Blow up a crowd

What have the films Iron Man 2, Oceans 13, Seabiscuit and Herbie got in common? 

They all used inflatable extras in crowd scenes.

Just make it up...

Planned Parenthood Claim: It ‘Was Not Intended To Be A Factual Statement’

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) defended Republicans’ willingness to shut down the government over funding for Planned Parenthood by falsely claiming that abortion is “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” In reality, just three percent of its work is related to abortion.

The response from Kyl's office?

His remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, a organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions

So there.

Nice!

The security guy at Bratislava airport looked at my passport. "New". he said to his colleague. Then spent five minutes examining it in minute detail with two magnifying devices before handing it back. "Is there a problem?', I said. "No, no" he said. "Very nice passsport". What the fuck? Perhaps he hadn't seen one of the fairly new microchipped passports or maybe he was just taking the piss?

Shhh, loose lips....

Maybe Britain needs a First Amendment, too

What is going on? How did we arrive at a situation where giving offence is automatically sackable or worse? Surely the freedom to disagree with a comment or to ignore it is enough. When it is suggested that certain points of view or ways of expressing them might be or should be illegal – or that intolerance should not be tolerated, to purloin the common malapropism – a notion that should chill anyone who holds the principles of liberal democracy dear is given life: the notion of thought crime. Freedom of speech was hard-won in the West; the freedom only to speak inoffensively is no freedom at all...

Furthermore, the giving of offence need not be intentional, nor the words (or cartoons) themselves possessed of the propensity to give it in order for it to be taken. Never mind the freedom to speak offensively: people have been invited to believe there is such a thing as the right not to be offended. Never mind that ‘incitement to hatred’ is a grey, disputable thing, and a different thing to incitement to violence, which was already a criminal offence. Never mind that most ideas are capable of giving offence, and that Socrates, Galileo and Darwin were all considered beyond the pale in their time. And never mind that in the marketplace of ideas, ‘hate speech’ can be challenged, debated or ignored. What we now have is moderated free speech at best.

Democracy or Mobocracy?

The majority support the cuts

Bad news for UKuncut and the marchers: the majority support the cuts.

It's worse than you think

Britain's leaders should come clean on the true depth of the fiscal crisis

The Labour party's most senior figures, in defiance of their education and intelligence, keep claiming that Osborne's actions are "driven by ideology, rather than necessity". This is absurd. Anyone who argues that rapidly addressing the fiscal catastrophe Labour left behind is anything other than absolutely crucial either knows nothing about global bond markets, or is so blindly ambitious, so determined to close their eyes to the facts, as to be unfit for public office...The UK's fiscal crisis is of monumental historic importance...What is in the balance...is the prosperity of the British people for at least the next few decades and our status as a top-ranking nation.

Over the last 12 months, then, this country's "on-balance-sheet" liabilities have risen by £147bn. That's roughly what we spent on the NHS and defence combined in 2010 – and that was merely, during this last year of "austerity", the incremental increase in what Britain has put "on tick"....What matters to the finances of any household is the size of the outstanding mortgage, the on-going costs of financing that mortgage, and the prospects of paying it off. Only an economically illiterate fool would claim the family finances will soon be "under-control" because sacrifices will be made and lifestyles reined-in to such an extent that, hopefully, if everything goes to plan, having re-mortgaged every year between now and 2015, that family will then enjoy a single year in which it won't need to re-mortgage.

I won't be around "in decades" so I can't afford to wait until things improve. Leaving the UK looks like a more attractive prospect every day.

Do turkeys vote for Christmas?

Anti-cuts march: Tens of thousands at London protest

What a surprise!

Botox bollox

Like other eight-year-old girls, Britney Campbell loves dancing to Lady GaGa, is fond of fashion and enjoys putting on make-up But Britney's beauty regime goes way beyond playing with Mummy's lippy. Once every three months, Britney climbs on a beautician's table and watches as mum Kerry prepares needles of Botox and fillers to be injected into her face.

Beautician Kerry, 34, from Birmingham, buys the substances online and injects them into her daughter's forehead, lips and around her eyes.The beauty-pageant obsessed single mum also takes her to have her body waxed, in a bizarre bid to stop her growing hair when she eventually hits puberty.

Kerry says these shocking and potentially dangerous treatments will guarantee Britney becomes famous as a teenager.

Famous as a teenager?

Maybe. But for what?

Make that a double, old bean

We don’t need to be saved from the ‘demon drink’

Ours is not the first age when the public has been constantly urged to cut back on the demon drink. But never before has the campaign for public abstinence taken such an elitist and morally vacuous form...

Current responsible-drinking policy is not concerned with self-control, but with official control of people’s behaviour. Public-health officials seem to recognise no limits to their interventions, and indeed I have heard discussions at alcohol-policy conferences about how they might close down drinks-related Facebook groups or prevent parents from leaving their beer in the garage.

Don't panic! Oh, go on then.

The globalisation of German angst

As Japan struggles with damaged nuclear reactors, the German government has announced that some nuclear power plants in Germany will be taken offline. In her policy speech last week, Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated that the German nuclear power plants were among the world's safest. However, events in Japan had created a new situation in which the seemingly impossible had become possible. It was now necessary, Merkel said, to suspend for three months a previously announced policy to extend the life of some of these power stations.

Yep. Earthquake and tsunami in a country sitting on the worlds greatest fault line leads to a land-locked, earthquake free country in central Europe reconsidering its nuclear policy.  Nuts.

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I prefer consensual M&Ms;

Judge in Craigslist 'sex-slave master' John Hopkins' case says consensual S&M can be criminal

S&M can be criminal even if it’s consensual, a Brooklyn judge said today during the arraignment of a self-described Craigslist sex-slave master.

Erm, no, that's not what the judge said. He said that just because someone agreed to indulge in sado-masochistic activities doesn't mean that nothing that follows can be considered criminal. It's no different from the law regarding "normal" sexual activity. It can start off consensual but become criminal.

Not waving, but drowning

Japan tsunami and earthquake: Nuclear power plants are dangerous

Yes, nuclear power plants are dangerous. But for Britain, the alternative is to start hoarding candles

It would be easy to just accept that this is just more twaddle from that great Daily Mail tit, Max Hastings but let's just stop and ask ourselves how the fuck that headline got written. As someone pointed out in the comments section of this appallingy piss-poor piece in the Guardian today:
     More people died at Chappaquiddick than at 3 Mile Island.

Dangerous? In the UK alone there have been around 165,000 recorded deaths in the coal mining industry and this is a) an admitted underestimate and b) excludes deaths of miners from lung disease and, more importantly, deaths in the general population by smoke pollution caused by burning coal.  The truth is that so far, as a result of this recent quake,  nobody has died from nuclear radiation in Japan but at least 10,000 are likely to have been killed by, erm, wave power.