Lifespan: 48 seconds

The only surprise is that the Guardian hasn't called for UN intervention...meeeow!

Why we don't listen...

Read Jonathan Alder's perfect deconstruction of the global warmists here.

Freaks

I found this story about a woman who aborted a child and had a hysterectomy to keep from 'polluting the planet' on Drudge...which is my way of pointing out that I don't spend a lot of time on the Daily Mail website...and had a "Madame Butterfly" moment (you know, the one that comes halfway through the final aria) when I shouted "SO DIE ALREADY!!" at the computer screen, much to the alarm of my work mates.

While this self-possessed, homicidal maniac alone provides adequate justification for Taunton and the surrounding area to be vapourised (I can add several other legitimate reasons), the least that someone who would utter these words...

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35.

"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

...can do is top themself. Now. But it's not really all about that, is it Toni. Making the ultimate sacrifice to 'save the planet'. It's about much more than that, or much less actually.

"I've never doubted that I made the right decision. Ed and I married in September 2002, and have a much nicer lifestyle as a result of not having children.

"We love walking and hiking, and we often go away for weekends.

"Every year, we also take a nice holiday - we've just come back from
South Africa.

"We feel we can have one long-haul flight a year, as we are vegan
and childless, thereby greatly reducing our carbon footprint and combating over-population.

"My only frustration is that other people are unable to accept my decision.

"When I tell people why I don't want children, they look at me as if I was planning to commit murder."

Planning? Errr...you've already accomplished that you vapid, selfish slag. She, the other nauseating cow in the article and both their neutered partners need to have one last long-haul flight off the top of Swiss Re tower on a windy day.

Good thing there's no emergency!

This would be funny if it weren't so....oh, wait!....this is funny. Very funny. What a completely fucked institution the EU is.

Ban this...

Compared to his predecessor, Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-Moon is but a puny amateur in the sweepstakes of sleaze. Though I guess we ought to give him time, this interesting tidbit has surfaced which shows how much he has in common with the egregious Annan. Only days after telling us in no uncertain terms that unless we pony up the big money we're all gonna fry, come news that the UN has been...err, economical...with the truth about the previous "we're all gonna die!!" global catastrophe: HIV/AIDS: (emphasis mine)

The United Nations' top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week
that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic,
which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N.
documents prepared for the announcement. AIDS remains a devastating public
health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic........Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

"There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda," said Helen Epstein, author of "The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS." "I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way."

Hmm. Sounds familiar.

Call it what it is: corruption of the worst kind...

Devil's Kitchen has more here on the truly alarming scandal of government-funded "charities" and "NGO's". I will write more on this at the weekend, but it is time that pressure is put on the MSM to either cover this in-depth or own up to their complicity in this eye-wateringly deep level of cynical corruption. The government should fall on this issue alone, and Brown, Blair...the whole lot of 'em marched off to a soccer stadium somewhere.

Dirty little secrets...

I have been seeing more and more about this lately but EU Referendum: The noose tightens really gets the goods on NGOs and how they are financed by the European Union to lobby the European Union to give legitimacy and support to EU initiatives under the heading of 'popular support'. This should scare you witless.

I'm melting, melting!!

Environment Agency chief Lady Young does her best here to convince the public that she is a gin-soaked crone who let her Prozac prescription lapse (quite irresponsibly). It seems that the global warmists are becoming more transparently shrill and hysterical...is that possible??...and at the same time more 'monotone' as if they realise that the 'debate is over' crap is, well....over.

Nurse!!!

Honey, Get the Charger...

One of the truisms of parenthood - which makes little sense to the childless - is that you have the innate ability to hear your own child's cry in a room full of other children. And so it is with electronic devices.

I was in the changing room tonight in preparation for my regular Monday training session...the sport remains nameless...having arrived late. I was alone in the room, a typical school gym changing room, when I heard the plaintive mumble of a Blackberry set to 'vibrate' mode.

I thought for a second...'didn't I leave mine up in the main hall?'...then could tell instantly by the sound it was not mine after all. Though in this case, I am not certain who is the child and who the parent.

A Disturbing Lack of Perspective

Although I am generally a fan of 'all things Boris', our MP for Henley is spending way too much time with Zac 'I have all this money so I must be relevant' Goldsmith. His slightly disturbing paean to eugenics in today's Telegraph demonstrates one of the Great British Vanities: we live shoulder to shoulder inside the M25, so the whole world must be like this. (Sort of like those other vanities: Britons are more culturally aware, better-travelled and read more).

It's easy to believe, living in SE England that humans are literally crawling over each other all over the planet. But painting a picture of unfettered human growth, as he does saying 211,000 new people are born every day, is completely potty when you leave out the OTHER statistic: 153,000 die in that same day. The FACT of the matter is that every person alive today on this planet will fit inside of France with 10 square meters per person. Hysterical, bed-wetting articles like this one do nothing to advance the debate on population growth.

Just as disturbing are the myriad comments from nutcases who seem to get all their opinions from sci-fi movies like 'Soylent Green' and 'The Matrix'.

The 'global warmist' Gaia religious freaks and crypto-Nazis need to put their money where their mouth is and lead the de-population movement.....by doing us all a favour and going first.

We'll be right behind you. Soon. Promise.

I want my money back

If this story from the Guardian is true, that the BBC has "tens of millions of pounds" available to put the effing Lonely Planet guides online, then I want to know what the bleeding hell they need a license fee for?

Thanks, but I'm going to anyway...

This is good. The fact that a person's right to defend himself is even in question is not.

Thy Master's Bidding

Although Dizzy has covered the issue well here, now would be a good time to remember how the City's corporate governance guidelines operate in "The Combined Code: Principles of Good Governance and Code of Best Practice."

As the chickens come home to roost after ten years of economic sleight-of-hand, juggling the stats, cooking the books and outright lies, we are reminded that were the Labour government an accountable institution (ie, to its constituents/shareholders) Gordon Brown's move to PM might not have been so easy to manage.

This issue was raised before during the Blair/Brown coup succession and damn if I can't remember by who, but the gist of it is the Higgs Report rules of corporate governance for the City states:

The Code’s overall aim is to enhance board effectiveness and to improve investor confidence by raising standards of corporate governance. Its main features are:

• ........

• the separation of the roles of the chairman and the chief executive to be reinforced;
  
• a chief executive should not go on to become chairman of the same company;

The point being that a person in a position of responsibility for the financial performance of a company - and it's reporting - should not move into a position of authority over his successor for the simple reason that it is far too easy to cover up past misdeeds. A situation we have now with Gordon Brown and his very own personal Renfield, Alastair Darling.

It couldn't happen to a nicer country

It seems that Belgium, in the throes of dissolution has found a buyer on eBay, and while that may not be a bad thing all round, the people at eBay decided the deal was off since the site "cannot host the sale of anything virtual or unrealistic". In the words of James Taranto, "We've been to Belgium, and that's a pretty good description of the place".

Never one around when you need it

If there was a functioning semblance of a conservative opposition in this country they would see the massive clusterfuck of personal debt, mortgage flameouts and this as reported by the Telegraph as the wellspring of angry voter discontent and ride it to overwhelming victory. But fuck me if there's not.

When people are trapped between a state education system that looks like it was dreamt up by a particularly vicious sadist and a private system that can't keep up with demand, tempers will rise. When the "opposition" response is to threaten to tax your holidays out of existence, they will not rise to your benefit.

Drunks 'should pay for treatment'

With a headline that, in context, could charitably be called 'unfortunate', the BBC presents us with what the LibDems consider to be a meaningful health care policy.

How do these people manage to get elected?

The Lights Are On, But No One's Home....

In comments to digital industry trade journal NMA (sorry no link, subscription content), Jane Lighting, CEO of broadcast tat-merchant Five, makes it crystal clear why she is running a second-rate afterthought of a television channel that few people can get and fewer people watch:

The chief executive of broadcaster Five has hit out at the lack of regulation surrounding the rise of Google as a competitor to media companies.

Jane Lighting told NMA that if the company was a traditional broadcaster then it wouldn't have escaped regulation. And she warned that it was almost too late for anyone to put the brakes on the rise of the search giant as a dominant player in the media market.

"Google is clearly an incredibly powerful company," Lighting said. "It has a very substantial share of the advertising sector and it has a hell of a lot of leverage.

"If you had a broadcaster with that kind of leverage there would be all sorts of regulations. You couldn't have that much leverage in one place in terms of ad monies," she added.

Clearly new to this internet thing, she attempts to redeem herself by demonstrating her monkey-grip on the bleeding obvious,

"By the time Google is regulated, it will be too late, is my ultimate feeling. It's growing too fast for that so I think the market's going to do what the market's going to do."

You don't say! Markets are funny that way. And it may seem strange that someone in her position would be totally oblivious to the events of the last twelve or so years, but I have had much direct experience with mainstream broadcasters and can tell you they live in a world all their own. It's just at the junction of the small and large intestine, as demonstrated by this dazzling bit of analysis:

Lighting claimed that companies like Google escaped regulation because the competition authorities considered it too hard to take on.

"I do find it strange that we have broadcast regulation all over the place on the basis that it comes into people's homes, and then we have this other thing called the web that, because it's rather difficult to regulate, we [simply] let it get on with it," said Lighting.

Bad regulators!! Bad, lazy regulators! Can an upward career move to the BBC be far behind for Jane?