Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep...?

The above is the title of the Philip K Dick novella from which Blade Runner took inspiration and, finally, we can now answer the question that it posed.

No, they don't.

Apparently, they dream of dog-fish, camel-birds and pig-snails...

From the Archives: the lobbyists fight back (2009)

Although the Filthy Smoker has moved onwards and upwards, he is responsible for some of your humble Devil's favourite posts. This little sample, from a 2009 post in which he discusses the tactics of fake charities, shows why...

The government funds these groups because they help it create a fake compromise while bypassing public opinion. Here's how it works:

1. The government feels like giving you a good kick in the bollocks.
2. You don't want to be kicked in the bollocks. You just want to be left alone.
3. A fake charity turns up wielding some bogus study and demands that you be kicked in the bollocks and pelted with turds.
4. The government conducts a bullshit consultation with some other fake charities and, in the spirit of compromise, concludes that you will be kicked in the bollocks but not pelted with turds.

Result: you get kicked in the bollocks. The government wins.

And if the charity is very good at its job, this will be quickly followed by the fake loophole:

1. The fake charity produces a study showing that being pelted with turds is not as bad as taking one in the Jacob's. They say that the government is being inconsistent by allowing people to kick you in the plums but not pelt you with turds.
2. The government agrees and, having set a precedent, it can't be seen to allow one and not the other.

Result: you get kicked in the bollocks and pelted with turds. Democracy has prevailed.

Although the fake charities site is no longer up (I know—I keep meaning to sort that out) nothing has fundamentally changed in the tactics employed by these organisations.

For more on these insidious lobbyists, why not have a look at Chris Snowdon's excellent (and free) IEA monographs on the subject:

• Sock Puppets: How the government lobbies itself and why;
• Euro Puppets: The European Commission’s remaking of civil society;
• The Sock Doctrine—What can be done about state-funded political activism?

As I always say, the phrase—and highlighting of—"fake charities" has been your humble Devil's sole effective contribution to public discourse—other than making it coarser...

Quote of the day...

... comes from the wife's article on Ann Coulter.

Libertarians don’t fight with left-wingers, they fight with each other. It’s the only ‘mob’ you’ll ever see where the crowd hears a rousing speech and says to one another, ‘You know, I’m not sure I agree with him. He misses Friedman’s point about the fact that…’ and then argues all the way to the pub, where they’d all much rather be anyway.

Quite.

Withnail & O

Genius.

Scientists hoist by their own petard

Now, as we all know, there is a pressing problem that we have—all this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is warming the planet and we are all going to fry unless we severely reduce our output of said gas.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the effective ways of generating the energy that makes our world go round emit CO₂ to a large extent; but, so severe is the problem, our politicians have responded to the urging of the scientific experts and put in place a number of measures to make carbon emission—and thus energy generation—much more expensive.

Now, do remember that this is all climate scientists because, of course, there is a "consensus" on the climate change topic. And almost all other scientists have urged us to listen to the climate scientists because they know what they are talking about and we laymen—even those who have a rather more specialist knowledge of statistical analysis or computer model programming—have no idea at all.

So, basically, we can say that the vast majority of the world's scientists back urgent action on carbon emissions: energy must be made much more expensive. Oh, wait, we didn't mean for us!

World-class research into future sources of green energy is under threat in Britain from an environmental tax designed to boost energy efficiency and drive down carbon emissions, scientists claim.

Some facilities must find hundreds of thousands of pounds to settle green tax bills, putting jobs and research at risk.

Altogether now... Aaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahaha! Aaaaahahahaha! Ah-ha! Ha!

Wait—let me catch my breath.

Aaaaaaaaaahaahahahahahahahaa! Aaaaaahahaha.

Whew.

Right. I... Aaaaahahaha. Ha.

OK, no, really, I'm sorry. I haven't laughed that much since Chris Huhne admitted that he drove a car.

Anyway, so, what are these scientists going to do? Could it be that they are going to cough up gladly, pointing out that this is precisely the outcome that they wanted? Ah, no.

The unexpected impact of the government's carbon reduction commitment (CRC) scheme is so severe that scientists and research funders have lobbied ministers for an exemption to reduce the bills.

No, absolutely not.

Alright, I admit that a good deal of the satisfaction of the above is based purely on spite: you bastards (as in the scientific community) insisted that we take action on climate change—and you got it. I don't see why everyone but you should suffer.

Yes, it might seem counter-intuitive that government-funded initiatives should have to pay government taxes (in the same way that it might seem odd that government-funded jobs need to pay taxes) but there are, as Timmy points out, a couple of valid reasons (i.e. ones not based on spite) why scientists should not be exempt.

1. It would be a subsidy. And we want subsidies to be out in the open. We want to be able to add up what whatever rule or regulation, tax or charge, actually costs us. So we don’t want any hidden subsidies at all. This applies to everything: council house rents should be full market rents, even if that means everyone gets housing benefit. We can then look at the benefit bill and see how much housing the poor costs us. Trains and farmers should pay full whack on fuel duty, even if that means we then have to send them a cheque to compensate. We want to be able to see, exactly, what their subsidy is.


2. We absolutely do not want things run by politicians and bureaucrats to be free of the rules politicians and bureuacrats impose upon the rest of us. It’s our only hope of reducing the complexities, that they have to struggle with their impositions as we do. Note the screams from MPs as their expenses are doled out in the same manner the dole is doled out. Quite bloody right too.

But it is very entertaining, nonetheless, to listen to the various sob stories highlitedby the Grauniad article...

Among the worst hit is the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, a facility for research into almost limitless carbon-free energy. The lab faces an estimated £400,000 payment next year, raising the spectre of job losses and operational cuts. "Considering our research is aimed at producing zero-carbon energy, it seems ironic and perverse to clobber us with an extra bill," a senior scientist at the lab said. "We have to use electricity to run the machine and there is no way of getting around that."

And that is different from other businesses how, exactly?

Oh, by the way, you're flogging a dead horse: you may have the largest fusion reactor in Europe but if it actually generated, you know, any electricity then you could offset the costs, eh? But it doesn't.

Another Oxfordshire laboratory, the Diamond synchrotron light source, expects a £300,000 bill under the CRC. A spokesman said the lab hoped to offset the bill by investing in better climate control and motion-sensitive lighting.

Well, that's what the government is telling private businesses to do—why should it not apply to these scientist types?

At the Daresbury laboratory in Cheshire, the CRC bill will worsen financial woes that have forced managers to draft redundancy packages and consider cutting back on equipment. "Science is already struggling here and now we are being charged an additional premium to go about our everyday business while working to address the government's own stated grand challenges in science for the 21st century.," said Lee Jones, an accelerator physicist at the laboratory.

Well, we are all doing that, Lee: after all, some of us have to try to "address the government's own stated grand challenges" for GDP growth over the next five years—also in the face of rising costs and taxes.

So, with all due respect, o science types, you can take your exemption and stuff it up your pontificating arseholes.

The art of letter-writing...

As Bishop Hill points out, someone submitted a partially successful FoI request for the Climategate emails of UAE Chancellor, Brandon Gough. There's not a massive amount of interesting stuff, but the following letter was—I thought—most amusing...

Dear Sir,

I am inquiring about the possibility of employment at the University.

I was recently sacked from my previous job for conspiring to distort company figures. Before that I was fired for gross incompetence and for losing critical corporate data; and before that for attempting to corrupt audits by getting my mates assigned to the role, and for attempting to cover-up my dishonesty by criminally inciting others to delete incriminating files and emails.

I was thinking maybe something in your Climate Research Unit, but I'm concerned I
may be over-qualified.

I also have two convictions for fraud. Is this enough?

Please advise soonest.

Yours Sincerely...

It's funny because it's true...

An Islamic revolution...

One of the defining features of the strictest versions of Islam, as highlighted by Carpsio, is the rulings that imams are asked to make on the tiniest of details.

They happily hold forth on matters like hair dye, whether video phones are ‘permissable’ and how frequently one should shave one’s pwabs—which is a welcome change from our own dear church, which can only answer “coffee or tea?”.

But Carpsio's imagined solution to this mania for religious micromanagement is rather excellent...

In fact, I often dimly wonder if you could spark an Islamic Reformation just by doggedly asking increasingly abstruse questions—is plasticine permissible? Is it allowed for a woman to handle spiders on her period? Can I ride a donkey if I’m wearing shorts? A few thousand questions like that and eventually even the sternest imam is going to throw his hands up and start playing wistful ballads in his mosque like his CofE counterparts, telling his flock to sort their own fucking lives out and, you know, just try to be decent people.

Works for me...

It's funny 'cos it's true

Found at Sim-O's Posterous site...



... and originally (a long time ago) from Finnbar at b3ta. I'm very late with this but it is very funny...

Don't ask me...

To ease ourselves back into this lark, here's a quick post highlighting a couple of Hoby's Road To Nowhere cartoons. The first [click pic to enlarge] is—like the political party to which it refers, a little incomplete and rough around the edges—but I think that it definitely has potential...



The second [click the pic to enlarge] simply made me laugh, since it pretty much sums up what I think about the student protests...



Do wander over to Hoby's place to see more cartoons (or even to hire him): I particularly enjoy the Road To Nowhere strip.

Quote of the Day...

... comes from Juliette's amusing discourse on lads' mags—I just thought that it was quite witty and, crucially at the moment, has absolutely fuck all to do with our political masters.

As for the ‘think of the children’ criticism of lads’ mags - whereby the fairy-like innocence of childhood will be irreversibly corrupted by glimpsing half-naked ladies on the lower shelves of WH Smith – I hate to break it to you, but you’re shutting the stable door after the horse has run off, lived a long happy life, dropped dead of old age and been sold for glue.

Very droll.

Football

This article is classic Daily Mash.

The use of television has been a source of controversy in the sport, but experts insist it offers a fool-proof method for determining whether a team is good at football or whether it is simply a collection of absurdly over-compensated, second-rate commercial brands with ghastly, vulgar wives, locked in a sado-masochistic relationship with a cretinous media that merely reflects a society that has taken its natural intelligence, its sense of perspective and its values and violently drowned them all in a bucket of piss.

Yup, that just about sums it up...

UPDATE: I enjoyed this from NewsArse too.

NASA ‘faked England 1966 World Cup win’

A leading ex-NASA scientist has gone on record to confirm one of the longest-standing conspiracies in the football world: that the American space agency faked footage of the 1966 tournament in order to imply an England win.

Dr Robert Wellington—who worked for the agency throughout the sixties and seventies—spoke out following ongoing speculation on the internet.

“We needed a practice run for the moon thing,” he said, from his home in Florida. “And the soccer world cup seemed just the job. We wanted to see if we could delude an entire nation that they could achieve something that was frankly unimaginable. And it worked perfectly.”

“But we had absolutely no idea that it would become a recurring delusion,” he added.

Enjoy!

Steve Hughes, libertarian comedian

It's somewhat unusual to find anyone in the media who is in any way libertarian—but I suspect that Steve Hughes might well be it...



Very funny: there's some good stuff on his website too...

Broke (un) backed mountains (of cash)

Via Samizdata, here's an amusing and succinct summing up of the current European financial situation, by Australian satirist John Clarke.



I laughed.

Well—to be strictly accurate—I put my head in my hands, moaning "fucking hellski."

And then I laughed.

Sort of...

Voter quote of the day...

... comes from Dick Puddlecote, who was giving a helping hand to Martin Cullip—the Libertarian Party PPC for Sutton and Cheam—on Saturday.

For now, though, a comment from a Sri Lankan Brit which had me at first confused before being doubled up in laughter, deserves a wider audience. He'd read the leaflet and asked about policies. Quite liked them in fact.

He: The thing is, the three main parties are all the same. Who wants to vote for them?
Me: Exactly.
He: I'm going to vote BNP.
Me: BNP? Really?
He: Yes, because if they get in, they will repatriate me out of this bloody country!

And with a wink and a smile, he was off.

Heh.

Adobe is hiring! (Mac users need not apply)

As some will know, Adobe is the software development company that makes such applications as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign—all those applications that professional graphic designers rely on. One such application is Flash and the next release of that application was going to allow programmers to compile Flash applications for the iPhone—only Apple has just scuppered that in their new iPhone OS 4 SDK (which delivers, amongst other things, multi-tasking—eliminating one of my gripes about the iPad).

Incensed, Adobe developer Jim Dowdell tweeted thusly...

I know that a number of good people work at Apple. If you're seeking a more ethical company, Adobe is hiring: adobe.com/aboutadobe/careeropp

Really? Gosh—let's go and have a look at the recruitment page that Jim is pointing those Apple developers to, shall we? Hang on, what's this...? [Emphasis mine.]

Adobe has a new talent acquisition system. This system is optimized for performance on IE 6 or IE 7, running on Windows XP. Unfortunately it is not supported on Firefox, nor is it supported on a Mac at this time.

Way to go, Adobe! Here's a software development company whose "talent acquisition system" software, apparently, doesn't even work on standards-based browsers.

Further, a developer at Adobe—a company which was started by ex-Apple employees and became a big company through, initially, selling Mac-only software—is urging Apple employees to apply for jobs through a system that doesn't support Macs.

Nice one, Jim, you moron.

DISCLAIMER: I own an insignificant number of Apple shares—currently sitting at $241.79...

MPs should be paid less—proved!

The Appalling Strangeness is discussing MPs' salaries and comes to a conclusion that I can entirely agree with.

For £65,000 a year I really do expect our elected officials to do something other than bray like a rabid mob at PMQ's, and traipse through the correct lobby on the instructions of a whip.

£65k a year for what we've got; I honestly believe we could have much better for far less.

And, do you know what? I can prove this theory by means of a simple logical argument...

Because, you see, everyone—including our useless fucking politicos—has been banging on about how bankers have fucked up, right? The conventional wisdom is that these bankers have screwed their employers, and comprehensively fucked the economy, yes? That these bankers were, in fact, utterly fucking useless at their jobs.

Further, there have been howls of protest—not least from our idiot MPs—about the vast salaries and bonuses paid to these bankers. And the bankers do not deserve such vast renumeration because they have totally buggered the economy.

So...

Bankers were possibly the most massively paid people in the country and yet they were fucking crap, right? Therefore, not only do you not get the best by paying massive salaries, you actually get people who are utterly disastrous.

So, this argument that we should pay MPs lots of cash in order to command the best talent is demonstrably false. And, as such, if we want the very best legislators, the amount that we should pay these cunts is only slightly more than fuck all.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

For the love of chips

When I read this story about the government wanting to interfere with the size of chips—found over at JuliaM's place—I was going to write something sweary and exasperated. Fortunately, The Daily Mash got there first.

GORDON Brown last night added the size of chip shop chips to his list of things to dick about with.

As the government's healthy eating experts told chip shops to increase the size of their chips by 32.7%, across the county 58 million people said 'oh for the love of fucking Christ' in perfect unison.

A spokesman for the Food Standards Agency said chips 32.7% bigger than average have less saturated fat, can form part of a balanced diet and blah, blah, fucking blah, his whiny little voice piercing the stillness like a red hot needle of unbelievably annoying dickishness.
...

And Charlie Reeves, a chip eater from Stevenage, said: "What are you doing? Seriously, what do you think you're doing?"

"I've had a hard day at work and I am just trying to have a bag of chips, you utter fucking prick."

He added: "I'm telling you right now - fuck the deficit, the environment, Afghanistan and the NHS. I will vote for whichever politician says this exact sentence - 'Chip shops can serve chips in whatever size they want'.

"I'm so tired."

Meanwhile, in a small cafe in Doncaster, van driver Martin Bishop placed his knife and fork gently next to his plate of haddock and chips, dragged his hands wearily down his face and added: "What? What the fuck is it now?

"Oh Jesus Christ, can I just have my dinner? I'm begging you. Can I just. Please. Have. My fucking. Dinner?"

Do I sense some slight desperation in this Mash article? I think I do. And it can only be because The Daily Mash is a satirical website and this cunting fucking government is now pretty much beyond satire.

And you know what? In order to win the election by a landslide, all David Cameron has to do is to promise (credibly) that this kind of shit will not happen under a Tory government...

...

...

Uh, Dave...? Dave, that was your cue...

Hello...?

Horrible dragon threatens council worker fanstasy land...

More total and utter genius from The Daily Mash—so good that it's tempting to quote the article in its entirety...

A LARGE, terrifying dragon is threatening the magical kingdom of massive pensions where no-one ever gets fired.

The fearful citizens of Council Worker Fantasy Land say they will surely be burned to a crisp by the fire breathing monster unless they receive urgent anti-dragon money from the people of the Real World that exists beyond the buttercup meadow and the four star country house hotel where the magical training days are held.

Since 1997 Council Worker Fantasy Land has been the happiest place in the world, where grade two fairytale princesses and thousands of badly educated left-wing elves live happily alongside magical dwarves who are not allowed to move your wheelie bin more than 38.3cm.

But now the fearsome dragon that has eaten more 300,000 townsfolk who actually had to work for a living, could ravage the blissful community and its enchanted ability to tell other people what to do.

Roy Hobbs, the £225,000 a year chief executive of Council Worker Fantasy Land, said: "Help us o good and generous people of the realm where bad decisions have actual consequences.

"We have spent all our money on magical diversity training and surely now the dragon will eat many thousands of us for his tea, which by the way does not contain five portions of fruit or vegetables and leads us to question his ability to raise young dragons."

But, as it happens, you will have to go over there and read the whole thing. Which you really should do. Really.

Tell us another, Tom!

The hilarious comment of the day comes from Tom Harris MP.

Even in its darkest days, Labour was never short of leadership material at the top of the party.

Your humble Devil had to rise to the bait, and duly left a comment over there (currently awaiting moderation).

Aaaaaahahahahaha! Tell us another!

One might as well say that throughout the 80s, the best person to lead the Labour Party was, apparently, Neil "Welsh windbag" Kinnock! And the man who took over from him—John Smith—was the idiot who basically lost Kinnock the 1992 election by insisting on publishing his good old, 1970s Labour, tax 'n' spend policies.

Cameron may be a slippery and massively-foreheaded nincompoop with al of the principles of a particularly unprincipled cad, but at least the idea of him representing Britain abroad is not actually laughable. The idea of the godawful, corrupt coward Kinnock representing British interests abroad was quite simply ludicrous.

So, we packed him off to a job that didn't matter—on the EU Commission—where the Welsh git immediately distinguished himself by being one of the most talentless and corrupt people in a distinguished group of talentless and corrupt people.

Or were you thinking of some other "darkest days" for Labour?

DK

Actually, of course, I took that line out of context—because the next line is possibly funnier...

Even in its darkest days, Labour was never short of leadership material at the top of the party. The same is still true.

Yes, Tom Harris is saying that there are just hundreds of great potential leaders in the Labour Party right now! Aaaaahahahahahaha!

I mean, we could look at the calibre of the fucknuts and arseholes in the Labour Party just now—the brothers Miliband, Harriet "jailbird" Harman, Ed Balls, etc.—and have a good laugh, but I think that there is a better comment on this.

Via Iain Dale, I found this blog post by Greg Pope (Labour MP). [Emphasis mine.]

... then [the "cabal surrounding Gordon Brown"] ensured that Gordon was crowned leader rather than elected (along with others I spent some time in early 2007 seeing if we could get enough Labour MPs to nominate any serious contender to take on Gordon. We got just about the requisite number of names but we couldn't find a member of the cabinet who dared take on Gordon's people for fear of what they would do...

Yes, that is the quality of leadership in the Labour Party at present, Tom: a bunch of people who were so principled—whose sheets were so unsoiled—that they dared not take on a malevolent, one-eyed cunt whom at least one senior Labour minister thought would be "a fucking disaster as Prime Minister".

And you think that the Tories are badly off, Tom? Well, they are—Cameron is a fucking muppet—but to say that the Labour Party has never been in a situation so bad is, quite simply, ludicrous—and self-delusional.

Christmas blog post of the year 2009...

... has to be Chris Dillow's learned analysis of the economic fallacies and cognitive biases in popular pop songs, e.g.

Let’s move to Cheryl Cole [YouTube]:

Anything that's worth having
Is sure enough worth fighting for
Quitting's out of the question
When it gets tough, gotta fight some more

The first two lines are acceptable. But the last two, surely, are not. Except in cases of severe duress, which Mrs C is not addressing, quitting can never be out of the question. Sometimes, when it gets tough, quitting is the right thing to do. To think otherwise is to commit the sunk cost fallacy.

It's a genius post of dry wit that made me laugh out loud several times. And the comments are pretty excellent too...