The Curmudgeon

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

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Eye-Catching Solutions

As the Conservatives' economic miracle continues to bite and foam, Britain's largest trainer of guide dogs plans to make almost a tenth of its workforce redundant. Rising veterinary bills and inflated dog food prices mean that Guide Dogs UK is threatened with a funding deficit of some twenty million pounds; fortunately, the number of people suffering sight loss is scheduled to double within the next fifteen years. With twice as many blind people, it should be a simple matter to pair them up and thereby extend the foundational principle of democratic Britishness - the blind leading the blind - into the disability convenience industry. Besides, there are still plenty of people who misuse what eyes they have and see what is in front of them instead of what the Government wants them to see; so once we regain our sovereignty from the hated foreign courts the Government may even be able to make up any guidance shortfall with a quick Exoculation Act.

Monday, April 29, 2024

A Very Strange Country

A healthy pink portion of best parliamentary gammon has gone squealing to the Maily Toryguff because some Africans and their subtle Oriental paymasters had the gall to treat him like a wog. The banker, Brexiteer, equal marriage opponent and high-maintenance expenses claimant for East Worthing and Shoreham was detained for several hours in Djibouti and then thrown out, allegedly on direct orders from the Heathen Chinee, who have very cunningly invested in the country for the sole purpose of inconveniencing forthright members of the master race. Despite Djibouti's relative nearness to Rwanda, such manifestations of British fair play as overcrowding, indefinite detention and conditions unfit for human habitation do not appear to have been bestowed; and the champion of democracy and human rights for the right sort of people also does not seem to have been tasered, cavity-searched or interrogated about his sex life, perhaps because he might have enjoyed it too much.

Sunday, April 28, 2024

Swift Justice

Even an acolyte of the Blessed Tony may occasionally make a mistake, and one such has graciously owned up barely twenty years after the fact. It appears, mirabile dictu, that the imposition of indefinite sentencing for petty crimes has occasionally led to people serving indefinite sentences for petty crimes, while promised courses for rehabilitation were found unsustainably non-productive of favourable headlines in the right-wing Press. The statute was eventually declared unlawful by the hated Euro-wog Convention on Human Rights and revoked under the coalition, but those who had already received indefinite sentences did not have their cases re-examined. Doubtless the Conservatives took a dim view of British justice being diluted by a foreign court, while their Liberal Democrat accomplices took a dim view of diverging from the Conservatives in the face of moderate and acceptable quantities of suicide and self-harm. Although the original policy was as flawless as any other conceived in the divine light of the Reverend Blair, it was let down by the human fallibility of lesser specimens, whose toughness on crime prevented their anticipating that making an option available to the judiciary might cause members of the judiciary to take up the option. Fortunately, lessons have been learned and any compensation made to the surviving victims will be at the expense of the taxpayer rather than the culprit.

Saturday, April 27, 2024

Sacred Second Amendment Hideously Misapplied

One of those fighting for the coveted position of post-Pence vice-Trumpster has run into trouble over, of all things, the legal use of firearms. Kristi Noem, the interplanetary-pornstar-monickered governor of South Dakota, has published the customary personal manifesto about her relationships with God, Murca, motherhood and rabid tangerine head-tribbles, and has recounted of her own free will how she applied Tennessee educational values to a training-resistant dog and on the same day rather effortfully shotgunned a recalcitrant billy-goat, finally finishing off the uncastrated, unruly and presumably unarmed animal with the third shell. Noem and/or her ghost-writer seem to have believed that these decisive actions would be viewed in the same kindly light as personally blowing away gooks, chinks, commies, beaners, ragheads, uppity ethnics and abortion-seekers; but for obvious reasons of self-preservation no patriotic American is going to be very comfortable with arbitrarily killing off bleating and barking dumb animals. Rivals were quick to condemn the shootings, pointing out that the same infinitely loving God who created earthquakes, tornadoes, intestinal parasites, Yersinia pestis and Democrats also created dogs, whose fawning nature and predliction for drooling, defecation and making loud noises about very little indicates both their inherently Christian nature and their birthright as honorary members of the Republican Party.

Friday, April 26, 2024

Nightmare Free

An extract

Someone was pounding at the door of the man who never had nightmares. The pounding was blunt and low, and was paced for the most part with comparative deliberation; every so often the impacts rose in rapidity and timbre as the furious flat of the palm stood in for the bruised yet persistent fist. Nagged from oblivion, the man who never had nightmares opened his eyes to the daylight. Through the yellowed window he could hear the chanting of children, to which the pounding on his door provided an eccentric bass-line. He listened through a cycle of punches and slaps, wondering vaguely who the percussionist might be and why they did not use the doorbell, which played brief tunes that changed automatically at random intervals to prevent the hearer becoming inured. The man who never had nightmares had missed no rental payments, had asked for no repairs, was not expecting a package and was in no trouble with the law. That seemed to exhaust most of the possibilities, except for a sudden emergency; but the man lived and slept on the top floor of a tall, elderly building with minimal amenities and no lifts, so his door would hardly be the first choice of anyone seeking immediate aid, and if the emergency concerned himself he would surely have noticed by this time.

In any case, it was becoming apparent that whoever was pounding on the door had no intention of giving up and going away. In fact, a further element had now been introduced into the morning's music, namely a muffled, incomprehensible, but imperious baritone. The man pushed back the bedclothes and sat for a few moments with his feet on the floor. One foot started tapping in time to the children's chant outside, but the next bout of beating on his door disrupted the rhythm.

"All right," called the man who never had nightmares. His throat was dry and his voice cracked into a cough; but his activity must have registered on the other side of the door, because the pounding stopped in the middle of a volley and the muffled baritone took on a querying note.

"All right," the man called again. His dressing-gown was draped over the back of the chair, and seemed to have adapted itself during the night for a different anatomy to his own. The sleeves were in the wrong places, and the collar and hemline had apparently undergone some sort of unnatural coupling. The noise from the door started again, more loudly than ever, but stopped when he ordered it to wait. The dressing-gown was fitted with a hood; once he found this and ascertained that it wasn't inside-out, the rest was relatively simple. He pushed his arms through the sleeves, tied the cord around his waist and pulled the hood up over his dishevelment.

Once outside his bedroom, the front door was along a short passage and round a bend. However long the pounding had been going on before he woke, there was no sign of any damage. Evidently the emergency was not, in the opinion of his guest, sufficiently severe to justify kicking the door down, at least for the moment.

The door was solid, with no window and no spy-hole. "Who's there?" called the man who never had nightmares.
"Logue, it's me, it's me." The voice was indistinct and excited. "Open up now. Open up this minute."
"But what's going on? Who are you?"
"It's me, I told you. Don't you recognise my voice? Open this door."
"What do you mean, me? What do you want, what's your name?"

There was a pause, as if the voice's owner were attempting to gather his patience, or perhaps to gather the strength for another assault. Then the voice spoke again, very slowly; far more slowly than necessary in fact, with a suppressed and trapdoor-rattling undertone of haste that made it sound almost inebriated: "Slee," said the voice. "Slee. Practitioner Slee. Do you understand? Slee. Now open this door. Open up. Open up."

Although the sounds of Logue taking off the chain and turning the key must certainly have been audible outside, the litany continued all the while. As soon as the door began to move Slee gave it a violent shove; perhaps he had even taken a few steps back and charged. He stumbled heavily inside, knocking Logue sideways against the wall. Slee turned too fast, stumbled again and pushed clumsily to close the door. His fat hands scrabbled at the lock and chain, and he tugged a couple of times at the latch to make certain. He and Logue stared at each other.

"What's going on?" demanded Logue, and Slee gestured frantically for silence. Under his light raincoat, the practitioner was dressed as Logue always saw him during their weekly appointments, in the casual-professorial style designed to exude whatever combination of authority and friendliness might be necessary to place the average patient at ease: the jacket smart and discreet like a diplomatic spy, the shirt-collar loose and open to avoid unsightly bulging of the neck. Logue's next appointment was two days away, and was supposed to take place at Slee's office. Logue had not even been aware that Slee knew where he lived, although of course his address and various other details had been required of him when they began his therapy. He had assumed that the information was needed purely for administrative purposes, or for occasional written correspondence, rather than for the practitioner to drop in on the patient whenever the fancy took him.

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Thursday, April 25, 2024

Voices of Virtue

Eighteen countries, including the world's moral leader and its favourite ally, have given Hamas a bit of a nudge about freeing the remaining hostages in the Gaza ghetto. The families of those kidnapped on 7 October have long accused the Netanyahoo of making too little effort to secure their release; and after only half a year of cheering him on the international paragons seem to be coming around to the families' point of view. There is even a chance that some of the less intellectually British governments may eventually tumble to the possibility that a happy ending to a hostage situation is rarely made more likely by dropping American quantities of high explosive on the area where the hostages are held. Meanwhile, the statement by the ethical eighteen may have allowed honesty to trump diplomacy by a slightly excessive degree in noting that the fate of the hostages is causing about as much genuine international concern as that of the civilian terrorist population.

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Classroom Ventilation

Legislators in the God-fearing state of Tennessee have responded to last year's school shooting at Nashville in the most Murcan way imaginable: namely by licensing teachers to carry concealed handguns in school. According to a survey by the wishy-washy liberals at the Rand Corporation, a fairly large majority of American teachers believe that pedagogues who pack would not make schools safer, and more than half believe they would make schools more dangerous; and this in a country which has boasted a school shooting resulting in injury or death once every nine and a half days this year. Nevertheless, parents and teachers protesting against the law were removed by armed men on the orders of the state's house speaker; which demonstrates, if nothing else, that unconcealed weapons also have their advantages when it comes to imparting appropriate social values.

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Compassion Actually

Five migrants, including a child have got thoroughly into the spirit of St George's Day by saving British jobs in the Channel, thereby proving the necessity for a fate worse than death as a deterrent to future invaders. Having finally pushed the Rwanda Transportation Bill past the House of Donors, Fishy Rishi has toddled off to Poland to brag about Britain's future wog-bombing capabilities, but took the opportunity to inform reporters that deporting refugees to central Africa is an act of tough love in pursuit of a better business model. Poland, where so many people were rescued from the pain of being Untermenschen while Mr Churchill was busy winning the Second World War, evidently seemed an appropriate venue for a joke along those lines, even though the parents of the deterred child were not present to appreciate it.

Monday, April 22, 2024

Putting Our Money Where Our Morals Are

Among the abiding glories of British justice is, of course, the presumption of innocence for the right sort of people. Following its snap decision to suspend funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the wake of Israel's evidence-free claim that UNRWA was a pawn of Hamas, Britain is unlikely to make a snap decision to restore the funding just because Israel's claim remains as evidence-free as ever. Some countries have subscribed to the Protocols of the Elders of Gaza and resumed sending money, but Britain is unlikely to follow their example because those countries do not include the USA. In any case, it appears that the Righteous State's accusations have already served at least part of their purpose, allowing collaborators to condone the targeting of UNRWA premises and personnel with, if possible, an even clearer conscience than before.

Sunday, April 21, 2024

Britain First

Since Labour is the party of working people, it is only natural that the CEO of Team Starmer should be burbling rah-rah and goo-goo at the readership of Britain's great Press bastion of bile-spewing senility. In a meditation upon patriotism for St George's Day, after the style of St Anthony of Baghdad before his transfiguration, the apostle proclaimed that the Conservative Party has forfeited the right to call itself patriotic; apparently on the grounds that it cannot withstand dissent sufficiently to denounce its leadership's critics as antisemites. The Conservatives have also trashed a number of national institutions, in whose foundation any patriot would be proud and grateful to have played the usual retrospective part between winning world wars. Cited examples include the NHS, to whose continuing effective abolition Team Starmer has repeatedly committed itself; and NATO, an organisation for killing people in the interests of transnational corporations. For good measure, the CEO of Team Starmer also shrugged off concerns which have been raised by the lesser breeds over the orgasmic splurging of the St George cross and its subordinates across Labour's election propaganda. Along with all the other democratic virtues, dissent combined with tolerance is a famously British trait, and readers of the Maily Toryguff will doubtless rejoice that their votes are so much more tolerable to Team Starmer than those of the fuzzy-wuzzies.

Saturday, April 20, 2024

Dastardly and Mottley

Extreme woke elements in the secessionist Republic of Barbados are angry at plans to purchase land from Richard Grosvener Plunkett-Ernle-Erle Drax, whose family was prominent in the Atlantic slave trade. Mia Mottley's government, which has pledged to build ten thousand new homes and seems to have a bizarre un-British obsession with following through on the pledge, is negotiating to buy a few football pitches' worth of the Drax estate for housing. A number of Barbadians have expressed dissatisfaction with the idea of Drax profiting by his ancestors' plantationeering, apparently under the impression that a squillionaire British Conservative expenses claimant might somehow be induced to substitute reparations for rah-rah. For his own part, Richard Grosvener Plunkett-Ernle-Erle Drax does not believe that people should be judged by events that happened hundreds of years ago, having evidently earned his sixteenth-century ancestral mansion and substantial chunks of Dorset and North Yorkshire purely by the sweat of his brow.

Friday, April 19, 2024

It's Not How Fast You Grind, It's Who You Grind

Italian prosecutors have ended the seven-year trial of a German NGO rescue boat crew by the quaint expedient of admitting straight out that there is no evidence against them. This technicality went unnoticed until now thanks to the indisputable heinousness of the crew's conduct, which included endangering some fourteen thousand jobs and conspiring to dilute the heritage of the master race. In response the Italian government pumped money into the Libyan coastguard, which has done so much to help matters in the Mediterranean ever since Britain's glistening pink Head Boy helped bomb the country into freedom. The crew was bugged, and other crews were infiltrated with government spies; while others suspected of fraternising with the migrant hordes have been reporting levels of threat and harassment worthy of the British scumbag press. On the bright side, the rescue boat crew have endured seven years of stress and defamation; and thousands who might otherwise have been rescued will have drowned or been forcibly removed to somwehere most of His Majesty's Government probably wouldn't know from Rwanda. Whether prosecutors will be permitted to re-start the wheels of justice turning all over again on the basis of new non-evidence remains as yet unclear.

Thursday, April 18, 2024

Wrong Side for a Street

There is more than one way to execute a rodentine maritime evacuation manoeuvre. One can charge crudely for the lifeboats, elbowing aside the women and children while trumpeting one's devotion to duty and humble pleasure in public service; or one can pull in one's scaly tail, dye one's fur a pleasanter shade, temporarily forego the perks that accrue to a messenger boy for the plague, and pretend to be a hamster. One or two staunch Conservatives have taken the latter course, including Brand Andy, the mayor of the West Midlands. Brand Andy describes himself as more of a businessman than a politician, presumably in order to differentiate himself from Fishy Rishi, whose business connections are purely marital and therefore nearly as negligible as his political skills. Brand Andy is also pushing himself as a rebellious sort who stands up to Westminster: a line also taken by my own soon-to-be-erstwhile expenses claimant, who trumpeted his independence from Westminster shortly before taking a job as a whip for the National Johnson. Brand Andy's defiance of Westminster has so far consisted of calmly accepting Fishy Rishi's cancelling of HS2, though whether he did so as a result of his political instincts or his commercial ones remains as yet unclear. For the moment Brand Andy and others are removing from their propaganda all mention of the party they proudly support, while hoping to crawl back into office on a delicate combination of personal charm and voter stupidity. If one didn't know better, one might think they had something to be embarrassed about.

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Worthy of Our Trust

While Britain's unelected peers continue to obstruct the Rwanda transportation bill with their insistence on, of all things, conformity with the law, the nation's partner in wog disposal seems to have acquired an enviable set of British values to go with all that money. Rwanda's president commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of his country's non-meritorious genocide by attending a football match, while his government told ordinary citizens to restrict their activities to the sober and non-frivolous. The moral affinity with His Majesty's Government shone forth brighter still when a Rwandan government spokesbeing blamed the police. According to a Downing Street anonymoid, Paul Kagame "was here to see the football and came in to see the prime minister," casually taking a break from recreation to drop in and discuss what is, after all, merely Fishy Rishi's flagship policy. With all these cultural advantages allied to a no-nonsense, can-do attitude to political opposition and 98.8% of the vote at his last election, it is scarcely surprising that His Majesty's Government considers the president such a safe pair of hands.

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Charity Cakeism

Much to the annoyance of the global south, and apparently somewhat to the surprise of Britain's leading liberal newspaper, the global north has provided little support for the mitigation of the climate catastrophe despite being largely responsible for the problem. In equally unfathomable fashion, the Government whose current leader sees public office largely as a means of helping his relatives dodge their taxes has been fiddling the figures on climate aid. Even the reduction of the international workhouse pittance from the giddy generosity of seven-tenths of one per cent of the nation's credit card thrift bonus has proven insufficiently prudent for the party of La Truss and the National Johnson; so His Majesty's Government has substituted repackaging for reimbursement and has called some already-paid money something else instead. Baron Goldsmith of Richmond Park, whose pitch for mayor of London was that Sadiq Khan was an Islamist fiend who would rob hard-working Hindoos of their sacred bling, and whose quickness on the uptake evidently rivals that of Britain's leading liberal newspaper, has voiced concerns that such behaviour might adversely affect Albion's unrivalled international reputation for straight talk, square dealing and civilised values.

Monday, April 15, 2024

Wisdom, Justice and Motheration

Since the Christian state of Georgia ranks forty-third out of the fifty in looking after the health of actual children, the fact of its offering tax breaks for uterine-resident Murcans should come as no surprise. As proof that God helps those who help themselves, the state has balanced its pious prohibition on abortion beyond six weeks' gestation with a chance for fleshly incubators who carry their foetus past that point to claim the tail-toting tadpole as a "dependent minor" with corresponding deductions from the tax bill. Lest such interference with Nature be seen as creeping socialism and pandering to the workshy (there is a significant statistical correlation between being unemployed and being unborn), the deduction is worth less than $200 and has been funded by cutting programmes intended to benefit the merely extant.

Sunday, April 14, 2024

This Time They Have Surely Gone Too Far

As with the US assassination of General Qasem Soleimani four years ago, the mad mullahs of Tehran have exercised a truly evil degree of restraint in their retaliation for the Righteous State's bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Most of the drones were shot down, the damage to Western colonial property was minor and Iran has stated that it considers the matter concluded, thereby proving its status as an existential threat to the Netanyahoo administration, which would much prefer the expediency of a regional conflagration doubtless leading handily to an Enabling Act. The mad mullahs even went so far as to contrast their attack with the Righteous State's assault on the Palestinians, thereby wilfully ignoring the vital distinction between states which are allowed to have legitimate security concerns and states which are not, and between the cycle of violence which began out of a blue sky last October and the peace process which has been going on since 1967.

Saturday, April 13, 2024

The Company She Keeps

Team Starmer, whose main objection to far-right policies seems to be their lack of fiscal prudence, has come over all moralistic about a far-right politician attending a gathering of far-right politicians. In a re-writing of history worthy of his Dear Leader's fellow purger and centraliser Stalin, the shadow paymaster general even invoked Winston Churchill, who thought Indians were beastly and liked to snigger about Hottentots getting the vote. The shadow paymaster general, whose front-bench colleagues write for the Sun and Mail, has called upon Fishy Rishi to prevent one of his erstwhile Home Secretaries rubbing shoulders with the likes of Viktor Orbán. Despite his open racism and authoritarianism, the Hungarian prime minister has rather sullied the Britishness of his values by supporting the wrong side in the Ukraine war. Another luminary, Hans-Georg Maaßen, has compared migrants with cancer; while one Rod Dreher has diagnosed white-genocide paranoia by the eminently Blairite phrase "legitimate, realistic concerns." Given that such pronouncements have been standard Home Office discourse for at least a decade and a half, it hardly seems that any of these worthies, let alone their fellow-travellers among the master race, has much legitimacy to gain from hob-nobbing with Suella Braverman.

Friday, April 12, 2024

Alien Invader

It appears that there are more Conservatives in Scotland than previously thought, although it took a molecular fungal ecologist to discover the latest one. Its allegiance is evident from its blue and white colouring, which obviously should be scrupulously distinguished from that of the Scots saltire. In this case the colours represent Conservative values in both skin colour and moral character: the blue is the glorious facial mottling of habitual and continuous apoplectic rage, while the white flags up the party's traditional attitude of swooning surrender to money, demagoguery and snobbery. It's notable that this particular species favours the Alps, a region centred on banking and bordering four countries (five counting Vichy) which were all making loud noises about duty, patriotism and hard-working families during the historical period inhabited by the average Conservative mentality. Like all Scots Tories, the new discovery is "incredibly rare globally," and has a co-dependent relationship with dense monocultures often considered ecologically dead; but it does seem a little ironic that one of the last, and presumably one of the more intelligent, Conservatives in Scotland should also be an immigrant in danger of expulsion.

Thursday, April 11, 2024

Tory Enablers

Is there no end to the depravity of the metropolitan middle-class lefty antisemites? Despite Team Starmer having spent several years making clear exactly whose votes it prefers to receive and exactly whose votes it would be morally indignant to suffer; despite Team Starmer's trashing of its climate pledges and vaunting of Zionist war crimes; despite Team Starmer's endless full-throated avowals that the plan is to change little or nothing, it appears that certain people may yet have the unmitigated gall to consider withholding their votes from Team Starmer. This is unlikely to affect the outcome of the forthcoming general election, beyond depriving Labour of a few seats which Team Starmer presumably considers excessively tainted with non-working people; but it remains as yet unclear whether the present grand electoral coalition will be sufficiently enthused for a Team Starmer incumbency after four or five years of business as usual.

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Native Deterrence

If the social and moral purity of the British race is to be properly maintained, then self-evidently stopping the small boats is only a partial solution. It is all very well to prevent migrants from diluting the Britishness of our economy by attending our universities or paying tax into our exchequer; but what of those precious resources among our own British stock who may one day venture abroad and succumb to the exotic wiles of the foreign? Happily, the ever-vigilant Ministry for Wog Prevention is raising the price of the iconic French-made Polish-assembled blue passport for the second time in fourteen months; so patriotic Britons can rejoice in their freedom from alien contamination, as well as in the ever-diminishing danger of of too many poor people having photo ID in an election year.

Tuesday, April 09, 2024

Flavour the Heretic

With all the camels to be swallowed these days, it is only natural that a few minions of the Most High should be straining at a TV commercial designed to sell potato crisps. The Italian advert combines crunchy nunsploitation with what its makers call "strong British irony" (in fact, some little time ago a British brand called KP did advertise its own crisps using some rather endearing cartoon monks, to minimal theological discomfort). The depiction of crisps being substituted for the Host has enraged several people and a newspaper, the latter on the intriguing grounds that the transubstantiation of the Saviour's flesh into anything but the official recipe is equivalent to the scourging, the thorns and the nailing-up.

Monday, April 08, 2024

It's How You Play the Game

We are all aware that there are few British values more important than Wogs Out; but competing priorities do occasionally emerge. One such was recently impressed upon a shipment of seventy-three Albanian deportees, most of whom had agreed to return voluntarily. They were transported with two paramedics, two interpreters and a hundred and twenty-nine "escort staff" (guards, in Oldspeak) from their respective wog warehousing units to a wog disposal facility, where they were detained for several weeks. Any undue sense of self-importance on their part was further minimised thanks to risk factors not being properly recorded or communicated, and any staff who felt the urge being able to spy on detainees as they used the lavatory. A report by prison inspectors found that this public-school régime was demeaning and unnecessary, especially for those being voluntarily removed; which seems rather to miss the point. Clearly, what matters most is not that the removals should be voluntary, let alone that they should happen with any un-British rapidity or efficiency; but only that those being removed should not escape without a good, hard dose of British decency.

Sunday, April 07, 2024

Save With Dave

Britain's glistening pink Secretary of State for Wogs, Frogs, Huns and Hottentots has warned of the possibility of famine in Gaza now that the wrong colour people are being killed. Hence the Royal Navy has been ordered into action so as to render significant the efforts at aid provision by the US, the beastly Euro-wogs and others not worthy of mention; though naturally this does not imply any hindrance to British entrepreneurial gumption in arming the Righteous State. When the glistening pink Secretary of State was Britain's glistening pink Head Boy, his administration did everything it could to ensure that there was plenty of poverty for charities to relieve; and the best way to ensure that supplies of aid are not wasted is self-evidently to keep up the demand.

Saturday, April 06, 2024

If Music be the Food of Lucre, Scream On

Contrary to all expectation, Christian churches are not averse to getting buttocks onto hassocks, even at the price of hiring out their organs to accompany metal bands. A senior lecturer in music production even thought the idea might be found "slightly heretical," which seems at best theologicaally naïve: like any organisation seeking to control hearts and minds, an efficient religion should inveigle its influence into as many walks of life as possible. Church premises were once the main social and commercial venues in the country, for the very simple reason that nobody with any inclination to avoid pariah status could avoid going to church. Now that other means of communication are available, custodians of the Deity's real estate holdings have ascended to the recognition that death metal dupes are still dupes, and that venues mean revenues.

Friday, April 05, 2024

Without Rational Motive

A school shooting in Finland has pointed up the moral inadequacies of the Scandinavian system, even beyond the single-figure casualties and single-unit death toll. As a juvenile, the perpetrator cannot be detained or publicly identified and offered up for media-powered mob hatred; but this protection is entirely dependent upon his age, rather than his contacts, his personal wealth or his position in the national class structure. Perhaps most scandalously un-Anglo-American of all, he eppears to have been provoked into action by peer socialisation measures rather than by legitimate and understandable concerns over race, religion or politics.

Thursday, April 04, 2024

Damaged Goods

The ever-happy relationship between the Conservative Party and the Babbage computificating contraptions appears narrowly to have escaped a new and interesting twist, courtesy of Conservative standards of business acumen. Presumably under the impression that treating party members like NHS users might gain them a share of the popular sympathy inexplicably accorded to vexatious public health workers, the Conservatives connived with a failed dotcom entrepreneur, failed newspaper salesman and failed media mogul to bring about True Blue, an electronic thingummy for farming personal data and turning worn-out members into rampant consumers. As it turned out, the promise of True Blue seems to have been about as true as the tanking thinkers at Bright Blue are bright. The failed businessman met with the current failed prime minister, and an arrangement was reached whereby three-quarters of the profits from the enterprise would go to the party; whereupon the failed businessman failed again despite the project having been worked on by senior Conservative officials, with all the intellectual heft and technical aptitude that implies.

Wednesday, April 03, 2024

There Are Limits, You Know

With the prospects of a seat on the ministerial gravy train growing ever more distant, a few Conservatives have been moved to question the Government's continuing arms sales to the Righteous State. Thirty thousand dead Arabs may be all very moderate and sensible; but when it comes to using British weapons in assassinating members of the master race, and ex-forces members at that, it is at least potentially arguable that there may justifiably be room for a certain amount of consideration of the risk for the perception being sown that the just cause of Palestinian genocide may on occasion be distinguished more by zeal than by emotional intelligence. As to those Conservatives for whom a ministerial post looks more likely, Team Starmer is content to wait upon the Government's legal advice before interfering with market forces; and then only in the face of a breach of international law sufficiently serious to annoy the United States.

Tuesday, April 02, 2024

Make America Gove, Amen

Those of a pious disposition may recall the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove commemorating the anniversary of the King James Bible by inflicting autographed copies on schoolchildren. No master should be too proud to learn from his acolyte, and the Trumpster has taken scarcely more than a decade to super-vulgarise the Gove inspiration into something appropriately meta-Murcan. An edition called the God Bless the USA Bible, as hawked by a country singer who provides Horst Wessel services at Trumpster triumphs, now carries the tangerine theologian's endorsement alongside its price tag of $59.99. To outcrass Michael Gove is no small achievement, and were it not for the unfair advantage of an inside cranium copiously besplattered with the diarrhoeic excretions of his hydrophobic head-tribble, it might have proved a challenge even for the Trumpster.

Monday, April 01, 2024

Unforeseen Consequences

Politics is the art of the trade-off, and certain policies come with counter-intuitive prices. Who would have thought, for example, that flouncing out of a bloc that was the country's biggest international trading partner might result in complications for the country's international trade? More subtly still, it appears that even good old British racism may sometimes have self-sabotaging consequences, as a former Minister for Profitable Education has warned that over-zealous migrant-bashing in the university sector could lead to an unhealthy reliance on the Yellow Peril. Chris Skidmore, who gallantly endured a decade or so of rolling back the green crap and then resigned on principle over environmental policy just as his constituency was about to be abolished, is worried that restrictions on student visas may impede diversification in the profiteering capacity of British higher education; especially as most Britons are now too poor to afford it. Should Mr Churchill's heirs decide to boost their electoral chances by starting World War III to save plucky little Formosa, a disproportionate number of Heathen Chinee in the student body might even cause some slight embarrassment.