Uncategorized – Page 38

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Published on September 5, 2006

Pope Gets All Medieval On Harry Potter’s Ass

I found this lovely headline via Maxspeak:

Pope’s top exorcist says Harry Potter is ‘king of darkness’

I’m not sure what’s more boggling, the fact that there’s an official exorcist in this day and age and that the media takes him seriously, or that this guy’s also apparently the president of the International Association , who unsurprisingly feel we’re being overrun by demons –

Leading exorcist Father Jeremy Davies, 65, from the Westminster Diocese, believes the Church’s increased vigilance in the past 10 years had also contributed to the number of exorcisms being performed.

He told the Catholic Herald newspaper: “The incidence of the demonic on the whole is rising. At the centre of this is man’s ever growing pride and attempted self-reliance.”

I bet their conventions are hella fun.

Read more: Pope, Catholics, Vatican, Exorcism, Superstition, Harry Potter

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Published on September 5, 2006

Mwahahahaha. Milliband’s Wiki Got Hacked.

I heard this on the radio yesterday and laughed like a drain. The Register has the whole amusing story:

An attempt by a UK cabinet minister to discuss proposed environment policy using a wiki has ended in embarrassment after pranksters made merry at the expense of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra).

Tech-savvy environment secretary David Milliband was left with egg on his face after his department’s draft “Environment Contract” wiki was edited to include spurious entries poking fun at the initiative.

Hours after publication of the policy, pranksters launched dozens of attacks against the wiki, hosted on Defra’s official website. The heading for discussion “Who are the parties to the environmental contract?” became, “Where is the party for the environmental contract? Can I come? Will there be cake? Hooray!”

Responses to the question of “what tools can be used to deliver the environmental contract?” solicited the illuminating answer: “Spade, Organic Yoghurt Stirrer, Old washing up liquid bottle, Sticky Back Plastic.”

Hackers suggested the correct tools to “create the right incentive frameworks” included a “Big stick” and an “Owl magnet”.

[…]

Have I said how much I loathe the oleaginous David Milliband, the Tory Boy of New Labour? Why, I think I may well have. A quick reprise:

Milliband is yet another member of yet another of those middle-class legacy Labour families like the Hobsbawms, Toynbees, Benns and so many others, local and national, who think that because their forebears were socialist pioneers it confers upon them the right to rule in perpetuity. Milliband’s never had a real job:

Former Head of the No 10 Policy Unit. He is a former Labour Party policy director (before 1997 election), Secretary of the Social Justice Commission and member of the IPPR. Brother of Ed Milliband, Special Adviser to Gordon Brown at the Treasury. He was paid ?70,000 in 2000. He went to Oxford University and MIT. While he was at No.10, no Government Green or White Paper was published until he cleared it.

Miliband and his peers in New Labour are not averse to using their own old-boys’ and girls’ networks to get ahead and they exude the same sense of personal and political entitlement ( though cloaked in a more touchy-feely disguise) as many of those inside-the-beltway, think-tank-employed, wingnut welfare recipents, who know no life outside that of party hacks, lobbyists and the continued jockeying for power and privilege.

“Tech-savvy?” Tech-bloody-savvy? He went to MIT and he spent 40,000 quid of our money setting up a blog when he could’ve done it for free? What the hell did he learn there? We’ve got a 3-legged cat that’s more tech-savvy than that.

What a twat Milliband is. His wiki mess is par for the course in government-funded but private-sector led IT projects though – the government has just had to drop yet another reworking of the benefits payment systems due to incompetence, at a cost of well over a million pounds.

Milliband is also the only one visibly sticking up for Blair in the media as 70 17 Labour MP’s are publically calling for his resignation (sorry, got a little optimistic and misheard), which tells you all you’ll ever need to know about the wunderkind ‘s judgement.

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Published on September 5, 2006

L’Etat? C’est Chimpy.

Well, he’s finally gone and done it and declared himself King.

Bush Declares Eco-Whistleblower Law Void for EPA Employees

Stealth Repeal of Clean Water Act Protections by Invoking “Sovereign Immunity”

By: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility

Published: Sep 4, 2006 at 08:40

[…]

Citing an “unpublished opinion of the [Attorney General’s] Office of Legal Counsel,” the Secretary of Labor’s Administrative Review Board has ruled federal employees may no longer pursue whistleblower claims under the Clean Water Act. The opinion invoked the ancient doctrine of sovereign immunity which is based on the old English legal maxim that “The King Can Do No Wrong.” It is an absolute defense to any legal action unless the “sovereign” consents to be sued.

[…]

This subfusc and underhand yet still somehow curiously blatant approach is what we’ve come to expect from Gonzales, though this also has the sulphurous whiff of Addington about it. I’m inclined to think this EPA case was meant as a quiet dummy run for a much wider application of sovereign immunity, that last resort of the corrupt politician or war criminal. Declaring the entire executive from the President downwards above the law was not at all what was envisaged by the framers of the Constitution. In effect it creates a monarch and a court.

Sovereign immunity at the Federal level is particularly indefensible since “We the People,” who ordained and established these United States and created the Federal “sovereign,” did not see fit to cloak “our sovereign” with immunity for its actions. However the doctrine has been judicially recognized these past 200 years, planted in dictum by Chief Justice Jay in Chisolm v. Georgia [2 Dall. (2 US) 419 (1793)], fertilized in dictum by Chief Justice Marshall in Cohens v. Virginia [6 Wheat. (19 US) 264 (1821)], and germinating in Clarke v. United States [8 Pet. (19 US) 436 (1834)]. There is no constitutional basis for sovereign immunity, it is purely and simply a judge-made legal anachronism.

Aha, so Gonzales may well be basing his monarchist opinion on the decisions of some reactionary activist judges from 200 years ago? How very antiquarian of him. He’s changed his view – I thought he regarded outmoded laws as ‘quaint’. My bad. I must’ve missed the memo. Oh well, we’ll never know exactly what he’s basing his reasoning on anyway, because the opinion is unpublished. The American people’ll just have to take it on faith that if Bush’s personal AG says it’s so, then it’s so.

You can’t say they lack cheek – when all else fails, even “It wasn’t me”, declare yourself infallible and all your domestic spying, illegal war and those other pesky little problemettes disappear in one fell swoop. No more Gitmo, no more Abu Ghraib, no more Katrina…Hey presto! It’s almost as good as being Born Again.

Allelujah! Praise the lord and pass the treasury keys.

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Published on September 4, 2006

Monday Morning Mixed Bag

I’ve had the weekend off as I was getting heartily sick of gloom, doom and the bloody internet. S0 I spent the time comfort-gaming. Sometimes you just need to backflip over a pit of fire while splatting crocodiles with exploding crossbow bolts to regain your innate serenity and poise.

Anyway, it’s Monday morning and I’m gloomily contemplating even more death, destruction, corruption and venality as documented by the blogosphere, when my faith in human nature is somewhat restored by one of the most geekily loopy and entertaining ever Sadly No threads. Sexual politics, fisking, forensic accident reconstruction, textual analysis, time travel, asscracks and particle physics – it has everything. Now if we could only harness that force for Good…

And while we’re being so insular and meta, let me also refer you to an amusing little kerfuffle re ‘journalist’ Lee Seigel of the New Republic. The NR is an allegedly leftish US magazine that’s now getting a long-deserved kicking from the actual left. Seigel’s been caught bang to rights being a sockpuppet- ie pretending to be someone else to back himself up – in his own blog comments, a no-no for any blogger. To add a twist, his sockpuppet even accused other commenters of sockpuppetry. There’s something very David Brent-ish about the whole thing:

Siegel is my hero. (12 of 179)

posted by sprezzatura on 2006-02-27 10:15:15 [warn tnr] [respond]

How angry people get when a powerful critic says he doesn?t like their favorite show! Like little babies. Such fragile egos. Siegel accuses Stewart of a ?pandering puerility? and he gets an onslaught of puerile responses from the insecure herd of independent minds. I?m well within Stewart?s target group, and I think he?s about as funny as a wet towel in a locker room. Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.

Ah, there’s nothing like a bit of tosserish vanity to ease you into the week. And speaking of vain tossers, there’s the uber-tosser himself, George Bush, tellling a reporter that all Jews are going to hell:

“As he gazed out a hotel hallway at the Superdome and waited for an elevator, Bush — clearly going for a laugh at his own expense — said the first thing he was going to say to Israeli Jews was that they were all ‘going to hell,'” Herman had reported. “Bush, who has both a quick wit and generally good judgment on when to use it, made the comment to the same Austin American-Statesman reporter who had reported his 1993 comments about his religious beliefs.”

Oh dear. That’s not going to play well with the Israel lobby.

This plays well though – more Mitch Benn, especially for Tbogg. When my children ask ‘What did you do in the YouTube wars, Mummy?’ I can say I did my bit for the British radio comedy industry.

Everything Sounds like Coldplay Now:

Indeed it does.