Photo of the Day - A First Class Miracle on the Hudson

"Has anyone noticed the ugly reality captured in the so-called “Miracle on the Hudson”? One of the first photos shows that first class passengers were offered first-class rafts to ensure that they’d survive in comfort, while the economy class passengers were forced out onto the metal wings to fend for themselves..."




The sad thing that I noticed was that none of the peons herded onto the wings had clambered over to the c*nts on the raft and started beating the shit out of them

Maybe that's why they don't let you take nail scissors on flights any more


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The Feckless Unemployed

I've just spent ten minutes typing out a response to question someone asked me underneath an earlier post and, f*** it, that makes it long enough to be a post of its own...

Anon - 05 January 2009 13:00

Stef, what do you make of this statement? (something I hear quite a lot in certain social circles):

Although it is true, there was a whole program on BBC dedicated to it. I said that we don't do the jobs on average as well as they do. That's not opinion, that's fact. There are plenty of stats flying around about workforce productivity in the labour market comparative to earlier years. A trip to Google might suffice.

The jobs will likely be filled at one point or another, although I wouldn't expect it to be the kind of speed at which they were taken a year ago. The sad truth is that a British citizen can quite effortlessly gain 15k a year through benefits, so why earn 11k at subway and have to work for it? Unemployment has far too many benefits, no pun intended.

As for those who are employed, take builders for example... It's pretty common knowledge that if you want an excellent individual job done you don't employ British labour. It's par to say the least, where as the foreigners really earn their money and do a great job (talking averages here), and do it a lot cheaper.

The absence of the immigrants means that we're not going to be filling jobs as fast, we're going to lose out on productivity, and it's going to waste money for corporations. Be that on recruitment, productivity, employment (maternity rights, anyone?), and general service. And that affects our economy.

A lot of people slate the Polish for reasons they don't understand, but they were actually a great benefit to our nation - and they expect very little.

Stef - 05 January 2009 14:32

There's a lot of talk in the press about one group of benefit scroungers, the 'feckless' unemployed, and fuck all talk about another group of benefit scroungers, exploitative employers, who can get away with paying shit wages and benefits because the shortfall in what they give their staff is picked up by the welfare state

The DSS, that would be the rest of us, effectively subsidises lousy companies

So maybe, just maybe, a large part of the problem is not that the benefits are too high but that the wages are too low

Anxiety Culture

It's also worth remembering that the expression 'productivity improvement' is largely a euphemism for paying people less money to produce more output

Maybe you could argue that was a good thing if that money made was reinvested in productive infrastructure or paid out in dividends to the people who took the risks and created the jobs in the first place.

What usually happens in practice is that the financial benefits of 'productivity improvements' are trousered by senior management who have no problem with paying people more to do less; provided they are the people being paid more and doing less

By any measure, income inequalities in the UK have increased over the last 10-15 years off the back of this kind of mentality

And, as well as being inequitable, it's unsustainable because, sooner or later, once you've ripped off ordinary people past a certain level they can no longer afford to buy the goodies that make your system go round. They can start borrowing, of course, but that can only work for so long; as we're currently in the process of finding out

People forget now but about 10-15 years ago the press was full of talk of a 'leisure bonus', as new technologies promised to reduce the amount of time people would need to spend at work.

Fifteen years on and now we're being told that we won't be able to afford ever to retire

What happened?

Imagine for a moment you're a member of the Evil Overlord class. Can you imagine anything worse than the prospect of the plebs having more free time on their hands and becoming financially independent?

Fuck that

Think about the kind of useless jobs so many of us are engaged in. Jobs that offer no real benefit to society as a whole and absolutely no sense of satisfaction or self-worth to the people doing them.

Anxiety Culture

The Evil Overlord class would have us believe that any job, however pointless and soul destroying, is worth having just for its own sake

Bollocks to that

It's also worth pondering upon the fact that the vast majority of jobs people would identify as being intrinsically worthwhile and offering a sense of self-worth to the people doing them usually sit at the bottom of society's pay scales. And, speaking as someone who's held down a couple of highish paying jobs in his time, I can absolutely guarantee that higher pay is absolutely in no way intrinsically linked to high ability, high intelligence, high integrity or high commitment

Migrants play along with this shit because they're economically desperate and easily exploited. Neither of these qualities strike me as something we should be encouraging in our society; however profitable they may be for The Few

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Plus ça change pt231

Some classic Retroloonery from Harry H. Corbett, who really gets going about two minutes in...

...from a visual gag featuring a bag of underpants falling on someone's head to talk about the machine-gunning of trade unionists in the space of 60 seconds. British comedy was certainly different back then. Certain other things clearly haven't changed at all

Steptoe and Son was, of course, miles funnier when you found out that the two actors really did hate each other

cf. "In 1976 as Prime Minister, Wilson wished to have Corbett awarded an OBE, but the middle initial "H" was lost in the bureaucratic process, and the award went to the Sooty puppeteer Harry Corbett instead."



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Bah Humbug

Like all intelligent people, I greatly dislike Christmas. It revolts me to see a whole nation refrain from music for weeks together in order that every man may rifle his neighbour’s pockets under cover of a ghastly general pretence of festivity. It is really an atrocious institution, this Christmas. We must be gluttonous because it is Christmas. We must be drunken because it is Christmas. We must be insincerely generous; we must buy things that nobody wants, and give them to people we don’t like; we must go to absurd entertainments that make even our little children satirical; we must writhe under venal officiousness from legions of freebooters, all because it is Christmas – that is, because the mass of the population, including the all-powerful middle-class tradesman, depends on a week of license and brigandage, waste and intemperance, to clear off its outstanding liabilities at the end of the year.

- George Bernard Shaw


An interesting man, Shaw, and a nice example of how, if you're not careful, pursuing a lifelong belief in social justice and equality can end up with you supporting, and making excuses for, some right shits

Still, it's better than having the Tories back in power...

Shaw was also flat wrong about the 'all powerful middle-class tradesman', who have never been any more powerful than they have been permitted to be

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Global Financial Crisis to Engulf Us All - Chavs to Blame

This little teaser in the Times On-Line just caught my eye...




Imagine my disappointment on clicking the link to discover that the article in question wasn't referring to the billions looted over the years by the likes of the Windsors and Rothschilds but was a dreary article about how ghastly the working and middle class unemployed are

In true hyperlink fashion, whilst reading through that piece of distractive shit, yet another teaser caught my eye...



Well, that was definitely going to include some Rothschilds

er, no, not really...

The Top Ten Richest People Ever

So, over to the Forbes Top 200 Wealthiest People of All Time from which the Top Ten were taken

Nope, still no joy

And then, tucked away as a note at the bottom of the Forbes List...

"It is widely known that the DuPont, Forbes and Rothschild families are among the wealthiest families. However, their fortunes have not yet been effectively calculated"

Actually, whoever wrote that footnote was being quite modest, as I could rattle off the names of at least a dozen other people (all bankers) who should have been included in the list

So, that would be the 'Forbes Not Really the Top 200 Wealthiest People of All Time as we've missed out some of the richest bastards ever, including our own founder' list then

The moral of the tale?

Quite a few people have an opinion about losers like this...




A considerably smaller number of people have an opinion about, or even know about the existence of, twunts like this...




Now why would that be?

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We're all terrorists now pt 534

Well, it's been a busy old week for the Guardian's home affairs editor Alan Travis

On Tuesday he wrote an article which revealed that...

"A Whitehall counter-terrorism unit is targeting the BBC and other media organisations as part of a new global propaganda push designed to "taint the al-Qaida brand", according to a secret Home Office paper seen by the Guardian."

(Lord Patel has already posted on this story and whilst the news is not particularly surprising it is depressing to see confirmation that there are publicly-funded astrotrufing twunts out there who think in terms of brands rather than ideologies - the same kind of bloodless sociopathic twunts who started the Al Qaida 'brand' in the first place)



And last Thursday Alan wrote an absolute corker which revealed that

"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 classified report concludes that domestic Islamic Terrorists are...

- not religious (!?)
- not mental
- not stupid
- ethnically diverse

In fact, the only thing they all appear to have in common is that they have shit jobs

There's no reason to think that MI5 are leaking this stuff to Alan simply because he's a nice guy. So, it's only sensible to conclude that there are some twisted, Machiavellian reasons for doing so

In the case of the terrorist profiling story it would seem to be just another step in the process of gradually expanding the public perception of what constitutes a terrorist to include anyone with a loose tongue who's fucked off with the state of the country and has a shit job - which by this time next year should cover about 20 or 30 million people

There's the distinct possibility of a class war looming on the horizon and virtually everyone is going to be invited

And even though the terrorist profiling story is deliberately leaked Mi5 bollocks, it's still a slap in the face for all the supposedly left wing and progressive commentators and bloggers out there who have been faithfully parroting any old establishment crap about the nature of the TERROR threat whilst posturing as legitimate opposition to that establishment

All in all, a handy little link to refer to next time you encounter some twunt posing as a passionate opponent of the encroachment on our civil liberties, whilst at the same time putting the boot into Muslims for somehow being responsible for all the shit that's going down

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Loving 'It'

This discarded magazine caught my eye on the tube the other day…


There are a few titles with a similar look and feel knocking around these days, though I’ve never actually seen anyone reading them. They turn up in doctors’ waiting rooms, hairdressers and lying around on public transport

A few of us Conspiraloons have discussed this peculiar publishing genre in the past without coming up with any concrete answers about what they’re all about.

You could argue that they’re simply the modern day manifestation of the ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ of the 19th Century and before; crafted to meet a basic human desire for a little death porn and the simple, honest pleasure that can be had from reading about other peoples’ misfortunes – the more fucked up and bizarre the better

An early edition of 'Take a Break' magazine - featuring 'Real Life and Celebrity Stories' from the mid 15th century - and a piss easy crossword

But the big difference between these modern magazines and what went before is the way they’re presented – all bright and colourful, with a cover picture of a smiling attractive woman and titles like ‘Take a Break’, 'Pick Me Up' and ‘Love It!’

Love It!?…

‘I’ve wanted to kill myself over marriage split’

‘A can of cola put me in a coma’

‘Cheating hubby was branded a rapist’

Love It!??

WTF is 'It' when 'It's' at home?

'Love it!' ... for optimum effect, best read whilst under the influence of some additive-packed snack product or doctor-prescribed anti-depressant - that should fuck your up brain nicely

Week in week out reams of this stuff is published with a consistent mix of mutilation, death, betrayal and misery; presented in the same cheery format, very carefully aimed at a particular segment of the general public.

No, I don’t pretend to know what it’s all about but the combination of the pathologically morbid with the cheerful visuals reeks of having a deliberately disconcerting psychological impact – the kind of fucked up shit those cheeky chappies over at Tavistock famously pioneered. It's hard to believe that such an unmistakable and frequently-used format is being applied by chance.

Now that's what I call a 'Pick Me Up' - A sinister manifestation of psychological class warfare? or simply profitable bollocks? or both?

Who knows what’s going on? Maybe someone is deliberately fucking with working class women’s heads or maybe this stuff really does just sell well

Whatever, it creeps me out big time

and remember, it's only subliminal if you don't notice...

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