Sim-O

7 weeks to go.

Labels: Blair

Fancy a chuckle?

Iain Dale has a piece on CiF about the freedom of speech and debate that blogging has brought to everyone.
Except he forgot to mention his sockpuppetry, anonymous bullies, distraction and diversion techniques and the latest one, his redirection script.

Laugh? I nearly shat!

Comments

Labels: Blogging, Freedom of Speech

Well, finger on the pulse once again, the Winograd Report, the interim report into Israels performance in the war with Hezbollah/Lebanon last summer is out, and it isn’t very good for Olmert or his Chief of Staff and Defence Minister.

Basically, it says that they had no clue as to what they were doing, had no experience of this sort of thing and didn’t take any advice from anyone that would know how to go about fucking up a country and have you own population think you did a good job.

• The Prime Minister made up his mind hastily, despite the fact that no detailed military plan was submitted to him and without asking for one. Also, his decision was made without close study of the complex features of the Lebanon front or of the military, political and diplomatic options available to Israel. He made his decision without systematic consultation with others, especially outside the IDF, despite not having experience in external-political and military affairs. In addition, he did not adequately consider political and professional reservations presented to him before the fateful decisions of July 12th.
• The Prime Minister is responsible for the fact that the goals of the campaign were not set out clearly and carefully, and that there was no serious discussion of the relationship between these goals and the authorized modes of military action. He made a personal contribution to the fact that the declared goals were over-ambitious and not feasible.
• The Prime Minister did not adapt his plans once it became clear that the assumptions and expectations of Israel’s actions were not realistic and were not materializing
• The Minister of Defense did not have knowledge or experience in military, political or governmental matters. He also did not have good knowledge of the basic principles of using military force to achieve political goals.
• Despite these serious gaps, he made his decisions during this period without systemic consultations with experienced political and professional experts, including outside the security establishment. In addition, he did not give adequate weight to reservations expressed in the meetings he attended.
• The Minister of Defense did not act within a strategic conception of the systems he oversaw. He did not ask for the IDF’s operational plans and did not examine them; he did not check the preparedness and fitness of IDF; and did not examine the fit between the goals set and the modes of action presented and authorized for achieving them. His influence on the decisions made was mainly pointillist and operational. He did not put on the table – and did not demand presentation – of serious strategic options for discussion with the Prime Minister and the IDF.
• The Minister of Defense did not develop an independent assessment of the implications of the complexity of the front for Israel’s proper response, the goals of the campaign, and the relations between military and diplomatic moves within it. His lack of experience and knowledge prevented him from challenging in a competent way both the IDF, of which he was in charge, and the Prime Minister
• The army and the COS were not prepared for the event of the abduction despite recurring alerts. When the abduction happened, he responded impulsively. He did not alert the political leaders to the complexity of the situation, and did not present information, assessments and plans that were available in the IDF at various levels of planning and approval and which would have enabled a better response to the challenges.
• Among other things, the COS did not alert the political echelon to the serious shortcomings in the preparedness and the fitness of the armed forces for an extensive ground operation, if that became necessary. In addition, he did not clarify that the military assessments and analyses of the arena was that there was a high probability that a military strike against Hezbollah would make such a move necessary.
• The COS’ responsibility is aggravated by the fact that he knew well that both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense lacked adequate knowledge and experience in these matters, and by the fact that he had led them to believe that the IDF was ready and prepared and had operational plans fitting the situation.
• The COS did not provide adequate responses to serious reservations about his recommendations raised by ministers and others during the first days of the campaign, and he did not present to the political leaders the internal debates within the IDF concerning the fit between the stated goals and the authorized modes of actions.
• In all these the Chief of Staff failed in his duties as commander in chief of the army and as a critical part of the political-military leadership, and exhibited flaws in professionalism, responsibility and judgment.

I was going to emphasise parts, but pretty much all of it ended up in bold.

Labels: Israel, Lebanon

Background: Iain Dale. Guido Fawkes.

The whole point of a blog is to be able to track back through conversations and posts and comments using links to provide an illustrations, examples and references to various points in the conversations using hyperlinks.
So Why would two of the ‘Leading Political Bloggers’ (as they keep telling everyone) want to block links to their posts?

That is what Iain Dale and Paul Staines have done.
When you click on a link to anything on their sites from Bloggerheads or The UK Today, Iain redirects you to his front page, and ‘Guido’ sends you to Page3.com.
mmm. nice.

Come on guys, if you’re the cream of the bloggers and are honest, have nothing to hide, and consistent, what’s the problem? It’s not like they’re hard to get round, and the links to various posts help people understand the situation.
Or is that what you’re afraid of…?

Labels: Blogging

It’s 1st of May today.
It completely passed me by until during a quiet five minutes at work a looked at Lenins’ Tomb and saw that someone has done a good thing today.
Hugo Chavez announced that Venezuela will withdraw from the IMF and World Bank, is to increase their minimum wage and “set up a regional lending organisation that doesn’t insist on ‘structural adjustment programmes'”.
I wonder who will follow suit?

I thought I would mention it as it makes for some good news after the negative vibes that’s been going on here lately with Dead Tossers and Kate Moss.

It’s good, go have a look.

Labels: Chavez, Venezuela

So fucking what.
A clothes horse spends a few years wearing clothes that other people have designed and made and people go mental when Topshop launch a range clothes that she, er, put her name to, not designed, just stuck a label in them.
And the press go mental too. Well, wake up, it isn’t news, it’s a free fucking advertising.

Link

Labels: Capitalism

Not really a tosser in the same sense as the others, I don’t think anyway.
Not so much an evil dictator or a bigoted shit, more of an incompetent twat.

He had a colourful life at the top of Russian politics, coming to power in 1991 as the first President of the Russian Federation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
As President of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin was committed to opening up the country and taking it from a centrally-planned communist system to a market economy.
Due to various power struggles, which included a coup, which Boris famously defied with a speech stood atop a tank, and another instance of unrest where Yeltsin ordered a the shelling of the Russian White House, the economy was in extremely bad shape as a fool-hardy strategy of market liberalisation called the Washington Consensus, otherwise known as ‘Shock Therapy’, was embarked upon, on the advise of The USA IMF, World bank and US treasury..
From Wikipedia:

In January 1992, Gaidar convinced Yeltsin to introduce a program of “shock therapy” in Russia. On January 2, Yeltsin, acting as his own prime minister, ordered the liberalization of foreign trade, prices, and currency. At the same time, Yeltsin followed a policy of ‘macroeconomic stabilization,’ a harsh austerity regime designed to control inflation. Under Yeltsin’s stabilization program, interest rates were raised to extremely high levels to tighten money and restrict credit. To bring state spending and revenues into balance, Yeltsin raised new taxes heavily, cut back sharply on government subsidies to industry and construction, and made steep cuts to state welfare spending.

In early 1992, prices skyrocketed throughout Russia, and deep credit crunch shut down many industries and brought about a protracted depression. Many state enterprises shut down as they found themselves without orders or financing. The living standards of much of the population were devastated. In the 1990s Russia suffered an economic downturn more severe than the United States or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression.

In 1992, Yeltsin began another round of privatisations and to give it a boost, issued every one with a 10,000 ruble voucher to spend on shares of select Russian enterprises, but with most people having nothing and needing to food, clothing and heating, most of these vouchers were sold immediately ending up in a few hands, rather than the many.
Again in 1995, more privatisations came as the mounting Russian debt forced Boris to exchange stock shares for bank loans, which also bought him support for the elections that were approaching in Spring 1996. This gave valuable state assets, telecoms, energy, finance etc, the Russian Oligarchs, became some of Yeltsins most major backers of the election.

Boris Yeltsin. Sold Russia down the Swanny.
Tosser.

Labels: Dead Tossers

Labels: United Kingdom

Labels: United Kingdom

Bernard Matthews, the Don of all things turkey is going to be receiving nearly £600,000 compensation for the loss of the healthy birds the company had to cull after the H5N1 Avian Flu virus was found at its Suffolk Farm.

Bernard Matthews will be receiving the money, which is calculated according to the market value of the birds, from the government.
From the fucking government.
What? Didn’t he have any insurance? Is he a not-for-dividend company like Network Rail?
No. Bernard Matthews Limited is a private company that produces over 7 million turkeys a year, so is the 160,000 it had to cull going to make dent so big that the company is going to go to the wall if it isn’t recompensed for the loss? I fucking doubt it.

This £600k is designed to act as an incentive to do the right thing and report a disease early.
Well, how about not getting a big suitcase full of case as a sweetener to do what a company is obligated to do and have the chairman and maybe the whole board do a stint of porridge if they don’t raise the alarm in good time? That would save a bucket load of taxpayers cash going to companies that should and can stand up on their own or shouldn’t have any trouble persuading the bank to extend its overdraft and at the same time it is easier to send directors to gaol, it might make the Captains of Industry behave a bit better, but I doubt it. It’ll probably only make them more devious.

Labels: Capitalism