"EU resolute on climate change"

Oh they are, are they?

Well so am I. It's a big f***ing hoax.

"Jail not deterring knife crime"

A Home Office spokesperson explains why:

"No-one should be in any doubt of the consequences of carrying a knife. If you do so, you are now more much likely to get caught. When you're caught, you're more likely to be prosecuted. And if found guilty, you're more likely to go to prison."

So there are three stages to this; being caught; being prosecuted; and being sent to jail. Assigning probabilities to each of those three stages, your typical hoodie knows that the probability of each is, let's say, 50%, i.e. if you carry a knife, the chances of being sent to jail are 12.5%, or one-in-eight. Assuming that "more likely" means "a 55% probability", the chances now rocket to ... er ... 16.6%, or about one-in-six.

The peer pressure on these murderous little shits is so enormous, I doubt whether the fact that their chances of being jailed has increased by 4%, or about one-in-twenty five, is going to make the slightest bit of difference.

Twats.

UPDATE: Knirirr makes a good point. If they lock away 166 offenders in every 1,000 instead of only 125, and seeing as jails are 'full', that means the sentence they can expect is reduced automatically by a quarter anyway, i.e. 125 x 12 months = 1,500 jail-months; 1,500 jail-months ÷ 166 convicts = 9 months each.

Barak Obama joke

The toss of a coin in a remote district of Montana is enough to tip that county's vote against The Chosen One, which in turn leads to that State's three electoral college votes - and ultimately the whole presidential election - to go in John McCain's favour, despite The Chosen One winning a slim majority of the popular vote.

The Chosen One then takes to the lecture circuit, forever bitterly recounting how the election was stolen from him, imputing racist motives on the part of "The Dime That Did It". Sooner or later people, this becomes tiresome, and the invitations from the Ivy League debating societies and Democratic fundraisers gradually dry up...

Many decades later, a tired, stooped, white-haired Obama is reduced to panhandling on the street corners of Springfield, Illinois, boring everybody who is prepared to listen senseless with his endless tales of how he was once nearly President.

A kindly stranger drops a ten dollar bill in Obama's outstretched hat, listens to the old man's apparently lunatic ramblings for while ... and realises who it is!

The kindly stranger stretches out his hand: "Actually, can we call it five dollars?"

Obama stares at him blankly.

The stranger repeats, more forcefully: "I dropped ten dollars in your hat, but I only wanted to give you five!"

Obama mumbles and starts to walk away.

The stranger grabs him by the shoulder, and shouts: "Sir! I dropped ten dollars in your hat but I only wanted to give you five! Goddamit! IT'S TIME FOR CHANGE!!"

Brendan Barber calls for tax cuts!!

Brendan was on Channel 4 News just now, rambling on about how wicked and evil the government's plans to slim down the bloated public sector were, yadda yadda, when out of the blue, he said something along the lines of "We have to think radically. We should look to America where they have reduced taxes to stimulate the economy"

This transcript unfortunately stops just short of these utterances. Crikey, the Records Department are quick nowadays!

Of course, tax cuts by themselves are fairly meaningless unless accompanied by spending cuts, but hey, one step at a time, one step at a time...

Serena Williams has a lovely big bum

Reckless plan to save taxpayer billions

There was a great article on ConHome's Your Platform last week explaining why debt-for-equity swaps are the best way to solve the banking 'crisis'.

Well worth a read, it's another slant on what I've been recommending for a long time.

"Market towns like wild west"

An article in today's Metro about 'Britain's 24-hour booze culture' includes this comment:

Simon Reed, vice chairman of the Police Federation, told MPs on the Commons Culture, Media and Sport committee that market towns have suffered most since the introduction of the Licensing Act. He said: "At times, policing is being really stretched, often in the smaller towns more than in the bigger cities. My impression of many market towns is they are really like the wild west on occasion because they are really stripped of resources."

I fixed all this a while ago, to summarise, scrap VAT on sales of alcohol (in fact scrap VAT, full stop) and replace modest (but bureaucratic) pub license fees with proper auctions of the value of licenses, the market value of which are £10,000s or even £100,000s a year (depending on location, size of premises and how long they are open etc). Provided the extra income covers the cost of the extra police officers, A&E visits, repairing vandalism etc, then we are still ahead of the game.

Economics joke

I can understand why people might be a little concerned about inflation, but why is everybody so worried about deflation?

Even Robert Mugabe knows how to prevent deflation!

For a bit of light relief...

From a Conservative party pamphlet entitled "Fighting off the UKIP threat"* that was passed round at a local UKIP meeting:

With a General Election in the offing there is good case to be made for giving priority to other issues and other policies. But that is no excuse for not having a policy on the EU. There is a clear and immediate need to formulate a policy on the EU. No doubt everyone will have their own views on what this should be ... But for the moment the actual policy is less important than what it should achieve.

Here's the picture from the front cover**
* Available to order here. Rather ironically, one of his books is entitled "Hitler, Military Commander"...

** ... obviously he didn't heed one of Hitler's famous instructions to his propaganda film units "Der deutsche Landser greift von links an!" I once saw a wonderful documentary about Werner Herzog in which he explained that the audience instinctively sides with the soldier on the left of the screen, as a result, the German attack on a certain town had to be restaged a couple of days later because the film unit had filmed it with the Germans attacking from the right.

What a difference a year makes ...

13 September 2007:

Chancellor Alistair Darling has urged Britain's banks to take a more cautious approach to lending*... Mr Darling said both lenders and borrowers needed to "think long and hard" about the risks involved. He also suggested a return to "good, old-fashioned banking" ..."In crude terms [lenders] need to know who they're lending to [sic], how much they're lending and what the risk is. Now, that's elementary banking, one might think, but there are times when going back to good old-fashioned banking may not be a bad idea." But Mr Darling made no suggestion government would intervene with tighter regulation of lending.

* This was about two days before Northern Rock went *pop*, of course.

13 October 2008:

As part of today's £37 billion bailout package Gordon Brown said that banks would be expected to help struggling homebuyers and small businesses by restoring the availability of loans to last year's more generous levels. But today the Council of Mortgage Lenders quickly warned that this might not be 'prudent or desirable'.