Monthly Archives: September 2010

Politics, United Kingdom

Labour leadership election: A message to voters

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The battle over which New Labour apparatchik will lead a lame duck Labour Party to resounding defeat next election is in its death throes.

Peter Mandelson as DavrosThe party regards it as being of utmost importance to elect a leader who will show as little sign as possible of varying from the widely popular and well-loved New Labour programme that every single voter in Britain, particularly the Labour ones, showed their appreciation for last election. This leader can then be taken out and shot when they lose the next election.

It is understood that a token left-winger is running, so that the party can feel ideological diversity is appropriately patronised. Take care not to vote for this person under any circumstances.

Some have spoken of trying to understand why so many voters wanted to fucking kill both Blair and Brown with their bare hands, and suggested that Labour should perhaps avoid doing those things next time, or at least, showing appropriately marketable sensitivity, say they were. You will be pleased to know that they are firmly onside with the programme in its broad sweep.

The important point for all party members to keep in mind is that Peter Mandelson is to be reelected as Grand Vizier and esteemed advisor. You know it makes sense. To victory!

Religion, United Kingdom

Don’t mention Belgium, says Catholic Church

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KINGDOM OF HEAVEN ON EARTH, Holy Prepuce, Monday (Vatican Rag) — The cost of the Pope’s visit to Britain this week will be outweighed by the moral benefits, said the Church, not mentioning Belgium.

Gay Pope Benedict“Nobody knows anything about religion in the UK,” said Jack Valero, the spokesman for Opus Dei in Britain. “They keep going on about institutional corruption and systematic abuse of the vulnerable. It’s as if they don’t want to talk about spirituality at all! Obviously, the bigotry against the Pope’s visit is motivated by anti-Irish racism.”

Mr Valero insisted that the four-day event was a “great coup” for the British government that would bring “huge prestige and kudos. I can’t tell you how privileged you are to pay twenty million pounds to protect such a revered and respected figure. Just think of the crowds of tourists! By the way, we’ve got tickets cheap. I can give you a bunch. Over eighteens only, obviously.”

“We were rather disappointed he isn’t coming to Wales,” said Collette Owen, head of Bangor’s Our Lady Roman Catholic Primary School. “I mean, the raping children bit, that’s annoying. I do wish people wouldn’t bang on about it so — you’d think it was the most important thing about the Catholic church. And the bit where every single Catholic church in Belgium, with no exceptions, had a priest molesting children. But that would never happen here, I’m sure of it. No Catholic churchgoer supports that sort of thing. Except by giving them money and showing up every Sunday to be counted as members of the Church and give them the strength of numbers. How dare you imply we should be at all ashamed to sign ourselves up with kiddiefuckers. Bigot! Bigot!”

The Vatican offered last year to welcome into the Catholic fold discontented Anglican traditionalists who felt small and controlled amounts of raping children was reasonable, as long as they said they were very sorry afterwards.

Health, United Kingdom

NHS budget in parking-led recovery

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HOLDING PEN, Knacker’s Yard, Sunday (NTN) — The government has carefully balanced the NHS budget using parking fees. “The NHS remains free at the point of contact,” said health minister Simon Burns. “But we didn’t say anything about getting to the point of contact.”

In 2009, Labour health secretary Andy Burnham promised to scrap the fees. He also promised to eliminate MRSA, help alleviate the symptoms of cancer with regular use, fit anyone who asked with new robot limbs and a forehead-mounted laser cannon, square the circle and make Labour sound reelectable.

But Mr Burns said this was not a U-turn. “It’s more of a sideways shuffle, like the road sign where the car’s tracks actually cross. We practiced that manoeuvre for quite some time in opposition, so you could reap the benefit.”

NHS trusts will be able to decide individually whether to offer parking free or to continue the charges and make another £100 million that year. “I’m sure we can expect them to do the right thing.”

Mr Burns emphasised the role of the tax system in properly motivating people to health. “Parking fees are vital in keeping people away from clostridium difficile and the awful café snacks.” He also spoke of the “underappreciated” role of homeopathy in the NHS, particularly homeopathic quantities of funding.

Defence, Entertainment, Technology, United States

US military bans icky nasty game

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SLIGHT INDISPOSITION STAR, Communal States of America, Saturday (NTN) — Medal of Honor, a popular video game that lets you play as the unAmerican team, has been banned from US military bases as “insensitive.”

After moral panics, including from UK Defense Secretary Liam Fotherington-Thomas — who issued official condemnation of the game as “horrid” — US military officials decided not to stock the game in the nearly 300 base exchange shops.

“This game is disgusting and violent,” said Maj. Gen. Bruce Casella, “and gives the impression that our actions in Afghanistan involve dangerous weaponry and people getting hurt. We cannot risk such appalling propaganda reaching our lovely soldiers and their delicate psyches.”

General Casella announced a new version of America’s Army, in which US soldiers go to the fictional country of Wartornistan, and sing songs, dance to psychedelic rock and paint flowers on tanks. Usually opium poppies.

Electronic Arts, makers of Medal of Honor, responded with plans to make a version of America’s Army in which you can play either the hippies or the troops at Kent State.

Media, Religion, United Kingdom

Terry Jones burns Times paywall at Ground Zero

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DESOLATION BOULEVARDE, Whopping, Friday (Mediocre Grauniad) — Terry Jones has called off his plans to burn a copy of The Times at Ground Zero tomorrow, after the paywall caught alight for half an hour on Friday afternoon.

Rupert Murdoch as GollumJones had planned to burn The Times because, he claimed, Rupert Murdoch would not rest until he had paywalled all of Google, including the remarkably lucrative Monty Python channel on YouTube. However, he was “rethinking” his plans after approximately everyone in the whole world suggested that just because it was legal might not actually make it a very good idea.

“We have made a deal with the thirty-three journalists still trapped down in the newspaper,” he said. “They will come out and Caitlin Moran will publicly recant her idiot piece from a few months ago about what an excellent idea the paywall was and how enormously pleased she was to be stuck behind it. Oh, didn’t you read that?”

The journalists have been trapped down the shaft since the first of July, and are being dribbled readers through a straw to keep them alive and focused and make them think there’s a point to being there.

“Of course, failing a recantation there will be a paywall conflagration that reaches the skies. All those lovely theoretical readers disappearing in a cloud of soot and cement dust! But I’m sure it’ll hardly be noticed and no-one will be upset.”

The “newspaper” was an ancient form of information distribution using cellulose pulp from crunched-up trees. It was popular in the early days of Google, when users would send written requests to the company enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope and receive a reading list to take to their library, with an advertising flyer also enclosed.

Entertainment, Europe

Plagiarism is not plagiarism, says plagiarist

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LA CARTE, Le territoire, Wednesday (Le Monde Petit) — Michel Houellebecq has angrily denounced as “incompetents” anyone noticing that large chunks of his latest novel Messieurs, démarrez vos photocopieurs were directly lifted from Wikipedia.

The book, published last week, was acclaimed as a “work of genius” by the newspaper Libération. “Specifically,” it noted, “other people’s genius.”

“If these people really think that passing off other people’s work as one’s own is ‘plagiarism,'” said Mr Houellebecq, “they haven’t got the first notion of what literature is. Taking other people’s stuff and making money from it is part of my method. It’s a form of beauty, money.”

Unlike his previous books, the new one contains no attacks on Islam and no overt misogyny, though it does note that BUSH IS GAY LOLOLOL.[citation nécessaire] However, its neutrality and notability have been questioned.

“Using a big word like ‘plagiarism’ always causes some damage,” he complained. “There will now be people who think I’m the sort of person who takes other people’s work uncredited, just because I take other people’s work uncredited.”

Mr Houellebecq has angrily withdrawn from publicity for the novel to concentrate on his next original work, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

Health, United Kingdom

Junior doctors inexplicably run screaming from medical hellholes

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SHIPMAN TEACHING HOSPITAL, University of Crippen, Monday (NTNHS) — Nearly a quarter of English junior doctors drop out of their NHS training after two years of shovelling twice the shit in half the time with no guidance or funding. The government blamed Europe.

The EU Working Time Directive means that junior doctors are no longer free, as independent individuals, to work any 120 hours a week they choose, with patients reaping the full benefit of being prescribed medication by someone who is hallucinating that they are a giant psychedelic rabbit carrying a watermelon gun.

Of those who did want to continue, 22 per cent were not accepted by NHS trusts, which was obviously their own faults for not getting out there and gathering one-on-one mentoring while they wandered deserted hospital corridors at 3am.

The British Medical Association said the issue was high workloads and no consultants available to supervise. The government said there was no evidence of this, because they had taken care not to gather it.

“It’s inexplicable that so many people who have wanted to be doctors since they were three get into a hospital after years of study and quit, just because they discover that every individual moment of the job is shit and the best they can look forward to is being glorified technical support and telling sick people they’re fat for the rest of their lives, and spending the other two-thirds of their time covering someone’s arse or doing paperwork,” said the Department of Health. “It’s definitely Brussels at fault.

“But I can assure you that there will be no return to tired doctors working excessive hours. Any doctor you encounter will be fully alert from working only the proper hours allowed by law, should you ever be so lucky as to find one.”

Religion, Science, United Kingdom

Hawking’s statement of the bloody obvious betrays lack of theological understanding

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THE RUPTURE, Tower of Art, Friday (NotScientist) — Stephen Hawking’s claims that no God was required to create the Earth six thousand years ago, and moreover that it is round, are trivially ignorant and heretical.

Large Hardon Black HoleHe betrays the shallowness of his theological understanding with the sentence: “Look, you drooling idiots, we can see across the universe and smaller than atoms, revealing unimaginable wonder and beauty over billions of years. Your superstitions have been irrelevant to actual science that works for four centuries now, and are a jawdropping waste of time for anyone with greater mental acuity than a rock. Haven’t you some altar boys to rape?” The logical ambiguity of this claim is trivially obvious: he fails to make clear what he means by the word “time” — deep time? Lunch time? Time, gentlemen? Such sloppy thinking reveals the essential frivolity of his notions and clearly demonstrates the flat nature of the Earth and that it is six thousand years old. He has also completely failed to specify the precise variety of rock in question.

Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explanation — that would be disprovable and might embarrass us later. Belief in God is belief in an intelligent living agent which everything depends on even though it’s undetectable. Which just goes to show how clever God is. He can make 2+2=5 and get away with putting advertising on the BBC as well. Thought Of The Day, don’t you know. The concept of non-overlapping magisteria clearly demonstrates that science has nothing to say about religion, and never mind that religion insists on saying things about science.

It is obvious to anyone with an idée fixe that physics claiming the universe is an entirely natural thing explainable by science is completely inadequate to satisfy the demands of upset monkeys for an answer which actually works in the real world but somehow does not conflict with their prejudices. It cannot answer why there is something rather than nothing, any more than it can explain why water makes the personal, volitional, moral decision to be wet. Also, you should come to church more. And take priests’ opinions on science seriously. And give us money. Hawking wouldn’t get away with this rubbish for a moment if the Inquisition was about, mark my words.

Politics, United Kingdom

Tony Blair confesses to bore crimes

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THE MEMORY WHOLE, London SW1A 1AA, Wednesday (NTN) — Tony Blair’s memoir, Seven Hundred Pages Of Tedious Equivocation, has caused mass outbreaks of violent ennui and destroyed the minds of the few remaining people who care.

The carnage has been truly numbing. Blair has expressed his “anguish” and “regret” at the millions who, having thought he was finally gone and they wouldn’t have to think about him or his party waddling about like a headless chicken that couldn’t really be bothered in any way whatsoever ever, ever again, had had their desire to evade his tree-killing atrocities thwarted by its serial rewriting in all newspapers, desperate to fill space in the silly season.

But he insists the 2010 publication was the right thing to do. “When I say I think about my awful book and Peter’s awful book and their consequences and their victims every day of my life, it is true; but more than that, I use that reflection to recommit to a sense of purpose in the bigger affair, a business yet unfinished: getting paid repeatedly for the same ghostwritten guff. I can’t say sorry in words; I can only hope to redeem something from the tragedy of stupefaction, something like continued public prominence and remarkably lucrative speakers’ fees.

“I deeply regret the British public’s failure to realise how right and justified I was in everything I did, all of which was absolutely correct. I am now beyond the mere expression of compassion. But you knew that.

“Also, Gordon is a moron. I know he’s a moron. Gordon is a moron. Gordon is a moron, Gordon is a moron.”