EU and Labour gild Bin Laden’s triumph.

Well if this article in The Guardian is correct, Osama bin Laden’s work is mostly done. He has frightened the EU into proposing surveillance for every train and airline passenger, with us being coerced into providing credit card details and mobile phone numbers as a license to travel in our own lands.

All airlines would provide government agencies with 19 pieces of information on every passenger, including mobile phone number and credit card details.

Message to EU and this UK government: Fuck off. The EU’s interference is egregious enough, but not to be outdone the Labour government has added further interferences into the citizen’s right to travel unhindered and the right to privacy:

But Britain wants the system extended to sea and rail travel, to be applied to domestic flights and those between EU countries.

The government is incontinent with our personal data and the more it they demand the more of it they have to lose. Government has now got out of control - it is not defending our security, it is stripping us of our liberties in the name of defence. And this proposal is one too far: if anything is to bring us to our senses and have us rise up against these intrusive, meddlesome gobshites, surely this is it. The EU admits:

Officials in Brussels and in European capitals admit the proposed system represents a massive intrusion into European civil liberties.

Massive, indeed. But is waved away on the basis of? Yes that great stinking red herring ’security’:

it is a necessary part of a battery of new electronic surveillance measures being mooted in the interests of European security.

I’m delighted to see that Sarah Ludford a Liberal Democrat MEP has spoken out against this: the proposal (according to the Guardian) is being talked about. (I’m a Lib Dem and have serious reservations about their pro-EUism).

Why aren’t there howls of outrage about this? Why aren’t cars blazing outside Parliament and Downing Street? Are letters flooding into MPs and MEPs in protest at this EU official-led, Labour Government gilded proposal of mind-bending affront to our civil liberties to travel and live, just bloody well live without being spied upon by the people we elect to run the country NOT hold everyone under suspicion…oh, what, Skippy, we didn’t elect the EU?

In doing this we are doing Bin Laden’s work for him: the government hangs the fear of a terrorist attack over us and pokes in our privacy and restricts our liberties step by cynical step because they know we have form in not rising up and forcing governmentss to back down unless it’s about something really important. Like petrol prices.

Well, I want the names of these officials in the EU. And I’ll be writing letters to my MP and MEP to be posted Monday morning, and I’ll be sending Sarah Ludford a postcard congratulating her on her common sense.

I had been considering reducing my involvement in politics, but this kind of shit makes realise that now is not the time. Enough people get bored and step away from these fights, the devious power hungry interfering wastrels in Whitehall and Brussels will continue to get away with it. I wanted to post about Mozart today and not get all riled. Now I’m fucking furious.

Liberal Burblings says it shorter, politer and nicer here.

I feast on Holy Smoke like a vulture on carrion.

It’s a Daily Telegraph religious affairs blog and for a peek through the bars of the asylum it’s a must-read.

The most recent bulletin from behind the bars is about a simmering row in the English Roman Catholic Church over saying mass in Latin.

About 30 years ago, a rebellious youth, I led a delegation to tell our parish priest we didn’t understand most of the mass*, as he and a handful of aged warbling ladies sang it in Latin. We were, I said, bored and put off.

Tough, he said, the old people like it. Well those old people have now found out whether or not it was all true (they’re dead) and all the young uns in that congregation have without exception shaken the incense-scented dust of the Church off their shoes. That church - one of two Catholic mausoleums in the town - has closed and the remaining one has a shrinking, aging congregation.

So it is with a certain amount of glee that I read of the traditionalists going for the throats of the aging liberals, of the English Bishops ignoring the Pope’s teachings on the Latin mass (again, shnore), that Church still prays for the conversion of Jews but in a watered-down way (how, on one knee?) and (the author is a Catholic) when the Anglican Archbishop Canterbury suggested that some elements of Sharia Law might be used in civil disputes in the British Muslim community, Holy Smoke administered a well-shod shoeing and another one and another one and another one and good grief another one to the protestant Archbishop.

It’s terrific stuff. Long may Holy Smoke smoulder on.

* I asked how the mass could be valid if you can’t understand what the fuck’s going on. He said it just is. Even in Klingon? It’s like the teaching that sacraments administered by preists who rape kids are still valid. EH? They just are. Their administration by a criminal pervert who should be tied up in a tank of hagfish rather than moved to another parish is neither here nor there. And no, it never happened to me.

We need the Church of England

says someone in the Guardian’s blathercorner.

Why? Is Prince Phillip planning to behead the Queen and shack up with some young trollopy Anne Boleyn-a-like?

Climate change deniers and the 70s ice age that wasn’t.

Here’s one that gets foamed around by the denialists, it’s variations on a theme of: ‘Well I remember that in the 70s scientists predicted we were heading into an ice age. AND WHERE IS IT? Now they’re saying global warming etc…etc…etc…’

The implication is that scientists were wrong about the climate then so why trust them now?

Bollocks*, says scienceblogger William ‘Stoat’ Connolly, a bona-fide scientist who can do sums, knows his way round the literature, takes a rational evidence-based approach and everything. He’s done a very unfair thing and looked at WHAT THE SCIENTISTS AT THE TIME ACTUALLY WROTE not what the media said they wrote, or quoted out of context. Stoat asks ‘Was an imminent ice age predicted in the 70’s?’ and after a look at the literature answers ‘No!’.

Now that’s what I’d call an inconvenient truth, and a thoroughly shot fox. The study, poshed up for mere mortal consumption, has made it into USA Today.

As the peerless xkcd once cartooned:

Alternative explanation for believers: the cold weather was God’s punishment for Glam Rock.

*Bollocks is a much under-used word in science literature.

What does a suddenly unemployed dictator do?

Between Fidel Castro and Pervez Musharraf there’s a sudden glut of them on the market.  Is there a club they go to, or something?

More fools capering round inflated bladders.

Someone has given Oxford University £1.9 million to investigate whether or not God exists.

That’s some costly foolishness. For just £1 million I could tell in them in two seconds and two letters.

Update: thanks to Joe Otten for this.  It’s probably not new but it is funny.  Now I have to clean my monitor and keyboard.

North Yorkshire dusk.

No photoshopping, honest. Update: good to hear from Gruts in comments that West Yorkshire had a similarly splendid sunset. Around here such colours in the sky usually means that another chemical plant in Teesside has blown up.

Update 2 - another astonishing one tonight. Has a load of Safari dust blown over here, or is this what happens under a high pressure with the sun still low in the sky?

Update 3: Yes, it is. According to weatherman Philip Eden on Radio 5 Live’s Up All Night last night, these sunsets are because of the sunlight reflecting off unusually high stratospheric clouds. The high pressure pushes these otherwise invisible clouds higher than usual, the sunlight hits the underside of this layer and scatters downwards, causing those a-mazing hues.

Sat next to a Royal Navy sailor at the pub quiz…

he’s leaving. His ship is ‘falling to bits’, the leadership is poor, morale is in the bilges and 10% of the crew have their notice in (the second lowest in the fleet, in other ships the percentage is higher). A young technician, he wanted out a year ago, they offered him promotion and improved conditions, prospects etc. He took it, stayed, things did not get better and he put his notice in again. He was offered a second promotion to stay.

This time he’s off to the North Sea oil rigs. A friend tells me his artillery regiment has no rounds for that all important thing: practice, and that senior officers are now talking about the impending day when an Army unit suffers a real hiding somewhere for want of resources.

In the Sunday Times: MoD fury as Brown wields axe.

China ups surveillance on dissidents

writes the Sunday Telegraph. One of the dangerous detainees is a two month old baby.

Bizarrely, among the activists now under house arrest is a two-month-old baby girl, who is believed to be China’s youngest political prisoner.

Her father, Hu Jia, a campaigner for the rights of Aids patients, and a blogger on land and environmental abuses, was charged at the end of January with “inciting subversion of state power”, a catch-all charge frequently used against dissidents. His wife Zeng Jinyan, together with her mother and daughter, are all under house arrest in Beijing.

Mr Hu was a high-profile supporter of Yang Chunlin, a factory worker arrested last July after circulating an online petition calling for “human rights, not the Olympics”.

Mr Hu also helped publicise the cases of Chen Guangcheng, a blind civil rights activist who has been under house arrest in eastern Shandong Province for the past four months for exposing a policy of forced abortions for people who break China’s rigid one-child policy, and fellow blogger Lu Gengsong, who is currently on trial, also for “inciting subversion of state power”.

 

Tessa Jowell: please shut your useless gob.

This post contains what some might call bad language. But given the subject matter, it’s entirely justified.

Just when you thought this government of all the failures couldn’t say or do anything more authoritarian or stupid, waste of rations minister for the Olympics (and is that going to be an over-budget fuckup? I’ll say!) Tessa Jowell has called a boycott of the Beijing Olympics ‘pointless’.

(Update 2: Now this is interesting - when I linked to this BBC story it was about Ms Jowell’s objection to Olympic boycotts. It has since been edited to reflect her newfound support for protest.)

No, Tessa, you brain donor, it’s not, it lets people like us express our displeasure that a dictatorial Communist regime like China hosts the Olympics, with the fawning connivance of Gordon Brown (and the satanic toenail parings that make up his cabinet) recently seen gurning outside the stadium. You’ve been in Government too long Tessa, if you’re telling us that an exercise of conscience against China - fucking China, woman! Tiennanmen Square! Tibet! (OK, let’s not throw too many stones about illegal invasion) Taiwan! Censorship! One party state! Forced abortions! Selling executed criminals’ organs! Forced labour camps! - is ‘pointless’.

It’s another word that begins with p, actually: principle. Maybe you had them once, although Labour always were deliberately blind to the genocidal faults of the left. Here’s another that begins with p: piss off. Piss a long way off, shutting your silly thoughtless dictator appeasing mouth as you go. Better yet find an oppressed Tibetan, shut your mouth, and listen. But please, just piss off, reflecting as you go that anyone who called for a boycott in China risks arrest and imprisonment.

Pointless?

Update: and in evolving hypocrisy news tonight she has said she supports pressure being put on China to ‘do more’ about Darfur. But not at the expense of the shininess of the Olympics. Why not? We all know - well maybe you don’t if you’re a busy government minister with civil servants an’ all - that the Chinese completely ignore ‘pressure’ about their exploitative foreign policy saying we don’t understand it.

Too right I don’t understand selling guns to and buying oil from a country knowing that the guns and money will be used to fund the janjaweed to kill, rape, displace and mutilate people.

The Olympics is China’s big, sore mouth ulcer of a pressure point and if sticking a cocktail stick in it and wiggling furiously makes them squeal like piggies and give ground on stuff like freedom, democracy and justice well good. This shower of cretins is bringing me perilously close to the position of this demon whose prescription for politicians involves lamp-posts and ropes.

If you want to know who else is kissing Beijing ass and what is becoming known as the genocide Olympics to implement your own boycott, the official sponsors’ page is here.

VW is among them. I was about to order a new car for the use of my disabled foster sister and a VW was on the shortlist. It’s not now.