When MP John MacDougall died, Gordon Brown gave a eulogy at the funeral…

And we are here today because we have lost in John a tireless fighter for social justice, we have lost an endlessly loyal champion of decent values…

Could Brown say the same about himself? Bollocks could he:

John MacDougall, the former MP for Glenrothes, launched a court action against the Ministry of Defence (MoD) last November after the Government turned down his request for a £300,000 payout. Mr MacDougall believed his lung cancer was contracted as a result of working at the Royal Naval dockyards in Rosyth in the 1960s and 1970s when he was exposed to asbestos

Only in New Labour can you write a man’s eulogy with one hand while making his last, hard days even harder with the other. As it has been and always will be under this lot, misery is tribute just as bombs bring peace.

The hypocrisy on display on Brown’s eulogy is breathtaking even for his myriad mendacities. How about his on MacDougall’s heroics during the Miners’ Strike:

And John [MacDougall] and Bert [Gough] were true to their words; when faced with the provocation of social security relief withdrawn, with miners reliant on soup kitchens, they used the Social Work Scotland Act to give essential relief to miners’ families.

Social security relief withdrawn? Why those bastard Tories. What monsters. What’s that? Oh, hang on…

‘More long-term unemployed people could have their benefits cut - or stopped altogether - under new proposals‘ … ‘Benefits could be withdrawn almost immediately if people do not cooperate‘ … ‘These proposals will make those people worse off, and that’s of course how these savings are to be made‘

Life is indeed measured by deeds. Gordon Brown, the morally vacuous old joke, has been measured. Please be sodding off now.

Via Aaron we have this - more morons in positions of power…

Might I humbly suggest that if members of the public have to teach these clowns their law, then the training isn’t all it should be down at police school.

The fat, like the poor, will always be with us. They’re not going away any time soon - we and they have reached an accommodation with their existence.

Take the adverts for the anti-chafing cream currently gracing our television screens at the moment. Is it aimed at athletes for who chafing can be a hindrance to optimum performance?

No, it’s aimed at wobbling sad sacks who seemingly can’t waddle to the fridge without crying out in agony because their corpulent thighs and buttocks are creating enough friction to light a camp fire for Ray Mears. Hey fatty, now your parts can glide together like two greased pigs (you and your mother).

Don’t people realised that when they can’t move because their thighs and mudflaps look like burger meat it might, just might, be time for a lifestyle change? You have to hand it to the cream’s manufacturers. They’ve clearly identified that section of the obese population who’ve decided that, in the screaming crimson glow of their red-raw inner thighs and bum cakes, amelioration rather than cure is the answer. Why eat a salad when you can just slake yourself with goo?

Goo you say? Twelve economy-size pork pies and a case of Abrade-B-Gone please, Mr Costermonger.

(Philip has another breakthrough to help us stay on our well-lubricated arses)

Jacqui ‘chins’ Smith on the loss of yet more sensitive data:

This was data that was being held in a secure form, but was downloaded onto a memory stick by an external contractor

BZZZZT! Wrong answer.

Memo to Ms Smith: If you have a system that allows some herbert to download information from it to a memory stick and then go out and lose said memory stick, THAT INFORMATION IS NOT IN A ‘SECURE FORM’. This system is, like so many, many others, is bollocks.

Is Smith ignorant or is she relying on the ignorance of the public here? I think probably both - Smith gives every impression of being genuinely witless on this matter and that, by lucky chance, allows her bad news masseurs to befuddle the ‘ee, I don’t understand computers, me’ public.

The lovely Philip reports that Chicken Yoghurt is crashing his browser. Whenever he goes to the comments, his Mozilla Firefox 1.0.3 (running on Mac OS X 10.2.8) closes unexpectedly.

Anybody else having trouble?

I know I’m breaking my Olympics embargo but this was too good to miss:

Olympics boss Jacques Rogge has told Usain Bolt to show more respect for opponents after the Jamaican claimed the first sprint double for 24 years.

If only the revolting and usually grotesquely obsequious Mr Rogge had the balls to say the same to the Chinese government, eh?

If nuclear energy companies were cat breeders.

In a not-at-all-patronising speech to troops in Afghanistan, the Prime Minister compared British soldiers to our Olympic heroes…

This week we are celebrating the Olympics, where we have had great success. People have been winning medals in areas where we have been breaking ground.

But this week also I believe that our Olympic athletes and everybody else in our country will remember that you have showed exactly the same courage, professionalism and dedication.

…said the Prime Minister likening ‘exactly‘ the courage, professionalism and dedication needed to ride a bicycle round in circles to the courage, professionalism and dedication needed to fight the Taleban. I think that’s what they call faint praise.

He is of course, however, exactly right. Our troops are just like our Olympians. They’re underfunded and spend most of their time abroad. They perform obscure activities that we only pay attention to once in a blue moon before turning over to watch the X-Factor. And politicians love their reflected glory unless they’re losing in which case they get barely a mention.

Clutching at straws, AC Grayling finds a lone reason recommending David Miliband as Prime Minister: he’s an atheist.

Grayling then proceeds to draw up a list of wishful thinking; a list of all the amazing things a non-believing prime minister will do. All very nice:

Atheist leaders are more likely to take a literally down-to-earth view of the needs, interests and circumstances of people in the here and now, and will not be influenced by the belief that present sufferings and inequalities will be compensated in some posthumous dispensation.

Wouldn’t that be lovely? Has Miliband gone on the public record anywhere giving even the merest hint that he might think along these lines? He was head of Tony Blair’s Policy Unity from 1997 to 2001, for crying our loud. He backed the Iraq war despite his belief that everyone fighting might squander their one existence without hope of the reward of an after-life.

The thing is, I have doubts whether religious (non) beliefs of any stripe colour the judgement of leaders to any large extent. For all his self-proclaimed Christian beneficence, Tony Blair displays very, very few of the qualities that mark someone as a Christian. Ditto ’son of the manse’ Gordon Brown. See also George Bush.

But here we go again, imprinting another potential Prime Minister with our tenuous hopes. Haven’t we learned our lesson in the last year? Miliband, like Gordon Brown, is a leading figure and architect of New Labour. He is the status quo; another bag carrier for the post-Thatcherite consensus.

He bought into all that when he was a kid. He’s been soaked in power-without-purpose politics for decades. Does he look like a boat-rocker to you? An ‘agent’ of ‘change’? The idea that, as he crosses the threshold of Number 10 as Prime Minister, his atheism gland will kick in and rewrite his New Labour DNA is, frankly, ludicrous.

Bad news for bigots:

MI5 has concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in Britain, according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation seen by the Guardian

[...]

The security service also plays down the importance of radical extremist clerics, saying their influence in radicalising British terrorists has moved into the background in recent years.

[...]

Those involved in British terrorism are not unintelligent or gullible, and nor are they more likely to be well-educated; their educational achievement ranges from total lack of qualifications to degree-level education.

As RickB also points out, however, there is one thing that links terrorist in the eyes of MI5…

[T]hey are almost all employed in low-grade jobs.

What? Poverty and shitty, unfulfilling employment should take some of the blame? Say it ain’t so. It’s the capitalist miracle we’re talking about here, isn’t it? Rising tides float all boats, don’t they? Free markets never made anyone bad, did they? Who knew MI5 would turn out to be a nest of goddamn pinkos.

I, for one, am now looking forward to counter-terrorism police kicking down the doors of call centres. I wait with anticipation the Policy Exchange investigation into how working in care homes is a fast track to radicalisation. What a day it will be when Gordon Brown and his ‘flexible labour markets’ are carted to off to Guantanamo Bay.

The government flashes its knickers at BAE…

BAE Systems has signed a 15-year deal with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to supply the UK armed forces with small arms and medium-calibre ammunition.

It also includes mortar bombs, tank, artillery and naval gun shells, but not weapons such as guided missiles.

No guided missiles? That’s a relief. Still, this should encourage us all. It shows that corruption is no barrier to success.

BAE, needless to say, are jumping about with joy. Here’s Charlie Blakemore, managing director of BAE Systems Land Systems Munitions…

You can imagine that the rate of production that we are now at, it’s been some achievement to keep that going in that period to make sure that we deliver on time.

You can imagine that the rate of production that we are now at. Oh do shut up, Charlie, you sound like a teenager talking about how much self-abuse he manages to fit into a day. Well done for keeping it up this long. You can almost hear the grin in the statement.

I know embellishing one’s CV is frowned up but think of the benefits. Worried you might not get that job? Just say you bought prostitutes - sorry, hostesses - and yachts for Saudi Princes and you’ll be quids in. There are those out there who’ll find it irresistible, like a spray of Lynx for your career.

How ‘every twentieth’ can expect to be treated. Nice to see someone enjoying their job so much, I suppose. And a public servant to boot. I wonder for how much longer searchees will be allowed to film proceedings.

I wonder if Osama’s seen it yet? I’m sure he’ll also be congratulating himself on a job well done.

(Thanks to Paul for link)

Update: The man doing the filming is Terence Eden - he’s got more on his blog.

It’s all over. You do have to feel for them a little bit…

ITEM: You have a prime minister who everyone says is dour and humourless. People feel free to impugn his mental state and say he’s out of touch.

ITEM: Number 10 attempt a light-hearted and humorous video involving Jeremy Clarkson. People feel free to impugn their mental state and say they’re out of touch.

(Coming soon: Complaints when Gordon Brown decides to give everyone a fifty pound note. ‘It’s a disgrace that people weren’t given the choice of two twenties and a ten,’ say critics.)

There’s something about the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station…

D’you wanna be in my gang? One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble. Here’s a Bangkok reporter on the Artist Currently Known As Nonce:

South east Asia is full of child abuse - my travel buddy from Nicaragua was in Cambodia until recently on secondment from the Met police to track them down. But the legislature is so weak and when they are caught and sentenced it is on such weak penalties exposing the permissiveness of sex abuse over here.

I asked my boss why they don’t clamp down harder on these sorts of crimes - the awful truth is, he said, it’s not entirely frowned upon. There’s an argument - held frightenly widely - “what else will these poor families do for money?”. I asked my Thai colleague - “it’s never really discussed” she said.

So that huge Interpol manhunt for “swirl face” teacher Christopher Paul Neil got him 3 years in prison. I’m not saying I know what the right sentence is, but it did seem light given that it included no rehabilitation programme, no monitoring mechanism on release… just recycled out on to the darkest streets of south east Asia where a blind eye is turned to routine abuse.

Hey, it’s not all doom and gloom coming out of the Middle East. Take a look at this:

Iraq is fast becoming one of the United States’ top customers for military sales. Since January 2007, Iraq has spent $3.1 billion on U.S. weapons. That number looks likely to grow exponentially as Iraq uses its vast unspent reserves of petrodollars to develop its army into a force capable of defending its borders against hostile neighbors.

In the past two months alone, the Pentagon has alerted Congress of a possible $8.7 billion worth of additional military sales to Iraq, for everything from lightweight attack helicopters to armored ambulances to binoculars.

There’s a friendly pimp who can guarantee you the best whores. A slick hustler always working the angles. He’s got the best girls. You don’t need to look anywhere else, man. Those other girls? They’re not clean. It’s his you want. Think of Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver telling you where you can put your missile.

Still, a good news story or what? Iraq might have some of the worst living and health standards in the world right now but, boy, are they going to be tooled up. I wonder what the mark-up is on a pair of US military-issue binoculars. Don’t shop for it, Pentagon it!

You know what I’d get me with all that cash if I was Prime Minister of Iraq? A WMD programme. I’d get me some mobile laboratories, maybe some VX gas rockets. Then I’d let slip some ambiguous remark dissing Israel. You know, just for a laugh.

How goes the crusade? Not well:

Earlier this year a report by Womankind, Taking Stock: Afghan Women and Girls Seven Years On, revealed that violent attacks against women, usually in a domestic setting, are at epidemic proportions – 87 per cent of women complain of such abuse, and half of it is sexual. More than 60 per cent of marriages are forced and, despite laws banning the practice, 57 per cent of brides are under 16. Many of these girls are offered as restitution for a crime or as debt settlement. Afghanistan is the only country in the world with a higher suicide rate among women than men.

We can’t clean dogshit up properly off our own streets. Just how we thought cleaning up Afghanistan was a task within our capabilities is a mystery to me.

Tony Blair is at the Olympics.

Dreams turn to so much slurry.

Read the headline to this.

How in the name of God’s holy trousers did such a delicate little flower such as Alan Duncan ever become an MP, and how does he survive the daily cut and thrust of parliamentary life? He must be constantly swooning with the vapours…

Barbara Tucker used a loudhailer to accuse Duncan of being a “murderer, terrorist, child murderer, bomber, disgusting, horrible and totally corrupt” as he left parliament one evening in February.

The MP was left “visibly shocked” as Tucker crossed the road to loudly call him a “war criminal” as he waited for a taxi.

I await any future pronouncements on freedom of speech from Mr Duncan with relish. Oh, hang on…

It is nothing to do with freedom of speech or the right to protest.

How’s that then? Or to put it another way: Yes, you bloody oiks, shut your traps and get on with paying Mr Duncan’s expenses. Know your place.

You can’t really blame him, I suppose. Nobody likes being reminded in their complicity in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children, do they? It would make me cross. People are always reminding me of the time I answered the door to a man in wheelchair while my knob was out and it does get a little trying after a while.

Then, without a trace of self-awareness, Duncan said the peace demonstration outside Parliament…

…has become a vulgar and pointless display which is utterly demeaning for the Westminster parliament.

Which means he obviously hasn’t watched Prime Minister’s Questions on the telly or, worse, listened to it on the radio where it sounds like a student rag week lark after too much cider.

Just how does Ms Tucker’s outburst differ from the abuse Duncan and all his chums heap on the Prime Minister each week? You know, the roaring and the braying, the ‘YEEEEAAHHH!’s and the ‘MMMMMEEEEERRRRRRR!’s and the ‘HEEEEEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWW!’s whenever Brown tries to get in a word in edgeways.

I think Ms Tucker’s mistake was her reasonably articulate use of the English language. Mr Duncan must have been ‘visibly shocked’ by her level of debate. If only she’s used ‘parliamentary language’. If only she’d made gibbon noises at him.

Shame’s an emotion that’s not much in evidence in these cynical times. The glands that produce it are underused and weakened. I bet they don’t survive our next evolutionary iteration.

Take the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean as an example. Back during the Cold War it was actually quite hot - over a period of 12 years, the Americans tested a total of 67 nuclear weapons there including the world’s first hydrogen bomb. Two of the islands were vaporised entirely.

The residents of the nearby islands saw the flashes of light brighter than the sun; the white ash of the fallout fell on their upturned faces. Those still alive today who witnessed the test are dying of cancers; their grandchildren, the ‘octopus babies’, who survive long enough, head for less remote parts of the world to have their birth defects treated.

Between 1964 and 2004, the US government gave $400 million for the clean up and compensation. Ten million dollars a year. One hundred and fifty millions of the money was ‘final settlement of all past and future claims deriving from the nuclear tests’. In other words, so long suckers.

On the nearby island of Runit there’s a crater left by one of the blasts. The US military collected all the radioactive by-products from the 67 nuclear tests (except for 19,000 cubic metres of radioactive soil that somehow went missing) and put it in the crater. They then built a concrete dome over the crater, nine metres high and 115 metres wide. The WA Today journalist who visited the dome wrote:

While the views from the top are stunning, it is a sobering experience to climb. Cracks riddle the surface, many water-stained at the edges and crumbling. Some spalls are so large, birds have laid eggs in them. The concrete cap - 45 centimetres thick and peppered with plutonium waste - contains at least two holes 15 centimetres deep. Below lie thousands more cubic metres of radioactive waste.

The dome was built in 1979. The plutonium waste underneath it has a half-life of 24,000 years. The US Department of Energy says that ‘the US has no formal custodial responsibilities for the site’. Anybody care to put a length to shame’s half-life?

Burying nuclear waste demands commitments - financial and moral - from future societies and governments. It’s a future we can’t predict and they are commitments which, by their very nature, we can’t put to those expected to keep them. The US’s ‘commitment’ to the people of the Marshall Islands lasted forty years. Iodine-129, a by-product of nuclear reactors (to name but one), has a half-life of 16 million years.

(See also Nuclear Reaction)

Ernest being earnest…

If this is true, I know of a few people who are effectively immortal…

(Via The Yorksher Gob)

I like xkcd.

There’s a piece in the current Private Eye comparing Gordon Brown’s statement after Labour’s defeat at the Crewe and Nantwich by-election…

The message that we have got is that people are concerned. They are concerned about rising food prices, rising petrol prices. People are concerned rightly about gas and electricity bills. They are concerned about what is happening to the economy. I think the message that I have to get to people is that we are unequivocal and clear in our direction, that we are going to address and are addressing these problems. We will continue to do so. My task is to steer the British economy through what have been very difficult times in every country in the world and that I will continue to do with a clear direction that shows that we will address all the problems that people are facing.

…and then after the Henley by-election…

By-elections come and by-elections go and of course we will listen to what people say. I think people know that we are going through difficult times in the economy. It’s my job to steer us through these difficult times. And people facing higher petrol bills, higher gas and electricity bills, people facing high food prices, it’s my job to make sure I can do more to help people’s standard of living improve.

…and after the Glasgow East by-election…

People are worried at rising food and fuel prices and we’ve got to show that we know that; only we understand and hear them. Labour will take them through these difficult times to help people and hardworking families who are hard pressed. We had a great candidate and I’m sorry that we lost but I know that people are looking to the government for the action that’s necessary. We’re looking at everything we can do for what is a global problem so we can help people through these difficult times and that’s exactly that we will continue to do. My task is to get on with the job of getting us through these difficult times.

To be honest, it sounds like the Prime Minister’s task in the last few months has been to listen to the sound of his own voice and learn just one all-purpose speech. Actually, you wonder if he’s in a bit of daze and thinks he’s commenting on the same by-election.

At least the speech will come in handy again after the Glenrothes by-election. In fact, it could come in handy after the next general election. When Labour are smashed and put out of power for twenty years, Brown could simply turn up for work as usual, declare on the steps of Downing Street that the message from the British public is unequivocal, fuel bills are rising, and that it’s his task to get on with the job. He’ll then attempt to carry on regardless in a lurching futility that’s difficult to watch. Hell, it’s worked perfectly well so far.

So, according to How Clever Am I, (via Matt T) it turns out I’m a triple-A student.

That being the case, why did I spend the early 90s at a poxy West Yorkshire poly and not at Oxbridge? How come now I’m a soulless misanthrope sitting in the spare bedroom in my pants and not a soulless misanthrope on the fringes of the Cabinet making poor people’s lives even more miserable?

I tell you, there’s no justice.