... and end with? I really am getting rather fed up with this self-opinionated douche. Anyone's is entitled to an opinion, even that idiot, but when he starts pontificating about what others should do ... and think ... then I reach for my gun.
I never thought that I could be anything other than a royalist. This man is living proof that it is quite possible to change even deeply entrenched beliefs.
COMMENT THREAD
The little Louise of the Daily Failygraph has gone so far down the line towards insanity that even the polar bears are having problems containing their mirth (pictured). Fortunately, I don't buy her rag any more, and as long as it is devoting its pages to greenie puffs, there is no need to.
Furthermore, knowing Louise's weakness for greenie zealots, one did not have to look very far to find the WWF fingerprints, with the lead "researcher", Andrew Derocher, up to his armpits in WWF money. Why the Failygraph should act as the PR agent for WWF, however, is anyone's guess, but at least we don't have to pay for it any more.
A better piece on this "puff" is, in any event, is here, where you can count the conditionals, demonstrating that this is yet another speculative offering. And to think that newspapers once went through the pretence of printing news.
The douches who created the so-called research do of course have form. Last year, in another WWF-sponsored puff, they were telling us that polar bears in Hudson Bay were going to die out in 30 years. Now, they're all going to die ... everywhere ... which makes you wonder what next they will come up with.
So far though, cuddly polar bears are such a nice little earner that you can't see them giving up the scare stories in a hurry. And, like little Louise, there's one born every minute.
COMMENT THREAD
But there is also a sense of the surreal, as I look at the newspapers and other sources of news. I wonder whether much of what I am reading is real, or one vast practical joke, as if 1 April has been extended indefinitely. In this topsy-turvy world, one supposes that there will be one day a year – or half-day – when the stories are true, and we are not being taken for fools. Will they call it "April non-fool's day" or will someone come up with a better title?
That we are descending into the abyss is evidenced by this particular story, although there are many more. This one tells us, the author no doubt keeping an absolutely straight face, that "the only way for the UK renewable energy market to grow to a respectable size comparable with Germany is for it to have the full support of the incumbent government".
We are then told that the fact that large-scale solar PV farms are beginning to appear in the English countryside should be celebrated as a success of the government's Feed in Tariffs (FIT) policy. And then we hear the lament that the scheme is being portrayed as an enemy to microgeneration, with little regard for the fact that large-scale solar PV helps companies to achieve lower costs that can then be passed on to domestic installations.
Here, the opening premise is so barking mad that I have difficulty dealing with it. In fact, I am not sure that I can. Had this appeared on 1 April, I would have smiled knowingly and said to myself, "nice try" – but so obvious that the joke was too transparent to be funny. But this writer is serious – either that, or I've been in a coma for fifty days and no one thought to tell me. That actually could be more plausible than some of the stuff I am reading.
The point, of course is that, as we wrote the day before yesterday, just as German is pulling out of solar subsidies as fast as she can, we have this commentator, with an IQ that is probably lower than the figure on my fridge thermometer, holding Germany up as the shining beacon which we should be striving to emulate.
But it isn't only solar which is having the same effect on writers' brains as would sticking their heads in buckets of liquid nitrogen. There is also the question of wind. Now, you've all heard the term, "soldier's soldier", usually spoken with approval of some wandering brown job. Well, this is the "moron's moron" speaking, Charles Hendry (pictured), to whom the task of differentiating the orifice positioned between the gluteus maximus and the ginglymus would be one of Herculean proportions.
This is the man – if it really is a human being, which is open to debate – that has told MPs that governments have spent £2.2 billion supporting wind power over eight years. Yet with that experience he finds it impossible to predict when windmills will prove profitable without grants.
Here, the one word "never" should be simple enough even for this mental midget to understand, a creature to whom the status of "retard" is a hopelessly unattainable objective. And, if "never" is the answer, then the whole policy falls apart, as the unfortunates who pay the burgeoning electricity bills will be quick to attest.
Despite this, we have in Mr Hendry, the supporter of a notion that we should pay for the erection of up to 20,000 more windmills – as well as putting millions of electric cars on the roads. Extracting sunbeams from cucumbers would make more sense, and would have the added merit of being less visually intrusive.
This now is the land where satire, and especially political satire, is dead. We have bred a whole new generation of self-satirising politicians, a group for whom no endeavour is so wild, or so utterly mad that they could not embrace it as their most dearly-held aspiration. Swift, thou shouldest live now ... if only for you to discover that there are limits to your creative genius, which have long been exceeded.
COMMENT THREAD
Britain is to abandon its warship patrols of the Caribbean for the first time since the second world war because of the navy's funding crisis, The Guardian tells us. The withdrawal means the navy will no longer provide a warship for anti-narcotic operations in the region, and will have to reduce its role in disaster relief work.
I bet there are an awful lot of people who were cursing Brown over his "meanness" on defence spending, and went rushing to the polls to vote Tory in order to get a better deal for the Forces, are now beginning to wonder why they bothered. Euroslime Dave looks set to abolish the military completely.
COMMENT THREAD
I decided not to sell it. The money wasn't good enough. And who wants to work for AoL anyway?
(PS: this joke is made of 100% recycled material. The carbon signature is zero and no animals were harmed during its creation.)
COMMENT: OPEN FRED THREAD
(PS: this joke is made of 100% recycled material. The carbon signature is zero and no animals were harmed during its creation.)
COMMENT: OPEN FRED THREAD
Place the ads, and follow the money. How much did the Failygraph whores get paid for this, one wonders. It was called "horizontal collaboration", I believe, although in this case, you just bend over.
COMMENT THREAD
You give us £1trillion by 2020 and we'll deliver energy savings worth £180billion. That's Euroslime Dave's latest "get rich quick" scheme that he wants us to buy into ... almost as good as his solar power deal.
What do we call this? How about Camoronics?
COMMENT THREAD
What do we call this? How about Camoronics?
COMMENT THREAD
It is utterly disgusting how brave, outstanding men such as Patrick Mercer, who have served their country so well, are viciously attacked for nothing more than their slight and perfectly understandable human frailties.
We are thus mightily reassured to lean that Tory MP Patrick Mercer has had a police panic button installed in his office after, as some reports would have it (but have since been so rightly removed), he was brutally kicked in the groin, punched and kicked on the floor by his former mistress, Sarah Coyle, who works as a House of Commons secretary.
This sort of violent behaviour simply must not be tolerated, so how wise former Army officer Mercer is in having closed-circuit television cameras installed in his Commons office, at public expense. Taxpayers will be only too pleased to see their money well spent.
And with such unpleasant, dangerous people on the loose, Mercer is very wise to carry a panic alarm linked to the nearest police station and to lock himself in his office in Parliament. Only this way can he avoid another incident of the sort that might have happened but is no longer reported, thank goodness.
We learn that the MP's ex-lover and vicious attacker, mother-of-one Coyle, has reportedly been told by police to stay away from the MP – and rightly so. It beggars description that Coyle has dismissed the allegations and that both parties are said to have reported the other's conduct to police. How could anyone not take the word of such as the gallant former officer Mercer?
"Mrs Coyle kicked Mr Mercer in the groin and then kicked and punched him as he lay on the floor,"an invisible report quoted one well-placed insider as saying. "Mr Mercer didn't raise a hand but he was terrified," the insider added.
But all that just goes to show what a fine, upstanding gentleman he is, and how much we are in his debt. Our heroes must have all the help they need.
COMMENT THREAD
March last year, I was railing against the madness of Feed-in-tariffs (FIT) for solar power, with a particularly vitriolic word (or two) for the Tories. My singular grief with them was that they had taken the Labour scheme to fund solar power to the level of two percent of national capacity and demanded an increase to 15 percent by 2020.
Thereby did they in one fell swoop elevate madness to rabid insanity, adding not £80 billion or so to the capital costs of our electricity system but, potentially £600 billion, recoverable by the suppliers from the FIT which, by 2020 could have reached £60 billion a year.
As it turned out, the Tories may be stupid – exceedingly so – and dishonest to a degree scarcely imaginable, but they are not (yet) certifiably insane. Faced with giving a blank cheque to the solar providers, last November they sneaked in a cap on payments. This was estimated at £400 million for the period 2014-5 but even that has been cut back to £360 million under the comprehensive spending review.
This is still £360 million too much – real money added to our electricity bills, but it is a far cry from the £60 billion a year the Tories were calling for when they were in opposition – proving once again that politicians will promise the moon in order to get power and then lie through their back teeth when they get it.
But, there is some joy to be had from The Guardian squealing with indignation that the now-capped "green subsidy" that was intended to pay homeowners, schools and community groups for installing solar panels, looks as if it is going to be sucked up by an increasing array of industrial-scale solar farms, run by thieving capitalist pigs.
What has one beating head against wall in despair, though, is the reaction of the Guardian on learning that its fluffy greens are to be deprived of their muesli money from their "microgeneration", complaining that: "What no one seems to have predicted is the emergence of large-scale solar farms". Doh! Are they really that thick? Are they that ignorant? Don't they knowwhat happened in Germany, where Frau Merkel is rowing back on the FIT as fast as her greenie partners will let her?
Still, at least The Guardian is now admitting that FIT is a "subsidy", which it seems happy to do, now it is going to capitalist pigs instead of tofu-knitters. But one still marvels at the idea that greens can be quite as stupid as they appear to be. Still, there is hope for us yet as the judiciary must surely now stop them breeding.
COMMENT THREAD
Fifty years on The Sunday Telegraph, marking the anniversary of its launch. Was it that long ago?
Despite a self-indulgent leader, however - "a passion for quality, truth and freedom" - the management continues to allow the comment on Booker's column to be sabotaged. This is being done with the active assistance of the moderators. They are deleting comments in "real time", while giving a troll a free pass to put up "spam" posts and to saturate the board, in defiance of the rules - ignoring the many "reports" against it.
The newspaper has become a parody of itself.
COMMENT THREAD
Despite a self-indulgent leader, however - "a passion for quality, truth and freedom" - the management continues to allow the comment on Booker's column to be sabotaged. This is being done with the active assistance of the moderators. They are deleting comments in "real time", while giving a troll a free pass to put up "spam" posts and to saturate the board, in defiance of the rules - ignoring the many "reports" against it.
The newspaper has become a parody of itself.
COMMENT THREAD
You might have noticed that I sort of took a day off from the blog yesterday, engrossed in writing the book. The two last posts were directly related, and are a fascinating corner of our history that is little explored.
One recalls of that period that the BBC regarded itself as its "finest hour", the period when broadcasting came of age. But I also found a minute from Winston Churchill from 1941, stating that editorial control was vested completely in the Ministry of Information. Effectively, the BBC then was an arm of the state, the official state broadcaster.
Now, it is the arm of the "liberal" establishment – in theory. But this piece in the Mail on Sundaymakes you wonder whether it is even that, or whether now it is totally out of control. The time has come for all good people to stop paying the BBC tax. The only license here is the BBC's – a license to steal.
COMMENT THREAD
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