Mark Holland wants to carry out airstrikes on people who tow caravans. Fair play – as long as I get to fire rocket launchers at the stupid fuckjobs who block box junctions.

What, do you think the yellow gridlines are there to make the road look prettier? Or do you just think "well, if I move onto the box then I’ll block the road for traffic going the other way, cause total gridlock, and then I’ll have to escape by driving across a pelican crossing where the green man’s showing. But I’ll get there five seconds earlier than if I drove properly, and I’m so goddamn important that I deserve nothing less"? The egotistical doglickers deserve to be exploded.

Although less satisfyingly draconian than mine or Mark’s suggestions, the government’s plans to introduce nationwide congestion charging are thoroughly excellent. It’s a shame it’ll be 10-15 years before it’s introduced, and the government will probably end up offsetting the charge revenues against the other taxes that currently fail to cover the externalities associated with driving, but at least it’s a start.

Ideally, the money raised from such schemes would be used directly to cut the basic rate of income tax (or perhaps to fund a Citizen’s Basic Income), thereby benefiting everyone. Voluntary taxation beats compulsory taxation, any day of the week…

"Fully a third of the brothels’ clients were men known as ‘juicers’… men who liked to wait outside a whore’s room until the first punter had done his deed, then the ‘juicer’ would rush in and suck out the other man’s sperm" – Sean Thomas on the brothels of 19th century Paris. Worthy.

You may already have encountered Amber4Ever. If not, you should. Top quote: "When the homunculus tries to hug me he squeezes too tight and he smells like rotting meat". Skilled. Via.

If you’re at work, or if you aren’t, don’t look at this picture. (via Hungbunny, who has moved here to serve up pretentious and wanky podcasts. Twat.) And finally, Larry has a wrong, and probably untrue, Killer Fact.

I’ve got a new article on The Sharpener about immigration and attitudes to immigrants in the Netherlands. Go there, read it, tear it to shreds, etc.

Speaking of Sharpener-ites, Andrew and Blimpish are curating a new right-wing group blog called Once More Unto The Breach (hopefully, they’ll imitate the action of a tiger. Rrrrr!), while Jarndyce has a new centre-left blog called Fair Vote Watch.

There’s an excellent article in Wired, making a case that the best way to defend against threats is through democracy, liberty and common-sense, rather than through paranoid Big Brother-ish security bureaucracies.

It also points out that one of the things that kept casualties relatively low on September 11 was that people ignored official security advice, and instead did what they thought was sensible. Go figure.

Obviously not in those words, for they are a bunch of mendacious spinners. However, the government has now admitted that Gitmo guards pissed on one prisoner’s Koran and wrote obscenities in another. While that’s not *literally* flushing it down the bog, anyone who thinks there’s a significant difference between the two acts is a total fucking joker.

I leave you with some quality bitching from Anthony Cox: "If you get stabbed in a knife fight, you could try out the homeopathic hospital. Using the homeopathic principle of ‘like cures like’ they’ll probably stab you with with another smaller knife – or more likely a knife that isn’t really there at all."

As usual, Fafblog has it. Especially sweet is the passage sticking it to the silly nitpickers with silly lists of Why US Detention Without Trial Isn’t Actually Exactly The Same As A Gulag.

"Please: we find the term ‘gulag’ absurd and offensive. A ‘gulag’ is Russian. You are not being interrogated to death by Russians. You are being interrogated to death by the greatest country in the world."

As those of you lucky enough to receive email from me will know, I’m "accompanied by a shocking entourage of assorted reprobates, including a fire-eater, a mulatto fortune-teller, a chimney-sweep, a village idiot, a cardinal, several snuff-addicts, and a mischievous Barbary ape".

The proof is over the fold.

If you’re a decent American, for the love of God assassinate Congressman James Sensenbrenner for proposing the worst, most Stalinist law ever.

This kind of mad shit (two years *minimum* in jail for failing to grass up stoners to the cops; up to three years in jail for buying someone a bong) makes me positively glad that we merely live under NuLab’s mildly benevolent and tolerant tyranny…

Although just as I’m saying that, some poor bastard over here gets eight months inside for a stupid drunken bomb joke that wasn’t even made at a security check.

On the other hand, just as I’m saying *that*, I find that the Yanks have gone paranoidly mental about an aeroplane that clearly isn’t being hijacked, diverting it to Canada under fighter escort ("well, even though it isn’t being hijacked, we may as well divert it anyway so we can pretend our jobs are worthwhile. And who gives a fuck if it crashes into the Canadians?" is presumably the Yankish attitude here…)

Chill out, everybody. Terrorism isn’t worth worrying about; there are about four terrorists out there [*], and they’re all rubbish. There’s no fucking Evil Conspiracy, apart from the conspiracy to keep us scared and to create the kind of climate where people who joke about bombs get thrown in jail.

[*] Hyperbole, but more accurate than most of the estimates in the other direction.

A good post from Tim Worstall on the value of a life. If you disagree with it, you’re a sentimentalist loon.