Sure, the fact that America is both overrun with and overlorded by batshit-crazy rightwing fanatics can be a little depressing from time to time – but on the plus side it provides satirists and parodists with fantastic material. Read both links.

Joshua Rozenberg, the relatively sane husband of Melanie Phillips, has written an article on his recent trip to India.

To his great surprise, on Mr Rozenberg’s arrival in Madras without an Indian visa, the immigration official threatens to send him straight back to London. With the aid of the British High Commission, he manages to persuade an immigration official to issue him an emergency visa on the spot. Later, he mocks the Indians for the bureaucracy involved.

I recommend Mr Rozenberg tries flying into London on an Indian passport without a UK visa, and then evaluates which immigration service is the embarrassing one (alternatively, he could try the USA; there’s a small chance that they’d let him out of jail at some point).

And if I were an experienced lawyer and journalist who’d risked screwing up my foreign trip because I hadn’t bothered to check the visa requirements, but for whom my host country’s immigration service had kindly made an exception, then my reaction probably wouldn’t be to take the piss out of them in print for being bureaucratic…

Although Googlism is now defunct (in the sense of not updating when Google does), you can still manually replicate its effects. Just Google for "[phrase] is", and the effects are similar.

I used this today in an effort to determine the safest thing (someone suggested it might be tape, which struck me as possible but unlikely). According to Google, these are the safest things:

* "The safest thing is to not keep a gun at home"

* "The safest thing is not to have sex with someone else "

* "the safest thing is to talk about Jesus as ‘a man of colour’"

I’m sceptical of the truth of the third claim: after all, one might be talking to a white fundie from Alabama. The other two are more feasible, but at least one of them would make life rather boring. Not entirely sure whether this proves that Google isn’t really an oracle, or whether safety is just a bit rubbish.

As an additional test, I tried running the same query on "john b is". The results are conclusive:

* John B is ahead of his time

* John B is sincerely deluded

* John B is the only one of us who can do a handstand pushup

* John B is owned and operated by a fulltime professional Captain

All of these are, without the slightest doubt, true. Google is King. Hurrah!

Sidewaysly, this article is interesting: it points out, more or less, that as mobile phones become more like sophisticated pieces of electronics, it becomes less and less appropriate for them to be sold by smarmy school-leavers with ten minutes’ training. This is unfortunate, given the mobile phone industry’s current sales model.

However, no marks for content.

For Christ’s sake, John Jones: if you’re going to abuse the ‘I’ll fight and die for my right to measure in chains, bushels and hogsheads’ brigade, you need to do so with the panache and literacy that they lack. Not with the panache and literacy of a dim 12-year-old.

A couple of quotes to start with: "He pushed the Reagan administration into supporting democratic reform for Central America, and he resisted the unionists who backed the proto-communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua" – Oliver Kamm defends CIA-backed death squads.

"When someone drinks excessively and needs to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, the police will also respond in order to see if underage drinking is taking place and to ticket the offenders" – US police act to maximise underage drinking fatalities (from Vice Squad)

Also mad and nonsense: Christian Voice and MediaWatch UK (look out, it’s a bomb); and the Democratic senators who support grinding the poor into the dirt. Including the US’s worst man on every policy issue outside of the Republican Party itself, Joe Leiberman.

Not that the UK can hold its head high. Today, our best-selling newspaper began a hate campaign against gypsies, in perhaps the press’s bleakest moment since the Daily Mail’s activities in the 1930s. Hopefully, Sun editor Rebekah Wade will be jailed for incitement to racial hatred. Or indefinitely interned under house arrest, since she approves of that kind of thing.

Oh, and lots of people seem to be linking to this wanker. Clue, not that anyone who’d fall for such nonsense will listen: the Cubans he discusses clearly didn’t lie down in the minefield and die because dying is preferable to spending one’s life in Cuba, but because they’d rather die peacefully than by being blown up by minefields.

I’m top on Google for Norwegians nude girls. Should this fact interest any Norwegian girls to the point of wishing to become nude, my email address is on the right.

Well, hopefully they can: continued Syrian occupation of Lebanon doesn’t strike me as massively in the country’s interests.

Nonetheless, can the pro-war camp please shut up with the gloating until we’ve found out what the fuck’s going on in Lebanon? Fortuitiously, this is likely to take until about 2010.

Update: according to a Zogby poll, well below half of Lebanese want the Syrians to withdraw.

It would appear that calling for George Bush’s assassination, far from being a terrible breach of etiquette, is entirely legitimate under international law.

"The prohibition on assassinating heads of state comes from the Geneva Convention. Now I seem to recall that Mr Bush ordered explicit attempts on Saddam Hussein’s life, both allegedly using assassins and more directly using – er – "precision" bombing of the odd palace. And Saddam was at the time a serving head of state – even Bush acknowledged that.

"So since Mr Bush has chosen to opt out of this particular protection, surely it follows that it’s quite legal for him to be assassinated? So what’s the fuss about?" (from here, with some reference to this.)

However, as previously discussed, I’d still counsel against such a move for pragmatic reasons. And moral ones, although for obvious reasons, I try and keep my personal morality out of discussions on assassination wherever feasible.

Relatedly, Nathan Barley really is rather excellent. The Monday night repeats are strongly recommended, since on a Friday and Saturday night one really ought to be attending videomedia installations with vacuous VJs and/or playing cock, muff and bumhole in gastrified clubpubs.

The Adam Smith Institute has an atypically incoherent article on France. It notes that blacksmithery has taken off in France over the last 20 years, in line with increased horse ownership, and quotes a blacksmith pointing out that French people’s 35-hour weeks give them more time to ride horses.

It then, on the basis of pretty much nothing, assumes this is a bad thing. The evil State must be compelling people to spend their time riding horses and getting them shod, for surely nobody would *choose* to work fewer hours in order to do fun things outside of work…

I’m agnostic over the enforced limiting of working hours. Obviously, if you want to work ridiculous hours for ridiculous cash, it seems silly for the state to intervene. However, the outcome of a US-style system with few limitations is that everyone ends up working longer hours than they’d optimally choose, so they don’t appear weak and lazy compared to their colleagues, who are all doing exactly the same thing. Society needs to strike a balance between the two; the ASI just assumes that the first outcome is Bad and the second is Good.

Meanwhile in the US, not only do you have to work 100 hours a week with 10 days’ holiday, you can’t even sleep with your colleages to make up for the fact you never have time to meet anybody else. I don’t have much sympathy for Boeing chief Harry Stonecipher, given that he drew up the code of conduct under which he was sacked, but the concept that such a code of conduct would exist is, well, fucking insane. Were I to work for a firm with HR policies like Boeing’s, I’d have been sacked several times for a wide range of reasons, none of which would have had any impact whatsoever on my ability to perform effectively at my job.

Would you rather have the freedom to work a 100-hour week, or the freedom to go out with your colleagues?

"For a Social Europe, maybe. Peace, Justice and the American Way the way Superman intended? Quite possibly. To make the world like it is in Star Trek, I’d consider it. For the introduction by the UN of World Naked Chicks Day, almost certainly." – a colleague, on worthy causes for which to give up one’s life. Can we start a campaign for the introduction of World Naked Chicks Day?

"Having Melanie Phillips lecture you about dhimmitude is like having a madwoman pour a bucket of someone else’s cold sick over your head." – A professor from the University of California, Los Angeles, testified as an expert witness about the psychotropic effects of cocaine. He said that he had smoked crack cocaine himself and sat in a cage with monkeys to teach them how to smoke cocaine as well" – the New York Times. Crack-addled-baboon-tastic…

"Yank: If it wasn’t for us you’d be speaking German, etc. Brit: And if it wasn’t for the French during your Revolutionary War, you’d be drinking tea at 4:00 pm every day and playing *real* football, laddie." – apocryphal encounter recounted here.