This is genuine top-level insania.

"A WEEK after the conviction of Kamel Bourgass, it has become fashionable to sneer that there never was a ricin plot and the murder of Detective Constable Stephen Oake was the work of a psychopath." – yes, that’s because it’s true.

"The armchair commentators who spread this view… would never dream of leaving their gated communities to set foot in the Algerian cafés of Finsbury Park" – strange, I could have sworn I lived 100 yards from the Algerian cafés of Finsbury Park, and went to one at the weekend.

Wanker.

Oh, the inspiration for this post is that O’Neill also wrote this hack job based on the fictional Respect-smearing story from Harry’s Place, plus these dodgy pieces of hackery (cheers Lenin…)

Are you a Westerner with a degree? Do you want to go backpacking in India? Are you worried about running out of cash? Why not sign up to go and work in an Indian call centre while you experience the joys of third-world life?

While it’s easy to bash our mentalist authoritarian government, at least we don’t live in a country where the police pay fit women to entrap teenage boys into selling them harmless herbs [*], or where it’s illegal to help a girl to get an abortion. Or where they execute the mentally ill.

How can anyone who isn’t an authoritarian extremist prefer the US to the UK? This never fails to mystify me. I mean, I could understand it if there were actually any *benefits* to living there, but (aside from it being one of the few places which is Different and Abroad without you having to learn the language), there aren’t.

Not unrelatedly, this is insane. Anyone who disapproves of vaccinating young girls against HPV should be beaten with an iron chain until they have no skin left. Although strictly, this isn’t a US/UK issue – I vaguely remember hearing homegrown mouth-breathing fanatics objecting to it as well. Bastards.

[*] Admittedly, the press sometimes does – but even then, the police are sane enough here not to press charges.

"Mr Les Dobrovolski, 69, was approached by a group of young men handing out George Galloway’s Respect/SWP literature… After refusing to take a leaflet and telling the men he would never vote for George Galloway, Mr Dobrovolski says he was followed by one of the men and pushed to the floor. The man then stamped on his hand before dropping a Respect leaflet on him and running off." – as reported on Harry’s Place, and by nobody else.

Labour turning a horrible, apolitical mugging into a Galloway-bashing photo op, anyone? No, I’m sure they’d never do anything so underhand. Cough. (obviously, in the unlikely event that the Respect link *isn’t* made up, it’s disgraceful, and in either case the people responsible for the beating thoroughly deserve one themselves).

Meanwhile, this piece is a nice bit of sanity on the whole Respect/Galloway thing; the Muslim-hating self-labelled Decent Left should probably give it a read.

As well as defending the Islamic elements for Respect from the appalling slanders they’ve been subjected to, and slating Galloway for being an unprincipled egomaniac, it also bashes Melanie Phillips (non-physically, of course, and quite right too: SBBS is strongly opposed to violence against journalists. This is also why we dislike the US Army).

Update: Lenin has done more digging on the Les Dobrovolski story. Unsurprisingly, the Respect connection is indeed an entirely untrue, made-up smear. In conclusion, vote Labour.

Any lawyer who uses this kind of bullshit sentimentalist rhetoric – "Seifert’s young son, Benjamin, now 2 years old, will never know his father, Mulligan said. At Christmas and Thanksgiving, there will always be one empty place at the table, he said" – should be instantly deported to Iraq, where they should be pelted with grenades by demented soldiers.

Also, countries where they sentence the mentally ill to death are not particularly civilised places.

Chris Lightfoot has an election-themed estimation quiz. Go and take it. He also has some background information here.

I’m going on holiday for a week and a bit starting on Friday May 6. If you fancy being a gastarbieter on SBBS, give me a shout and (as a big fan of outsourcing) I’ll sort you out with a login and you can post nonsense over the period.

No, not *that* Spamusement. Rather, I’ve just discovered that because of Eli Lilly’s wonder drug Cialis and the spamming bastards who promote it, anyone who’s attempted to write about ‘socialism’ or ‘socialists’ in the comments section over the last few months has been branded a spammer and had their comment rejected.

This is now fixed. Thanks to old reactionary David Duff for the pointer…

Ahmad Chalabi, Minister for Oil.