Bad voodoo

The world is now officially a less silly and good place. Dr Gonzo, you’ll be missed.

Fafblog has a more heartening take on the affair: [HST] said he was headed up to heaven to shoot God. "The great bastard’s in season and it’s long overdue," the Godfather of Gonzo said as he dusted off his elephant gun. "I have full reason to believe they will award me both the head and the tail. Expect me back by the apocalypse."

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Blogotrivia

I *would* suggest that anyone with an interest in UK political blogging checks out the UK political blogs aggregator – except for the fact that they exclude the UK’s sixth-best weblog from their source list. Boo!

I do definitely suggest checking out libertarian Tim Worstall, with whom I also more or less entirely disagree. His weekly British Blog Roundup is a rather groovy concept.

Relatedly, someone else has set up a British Blogs Top 10 site, based on traffic figures. SBBS is unlikely to feature here until I move servers and content management systems next month (FWIW, we’re running on about 1500-2000 views per day, and I haven’t written the code to count individual visitors…)

Finally, George Orwell has much tea-related wisdom.

(an earlier version of this post was shorter, drunker, less comprehensible and more offensive)

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‘Clear’ buttons

As programmers, designers and developers, why do we go through the gratuitous cruelty of providing ‘clear’ buttons when their only purpose is for people to accidentally click instead of "OK" and destroy their work?

Until quite recently I had a post to go here, you may be surprised to learn.

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Cognitive dissonance to the max

The scumbags at Powerline are trying to claim that Jimmy Carter is on The Other Side against America (presumably that’s the side of such well-known allies as Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomenei, Michael Moore and Jacques Chirac).

While the main accusasion is sufficiently insane to not even be worth bothering refuting [*], one particular bit stands out like a rent boy at a White House press conference. The Powerloons accuse President Carter of "conspiring with our chief enemy to try to influence an American Presidential election."

This is based on a report on NewsMax that in 1980, President Carter asked the Russians to give Jews extra emigration permits, so that he could claim credit for this deal in the election campaign.

This hardly seems outrageous, given that the Russians were offered nothing in return (other than the prospect of an opponent less mad than Ronald Reagan). But the mind-exploding thing about the whole made-up scandal is that *at the same time*, the Reagan team were cutting a deal with Iran to ensure that 51 American hostages would not be released until Ronnie’s inauguration.

Memo to all concerned: if you’re going to accuse your opponents of treason, then try not to pick occasions when they aren’t guilty of treason, but the people on your side are…

[*] Commendably, The Editors and Matt Yglesias do so anyway.

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Food, oil, etc

You know that UN Food for Oil corruption thing that people keep going on about? Well, the serious accusations in it (rather than ‘Iraqi officials added a couple of % to contracts and pocketed the difference’, which is a necessary evil when providing humanitarian assistance to people living under a corrupt regime) are pretty much made up.

I wonder how this will play in the right-wing media? (no, I don’t really; I’m perfectly aware they’ll ignore it as overly reality-based…)

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Vote Steyn

So far, Mark Steyn is trailing Harry Hutton‘s Canada’s Leading Asshole poll, with 45 votes compared to Celine Dion’s 72.

While Ms Dion is undeniably an irritating witch, Mr Steyn is infinitely more of an asshole under the canonical definition of the term than Ms Dion (or indeed, anyone else alive). I urge you to vote for him as many times as you can persuade the system to let you (deleting cookies doesn’t work, but there are clever things you can do with proxy servers).

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End this food smuggling menace

The Contaminants in Food (England) Regulations 2004 is a harsh law indeed.

"Any person who fails to comply with any of the requirements specified in a notice served under paragraph (1) shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary execution to a fine…"

It’s disturbing enough that we’ve reintroduced the death penalty for people who import inappropriate food into the UK – but fining people after they’ve been executed seems particularly harsh.

(via Jess, who doesn’t have a blog to link to. Freak.)

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Thank you

"So, all this energy is expended [by supposed left-wingers] attacking a man who has proven himself to be a committed anti-racist campaigner, at a time when both the New Labour and the Tories have been feeding, and feeding on, racist attitudes in their competingly tough ‘anti-immigrant’ campaigns." – Andrew Bartlett gets it absolutely spot on, at Harry’s Place.

That’s all there is to say, really. The spectacle of the two main parties battling over who can be beastlier to the blacks and the Pakis is disturbing and horrible, whereas a drunk man being rude to a journalist is moderately funny. And that’s pretty much where it ends, unless you’re a demented loon with your own weird agenda.

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Mysterious victim psychology

More Europhobic lunacy, this time from the EU Referendum blog: blogger Richard opposes the EU’s plans to stop airlines grievously fucking over their passengers, because he *enjoys* being grievously fucked over by airlines.

"I recall arriving once at Charlerois airport, for the last Rynair flight of the day, after a gruelling day in the European parliament, only to find that the flight had been delayed and then, well after midnight, cancelled without notice. Passengers were left to their own devices, without even a hint of compensation.

"I recall being so, so tired, and struggling to find a hotel for the remainder of the night, barely being able keep awake. But there was no feeling of recrimination. There had been an air-traffic glitch throughout Europe and Ryanair was as much a victim as we were."

For God’s sake; what kind of maniac could end up in such a situation with any thoughts other than "I hope Michael O’Leary dies in a horrible way" and "I’m never going to fly with these crooked bastards again"?

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