No Mandate Brown brought his rump cabinet to Birmingham yesterday for the first exciting installment of his tour of what he refers to as “the regions”.

Is it a co-incidence that the Met Office subsequently issues the following warning?

There is a moderate risk of a severe weather event affecting Wales, Southwest England, parts of the West Midlands, Northwest England, Southwest Scotland and Northern Ireland

Perhaps we should start calling him Arthur Dent (see Agrajag) …

Technorati Tags: Gordon Brown

As far as economics goes, America sneezes and the world catches a cold.

America has the flu, the world is about to contract pneumonia.

The two biggest mortage lenders in the US which, between them, have either loaned or guaranteed half of all American mortgages are being temporarily nationalised.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have underwritten around six trillion dollars of mortgages between them and have $1.6 trillion of debt outstanding.  They made a combined loss of around $14bn in the last 12 months.

This will hit every economy on the planet.  We are all, in a word, fucked.

Technorati Tags: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Economy

Why are the BBC expending huge amounts of money covering the US election circus, over 3 months before the election actually takes place?

Let’s face it, no matter which side wins, America will be run by a fundamentalist christian nutjob.  Which fundamentalist christian nutjob happens to win is largely irrelevant and that’s why I stand by my previous pledge that Wonko’s World will remain a …

Technorati Tags: Elections, USA

Harridan Harperson has been telling the BBC, in her usual condescending manner, what a simply marvelous idea it is to spend £200m of taxpayers money paying deposits for people who can’t afford to buy a house and bailing out people who can’t afford to pay their mortgages while we’ve just entered into a recession.

Of course, the money won’t go to undeserving people who borrowed irresponsibly – it will go to “decent families” who need help.  The “decent families” is a very important part of this latest social engineering exercise, she said it about 5 times.  There’s no word on what a “decent family” is just yet but I’m sure Harridan Harperson will tell us what qualifies you for being a “decent family” rather than an indecent family so we can all strive to meet her exacting standards.

Technorati Tags: Harriet Harman, Recession

There’s nothing like getting your priorities right and this is nothing like getting your priorities right.

The Campaign for Plain English has convinced Tesco to change the wording of its “10 items or less” because it’s grammatically incorrect.  They quite rightly point out that when you know the quantity then it is grammatically correct to say “10 items or fewer“.  But what the hell has this got to do with making things easier to understand?  Is there any English speaker in the world that wouldn’t understand what “10 items or less” means?

Here are a couple of quotes from their website:

What is Plain English Campaign?

We are an independent organisation fighting against jargon, gobbledygook and other confusing language, while promoting crystal-clear language. We are based in New Mills, Derbyshire, in England.

What is plain English?

We define plain English as writing that the intended audience can read, understand and act upon the first time they read it. Plain English takes into account design and layout as well as language.

Ticks neither of those boxes so why are they wasting their time and Tesco’s money on getting a harmless name changed when it doesn’t do anything to promote their agenda?
If the Campaign for Plain English wanted to target Tesco then there is a far more legitimate reason for complaint than breaking an arcane grammatical rule – the labelling of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish products as such and the labelling of English products as British.  Putting up a sign saying “10 items or less” instead of “10 items or fewer” introduces absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever, the meaning cannot be confused.  Labelling English products as British does make the label entirely ambiguous – was the product produced in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland?  Unless it tells you the county on the packaging then it’s impossible to tell.

Technorati Tags: Tesco, Plain English Campaign

I got an email a month or two ago telling me that Wonko’s World had been added to Politigg as a trusted source.  I then forgot about it until the other day when I noticed that the Devil had implemented Politigg.

I notice that there are only a handful of posts on the Kitchen that have the Politigg button and I suspect it’s because, until today, the process of adding a Politigg button to your post was as follows:

1. Write your post
2. Submit the post to Politigg or wait a while for it to be auto-submitted
3. Go to the Politigg entry for your post and click on the Comments link
4. Copy the id, put it into a URL Politigg gives you and insert the html in your post

Hardly ideal and I suspect that is why only a handful of posts on the Devil’s Kitchen have the Politigg button on them.  I simplified the process for myself by putting some code into my template to check for a “Politigg” meta tag on the post and insert the code for the button but it was still a ball-ache so I emailed the creator of Politigg and asked him to change the code to accept a URL instead of an id.  So he did, which is nice.

If you’re interested in the code for a WordPress blog, here it is:

<?php
$politigg=get_permalink();
echo ‘<div style=”float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: -50px; display: inline; width: 52px;“><iframe src=”http://www.politigg.co.uk/ex.php?url=’.$politigg.'” scrolling=”no” width=”52″ frameborder=”0″ height=”83″></iframe></div>’;
?>

Technorati Tags: Politigg

A couple of weeks ago, after Russia invaded Georgia, I said that the UN would be unable to act on Georgia because of Russia’s veto and that Federal Europe would denounce their invasion but Russia would respond along the lines of Federal Europe supported Kosovo’s universal declaration of independence so they’re doing the same in South Ossetia.

I think I’ll have a punt on the lottery this week because since then the UN drafted a resolution calling on Russia to withdraw from Georgia, Russia vetoed it and now they have formally recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazian independence.

So what next?  South Ossetia has a population of around 70,000 and about half have Russian passports.  Russia has been handing out passports to the ethnic Ossetian population of South Ossetia like they’re going out of fashion to bolster South Ossetia’s claim to independence and to give themselves the all important justification for invading.  This is nothing new, there’s even a word for it: Rusification – the process of replacing one nationality and/or culture with a Russian one.

The South Ossetian seperatists want unification with North Ossetia – will Russia be giving North Ossetia to South Ossetia or does their respect for the wishes of Ossetians only extend to those that live in Georgia?  If Chechnya is anything to go by then it’s unlikely we’ll see a unified Ossetia any time soon.  Or perhaps Russia’s imperial ambitions go a little futher than rebuilding the network of client states it built up in the soviet era and South Ossetia is to be incorporated into Russia proper.  I really wouldn’t be surprised if Russia has already had talks with the South Ossetian government to decide what’s going to happen already – this certainly wasn’t a spontaneous campaign, it must have been planned some time ago.

So what’s the difference between Kosovo and South Ossetia and Abkhazia?  Both have their own national governments, both have held referenda on independence and both have declared unilateral independence.  But the Kosovans stopped shooting Serbians (mostly) years ago and Kosovo has been run as an independent state by the UN for almost a decade.  Georgia has attempted to assert control over South Ossetia and Abkhazia almost constantly since 1991.

If South Ossetians and Abkhazians want independence then fine, let them have it.  But South Ossetia wants unification with North Ossetia and that’s not going to happen unless South Ossetia is annexed by Russia.  That’s not independence.

Technorati Tags: Russia, Georgia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia

The Beijing Olympics has finally, finally finished.  Thank christ for that, perhaps now we can get back to normality?

The Olympics is shit, the Beijing Olympics has been shit and the London Olympics is going to be unbelievably shit.

China shouldn’t have been given a second thought when it put in a bid for the Olympics.  Being given the Olympics sent a message to oppresive, human rights abusing dictators all over the world – keep doing what you’re doing and you will be accepted.

It will be difficult to top the tickery, fakery and general naffness of the Beijing opening and closing ceremonies but London will manage to make 2012 even more shit.  You just can’t have what is still nominally a socialist government handling a multi-billion pound spectacle without it being turned into an absolute crock of steaming horse shit.

Technorati Tags: Olympics

I bought a family passport for the Ironbridge Gorge museums not long ago.

We get them half price through my employer in conjunction with the Transforming Telford quango I’ve blogged about before (a VP at my employer is a director of the quango as well).  At £24 for a family passport that lets us into every attraction however many times we want for a year, I put aside my principles and snatched their hands off.

We spent most of the day at Blists Hill yesterday as it’s only 5 minutes down the road.  Blists Hill is a victorian town that’s been built pretty much from scratch.  There was a big blast furnace on the site previously and a handful of associated buildings but over the years the trust that owns the site has bought victorian buildings from the surrounding area, taken them down brick by brick and rebuilt them at Blists Hill.

Here are some pictures we took yesterday:

Technorati Tags: Blists Hill, Ironbridge, Museums