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 2017/April 
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 POWER NEWS 

Pointless and expensive political gesture
bullet April 21st was the first day since coal-fired power stations came into use in 1882 that Britain spent without electricity produced from coal. Was that something to celebrate? Not really, given that coal remains the cheapest fuel and that all yesterday's energy was coming from gas, nuclear, a bit of ‘occasionally availables' (wind and solar) and imports from France – all at a greater, going up to a significantly greater, cost compared to electricity from coal.
   Even worse, there was no power produced from burning coal but that still meant that the power stations had to be kept ticking over on standby to meet sudden changes in demand, which underlines the political-stunt and green-crap aspects of the whole charade.

 ELECTION NEWS 

Doing the nation a favour
bullet The PM is a rotten spoil-sport for depriving Kim Jong-dimbleby of his hereditary right to perform as ringmaster of the party leaders in election yawncasts? But we know what all the party leaders will say; that they're marvellous and everyone else is crap. So where's the point in encouraging the meeja hangers-on to think it's all about them?

reader comment“Do we really need TV ‘debates' featuring the usual political suspects? We know they'll just become ya-boo sessions with the candidates with the least hope of gaining power writing endless cheques their ass can't cash and making promises they have no chance of fulfilling. Not to mention more chances for the current generation of meejaocracy to ponce about on TV, pretending it's all about the Dimbleby of the Moment, really.”
[Anyone care to put a contrary view? Ed.]

Just another stooge as mayor?
bullet Getting us into training for the General Election, we've had some bumf through the post about electing a cosmetic mayor for Greater Manchester: an official how-to-do it guide with party political puffs strapped on.
   The most stand-outish character has to be the UKIP candidate, who rejoices in the splendidly British name of Shneur Zalman ODZE. As he didn't bother submitting an election flier, we can assume only that UKIP decided that the party has no chance of success and decided to take the bodily fluid out of the whole business.
   Depressingly, the likely winner of the job is the Stafford hospital guy; the man who was health secretary when patients were dying of neglect because the staff were too busy doing New Labour bean-counting for Mr. Burnham to keep the customers cared for or even alive.

Who says the Scots aren't weird?
bullet Seven trips to the polls in three years – for elections to local councils, the European Parliament and the Scottish Parliament, IndyRef1 and Brexit (okay, not elections but they still involved voting), a general election in 2015 and one to come in June – and the Scots are complaining that they can't stand the pace.
   The poor wee souls are complaining they're politicked out. Which makes it all the more strange that some of them are busting a gut for yet another trip to the polls for IndyRef2.

Half-hearted copycats
bullet Trust the French to copycat Britain and America. The winner of the first round of their presidential election is an ex-banker and head of a self-created ‘Ça va if the EU wants it' socialist-ish party. Second place went to the ‘Vive la France' party led by Marine La Plume de ma Tante. Conventional socialists, Gaullists, swindlers and all the rest were binned.
   Of course, the dull socialist-ish is the favourite to win in a fortnight's time, when the Establishment is expected to strike back. And M. MacRon's lack of a party isn't likely to be a problem. As a former member of President Hollande's regime, the socialists are sure to rally round; if only in search of some job security.
   And if that doesn't work, M. MacRon can always try to cash in on the Auld Alliance by heading for Écosse to challenge Wee Burney Sturgeon for the job of Queen of Scotland!

reader comment“Jeremy Corbyn is pretending to be anti-establishment?? Who's going to buy that when it's plain that he belongs to a peculiar, anti-British, pro-terrorism, looney left establishment? Talking about buying, his best idea for buying votes is to offer 4 new bank holidays per year as compensation for the fact that wages have not returned to the levels before the crash engineered by New Labour in 2008. He thinks he's playing the patriotism card if the holidays will fall on the saints' days of the 4 members of the UK. No one seems to have reminded him that he's seeking to set up shop in the last refuge of a scoundrel!”

One less thing to worry about
bullet The Liberals (with taxpayers' money) want to know how the Tories will fill the Brexit Brown Hole. The simple answer is that they don't have to, given that the brown hole is a Liberal invention.

reader comment“Dear Brenda of Bristol, There's no need to be flustered about the coming general election. You don't have to bother with it or vote in it—you can just leave it to the grown-ups.”

reader comment“A 'progressive' alliance of Labour, SNP and Liberals? That's 'progressive' as in 'progressive decline'.”

 SAFARI NEWS 

Where's your handbag, Dear?

 FIREWORKS NEWS 

Every week, a show for you!
bullet Good news! The Kimocracy in N. Korea has announced that it will launch missiles every week. Which will provide security of employment for the CIA's hackers and the professionally outraged at least until the Koreans run out of missles.

 TRAVEL NEWS 

Pull the other one, mate
bullet You really have to wonder how much politicians believe of the BS they spout. Take transport minister A. Jones for example. He's claiming that putting the use of a satnav into the driving test will help to reduce road deaths and injuries.
   Really? Taking a driver's eyes off the road will make other people safer?

reader comment“That was a smart move by the Americans; getting in first with the story that they hacked the latest N. Korean missile test and that's why it travelled only about 4.3 feet off the launch pad before going haywire.”

reader comment“It's somehow comforting to know that French councils can be as stupid and vindictive as the ones we have here. Like Paris city council, which is trying to stop citizens from playing petanque in Place Dauphine because the pastime creates a lot of dust and the players talk noisily.
   No doubt the councillors are after a modern image for the area and they'd rather have zombies stumbling around peering at mobile phones instead of people actually daring to enjoy themselves by playing an old-fashioned, traditional game.”

space news
 SPACE NEWS 

We are not alone! Hurray?
bullet NASA is getting very excited about detecting hydrogen in the plumes of gas and vapour, which are shot out of the tiger stripes at the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Compounds of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen have already been detected, leaving NASA just two elements short of the Big Six basics for ‘life as we know it'. But its boffins are confident that phosphorus and sulphur are present in the hot, rocky core of a moon which features a 6-mile belt of liquid water under a frozen-solid outer shell.
   Could there be primitive life on our doorstep a mere 800 million miles away? No one knows. And before the "we're not aloners" get too excited, let us not forget that their wish for life all over the galaxy could involve the doomsday scenario of mile-long spaceships parked over our biggest cities and scum-sucking aliens adding another bunch of slaves to their empire.

Yawn and yawn again
bullet Are we really bothered that a space rock ‘the size of Gibraltar' going at 73,000 mph missed us by a million miles yesterday, making its closest approach at 1:24 p.m.? As it's not big enough to cause an extinction-level event, we could almost hope that this rock had landed somewhere troublesome, like Syria.
   Apparently, it was our closest shave since Toutatis missed us by another million miles in 2004.

 WAR NEWS 

 
reader comment“Six million bucks for a bomb to write off thirty-six members of Socal Islamic State? That was a bit of a dear do!”

reader commentTrump drops biggest weapon since Nagasaki on Afghanistan screamz the headline. Really? If the bomb weighs 21,600 lbs, there's no way that Mr. Trump could have lifted it enough to drop it. That certainly sounds like a bit more fake news!”

The impossible achieved!
bullet The Home Office has cancelled the British passport of an offspring of 'Captain Hook' Abu Hamza, the terrorism supporter now doing life in gaol in the United States. S. Mustafa, the 5th son, chose to go to Syria to get involved in the war there. He is now effectively stateless.
   The Home Office has been telling us for years that British passport-holders who turn traitor can't be rendered stateless in this way. Clearly, we were being lied to.

In no one's pocket
bullet The scheme to squash the accusations that newly installed President Trump is in Russia's pocket is going very well. Bombarding the Syrian air force has given Trump some credibility and also allowed Vlad the Putin to play the outraged despot. So win-win all round.
   But does the way Putin is rubbishing the idea that the Syrian regime deployed the sarin poison gas mean that it was actually provided by the Russians? Or even that it was Russian insurgents who released it so that Vlad could defend the Assad regime with a clear conscience? (For once.)

Weird war stories
bulletWe're getting some curious stories coming out following the use of the MOAB in Afghanistan. The bomb was exploded at 7.32 p.m. local time. A bloke living in Pakistan, some 9 miles on his side of the border, claims he was woken up by the blast. Which raises the obvious question: What was he doing in bed at half-seven in the evening?
   Nothing on TV?

reader comment“How soon can we expect parades of fake missiles in Turkey in imitation of the mass rallies held by Kim Jong-whoever?”

Living comfortably in the past again
bulletMikhail Gorbachyov; yes, the man who put the skids under the Soviet Union is still around at 86; thinks that Russia and the West are in the grip of a new cold war. So he should be feeling right at home again.

It has been pointed out . . .
bullet . . . that even though the Yanks are claiming their MOAB was the biggest bomb dropped since Hiroshima, in typical bloody Yank fashion, it's not as heavy as the 22,000 lb Grand Slam developed by Sir Barnes Wallis of dam-busting, bouncing bomb fame. The RAF was unloading these earthquake bombs against difficult targets at the end of WW 2. Which means that if the Guinness Book of Records changed its policy on excluding weapons, the US MOAB wouldn't get a look-in, seeing it's 70 years late and not heavy enough.

Each to his own trade
bullet Boris Johnson, currently Foreign Sec., thinks that a campaign of strikes will get rid of the appalling President Assad. Maybe we could accelerate the process by exporting a few trade union leaders to Syria to show them how to organize the strikes.

What do they do for a fun day in North Korea?
bulletLine up all their tanks and self-propelled guns in three ranks on a suitable beach and blast salvoes out to sea. It must be costing the Chinese a bomb in blank ammo!

 DOSH NEWS 

 
Obviously over-promoted
bullet A Commons committee has pointed out to Justice Sec. L. Truss that the plan to impose a death tax on probate fees is illegal. Charging according to the value of the estate rather than the value of the work done amounts to taxation, and a vote in the Commons is needed to approve new taxation. This has not happened.
bullet There has been a suggestion that judges are conspiring to get rid of her because Ms Truss is female and not a member of the legal trade. Nothing wrong with that if it helps to get rid of someone who isn't up to the job.

Purely cosmetic
bullet We're hearing a lot about all sorts of fancy scams for imposing ‘pay as you pollute' charges on motorists, but what will they achieve in the end? Lots of cash flowing into government coffers but little or no change in pollution levels. The only way to stop air pollution in cities is keep out the vehicles causing the pollution. And like any government is going to grasp that nettle.

The real story
bullet We're being told that the taxpayer has recovered the £20-odd billion pounds hosed into Lloyds Bank when it went bump in 2008. But why was that necessary? Lloyds Banking Group collapsed into insolvency because Gordon Brown had a word with the spiv running it at a party and got him to take over Halifax Bank of Scotland to save Scottish jobs to do Brown a political favour.
   Unfortunately, no one at LBG took the trouble to check how HUGE the Brown Hole in the accounts of HBoS was, and both banks fell into it. So much for Gordon Brown's reputation as a financial genius. He can be seen now only as someone who rubbed every vestige of gloss from the black art of political fiscal analysis.

black square It seems that 70% of TV licence dodgers are women. There must be something significant in that!

Bunch of liars
bullet 'Buy a diesel car and save the world from global warming' was the message in the Tony B. Liar years. And it was cheerfully endorsed by the then chief scientist of the government, the notorious warmist T. King. Surprise! Now, King is telling us it was a lie, and he knew it was a lie at the time but he went along with it anyway. So pardon the mocking laughter the next time we hear something from a government's chief scientific stooge.

Good news!
bullet An interactive map of the hundreds of earthquakes which rock Britain every year has been compiled from British Geological Survey data to celebrate the 117th anniversary of the birth of Charles Richter. The map shows that the Manchester area is one of the most earthquake prone but seismic events on the scale of the (not-so) Great British Earthquake, which flattened parts of Colchester on April 22nd in 1884, are mercifully rare. And the really good news is that global warming isn't producing an increase in the frequency of earthquakes.

black squareWow! Someone has actually been allowed to put in a good word for global warming in print! Writing in Nature Human Behaviour, the researchers from Harvard U. declared that if things get warmer, fat people will be encouraged to take exercise and the Great Global Obesity Crisis will be solved.

 HEALTH NEWS 

 
Health, wealth & Green happiness!
bullet The Greens think the country would be more productive and healthy if we switched to a 3-day weekend. Maybe we should try it – and if it works out, go the whole hog and make Monday to Friday the weekend and work only on Saturday and Sunday.

Deceased Pedestrian-free zone!
bullet A team from Historic England and Southampton University has found evidence that there was no zombie threat in the north of Yorkshire between the 11th and 14th centuries. The conclusion is based on the discovery of burials containing bodies with snapped thigh-bones, to prevent the revenant dead from wandering about, and no head to make sure they couldn't see where they were going.

We don't do decisions here
bullet The government has ducked a decision on how to bring the shambles that is the infrastructure of the dilapidated Palace of Westminster up to standard. The say on what to do and when is to be handed to a specially created body, which will take years to come up with any working principles.
   The cheapest option is to boot the MPs and peers out completely to give the builders a clear run, but that's much too simple and obvious for a lot of the Westminster Wonders. It looks like we'll just have to hope that something drops off the crumbling building and lands on a couple of the dozier members. That might concentrate thought processes somewhat.

Habit-forming in more than one sense
bullet The Royal Society of Public Health has found that 90% of e-cigarette shops are selling to non-smokers, who are taking up e-smoking because they think it makes them look cool. Apparently, e-tailers have guidelines which say they should sell e-products only as a harm-reduction tool for smokers, and they should not be sold to non-smokers.
   The Vape trade association believes that 90% of its sales go to active and reformed smokers, and that the e-lifestylers are not a problem worth bothering about. And their cash looks just like anyone else's.

 BREXIT NEWS 

 
Pure selfishness
bullet If the Bremoaners had won the day on the EU membership referendum, would they have been as keen as they are now to have a second referendum to be sure the nation got it right the first time and everyone knew what they were voting for?
   Of course, not. And their current agitation is rooted in sheer hypocrisy. The referendum was a one-off, like the Cup final and the once-in-a-generation Scottish independence referendum. We got a result and whether or not a replay on another day would give the same or a different result is totally irrelevant.
reader comment“The EU's attempt to sneak Spanish claims to Gibraltar into the Brexit process has to confirm that the decision to leave this rotten pillocracy was a wise one.”
reader comment“Maybe we should start paying a bit of Homage to Catalonia and back their case for independence in the UN to show Spain that agitation is a game more than one can play.”
reader comment“Is it possible to write a description of the EU which wouldn't apply to any other cult, e.g. the Moonies?”

black square On Brexit day in 2019, VAT will be reduced by 1.5% as we will no longer be required to hand over this slice to the burrocracy in Brussels.
reader comment“The Bugger Balance Corporation has a peculiar notion of what constitutes balanced reporting. With the EU membership referendum campaign over, the Beeb sees no reason why it should report Brexit and Bremoan views equally, and so has reverted to its role of a lefty, anti-British propaganda outlet. Let us hope that its management doesn't expect the rest of us to treat their biased views with anything other than the derision they so richly deserve.”

No wonder we voted Leave
bullet The idiots at DfID got to blow an extra billion pounds on overseas aid last year; and the EU is to blame. Its financial geniuses insist on including income from crime; prostitution, drug dealing, extortion, bank robbery, etc.; in official GNP guesses, and as Dopey Dave nailed overseas aid at 0.7% of GNP, that's more cash for DfID to shovel out with no idea where it's going.

Unaccountable, though
bullet Dave the ex-Leader and Boy George Osborne have been duffed up by the Commons admin and constitutional affairs committee for lying about the consequences of Brexit, wasting £9.3 million of taxpayers' money on a propaganda leaflet and doing further damage to the already battered image of the civil service on impartiality. Shifty Heywood, the cabinet sec., also got a boot up the backside for neglect of duty for failing to start preparing for a Leave vote from the referendum and Brexit.

reader comment“So democracy works best when the people make the right decisions? No prizes for guessing that could only have come from a looney left Bremoaner.”

Crime News
 CRIME NEWS 

Cosmetic suspects
bullet 12 suspects were arrested after Adrian Elms launched his murderous attack in Westminster last month and committed suicide by cop. The last of the suspects was released at the start of this month. None of them has been charged. Which rather makes it look like the police grabbed some bodies to make it look like they were following a trail and let the bodies go when the story dropped out of the news.

Can't arrest us!
bullet The North Wales police farce has saddled the taxpayer with a bill for £44,500 after giving a mobile phone to a suspected burglar. Delighted to find that it was 'use it as much as you like for free' as opposed to 'pay as you go', the burglar and two mates went mad for 6 months before the police farce noticed that anything was amiss.
   Neither the burglar nor his mates suffered the inconvenience of being charged with anything and, of course, no police careers were damaged as a result of this act of monumental stupidity and negligence.

One law for some
bullet Not just bankers at Barclays, etc. were involved in fixing the inter-bank lending rate when the wheels came off the world of finance in 2008. The Bank of England and the current No. 1 civil servant, J. Cover-up Heywood, were also getting their hands dirty. A few token bankers have gone to gaol for financial misconduct. Not chance of the rest suffering any consequences, though.

What's blue and useless?
bullet No wonder the police have an image of being largely cosmetic and led by senior officers who are more concerned about meeting pointless diversity targets than in solving crimes and making life tough for criminals.
   Police Scotland has just been busted, via a leaked memo, for concealing the true extent of knife crime. There's some sort of investigation going on, but no one is expecting to hear anything other than that the policy of making knife-crime vanish ‘just happened' and, of course, no one is to blame.

Public Service Announcement

He's been called the Blogger of the Decade

His intellect is matched only by the size of his luck and the size of his bank balance. And yet he manages to keep his Feet On The Ground with the greatest of ease. Do yourself a favour and find out what Xavier has had to say about what's going on Right Now!

Home News
 HOME NEWS 
UK Flag

Oh, no! It's April again
reader comment“The most obvious April Fool story in the whole history of the universe has to be the Daily Mail story about Prince Harry having a Las Vegas wedding with Megan Merkel without inviting the Queen and Angela.”
reader comment“That one about coppers and copperesses having to wear the same hats to avoid embarrassing the Mxs in the Dyfed-Powys police farce sounded daft enough to be true. Are there secretly millions of MX coppers in Wales?”
reader comment“That story about the lawyer who had his plumbing swapped three times takes a lot of believing.”

Problem solved?
bullet How do you get migration to meet the target figure? Fiddle the numbers, is the answer from the Cabinet. Cut out students and other inconvenient groups until you get the number you want. How very New Labour!
[Mrs. May isn't going along with it, though. Ed.]

Nothing like planning ahead
bullet Some of the experts who are predicting that 30 million jobs will be taken over by robots by 2035 are now worrying about what the government will do with all the redundant staff from transport, factory and office jobs when we have robots driving everything, building everything and screwing up all the record-keeping.
   Creative people like writers, actors and accountants will still be in demand but the experts think that there will have to be some cosmetic jobs for humans, whose work will command the same sort of premium as organic products today – not as good as what the machines do for twice the price.
   The experts think that giving employers a tax break will encourage them to take on cosmetic humans. But it is more likely that employers will realize it's just not worth it any more, jack it all in and let the machines be entrepreneurs.

world news
 WORLD NEWS 

The real Brexit story
bullet Mr. Tusk, president of the EU Council, has let the cat out of the bag. The EU establishment plans to chuck all sorts of irrelevancies into the Brexit process, turning it into negotions. In case anyone is wondering what they are, negotions is merely going through the motions of negotiation. Why? Because the EU is such a shambles that nothing can ever be agreed with all those contrary voices until well beyond the last second of the last day of the deadline.
    Which just confirms the old adage: "Life's a beach, and the tide is coming in to drown it."
reader comment“And the shallower the slope, the faster the beach is overwhelmed.”

The DNA could do it
bullet A professor in New Zealand has suggested testing water samples from all over Loch Ness in a bid to find out if the famous monster is for real. Professor Gommell reckons that his DNA detection technique is sensitive enough to identify all sorts of marine creatures from fish to seals and whales, and that anything anomalous would be detected.

black square Bob Dylan took delivery of his Nobel Prize; a diploma and a medal; on the 1st of this month. To get the money; $900K; he has to perform a lecture within the next couple of months.

Public Service Announcement

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Far Queue List

Far Queue symbol Those responsible for deciding to introduce rip-off business rates, which will generate thousands of appeals and those responsible for planning to get rid of one-third of the staff in the appeals department, which already has a backlog of a quarter of a million cases.

Far Queue symbol FA chairman G. Clarke for being a twat over the Moyes of Sunderland storm in a teaspoon.

Far Queue symbol Former government chief scientist and warming D. King for going along with Tony B. Liar's lies.

Far Queue symbol Mondelez International, current owner of Cadbury, is said to be trying to hijack Easter with the full co-operation of the National Trust. Well, it was a successful publicity campaign, which delivered a lot of business to the Nat. Truss. What are they planning for Xmas?

Far Queue symbol Gary bloody Lineker.

Far Queue symbol The United airline and its 'fly us if you want to be assaulted and sleazed' policy.

Far Queue symbol Tony B. Liar and anyone who gives him money to try for a parliamentary seat.

Far Queue symbol Jimmy Wales (no relation to Chazzer), the fake news king, and all his fans at the BBC.

Far Queue symbol “Far queue, far queue very much!” – Frank Zappa.

The Far Queue: the traditional parking place for everything "not wanted on voyage".

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to set the record straight in the 3rd millennium. © RAL, April MM17.