Palau

Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, washed the t-shirt 23 times, threw the t-shirt in the ragbag, now I'm polishing furniture with it.

But Where’s The Toast?

Food
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Full marks for imagination Mr. Sallin, but if I’m going to be woken up with fresh sizzling bacon, I want tea and hot buttered toast too. From the Telegraph:

New-style Teasmade wakes you with freshly cooked bacon

A bizarre new alarm clock uses the smell of freshly cooked bacon to wake you up in the morning.

[…]

The Wake n’Bacon clock cooks a frozen rasher for 10 minutes before the time you need to rise from your slumber.Designer Matty Sallin says the sizzling sound combined with the classic aroma is enough to wake you.The user is also welcomed by the almost-instant breakfast of a bacon sandwich in bed.
Mr Sallin altered a regular alarm clock so that instead of a sound going off, two halogen lamps are switched on.The lamps then take 10 minutes to cook a piece of bacon that was placed inside the clock the night before.The user can leave some bread and ketchup by the side of their bed to make up the bacon sandwich.

No, not ketchup, HP sauce. Any fule kno HP is the one true condiment for bacon sandwiches.

Update: Ooooh, bacon jellybeans and even more bacony goodness.

A Man Can Smile and Smile and Yet Be A Villain

liberalism, Torture, War on Terror
Published on 6 Comments on A Man Can Smile and Smile and Yet Be A Villain

It seems the new administration, for all it’s warm fuzziness, considers only Americans human enough to have actual human rights. The rest of us are still fair game for state-licensed kidnap and US torture at one remove.

But Obama won’t torture, he’s said so, hasn’t he? He was a constitutional scholar, surely he’s way too high-minded, moral and gosh-darned exceptional to do such a terrible thing?

But he has a problem: his employees do and have tortured. Over the past eight years the mammoth intelligence and security apparatus built by Bush and Cheney (and no doubt still loyal to them and their neocon associates) has been allowed and even encouraged to use their virtually unlimited power to kidnap, torture, murder and just generally disappear pretty much anyone it wanted, worldwide.

That kind of malevolent power is not easily contained once unleashed on the world, particularly as Bush and Cheney were careful to make sure that those they put in charge of intelligence and security were politically in tune with their worldview.

Those people are still there. I think they’re still rendering people and having them tortured abroad – and I think Obama probably knows it and can’t stop it. The rot is too deep and too wide.

So rather than mar that shiny new presidency with any speck of unpleasantness, he’s going with the flow, banning torture but allowing rendition.

Voila,Americans don’t do torture and his pristine reputation as the Lincoln de nos jours need never be sullied.

More Morbid Fear Of Melanie Phillips

BBC Bias, bigotry, Gaza, Manufacturing consent, Media, Video
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Here’s Tony Benn, (nee Viscount Stansgate), the last doughty remnant of the Christian socialists, giving a BBC newsdroid merry hell on the subject of moral cowardice and giving in to Israeli bullying:

He’s right, they’re scared – though I must admit if I had that shrieking Zionist harpy Phillips in my ear every five minutes I’d be scared too. I’d also change my phone number.

Facteiousness aside very little has been made – as yet – of the current BBC Director General, Mark Thompson relationship with the Israeli government or of his 2005 visit to Israel at governmental expense.

This cosying-up to a foreign leadership (and such a politically rabid one as that) is something a BBC DG has never done before, presumably on the grounds that it would compromise BBC impartiality and neutrality.

Of course the cosy tete a tetes he had with Ariel Sharon and sundry other Israeli political notables, those couldn’t possibly affect his impartiality or appear to impute an appearance of impropriety at all, no sir.

Maintaining Impartiality

BBC Bias, Manufacturing consent, Media, Merkins..., Uh? WTF?, UK politics, Wingnuts
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I know the BBC has shot itself in the foot a number of times this weekend what with Gaza and all, but this beats everything yet.

Jonah Goldberg has a gig on on Andrew Marr’s Radio 4 discussion programme, Start The Week. Yes, really.

He’s going to discuss his new book, apparently;

The Los Angeles Times columnist JONAH GOLDBERG calls for a re-evaluation of fascism. He argues that by using the word as a synonym for anything that is undesirable, we are blinded to the examples around us of real fascism from both Left and Right wing governments. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning is published by Penguin.

New? WTF? Someone at the beeb was wilfully misinformed.

Either that or Justin Webb’s been given editorial control. He must’ve met the Pantload on the Koolaid aisle in Safeway.

Dictatorship: Are We There Yet?

Activism, Civil liberties, Corruption, Manufacturing consent, New Labour, Policing, Tories, Uh? WTF?, UK politics, War on Terror
Published on 1 Comment on Dictatorship: Are We There Yet?

I keep asking that.

But I think finally we are undoubtedly on the cusp of it (or in that annoying phrase that seems to have become hip recently, on the flex), when a squad of not just any old plods, but armed antiterrorist police is sent to arrest legitimately elected member of parliament and shadow immigration minister Damien Green, search his home and office, take his DNA, impound all his personal or business data and hold him incommunicado for 9 hours while the ruling party briefs assiduously against him in the media, on a spurious suspicion of ‘conspiracy to commit public malfeasance in office’ (ie receiving leaks of how incompetent Jacqui Smith, Phil Woolas and other Home office ministers are).

I’m amazed they didn’t taser him for good measure, pour encourager les autres.

But why? What could have posessed them to do such a disgusting, antidemocratic thing? Why would a New Labour prime minister rip up the constitution (such as it still is) and begin arresting the opposition, for all the world like some nascent Mugabe?

It appears that Green was treated like a terrorist simply for doing his job and exposing government wrongdoing and incompetence in the public interest. Since when has that been an offence? Exposing government wrongdoing is what an opposition MP does. That’s why the communications of MP’s are privileged; so that political police pressure like this can’t be brought to bear on the people’s representatives when they are doing their duty.

Privileged communication is the bedrock of the parliamentary system Parliament is said to be jealous of its privileges and ready to fight to the death to protect them; an MP cannot be arrested while in the precincts of the House, for instance.

Why, then, did the parliamentary authorities, the sergeants-at-arms, allow the Metropolitan Police into Green’s parliamentary offices to leaf through privileged communications at will, unless they had political clearance at a very high level – say from a Home Secreteary or PM – to do so?

Labour ministers like that lying little ratfaced sycophant, immigration minister Phil Woolas, are all over the papers, radio and tv this morning, disclaiming any political motivation for this unprecedentedly shocking act. “Ooh no, wasn’t us guv, nothing to do with us. Dictatorial, authoritarian, Stalinesque? Oh no, we don’t accept that. Blame the Met and Ian Blair, he’s retiring, he’s a a handy scapegoat. Jacqui Smith? Who she?”

Bollocks. They can deny it till they’re blue in the face but I’m in no doubt that the order to arrest an opposition MP came right from our very own Rosa Klebb the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, angry at having her own and her colleagues’ mendacity exposed.

Smith has shown herself quite happy to use the law to pursue her political priorities. Smith is perfectly prepared to use the power of the state against the individual for partisan purposes too, and freely admits it. Here she is speaking of manipulating the law and the police against the populace for purely partisan political ends:

I now want the Action Squad to co-ordinate a new drive against the hard core of ‘hard nut’ cases.

That car of theirs – is the tax up to date? Is it insured? Let’s find out

And have they a TV licence for their plasma screen? As the advert says, “it’s all on the database.”

As for their council tax, it shouldn’t be difficult to see if that’s been paid

And what about benefit fraud? Can we run a check?

No stranger to dictatorship she; it comes as absolutely no surprise that Smith concentrated her political studies at Uni on East Germany.

Here she is on the BBC yet again, within the past 5 minutes, still asserting that no minister had anything to do with it and it was all David Normingtonof the Cabinet Office.

In a statement, the Metropolitan police said:

‘The investigation into the alleged leak of confidential government material followed the receipt by the MPS (Metropolitan Police Service) of a complaint from the Cabinet Office.’

Yes, from Normington the highest ranking Home Office civil servant, who of course didn’t even speak to the PM or Home Secretary about something so momentous as the arrest of an MP.

Oh, sure.

But the order for Green’s arrest has to have come from Gordon Brown, if not at his instigation, then at least with his entire approval. They can deny it till doomsday; the order for Green’s arrest came direct from New Labour, no matter how much they dissemble; not only that, it came direct from the Cabinet Office and therefore direct from no 10; and most of all it came direct from our unelected prime minister, Gordon Brown, unless, of course, the police are lying. And I wouldn’t put it past Mandelson to allege that either.