name dragged through the mud with despicable smears, had personal information published all over the place on the net, been threatened with physical violence and had any plea for help from the very people able to put a stop to it fall on deaf ears. All by Conservatives, or associates of Conservatives.

Well, it’s just got worse…

Recently, someone involved in this ongoing campaign of harassment began publishing material targeting my wife, my children, and other members of my extended family.

This has included false accusations aimed at my kids, making specific allegations of criminal behaviour that are not only entirely untrue, but extremely damaging (and, it must be said, upsetting).

His bloody kids.

One of those involved is Iain Dale, who just tweeted…

Hurrah. Am connected to the internet on my iPad. Praise be to Allah. Wonder what to do now….

How much of a fucking clue do you need, Iain?

If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn’t move, shoot it till it does

September 3rd, 2010 § 4

For fucks sake…

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.
[...]
The military court cleared the soldier of illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice by asking soldiers under his command to alter their accounts of the incident.

Capt R’s lawyers argued that the “confirmation of the kill” after a suspect is shot was a standard Israeli military practice to eliminate terrorist threats.

The officer always followed standard practice, you see…

A recording of radio exchanges between Capt R and his troops obtained by Israeli television revealed that from the beginning soldiers identified Iman as a child.

In the recording, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post’s operations room and describes Iman as “a little girl” who was “scared to death”. After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.

Is that also standard practice? Shooting into a suspected bomb to see whether it actually is a bomb or not?

Although the military speculated that Iman might have been trying to “lure” the soldiers out of their base so they could be attacked by accomplices, Capt R made the decision to lead some of his troops into the open. Shortly afterwards he can be heard on the recording saying that he has shot the girl and, believing her dead, then “confirmed the kill”.

Even though the girl could be a lure, the captain still move some of his men into the open. Is that standard practice, too?

Capt R claimed that he had not fired the shots at the girl but near her. However, Dr Mohammed al-Hams, who inspected the child’s body at Rafah hospital, counted numerous wounds. “She has at least 17 bullets in several parts of the body, all along the chest, hands, arms, legs,” he told the Guardian shortly afterwards. “The bullets were large and shot from a close distance. The most serious injuries were to her head. She had three bullets in the head. One bullet was shot from the right side of the face beside the ear. It had a big impact on the whole face.”

He fired shots near, not at the girl? And she was shot 17 times? This man should be prosecuted for incompetence as well as murder.

Lost for words, I really am.

Via MsMaryViola

Wanted: ‘Gifted’ constituency secretary

September 2nd, 2010 § 0

I know I shouldn’t blog anything anything to do with work, and I normally don’t, but this appeared in my rss this morning (click to enlarge)…

Naturally I clicked the links to see the full advert, and got this…

I just want to get home on to an unfiltered computer and see what exactly being a parliamentary secretary involves.

a nationalist or religious conflict?

September 2nd, 2010 § 0

I just heard Jeremy Bowen on Radio 4 talking about the Palestinian/Isreali peace talks…

There is a religious war developing in what has been essentially a nationalist conflict. You can make a deal with nationalists, it’s much harder to deal with people that believe they’re doing gods will.

Oh? As opposed to people that believe god gave them some land?

Come on Jeremy, the Palestinians have been fighting against a religious justification for the occupation of their land for generations.

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)

TGTSE: First Journey

August 27th, 2010 § 0

Part of the series: The Great Travel-Sickness Experiment

I tried my new wristbands today.

It’s was only a short journey of about 9 miles each way. I only had mild motion sickness, but I think that was due to the short journey rather than the wristbands.

They are quite tight on the wrist and even after only 10-15 minutes of wearing there was quite a mark left around my arms, the sort you get round your leg when your sock are too tight, and I wondered if the mark where the nylon bobble was, was actually going to leave a bruise. After 10 minutes or so the marks had disappeared.

When I put the bands on, they felt very tight, as I mentioned previously, and I thought it would annoy and start to itch and stuff, but they didn’t. I think they could on a long journey, though.

Getting the bands in the correct position may be a struggle and will need a bit of trial and error to get right.
You’re supposed to have the bobble three finger widths up your arm from the first wrist crease, and then in between the the tendons. The distance up from my wrist is fairly obvious, but I can only find one tendon. I don’t know if I’m a freak with just one tendon, although everything seems to work ok, it’s hidden behind other stuff or I just don’t know what I’m looking for, but I could only find one.

I think that may be the biggest stumbling block to getting the bands to work correctly, if they do indeed work, is the positioning of them. They need to be in a certain position and you’re trying to get an untrained person to get them in the right place with a basic diagram and short description.

Well, that’s my initial thoughts on them: comfy enough on short distances, not sure if they’re postioned correctly, but they didn’t work. I am not put off though, in my quest to have my head screwed by a cheap bit of woo I shall carry on and try them on a longer journey. Although when that’ll be, I don’t know yet.

The Great Travel-Sickness Experiment

August 27th, 2010 § 3

I have never been troubled by travel sickness. Well, I may have puked in the car on the way to Skegness when I was five years old, but if I did i) i can’t remember it and ii) who hasn’t?

I’m fine in aeroplanes, even better when I’ve had a few beers. I’m good in cars, I’m not troubled by trains and when everyone is emptying their guts out the wrong end on a ferry, I’m out on deck laughing as the waves crash over the side of the boat.

That is until we bought our latest car.

That car is a Mazda 5. It’s a great car. It seats more than five people. It goes quite well, has loads of cubby holes for storing stuff, has six gears so cruising at 70mph is at about 2k rpm and the bit the kids love the best: sliding rear doors.

The problem I have with it is that everytime I’m a passenger, in the front or back, I need to puke. Or sleep. Or puke then sleep.

How do I know it’s the car that’s the problem? Well, as I mentioned at the start of this post I have never suffered travel sickness before. I have never suffered it previously on any other form of transport, in any vehicle with any driver. The closest I’ve come to it is a condition of the inner ear called ‘benign paroxysmal positional vertigo‘. This involved getting out of bed and instead of walking down the bed to the end of the room, I walked diagonally across the room and nearly through the window. I felt sick just bending over to put my socks on.

Now. I could resort to travel sickness tablets, which I have been using. They work, too. Presumably they contain the same substance doctors give you before a general anaesthetic to stop you puking whilst unconscious flat out on your back. The trouble with that is that travel sickness pills ain’t cheap and the cost soon adds up. I’m looking for an alternative.

I’m gonna give these babies a go…

(the one on the left is inside out)

The blurb on back of box says…

Using the ancient Chinese principles of acupressure, many people find wearing the bands on both wrists can help control nausea including all forms of motion sickness.

Acupressure is believed to work by restoring the balance of negative (Yin) and positive (Yan) ions in the body as imbalances are believed to affect health.

What do you reckon? Will they work? Yin and Yan? Acupressure? They’ve been known about for centuries. Of course they work.

Don’t they?

Boots, whose own brand product this is but made by Sea-Band, don’t seem quite so sure. No mention of trials or percentages of people that find these work. Using words like ‘believe’ in the blurb, too. Using “many people believe” is the same as “lots of unqualified peoples’ opinion”.

~~Not being an actual scientist chap I could be wrong, but I didn’t realise that Yin and Yan were ions. I thought that ions were ions.~~ After a quick look at the all-knowing Wikipedia, there is in fact positive and negative ions, but they’re not called Yin and Yan and whether they are positive or negative ions depends on how many electrons they have compared to how many protons.

So, if I follow these directions…

A band must be worn on each wrist with the button placed over the Nei Kuan point.

To find this point place your middle three fingers on the inside of each wrist with the edge of the third finger on the first wrist crease.

The correct point is just under the edge of your index finger and between the two central tendons. Position the button face downwards over the Nei Kuan point.
Can be worn while sleeping.

These elasticated bands with a nylon nobble on them will alter how many electrons my ions have and bring me back to balance and stop my travel sickness in our Mazda 5.

I’m not so sure it’s gonna work. But for a one-time payment of £7.99, I’ll give it a go. I’m willing to have my skeptic head turned inside out with a result that may not be quite what I expect.

I’ll keep you updated.

*if you have any other suggestions, apart from those rubber things that you dangle from the back of the car, then let me know in the comments

For the record:

Fibre content:
Acrylic: 64.2%
Nylon: 24.2%
Elastane: 11.6%

being denied the right to ‘self-association’

August 24th, 2010 § 0

Dear Fellow Patriot,

Uh-oh. Here we go.

Imagine a country where high-handed police chiefs abuse their powers to stop the native people celebrating their own culture and traditions.

OK. I’m imagining, but it’s quite hard to imagine that when the last time I went morris dancing, in the street no less, the police rather enjoyed the show. It’s quite hard to imagine when up and down the country there are folk events going on all over the place, with the police not even bothering to turn up. I wonder what traditions and what part of our culture Fat Nick thinks he can’t do that anybody else can?

Imagine a country where busybody local council bureaucrats use petty regulations to harass campaigners for the rights of the indigenous people and prevent them holding perfectly peaceful festivals at which the older generation seek to transmit knowledge of their culture and heritage to youngsters.

Those petty regulations aren’t used because of the festival per se, but because of the crowds of demonstrators that turn up as well. Creating chaos in the local area and annoying the local population even more than having wankers get lagered up in a field.

Imagine a country where it is ‘illegal’ for a band to perform a live song

Have they never talked to a landlord of a pub in a residential area that’s tried to get a live music licence? Obviously not.

or for a Punch and Judy Man to put on a show without a licence – a licence that is refused to opponents of the ruling regime.

Why would the Punch & Judy man be granted a license to perform, and that is what it is and not specific a Punch & Judy license, at an event that hasn’t been granted a license itself?

Imagine a country where the ruling elite uses taxpayers’ money to try to force a political party that stands for the survival of the native people to change its rules and policies with the intention of swamping it with hostile members of ethnic minorities who boast of their intentions to destroy that party and to deny its members the right to self-association.

Oh dear. Poor little racists. Having to change their rules to comply with the law. Boo-fucking-hoo.

And “self-association”? Surely they mean free association? ‘Self association’ sounds like a rather grubby thing to do at a supposedly family event. No wonder the BNP weren’t granted a license for their Red White & Blue festival of hate.

removing responsibility from the junkie

August 24th, 2010 § 1

People should stop calling heroin users “junkies” or “addicts”, an influential think tank on drugs has said.

The UK Drug Policy Commission said such names stigmatised users and made it more difficult to get off drugs.

…says a page on the BBC website.

What a crock of shit.

Heroin users are called ‘junkies’ because heroin is also called Junk – by drug users. Junkies are also called ‘addicts’ because they are addicted to a substance.

Authors of the six-month report said the terms “junkie” and “addict” were distrustful and judgmental and led to feelings of low self-worth among drug users.

The feelings of low self-worth are caused by the drug. Any term used to describe a junkieis going to have negative connatations because of how junkies behave.

They said these hostile attitudes only added to the stigma of drug addiction and made it harder for users to give up.

I would argue that these hostile attitudes also prevent a fair number of people from taking heroin in the first place.

Colin Blakemore of Oxford University, one of the report’s authors, told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme drug addicts faced stigma “as damaging as similar attitudes to gay people, and people with mental health issues, were 30 years ago”.

And that’s a bad thing how? There may be many factors determining whether someone take drugs or not, but the ultimate responsibility lies with the individual. It is a choice. People don’t choose to be gay, and you’d have to be mantal to actually want a mental health issue of any sort. Gay and people with mental health problems don’t have to spunk a great wodge of cash they don’t have on being gay or being er, mental. They can be for free.

He added that hostility towards drug addicts failed to recognise how difficult it was for them to quit, describing what they faced as “chemical bondage”.

No it doesn’t. It recognises that the vast majority of mainliners are untrustworthy to some degree or other. Don’t give an addict an ultimatum between you and the drugs. The drugs will win.

“The crux of this problem, I’m afraid, is the persistent view that drug addiction is the problem of the addict,” he said.

For fucks sake. Who’s fucking problem is it then, if it’s not the addicts’ problem? Society at large, I suppose.

I’m all for liberalising drug laws and spending money rehab rather than prison, treating drug addiction from a public heath direction rather than criminal, but lets not remove responsibility from the user for getting hooked in the first place or try and hide what a fucking awful life being a heroin addict is.

N.B.
Yes, I know there are always exceptions to the dirty skank junkie, and prostitues that get hooked because of their pimps etc.

Oi! Dave! You wanna have a word with this guy

August 4th, 2010 § 2

WTF?

Not sure what to make of this…

The world of philanthropy got a huge financial boost today as more than 30 American billionaires pledged to give away at least half of their fortunes to charitable causes, signing up to a campaign launched by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

As the article states, Buffett alone is worth $47 billion.

What, though, has prompted this? Have they finally realised that their children will have a secure future without having to worry about a thing with a fraction of that? Did these guys get out a calculator and realise that they could never spend it all?

Of course, not to put a dampener on the gesture, the pledge isn’t binding, but well, it’s a start. Maybe the next step is to make people realise they don’t need to amass these large fortunes in the first place.

I tell you what though, if Warren Buffett can persuade these guys to give away half their fortunes, maybe David Cameron should have word with him to get some of our rich people to help out with his Big Society plans.

Crap tag lines

August 4th, 2010 § 1

What sort of tag line is that…?

Living Our Values & Ethics

I’m guessing it’s supposed to be all corporate responsibility but it’s a bit rubbish. After all, who doesn’t live according to their values and ethics?

It doesn’t even give you a clue as to what those ethics and values are, although it’s probably a big list that doesn’t fit on a shipping bag.

It’ll be about recycling and paying a fair price to their suppliers. You know, the things that are all the rage at the moment, that they didn’t give a shit about a few years ago and, like most companies, wouldn’t care again if they thought the public didn’t.

If you’re not ‘living your ethics and values’ you’re either lying or living a lie.