Apparently Britain *isn’t* a hotbed of dhimmitudinous Muslim-coddling, after all – at least judging by Sheikh Ali Tariq Ahmed’s job-hunting experiences under his own name, and under the name of Daniel Jacob.

Top quote: "If you want to find a job when you are out of work and a Muslim, then change your name and it will happen more quickly. Believe me, I know".

Can all the "our culture is being destroyed by Jihadis, and there’s no such thing as Islamophobia" merchants please shut the fuck up now?

(via insaniac B-BBC commenter Pete_London, who seems to be blaming the Beeb for running the article rather than himself for being a bigot)

Are you bored? Do you fancy doing some kind of moderately cryptic puzzle based on public transport? I’ve made [*] a new Tube stations quiz to go with the one that’s been doing the rounds for a while (Excel required for both).

Otherwise, here are some pictures of attractive young women:

[*] By "made" I mean "found the question list, worked out the answers, and then formatted it into an Excel quiz". All finding via the excellent Going Underground site.

A while ago, Meaders described "Timbeaux"’s comments on this SBBS thread as "the unarmed kamikaze approach to debate… Not so much being savaged by a dead sheep, as seeing someone punch themselves repeatedly in the face. It is painful to watch".

With that phrase in mind, I recommend you have a look at the comments by "Pete" on this Harry’s Place post.

I just saw a black girl greet a white, male acquaintance with a cheerful shout of "Hello darkie". Does that count as postmodern?

Don Marti has some an interesting ideas – I recommend his piece on DRM. Unfortunately, he’s also a member of a club that only seems to exist on the Internet: the Blinkered Linux Evangelists.

He says, "In the 1990s, did customers want overpriced UNIX from bickering vendors or stable-any-day-we-promise Windows NT? Sorry, neither one works for us. Support Linux, please. Or on-line services. AOL or Compuserve? We’ll take the Internet, thanks."

Indeed. Imagine how strange it would be to live in a world where AOL was the online service with the most subscribers, or where Windows NT and its derivatives had the highest operating system market share…

You need to read Jim Bliss’s article on peak oil, and you need to read it now.

I’m sceptical that the engineering facts he points out (the big one being that global oil output has almost certainly peaked) lead to his conclusions about the certain collapse of Western capitalism. However, it’s undeniable that a) we need to seriously change what we’re doing and b) we need to do so Right Now.

Increasing fuel tax tenfold across the EU and spending the money on new nuclear power stations would be a bloody good start (*and* it would piss off all the right people, which is always a bonus). Better to wean ourselves off car culture gradually, rather than watch all aspects of society collapse when suddenly the cars won’t go.

Unfortunately, that looks rather unlikely to happen (see the "piss off all the right people" point above). I recommend alcoholism and drug addiction as a coping strategem (and possibly the acquisition of a 50-year supply of canned food…)

Why the hell do we waste time and money prosecuting joke cases like this one and this one?

Anyone who suggests that computer hacking is in any way a Serious and Important Threat that we should Take Seriously will be mercilessly mocked and jeered in the comments.

We have a totally ridiculous story from Oxford, of a student being charged and fined for calling a copper’s horse gay. What a sodding waste of time, and what an utter cock of a policeman. Sadly, none of the articles published on the case reveal the bastard’s name.

Presumably, the reason the peeler took offence is that he regularly fucks his horse, but is a homophobic bigot – rather in the manner of boarding school types who’ll merrily bugger each other but would punch anyone who suggested they were queers. When a passer-by points out the animal’s true sexuality, it becomes much harder for the officer to keep up this heteronomative pretence, and therefore he lashes out.

To everyone taking the side of the US administation in the whole Amnesty/Gulag debacle: what the fuck are you smoking?

One organisation has spent the last 50 years opposing torture and brutality everywhere in the world, on an non-partisan basis and without exception. The other has spent most of the last 50 years *promoting* torture and brutality everywhere in the world.

One organisation has just published a report on how countries across the world are brutally torturing and abusing people. It decided to PR this report by pointing out that the most powerful (and therefore most interesting to media) country in the world is guilty of brutally torturing and abusing people without trial in secret prisons. The other organisation has just, err, brutally tortured and abused people without trial in secret prisons.

Really, how hard can it be to decide what fucking side you’re on? OK, so some of you have hard-ons for Yanqui dollars and think bombs and guns are cool. Fair play: they are. Even so, do you really want to be backing the torturers over the people protesting about torture?

If yes, I hope hell exists, purely so that you can go there. See also The Editors.

This is one of the most unbelievably horrible things I’ve ever read, not to mention yet another piece of evidence (should you need one) of the mindless cruelty in restricting abortion rights.

Were someone to assassinate prosecutor Art Bauereiss and legislator Frank Corte Jr (hmm, both men. Surprise fucking surprise), I’d happily contribute all my savings to their defence fund. Both deserve *every* nasty thing that could possibly happen to them.

Why do people occasionally claim the US is a civilised, first-world county? With the exception of four or five major cities, it’s Saudi Arabia with better shopping.

(on a lighter note, a good comments exchange from the same thread:

1: "If you view a fetus as a child, all abortions are murders".

2: "And if you view snot as a child, then all sneezes are murders. Sheesh.")