The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Saturday, February 28, 2015

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.

Friday, February 27, 2015

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.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

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.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

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.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

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.

Monday, February 23, 2015

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.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

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.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

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.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Lent For Real People

Britain's wealth creators are again preparing to dish out their creation to those who deserve it most. HSBC will be declaring on Monday the rewards for those belt-tightening and efficiency-saving measures which it has employed in Switzerland; and at the end of the week RBS and Lloyds will be letting the British taxpayer know the precise terms of this year's benefits bill. Lloyds will be paying dividends to its shareholders for the first time since the 2008 collapse, which financiers and politicians have so deftly converted from a crisis into a pretext; but since Lloyds was fined £226 million for chicanery last year, its bonuses this year will be cut by about one-eleventh of that amount, which seems only fair. Similarly, RBS will be giving away twenty-five per cent more in bonuses than it has paid out in fines, just to show that there are no hard feelings.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Perilous Resources

The adorable Farage Falange filly Victoria Ayling, having previously epitomised the party's non-racist benignity with her recorded comments on immigration ("send the lot back"), has been besting the evil Lib-Lab-Con-Green establishment in public debate. Ayling was asked about a claim that foreigners were taking all the jobs in offshore wind energy and, true to the Falange's anti-establishment style, raised the question all those trendy, windmill-happy metropolitan elites haven't dared to ask: namely "What happens when renewable energy runs out?" Unfortunately, the audience must have been packed with trendy, windmill-happy establishment types, because a number of guffaws were heard. Within only a few hours Ayling decided, or was informed by her minders, that she had actually meant renewable energy subsidies, which would obviously become more and more necessary as the relevant industries grew in importance and became more profitable. To see the likely perils, one need look no further than the endlessly profitable, eternally subsidised banking industry, where the Caudillo of the Farage Falange first developed that down-to-earth brand of straight-belching populism which has attracted so many mouths of the expansive Ayling calibre.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

An Ill-Fitted Truss

Well, here's a thing: the environment secretary in the greenest government ever has been saying the thing that was not about solar panels. The Government holds no data on English land covered by solar panels, does not know what the effect will be on agricultural subsidies, and has no evidence that solar power harms food production; but Elizabeth Truss, who once co-authored a tract claiming British workers were among the worst idlers in the world, apparently cannot be bothered to keep up with her own department's documents. "I am committed to food production in this country and it makes my heart sink to see row upon row of solar panels where once there was a field of wheat or grassland for livestock to graze," she babbled last October, apparently in a bid to out-oaf her predecessor, the well-known climate-change sceptic and patron of Lake Paterson in Sussex. A great believer in hard work for the lesser people, Truss is also known for her stint as childcare minister, which the Bullingdon Club no doubt considered a suitable post for a woman. Truss earned her demotion to Defra by attempting to deregulate the market in toddling resources and force minders to take care of larger numbers of young children: a policy of such blatant Gove-standard brilliance that even the Deputy Conservatives somehow found the courage to veto it.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Blair's Not to Reason Why

The head of the British army, of all people, has been peddling the outmoded, trendy-lefty, virtually foreign idea that before embarking on a course of action it is usually best to have some idea what you are doing. If that were true, of course, there would be some reparations to be made over a number of Government decisions, notably the careers of Chris Graybeing, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove, and the almost equally glamorous military adventures in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. The head of the army seems to think our mission might have been accomplished a bit more comfortably if the Reverend Tony and his acolytes had bothered to do a bit more research about such piddling matters of detail as "the politics, economics, tribes and culture of Afghanistan, and the consequences of sending thousands of troops there", as though the Reverend Tony and his acolytes didn't have enough to do counting their money.

The head of the British army also suggested that the army's composition should better reflect those varieties of ethnicity and gender which are now gaining token recognition even in the Church of England and the British Conservative Party. A sufficient number of white Caucasian recruits can no longer be relied upon, so the Government may have to overcome whatever inhibitions it has about giving weapons to those wogs with the bad manners not to be foreign dictators.

Monday, February 16, 2015

Boosting Commercial Acumen

Weapons manufacturers are saving the British taxpayer a fortune by infiltrating the Ministry for War and Wog-bombing. Other government departments also use personnel seconded from the private sector in order to utilise their skills and experience and to prevent ministers having to soil their offices with civil servants. The practice is so thoroughly acceptable that some departments, such as the Cabinet Office, refused to respond to questioning on behalf of their employers, the public. Still, we are assured that the salaries of the skilled and experienced ones are paid by the firms which employ them and not by the ministries which are used by them, so obviously they will be working first and foremost with the taxpayers' best interests at heart.

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Sunshine Boys

Recent victories in the War on Terror and the new détente with Cuba evidently mean that some clandestine servants of the World Cop by the Grace of God have a little too much time on their hands. Now that Castro's beard no longer requires the Agent Orange treatment, the CIA has turned its attention to artificial weather. A recent report on climate change was partly funded by America's waterboarding community, and a New Jersey academic claims that a couple of spooks turned up three years ago and questioned him ever so subtly about the possibility of induced meteorological chastisement. Notwithstanding the agency's contribution, the report's conclusions were unfortunately somewhat anchored in the real world, where prevention is likely to be more effective than CIA-sponsored techno-miraculosities. The use of weather as a weapon has been prohibited by international treaty since 1978, once the Americans had tried it in Vietnam and presumably found it too uneconomical to serve as an instrument of general democratisation.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Go Set a Watchman on a Skinny Black Guy

Police in the God-fearing state of Alabama have taken relations with the coloured folks to a new level by causing an international incident. An Indian man visiting his son and grandson had somehow drifted into the habit of walking up and down the street, in defiance of all civilised practice, and was duly reported by a neighbour as a "skinny black guy" and possible danger to the watchful citizen's wife. When the forces of law and order arrived and discovered that the Indian couldn't speak English, they threw him on the ground to make their point clearer. The Indian government has registered concern, and one officer has been charged with third-degree assault; but it is as yet unclear whether the rates of police acquittal for attacking foreign nationals is the same as that for attacking domestic racial problems.

Friday, February 13, 2015

A Geographical Expression

Following up the Pope's recent finger-wag at non-breeding couples who stand in mortal peril of having sex for fun, the Italian health minister has been worrying about the country's declining birthrate. The population is very selfishly living longer, in spite of all that has been done to starve it into efficiency; and such young people as still exist are emigrating at such a rate that there may soon be insufficient numbers to keep out the refugees and the Roma. Many developed countries are suffering from ageing populations, whose banker-supporting abilities are severely compromised by their demands for pensions and healthcare; but the crisis in Italy is such that the pure-bred Italian may soon go the way of the Castellieri, the Messapians and the Etruscans.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Not Dodgy At All

How decent is old Stanley Fink,
Who pays all the tax one would think.
This clean, noble Lord
Is all above-board,
Washed white by Conservative link.

We shirkers should not boo or hiss
Lord Fink's little number, for this
Helps all of our health
By making more wealth
To squirrel away with the Swiss.

A charming old chap is Lord Fink,
With finances quite in the pink.
We need have no fear
Of dodginess here;
Of avarice, barely a stink.

Gideon Fatwick

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Grace and Favour

Touching evidence of concern for the poor and disadvantaged has emerged at the General Synod, where a lay member was reassured that the bishops were in no danger of eviction from their houses. In accordance with the Saviour's little joke at Matthew 6 xix, the average value of an episcopal hovel is two and a quarter million pounds, and eleven of the Saviour's humble servants also employ chauffeurs, four of whom also work as gardeners, doubtless in the interests of thrift. Andreas Whittam Smith, the First Church Estates commissioner, said: "Nowhere in the Church, and this includes bishops, is there any excessive spending. People do the best they can, I think." The reverend residences "are as they are", much like the Deity Himself in Exodus 3 xiv, as a result of a deal struck a hundred years ago. Well, that certainly settles that. The Church, of course, has only recently recognised women and discreet homosexuals as more or less fully paid-up human beings, so it may be a little unfair to expect further radical modernisations for a few decades yet.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

A Face That Fits

Undeterred by her recent difficulties in finding a suitable chair for the child sex abuse inquiry, the mad old cat lady at the Home Office has appointed her next chief inspector of borders and immigration. The previous holder of the post, a former chief constable, resigned after five and a half years during which he repeatedly criticised the inefficiency of the immigration system, which persisted despite any amount of arbitrary targets, political dog-whistling and licensed thuggery. The mad old cat lady at the Home Office responded to the criticism by taking direct control, first of the functions of the shambolic UK Border Agency, then of the publication of any reports about her department's own cherished brand of malignant incompetence. For her new chief inspector, the mad old cat lady has chosen a former MI5 officer, who can be expected to display a more constructive attitude to the Home Office's priorities. As an additional precaution she has shortened the length of his contract, just in case his commitment to openness, accountability and common humanity should prove less than a match for her own.

Monday, February 09, 2015

We Don't Just Provide the Orphans, We Burn Down the Orphanage

About thirty people have died of hypothermia after fleeing the peace and freedom which resulted from the coalition's single successful wog-bombing campaign. A hundred and five Libyan ingrates were found adrift on an inflatable boat among freezing temperatures and twenty-six-foot waves, and only twenty-nine have so far had the good grace to die before using up taxpayers' money being detained and deported. Since the coalition helped to close the Mare Nostrum rescue operation, no ships have been available which can take large numbers of suspects below deck, so those who were picked up spent eighteen further hours exposed to the elements on the decks of small patrol boats. The rescue operation was abandoned "partly because of public concern about the €114m (£85m) cost" or, in Standard English, because Britain's Head Boy and his chums were concerned about wasting money on wogs that might be better spent on tax-dodgers. "Without Mare Nostrum," said the mayor of Lampedusa, "it’s as if no one, and not just the criminals, cares if they live or die." I am sure that, at least as far as the UK is concerned, her statement is unjust; all things considered, the coalition would clearly rather they died.

Sunday, February 08, 2015

Removing the Red Tape from Peaceful Protest

Efficiency savings at the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club have led to the rather convenient consequence that public protest will now be the preserve of those who can afford to hire a private company to maintain security. The Metropolitan Punishment Service (MPS) has refused to police a proposed demonstration by the Campaign Against Climate Change (CACC), on the novel grounds that no criminal activity is expected; this is certainly a welcome change from the usual stance of coshing the noisy ones and kettling the rest, but it leaves the marchers having to pay for their own stewards and traffic management. On the bright side, such arrangements are unlikely to be beyond the financial resources of sane and legitimate grassroots organisations like the Taxpayers' Alliance (TPA), the English Defence League (EDL) and the British Union of Garden and Home Owners for Unlimited Shale Extraction (BUGHOUSE).

Saturday, February 07, 2015

Peace in Our Time

Fury at isolationist appeasement horror

Prospects for a Third World War appeared slightly diminished today as it emerged that the UK Government has better things to do than participate in talks about the Ukraine crisis.

The decision is believed to have been prompted by poll findings that most potential UKIP voters don't know where Ukraine is, and therefore would be unlikely to defect to the Conservatives in the event of the Bullingdon Club helping to provoke a pan-European war.

A senior military figure said that, in the absence of the liberators of Iraq, the accomplishers of Mission Afghanistan and the ex-best chums of Colonel Gaddafi, "there is a threat of total war".

For Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, the shadow Minister for Wogs, Frogs and Huns criticised the Government for being "one step behind our allies" and thus insufficiently competitive in the international race to corner the global diplomacy market, as once it was during the Blairy wars of yore.

Weather patterns across Europe were slightly disrupted as potential collateral damage across the continent breathed a collective sigh of relief at the British government's decision to stay at home and complain from the sidelines.

Nevertheless, experts believe the Government's stand may be more nuanced than it is given credit for. "Any possibility of selling weapons to either side or both, and we'll be in there slavering for action," said a spokesbeing for the Liberal Democrats, in case somebody asked.

Friday, February 06, 2015

Had We But Known You Were Legitimate Wogs

Compassionate Conservatism has triumphed in the case of the Zimbabwean family who were refused visas by the Ministry for Wog Control on the grounds that they might use a five-year-old girl's funeral as an excuse to claim benefits and steal British jobs. According to James Brokenshire, the heroic Home Office cockroach who refused the original application, the family has "provided new information" after Britain's Head Boy promised to pull a few strings and either was rebuffed by the mad old cat lady or found himself too busy helping the little woman with her tax returns. Anyway, it just goes to show that if wogs play straight with the Home Office then the Home Office will be fair to the wogs, provided only that they have the backing of their community, the good wishes of a couple of churches, and the moral force provided by a local MP in an election year.

Thursday, February 05, 2015

It Blesseth Him That Gives And Him That Takes

The City of London police, who so charitably helped the management of St Paul's Cathedral cleanse their temple precincts of poor folk three years ago, have adopted a predictably forgiving attitude towards some straying moneylenders. The loan-sharking firm Wonga has been fined two and a half million pounds for frightening its customers with fraudulent letters sent out in the names of non-existent law firms; City of London police have decided that there are no grounds for action because most of the letters included small print identifying Wonga as the sender. A few letters did not include such small print; but those were very early versions, and City of London police are not the sort of chaps who criticise an author for making errors in the first draft.

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Depraved Hearts

A jury in the Christian state of Indiana has memorialised the late monarch of Saudi Arabia by convicting a woman of bodily heresy on two mutually contradictory counts. Purvi Patel has been found guilty of aborting a foetus and also of child neglect with regard to the aborted foetus. The first charge assumes that the foetus died in utero, while the charge assumes the simultaneous existence of a living and viable neonate; but such pettifogging objections evidently concerned neither the Christian state of Indiana nor the twelve good folks who reached the verdict. Mom kills baby - why, in such circumstances the very act of having a mind, let alone keeping the thing ticking over, is arguably a sin of omission.

The Christian state of Indiana has a prior record in such matters: four years ago a certain Bei Bei Shuai was prosecuted when a suicide attempt brought on an abortion; in Mississippi the same year, a teenager was charged with "depraved-heart murder" over a miscarriage, apparently as part of a minor skirmish in the War on Drugs. According to some, the legislation which provides the pretext for all this gibbering moral sanity was originally intended to outlaw violence against pregnant women; so thank heaven it's being put to proper use at last.

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

The Transformation

When, to uneasy dreams
On the third day, the Nazarene
Awoke, he found himself changed
In his tomb, into a strange
Insect. A great stone blocked the light.
He crawled beneath its weight
To await the final metamorphosis
Unto glory; but his brittle carapace
Cracked. As his guts leaked from the shell,
The noise was christened Gospel.

Rev. Frank Crow

Monday, February 02, 2015

Business Friendly

When politics and profiteering mix, there is no such thing as a conflict of interest; there are only enhanced networking opportunities. Unfortunately, not everyone in the country has yet reached the exalted ethical heights of Chris Graybeing, the Minister for Profitable Incarceration and Heterosexual Hostelry; and so his appointee for chief inspector of probation has been forced to resign in order to pre-empt malicious gossip. Paul McDowell was given the role of independently overseeing the newly-privatised probation and re-offender manufacturing industry; then, by an astounding coincidence, the firm of which McDowell's wife was managing director somehow became the preferred bidder for six of the twenty-one available contracts. McDowell, who is a man of unimpeachable probity and never discusses business with his wife, let alone any business they might have in common, has resigned not because of any wrongdoing, but solely to avoid any misunderstanding of his position; while Graybeing, who is far too intelligent to understand how any misunderstandings could have arisen in the first place, has been left looking through his address book for a crook with a thicker skin.

Sunday, February 01, 2015

Lansley Disaster: UN Denies Relief

Years of patient and tactful Bullingdon Club diplomacy look set to be scuppered by the uppity wogs at the United Nations. Britain's Head Boy has been trying for simply ages to find a new sinecure for Twizzler Lansley to be forgotten in, and UN under-secretary general for humanitarian relief evidently seemed just the job. However, the UN has other ideas, and certain deranged anarcho-Stalinist voices are even whispering that the post really ought to go to someone who is qualified to do the work. Of course this is anathema to a Head Boy who put a climate change denier at the Department of the Environment, a legal ignoramus at the Ministry of Justice and a jabbering brace of Murdoch drones at Health and Education. Britain's Head Boy has done his best to appease the wogs as far as conscience will allow, by suggesting other choices for the position; since the brilliant Duncan Smith is unavailable, he has nominated Caroline Spelman, who might just about be competent to privatise a tree or two in the rainforests before having them chopped down; and Stephen O'Brien, an underling's underling whose qualifications include being in the Government and being a member of the Conservative Party. Whether the uppity wogs at the UN have sufficient breadth of vision to accept these outstanding prospects still remains to be seen.