Blown

Despite the best efforts of the greenest government ever and its eminently impartial chums in the popular press, the British public remains deplorably ignorant about the cost, capacity and efficiency of wind power. Most people believe that costs are fourteen times higher than they are, underestimate the energy that turbines produce and overestimate the energy needed to keep them turning. Nevertheless, public support for wind power remains high; which only goes to show, once more, the inherent illogicality of the British prole. Thank goodness for the Westminster set and their paymasters in the cuddly coal and sustainable uranium industries, who continue to protect us from ourselves in return for such notoriously moderate financial gain.

Raising Standards

Britain's Head Boy's monitor in charge of tuck-box has issued members of the House of Claimants with a stiff talking-to about being more forthcoming with the public. "Precisely because politics has become more elitist, more apparently to the public, an insider’s game, it is all the more important to get the rules right"; therefore the immediate necessity is not (perish the thought) to ensure that MPs actually work as MPs, but to suggest very, very forthrightly that they police themselves with sufficient rigour to declare up-front how many trotters they intend keeping in the trough once elected. This tough new régime will mean giving the voters a choice between corporate sponsors, rather than anything so undemocratic as a perceptible difference in policy; and "if the public feels that they have been brought into a decision on this matter, that can only be helpful". Reassuringly enough, the monitor in charge of tuck-box is "absolutely sure" that Britain's Head Boy is jolly concerned about the whole affair. After all, nobody really knows how many more members of the House of Expenses Claimants, under pretence of spreading murder, mayhem and torture for glorious profit, are in fact mere chiselling little crooks.

Curriculum Veneris

A survey of sex workers has found that most of them got there via society's other despised professions. More than seventy per cent of respondents had previously worked in education, the charitable sector or the NHS; the second most popular area of prior experience was retail, where workfare (or, in Labour terms, "guaranteed employment") is such a profitable option. Sex work is legal in Britain provided that workers make themselves suitably vulnerable to assault and do not indulge in collective bargaining; a model with which the British Neoliberal Party has been working long and hard to penetrate the other caring professions.

Care Bear

Japanese roboticists have developed a rather cumbersome method of lifting and otherwise aiding patients with mobility problems, in the shape of an experimental cyberbear with blue-trimmed Lucascrap™ stormtrooper accessories. “We really hope that this robot will lead to advances in nursing care, relieving the burden on caregivers today,” said the leader of the sensor systems research team. The elderly population in Japan is growing rapidly, as it is here; but apparently it has not yet occurred to the Japanese that elderly people may be less of a burden on caregivers if the caregivers are casual corporate agency workers with no tiresome scruples about health, safety or hygiene.

Just Keeping Order in the Playground

Britain's Head Boy's minister for War, the Colonies and Wog-bombing has had a bit of a blather about the deployment of "military advisers" to Ukraine. He confirmed that, sensibly enough, the Government has no particular interest in starting a war with Russia until after the general election, and that the training of Ukrainian troops by the co-liberator of Afghanistan and Iraq was purely a matter of posturing because the crisis in Ukraine has no military solution. He also admitted that it was not a NATO deployment and apparently didn't know or care whether Britain's fellow conquerors had been consulted. From the back-benches, Adam Werritty barked orders through Liam Fox for a rapid escalation, on the grounds that any lack of interest in mission creep would provide a "bullies' charter" for countries whose sacred right to international aggression was still in doubt.

Perfectly Sane

A perfectly sane member of the House of Claimants, who bears a glamorous facial resemblance to Paddy Ashdown after a night chasing parked steamrollers, has been burbling the praises of a mysterious, arcane discipline which may one day revolutionise the healthcare industry. It will take pressure off doctors, aid in diagnosis and enable us to see strengths and weaknesses clearly and quickly, perhaps even unto aborting potential terrorists in the womb, as once it was foretold by the Reverend Tony. Naturally, the BBC is against it, and anyone who expresses scepticism is an ignoramus, a bully and a racist. However, thanks to some oversight or left-wing mischief, the perfectly sane MP's burble was doctored before he burbled it, so that he has been saying astrology and homeopathy where he meant to say market forces, and now looks saner than ever.

No Naughty Doodling

Google has decided that readers of the blogosphere are far too stupid to take notice of an "adult content" warning, and has decreed that anyone using Blogger to post sexually explicit images shall be censored forthwith. Certain forms of nudity will be permitted, provided that it "offers a substantial public benefit." We have thirty days to comply, and Google does not consider itself in any way bound to give us an explanation. I wonder who'll be next.

Right Honourable

The leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition has called for a ban on members of the House of Expenses Claimants holding outside consultancies in order to supplement their meagre incomes and platinum-plated pension plans. The call comes in the wake of renewed scandal over outside earnings, as a jabbering Thatcherite mercenary contractor and a clapped-out New Labour war flunkey were recorded offering to sell their influence for profit. Such a ban would be controversial, as members of the business community fear that it would prevent members of the House of Expenses Claimants working for anyone other than the taxpayer, which self-evidently would be a most unfortunate development. A ban would also mean that professional people from every walk of life who became members of the House of Expenses Claimants would instantly lose every vestige of whatever expertise they had built up in their previous employment, thereby condemning the country to a parliament full of political placemen, public-relations office boys and braying unemployables, which would arguably be somewhat inferior even to what we have now. On the bright side, there is no sign that any of the two and a half branches of the British Neoliberal Party believe that war criminals or torturers should be excluded from full participation in Britain's democracy.

A Public Relations Tragedy

Those tactful Starbucks people have run into a bit of trouble thanks to an advertising poster showing Armenian women in traditional dress enjoying an economy-size styrofoam under balloons bearing the Turkish flag. Evidently Starbucks' Los Angeles advertising department is utilising researchers with qualifications in Gove History™, where waving flags and jolly chaps doing jolly things are much more important than mere bloody and sordid facts.

The present state of Turkey is the successor to the Ottoman Empire, which wiped out between a million and a million and a half Armenians, along with other ethnic minorities, between 1915 and 1918, possibly in an effort to preserve Turkish jobs for Turkish workers. Twenty-two countries have recognised the event as a genocide, and the Official Greatest Ever Number One Greatest Briton Ever, Winston Churchill, even used the term Holocaust at the time, since (thanks partly to his own high-handed bungling) the Ottoman Empire was then on the wrong, and winning, side of the Dardanelles Campaign. The present state of Turkey refuses to call the event a genocide; a position it shares with the present British government. The Ministry of Wogs, Frogs and Huns prefers the term "tragedy", doubtless on the supremely moral grounds that Britain has fewer commercial ties with Armenia than with Turkey. The centenary of the massacre will be commemorated in April, when presumably the representatives of the British Empire's successor state will be too busy celebrating Churchill's great victory at Gallipoli.

Making Work Pay

A mere three years after Britain's Head Boy decreed that tackling human trafficking might be a rah-rah sort of thing to do, the Bullingdon Club and its chums are unable to make up their minds whether the Modern Slavery Bill should be for or against. In 2012, as part of its effort to rid the nation of unauthorised wogs, the coalition ordered that every migrant worker should be indentured to a single employer, which means that the wogs in question are prevented from fiendishly renewing their visas. This means that employers can withhold pay and food, demand extremely long hours, and in general behave towards foreign workers in much the same way as the British Neoliberal Party would like all employers to behave towards British workers.

To call it slavery would, of course, be to risk terminological inexactitude; but it has cast a bit of a damper on the Modern Slavery Bill, whose proponents are seeking an amendment that would imply, of all things, "that domestic overseas workers are not a sub-class of people here merely to facilitate the lifestyle of their employer". A spokesbeing for the mad old cat lady in the Home Office responded with predictable forthrightness, stating that the existing system gives hard-working wogs "access to protections under employment laws" which, in the liberating absence of legal aid or information, they can pursue during their copious free time.