BlackFlag News
 
 2018/September 
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In case you hadn't noticed, the SILLY SEASON won't go away

This month's phone scam
reader comment“I had a call from the robot with the American accent. She told me that I was due for a refund of my MicroSoft Windows Security Licence following a failure. So would I please press '1' to talk to a human scammer. Who, no doubt, would attempt to extract bank account or credit card details for the imaginary refund as a preliminary to stealing lots of money from me.”

 WEEK 1 

 
Any more for any more?
bullet We've heard lots about soft Brexit and semi-Brexit and hard Brexit, [And soggy Brexit? Ed.] We've had no-deal Brexit and WTO Brexit. Now, a bunch of Bremoaners have come up with blind Brexit to describe the circumstances under which some of deal has been made but no one knows any of the details of it when we exit from the EU.
    It's clearly a "And always keep a-hold of Nurse for fear of finding something Worse" tactic by the Bremoaners.

Zone of perpetual summer
bullet The EU Commission's latest scam is to abolish winter blues by getting rid of daylight saving time and keeping the current summer time all year round.
    The EU is justifying the plan on the grounds that 4% of the population of Germany want it, 3% of the population of Austria want it and so do a massive 0.02% of Britain's population.
bullet The scam would put Northern Ireland in a different time zone from the rest of the UK if it has to match clocks with the Irish Republic. Lots of countries can handle having sub-divisions across a range of time zones, but can you imagine the bolshy Irish being willing to accept it?

bullet Curious things you might not know about the medical trade No 31
If a surgeon punches another doctor when drunk, and does it hard enough to draw blood and break the victim's glasses, that doesn't amount to misconduct.

bullet Quick News: + + + J. Corbyn + + + anti-Semitism + + + on-going + + +

Failure to deliver
bullet In Holland, they plug small holes in dikes with a thumb. So why not do the same in space? Which is exactly what ESA astronaut A Gerst had to do to plug a 2 mm hole caused by space junk in the hull of the International Space Station while his fellow crew members attended to it. [Dutch astronaut? Ed.]
    A piece of tape applied over the hole 'slowed' the rate of air leakage into the vacuum of outer space. The astronauts are said to be working on a permanent fix. Leaving the rest of us wondering why they didn't use two pieces of tape right away. Or enough to plug the leak completely.

bullet The Scottish Nationalist government is really pissed off because former superstar A. Salmond has raised enough cash from members of the public to take the Gnats to court over the way they handled allegations of groping. The Gnats thought they were fireproof. Clearly, they're not.

No Britannia on the waves
bullet When the trouble starts off Normandy, how much help can British fishermen in the Bay of Seine expect from the Royal Navy's fisheries protection gunboats? At the time of the piracy, one was in port, one was on a jolly to Norway, one was 8,000 miles away and one was back at the shipyard, broken. So not much help is the answer.
update The French are catching tuna in our parts of the English Channel, something which British boats can't do under EU rules. Another sound reason for getting out.

Dead or alive
bullet The government has wasted £1 BILLION of taxpayers' money on trying to persuade people to use bikes instead of cars. The big problem is the state of the roads and people realizing that they stand a better chance of surviving an encounter with a pothole if they're in a car rather than on a bike.

Some dodginess only eliminated?
bullet Nice to know that the bunch who hand out honours can do something right and that really dreadful tax avoiders get a red light from HMRC. Although, with the amount of back-scratching that goes on in these circles, it wouldn't come as any surprise to learn that 'HMRC say no' can be ignored for someone who has scratched all the right backs.

Remembered in kitchens everywhere
bullet He didn't get on with President Trump, who found that he had a previous engagement on the day of the long-serving senator's funeral. Knowing that he would be done over if he did and done over if he didn't, the president took the pragmatic decision not to change his plans.

McCain oven chips

bulletRussian web robots are making sure there is lots of traffic about the complaints laid against ex-SNP leader A. Salmond on anti-social meeja. It's all part of the campaign to make the abuses of the Putinocracy seem like business as usual everywhere.

Process of extinction
police helmet Police Scotland is planning to bin all of its current stock of desktop and laptop PCs and buy new ones by 2022. Doing this will cost £226 million, which PS doesn't have.
    The accountants reckon that PS will have to bin 3,000 frontline coppers to plug a £35 million/year Brown Hole in its accounts. At the same rate of exchange, 17,657 frontline coppers will have to get the chop to pay for the new computers.
    Which raises the question of whether Police Scotland will have anyone left to use the shiny new computers.

Ignorant or lazy?
bullet We know politicians are both, which is why Tony B. Liar thought that the third millennium began in the year 2000. But meteorologists are supposed to be scientists of a sort as well as crystall-ball gazers. Which means that it they ignore equinoxes and solstices and start a 'meteorological' autumn on September 1st instead of the vernal equinox, that's just laziness.
[September 23, the equinox. Ed.]

Ignorant or lazy?
bullet The Surrey police farce has revealed why the police everywhere are soft on travellers and the filthy messes they leave behind them. "Imagine how upsetting it would be, being uprooted every day" was offered by some twit on Twitter.
    Clearly by a plod who has failed to grasp the concept of travelling.

Awash with dosh
bullet If some top copper starts pleading poverty, don't believe him/her. The nation's police farces have closed 606 police stations in the almost decade since 2010 and sold off most or all of the properties. The Police Farce of the Metropolis in London has made over £1 BILLION out of its deals!

bullet If the best that the city of Kingston upon Hull can come up with in the way of sexy people of 2018 is J. Two Jags Prescott, what a truly appalling place Hull must be!

Naked discrimination
bullet The Royal Academy has minions doing a count of bare bodies in order to present an exhibition of Renaissance nudes next year containing a balanced number of bare blokes and naked ladies. Quality of execution of the paintings has been binned as a consideration on diversity grounds.
reader comment“No doubt it will be opened jointly by some female celeb 'dressed like a prostitute' and some bloke who's currently identifying as female.” A.M.
reader comment“Are we to be told that a sufficient number of Renaissance Old Master painters identified as female in order for the RA to achieve a balance of sexes in the exhibition? And what provisions have been made for those who didn't know their sex? This information needs to be disclosed immediately. S.R.S.

bullet Oh, dear! It is now too late on legal grounds to hold a second referendum on Britain's membership of the EU and get it done before we leave at the end of next March.

Far Queue symbol InYerFaceBuk is in trouble for refusing to hand over to the police, the password for the account of the prime suspect in a murder case.
reader comment“They claim they're co-operating with the police but they have to sort out their sock drawer first?” Q.H.

Wholly Cynical
bullet You're an archbishop and no one is taking any notice of you but it's the Silly Season and the papers are desperate for space-fillers. What do you do?
    If you're the Archbish of Canterbury, you pretend you're Jezzer Corbyn and start demanding the rich hand over cash for you to throw at potential customers.
reader comment“It's the same cynicism displayed by a teenage girl, who gets herself pregnant hoping for a council flat and a life on benefits and not having to work for a living.” J.C.
reader comment“It's a first step on a road to a New Labour paradise in which all the rich people have sold up and gone, everything belongs to the state and it's rotting away because there's no cash to keep it in repair and no one knows how to do the work anyway because enjoying a life of idleness at the expense of others means that no one has been trained to do it.” T.H.

Corruption flourishes — situation normal
bullet J.C. Druncker and his cronies parachuted a stooge in to the top job in the EU civil service even though he wasn't qualified for it, sez the EU's Ombudsman. But despite all the maladministration, and possible breaches of the law, no one will be sacked or even disciplined. This is the EU, after all.

bullet The two Russian GRU agents who attacked the Skripals in March with the nerve agent Novichok have been named by the police but not shamed. After all, they are Putin stooges and agents of the Evil Empire and, therefore, shameless.

bullet Some German bloke who is the EU's budget commissioner is under the impression that Italy is trying to destroy the EU. We're struggling to see anything wrong with that.
    China, Russia, Hungary, Poland and Romania are also getting a share of the blame. No mention of Britain, though, which is odd.

Don't panic, it's one of ours!
bullet The residents of an old folks' home in a Zurich suburb had a bit of a thrill this week when gardeners found an unexploded bomb whilst doing a bit of digging. Not a result of enemy action against the supposedly neutral nation, however. Experts described it as an aircraft bomb used for testing purposes in 1938 or 1939.

bullet If you go to one of Tesco's outlets to buy bananas, then there is an excellent chance that you will be ripped off.

Are the Russians trying to kill the ISS project?
bullet A small leak is located in the fabric of the International Space Station after a small drop in air pressure is detected. The astronauts cover the 2 mm hole with tape to plug the leak. It looks like the result of an impact with a micrometeorite or a piece of space junk. Or it could be a manufacturing fault or structural materials failure.
    As the leak is in a Russian-built Soyuz module docked to the ISS, defective manufacture is a serious possibility. The Russian reaction is predictable — cover it up with a silly story that one of the astronauts; not the two Russians, one of the 3 NASA guys or the German ESA guy; has gone nuts and he's drilling holes in the space station because he's crazy.
    The Russians then hope to create enough suspicion and ill-feeling that the project collapses and the embarrassment over their shoddy engineering goes away. Not that NASA can walk away from the shambles without blame. Their mismanagement of the space shuttle programme is what left the ISS at the mercy of an all-Russian supply system.

Must do better
police helmet A policewoman tasers her force's race relations advisor after he turns nasty and refuses to identify himself when the WPC does a 'stop & cop' to find out if he is a wanted man, who is known to be habitually armed and violent.
    The WPC is cleared of an assault charge at a criminal trial with body-camera evidence on offer, and cleared of breaching police regulations at a misconduct hearing. Sounds like the Bristol police are okay at picking coppers but totally useless at picking race relations bods.

bullet At least one in five adults has less that £100,000 in savings, the National Audit Office has found.

Egg on face
bullet An expert has concluded that the Greek campaign to winkle the Elgin Marbles out of the British Museum is just more confected outrage because there are fakes!
    The expert is convinced that the Romans made and fitted to the Parthenon, reproductions to replaced badly corroded Greek originals, and that's what Lord Elgin bought from the Turks: the Roman reproduction marbles, not Greek national treasures.

So much for experts
bullet Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla electric car guy, hired Goldmine Sacks to work out a price for buying back his company from the shareholders. He was tossing a figure of $420/share around before he went off the idea. Now, the Goldminers are saying that, in fact, his company's shares are worth only $210 apiece. Which just shows what a wonderful job they do when someone is paying them good money.

So much for experts II
bullet A bloke pretending to be a woman, who was accused of raping a woman, was remanded to a female gaol, where he assaulted four inmates (female). What further proof do we need that the people running the justice system are idiots, no matter which sex they are pretending to be this week?

Chunky Chelsea Tractors
bullet It's not just people who are getting fatter. The same applies to cars. Roads remain the same width but a survey has found that current production models of cars can be up to 24% wider than they were 20 years ago. Which makes them harder to manoeuvre and park, and even more of a bloody nuisance.

 WEEK 2 

 
Will it last?
bullet The No Fun League can be a bit of a clunker — mainly by design — compared to what goes on north of the border, but this year's NFL opener between the Atlanta Falcons and the World Champion of America Philadelphia Eagles had a very CFL sort of ending. No lead is safe in Canada. The Falcons had a bloody good try at making that come true in Philadelphia.

Those bloody Russians, at it again
bullet Not only are they up to no good down here, the Russians have upset the French and Italians in space by parking one of their spy satellites right next to a joint French/Italian satellite, which was providing secure communications for the French military. Could it be that the French defence minister is about to join forces with President Trump with regard to his plan to create a new Space Force to counter the Russian threat? "I've heard some people laugh (about the Trump plan)", she is quoted as saying, "but I'm not among them."

Those bloody Russians, at it again
bullet The Danish government is drawing up an action plan to counter Russian attempts to interfere with the next elections for the Danish parliament. Changes will be made to the criminal law and the Danes plan to build on the experiences of the governments in Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands, all of which have received the attention of Russian fake-news bots.
   The Russian reaction has been a standard, "Not me, Gov." Their embassy in Denmark came up with: “Meddling into Danish elections makes no sense because the government and opposition parties are all Russophobic."

The Permissive Age arrives for the Canadian military
bullet The management of the Canadian Armed Forces has come up with a list of dos and don'ts for those members of staff who use cannabis sativa and its products. They will not be allowed to consume it during a shift or domestic exercise, they will not be allowed to bring cannabis on any aircraft or vessel, and they are not permitted to bring cannabis with them internationally.
   Military members cannot consume cannabis up to 8 hours before performing any duty, up to 24 hours before handling a loaded weapon or driving a vehicle, and up to 28 days before joining the crew of an aircraft or submarine.
    The plan is based on how THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, is processed by the body. The Chief of Military Personnel feels very confident that the 8-hour, 24-hour and 28-day windows will ensure that the military remains operationally effective and that personnel will be ready at all times to do their business. [Good luck with that, chaps. Ed.]

Reader contribution:
Two-Jags Prescottbullet Further to the item on the sexiest people in Hull in 2018, one of our readers has sent in a picture [right] of old Two Jags so that everyone can appreciate what Hull has to put up with.
    Not a sight one would wish to be confronted with down a dark alley.

The bullet for Labour's dissenters
bullet Iranian infiltraitors into the Labour party are helping Momentum to wage war on those MPs who don't agree with Jezzer Corbyn's crazy views. Like the Russians, the Iranians see a Labour regime under Corbyn as hugely damaging to British interests and therefore of benefit to their own interests.

bullet The BBC has issued itself with a licence to push fake news on man-made global warming and the threat of extremely X-treme weather because of it.

bullet The government has given a minor tweak to the 2003 rules on nuisance telephone calls. But there's not much any of the government's customers can do about calls with the number withheld with regard to cutting out nuisance and silent calls.

Pull yer head in, mate!
bullet Chunky Umunna, MP, is having a moan at the Corbynites because he reckons they are depriving ethnic minorities, like his, of their more than fair share of everything.
    He, in turn, is being accused of pejorative language and offense confection in retaliation. And, of course, the Corbynasties are playing the fake news card for all they're worth and reminding old Chunky that diversity also includes rabid looney lefties as well as soft-headed ones.

bullet The EU is gathering the courage to order its Brexit negotions guy to dial down the hostility and obstructionism in the interests of cobbling together a workable deal in time to let the 27 national parliaments have a chew at it, and decide which of them will be the awkward squad which rejects it.

Far Queue symbol The current Home Sec., S. Javid, is pretending that it is only being in the EU which prevents the UK from being swamped by an epidemic of rioting, looting and a huge rise in crimes of every other sort. If that's the best he can do in the way of fake news, he needs to ask the Russians for a training course.

Two tears for two tiers
bullet It's true, HMRC actually does have different policies for some of the rich and some of the poor, it has been revealed. Rich people who don't want to be embarrassed by being hauled into court can be made to cough up what they owe plus penalties.
   This pragmatic approach spares the nation the cost of a trial and adds the penalties to the national wealth. But it has really upset those who make a living out of representing minor crooks and scumbags, who don't contribute to the national purse and end up in gaol because of it. Not that anyone else is particularly bothered, of course.

Lurch from the Left
bullet Sweden's socialists, who are attempting to inflict a New Labour 'Flood With Migrants' policy on their nation, got a good tonking in this week's elections. Swedish nationalists are the big winners and the EU is wondering now if the much debated Swexit could actually go to a referendum and happen. At least they'll have the experience of our defection to guide them if it does.

Softer on criminals
bullet D. Gauke, the current Justice Sec., wants convicts to be allowed to use mobile phones in their cells. Maybe he feels that having to use phones on public landings has an inhibiting effect on their ability to conduct criminal enterprises from behind bars. Anyhow, it sounds like the first step on the road to a phone in every cell and the inmates allowed to make unlimited free calls as a 'uman bluddy right. No doubt the Corbynites will be agitating for this before you know it.

bullet At the grand old age of 176, Paul McCartney has decided to stop using hair dye. Does anyone really care, though?

Reality check
Kriegsverdienstkreutz II Classebullet Is it genuine or is it a forgery made by the Royal Mint at the end of WW II at request of one of the Rothschild bankers? A service medal to be presented to British citizens whom MI5 had fooled into thinking were spying for the Nazis in their home country?
    The owner of this Kriegsverdienstkreutz 2nd class thinks that the bronze medal is probably the genuine article. "It would be worth a small fortune if it's a Rothschild forgery," he told BFN. "But unfortunately, life's not like that."

reader comment“If schools are to be obliged to teach atheism in religious education classes, does that mean that PE teachers will also have to include sloth in their lessons?”

No one really wants him
bullet The current governor of the Bonk of England, M. Carney, sees no hope of being invited to become the PM of his native Canada anytime soon, and he has agreed to stay on in the job until January 2020 in the interest of continuity of Project Fear and the Bremoaner cause.
    A nation rejoices.

bullet The current Labour leader, J. Corbyn, is not getting involved in purges of soft looney left MPs by the hard loonies as he has no wish to interfere with the democratic process.

Cop for this, scumbag!
Swiss police smiley-face rubber bulletbullet They have a different style of policing in Switzerland. When yobs riot on the streets of a major city and the police have to quell them using pepper spray and rubber bullets, they use rubber bullets with a smiley face drawn on them just to prove that they are nice guys, really.
   The rumour that they put something in the pepper spray to make it smell nice remains unconfirmed due to a lack of volunteers willing to sample it to find out.

Another Labour mess
bullet Those who enjoy mocking the railway industry have a rich range of "wrong sort of"s to choose from. The latest addition to the list is the wrong sort of trains.
    The Japanese diesel-electric ones bought for the east-coast mainline can't be used in electric mode north of York as they create such strong magnetic fields around themselves that they force older signals to fail-safe from green to red when the train approaches.
    They were ordered by the Labour minister who is currently Lord Adonis – 'nuff said.

More spherical objects
bullet Petanque players in Paris have found that their objects de jou make idea missiles for felling migrants who turn into psychotic killers. The discovery were made when citizens went to the aid of the victims of an Afghan miscreant, who injured 7 people with a huge knife and an iron bar; including life-threatening injuries inflicted on a local man; before the bombardment of boules felled him.

Nearly the champions
bullet Britain has just 2 more nations to beat to claim the title of Obesity World Champion of Europe. The good news is that Malta is genuinely Europeon and only slightly more obese than Britain and the other contender ahead of us, Turkey, can't really be classified as a European country because of its Asian content.

Process of grooming
bullet Vlad, the hijo de Putin, has sacked his two Novichok killers from the Russian military intelligence agency (the GRU) so that he can parade them on TV as civilians and nothing to do with him. That's Plan B.
   Plan A is to offer two blokes who genuinely have the names assumed as aliases by the killers for their trip to Salisbury. It is believed that the GRU has identified several well-documented Alexander Petrovs and Ruslan Bochirovs, and that they are being groomed for their opportunity to become TV stars whilst the after-effect bruising from cosmetic surgery is settling down.
    The Putinocrats have no wish to display two characters who look like they had a good working over in a KGB dungeon before they were hauled in front of the cameras.

bullet Note to the idiots of the US weather industry: Hurricanes are not vicious. Hurricane Florence might have a girl's name but it is not a conscious entity. It is just a hurricane.

Warning to pensioners
bullet Anyone who qualifies for the free flu jab is advised to stay well away from Japanese people and anyone who has had contact with them. The triple jab does not protect against Japanese flu, which was last year's worst killer.

Venezuela bound?
bullet Being the shadow chancellor means that you're living on the taxpayer with nothing much to do but doodle on the backs of envelopes. The latest doodle from Labour's appalling J. McDonnell is a plan to blow £500 BILLION over 3 parliaments or 15 years.
    He has no idea where the money will come from and there is absolutely no chance that he will be the chancellor from 2022 to 2037. And it would be really sad if he actually believed his own silly blow job fantasies.
    So why does he reveal them? Just to be noticed.

More Silly Season guff
bullet The 'experts' have decided that the yellowish discolouration of Leonardo da Vinci's 500-year-old painting Mona Lisa indicates that the lady had a thyroid condition. Clearly, no one has mentioned to the mad medics that yellowing is a normal feature of ancient art materials. But specialists in one field tend to be appallingly ignorant of basic facts of life in another.

We're all doomed
bullet Professor J. Al-Khalili, the new president of the British Science Association, reckons that artificial intelligence is a greater threat to the British way of life than terrorism, climate change, the EU, antibiotic resistance or anything else you can think of. He reckons that there is unprecedented technological progress taking place in the AI field, and that it is unfolding quickly and without proper oversight and regulation. So cue a rush of civil servants to tie AI up in pointless rules to make it totally ineffective? It's what they do best.

We're all doomed
bullet The cosmetic mayor of Greater Manchester, A. Burnham (a.k.a. the Stafford Hospital Guy), has signed up to Project Fear. He's pretending that there will be riots in the streets in the event of a WTO Brexit.
bullet The Liberals in Manchester are also signed up to the Bremoaner cause.

bullet The prudes dropped the swimsuit competition in the new Miss America pageant and condemned the show to its lowest ever ratings on a broadcast network. Nice one!

bullet Gooble, more blatant than the Russians, is in trouble with Congress for making a 'silent donation' to the Hillary Clinton re-election campaign in 2016.

bullet The Dolt of the Month Award goes to F. Fazeli, who tried to stab a Republican congressional candidate at the Castro Valley Fall Festival in California. He produced a switchblade knife but he failed to get the blade to come out and ran away. When the cops caught up with him, he was charged with the felony of making criminal threats and the misdemeanours of exhibiting a deadly weapon and possessing a switchblade.

reader comment“Why is there any surprise that J. Corbyn's private sec. hasn't passed the security checks needed for access to Parliament's back offices? Seems like the only people he cultivates are terrorists and people who would never pass any sort of basic security check.”

Talk, cheap or not?
reader comment“Health Sec. M. Hancock sez all patients should be able to Skype their GP on a smartphone. Does that mean those who don't have one will be forced to buy a smartphone? Or is Mr. Hancock planning to distribute them to all qualified NHS customers? Presumably, on prescription.”

 WEEK 3 

 
Sod safety, here's a chance for a mega-whinge!
bulletAmazon has abandoned the idea of moving workers among potentially dangerous machinery in a mobile structure, which looks like a shark cage on wheels.
   The company obtained a patent for the device in 2016 but it has been filed in the 'bad ideas' drawer for fear of a shower of even more adverse publicity, attacks by looney lefties and accusations of treating people like pieces of kit.
    The mobile safety cages can be steered by a warehouse's computer system to an area which needs attention in order to co-ordinate their movements with those of automated machinery, and operated under manual control by the occupant as required.
reader comment“Maybe people who use a shark cage for personal protection in the sea or an aquarium need to start worrying in case they're banned as a violation of their 'uman bluddy right to free movement and a shark's inhuman bluddy right to snack on anything in the water.”

Elastic ethics
Far Queue symbol The Archbigot of Canterbury thinks Amazon and Gooble are disgraceful tax dodgers but that doesn't stop him from working for an organization which has huge investments in both of them.
    He also seems to be working for the Labour party as a propagandist, but the quality of his outpourings suggests that it is probably unpaid voluntary work.

update BoE boss M. Carney's latest Message to the Nation is that a WTO Brexit will trigger a financial crisis of the magnitude of the Brown Bust in 2008 and that house prices will plunge so far down and down that people won't be able to give them away.

Putin needs to do better
bullet The scriptrotter for Putin's bogus killers is getting a good kicking for the lameness of his story. “We went to see Salisbury cathedral's world-famous, 123 metre high spire. And to dip our perfume spray bottle of Novichok in the holy water to get it blessed. Oh, what a giveaway.”
    The incredibly lame, 'just reading from the autocue' performance of the boguses is also getting a roasting.
update The stooges are claiming that the British Secret Intelligence Service has put a bounty on their heads. 3p and a signed photograph of Queen Victoria sounds about right.

Rule No. 1 Violation?
bullet How do you upset Russian stooges? Conclude that if they had a perfume spray bottle which didn't contain Novichok, as they claimed in their Putin Today interview, then they have to be a pair of poofters who were on a romantic minibreak in the exotic foreign parts of Salisbury.
    Worse, they showed no interest at all in the female PT reporter during the bogus interview.
bullet The Putin Novichok fable is so pathetic that even his own supporters make no effort to pretend that they believe it.

Equality for all
police helmet The forces of diversity have persuaded the police to go after white suspects for relatively harmless imaginary offences to give Asian terrorists a break.
   As a result, the police have been able to massage the number of white suspects arrested above the number of Asian terror suspects for the first time since the 7/7 bombings of the transport system in London in 2005.

Voluntary or involuntary tenants?
bulletThe chief inspector of prisons has described HMP Bedford as vermin-infested. But whether he was talking about the human or the rodent population remains to be clarified.

bullet The Burmese boss A.A.S. Kyi has said about the mass murder, rape and arson in the east of her country: "There are, of course, ways in which, with hindsight, I think the situation could have been handled better."
    As we're doing Semmitism again, it's pertinent to recall that they said much the same about the Holocaust at Nuremberg.

Not bovvered
bullet What do you do when you've been fired by your current team, next year's team has told you not to bother turning up and the sport has awarded you a life ban?
    If you're Romano Fenati, who reached across to pull Stefano Manzi's brake lever during last weekend's Moto2 motorbike race in San Marino, all that's left is pretending that none of the above happened and retirement from motorbike racing is your own decision.

Damage Limitation
bullet The CoE is trying to buy back some friends by persuading other people to bail out those who took unaffordable loans from another of its investments – Wonga. The Archbigot of Cantab. is hoping to drown the stench of hypocrisy with the sweet perfume of charity.

They're everywhere!
bullet It has been revealed that two more Russian spies were busted in Holland en route to the aptly named Spiez centre in Switzerland. Their aim was to tamper with its work on chemical attacks. The centre was working on samples from Syria, where the Russians are backing up the chemical weapons-using Assad regime, at the same time as Novichok samples from Salisbury, making it a doubly tempting target for the Putinocracy.

bullet The Salisbury Two reckon they are fitness product salesmen. Who writes their guff? The scriptrotters for The News Quiz on Radio 4?

How low have the nation's police farces sunk?
police helmet As far as threatening a Metropolitan Police detective superintendent with the sack for gross misconduct for using the perfectly comprehensible expression 'whiter than white' in a briefing about corruption at the Complaints Department.
    No danger of the sack for the pissant who got the hump, though.
reader comment“One of the excuses for the sacking threat is that the offending phrase was delivered in a menacing tone. See the comment above about who writes this sort of crap.”

bullet The Loch Ness Monster provides the Scottish economy with £41 million/year of income. Not bad for a virtual beast which is 1453 years old.

bulletreader comment“The NUL lobby — is that the same as the boo-hoo buggers?”
[Some differences in detail but pretty much. Ed.]

Brilliant idea, won't work
bullet Amazon, which is notorious for its overkill policy on packaging, is being threatened with a Cardboard Tax to help fund the enormous costs run up by local councils when they pretend to run a recycling process and they are confronted with HUGE cardboard boxes containing miles of crushed paper sheet packing.
    Natch, the smart money is on Amazon reducing its packaging to more modest levels just before the tax crawls through Parliament and not much money (or even less than none when admin costs are include) is raised from it.

reader comment“Should Serena Williams be made to change her name after that hissy fit she threw in a major tennis tournament? Serenity has nothing to do with that sort of behaviour. Maybe Entitled Williams would be more accurate.”

You'll stay overboard
bullet Three-quarters of the people who go overboard from a cruise liner are men and the chance of being rescued by the ship you were on is just 17%, according to the experts. Looks like not falling overboard is an excellent survival strategy.

bullet 83% of the public think that MPs lie about immigration, according to the latest poll? The surprise is that it's not 99%.
    But people do trust MPs who wear glasses, like Mr. Rees-Mogg, more than MPs who don't, like Boris Johnson, as it's a sign that they know their eyesight is wonky and they are intelligent enough to have done something about it so that they can pay attention.

Not paying attention
bullet A female CoE bishop wants people to refer to her god as She rather than He. The bish clearly hasn't noticed that lots of people do it already on the grounds that no bloke would be as nasty and vindictive as the CoE's god.

Far Queue symbol Git of the Month: I. Bone-Idle, the looney left scrounger who went for a whinge at the MP J. Rees-Mogg, who has a job and contributes, and his kids. Brilliant advert for Corbynism!

Attention CFL — here's another:
University is Strength

The silliest police story of the month
police helmetbullet Apparently, the two Putin stooges who carried out the Novichok murder in Salisbury 'could' escape arrest if there's a no-deal, WTO Brexit. That's what the police chief's union would like us to believe, anyway.
    The story conveniently ignores the fact that the stooges are in Russia and they're never, ever going to be turned over for trial or risk going anywhere else, no matter what sort of Brexit we have; even one with purple and green stripes and pink knobs on it.

Tip of the month
reader comment“If your Bic ballpoint suddenly stops writing, even though you can see tons of ink left in it, try doing a bit of gentle scribbling on a sheet of fine sandpaper or one of those emery boards used for trimming fingernails. That should get it working again. Just don't get too enthusiastic until you're sure the bloody thing is never ever going to write again.” H.T.

bulletWarm words for the EU: That's what we're being asked to offer to facilitate Brexit. "Burn in Hell." Is that hot enuf?

bullet According to V. Cable, the figurehead of the Trivial Democraps, the 2016 vote to go for Brexit was an 'erotic sprezm'. Translation, please.
reader comment“Incomprehensible to him, implying it should therefore be incomprehensible to everyone else?” A.C.

He sez, she sez
Far Queue symbol The leader of the Women's Equality party is complaining that no one noticed that she had a clitoris in her leader's speech. Perhaps if she'd pronounced it 'clitourist', they might have.

Not paying attention [part 2]
reader comment“That lady bishop who wants her god to be a woman seems not to have bothered reading her own company's script:
    “Half Arthur, who's Art in Heaven, Harold be thy name.
    “Arthur Harold is the name of her god, and that's a bloke's name. Q.E.D.” C.B.
[Not if he's identifying as female, it ain't. Ed.]

How not to do statistics
bullet Men are six times more likely to be disqualified from driving than women, sez the DVLA. The conclusion is based on the total numbers of men and women who have received a driving ban and takes no account of the fact that there are considerably more male drivers on the road than female ones.

bullet More embarrassment for the Archbigot of Cantab. Starbucks pays 2.8% tax on its UK profits instead of the 19% corporation tax and the Church of England owns a piece of the coffee chain.

Not very Tory at all
bullet The PM seems to have abandoned the traditional Conservative policy of being the party of low taxes; they are now as high as they were in the late 1960s when Harold bloody Wilson was PM. And Mrs. May is cool with putting taxes up even more to hand £20 BILLION to the NHS with no guarantees that the cash will be spent wisely, the existing areas of abuse and waste will be eliminated instead of allowing new ones to be created and definitely no guarantee of sackings and ministerial resignations if the money isn't spent wisely and effectively. Not a chance of that last bit.

Calling the bluff
bullet President Trump has done the dirty on the FBI's attempt to create a vast conspiracy involving him and the Putinocracy by ordering the declassification of the documents and messages gathered by the FBI. The Democraps, naturally, are opposed to the move as could expose what they were up to in the way of dirty tricks during the 2016 election campaign, and the FBI's collusion with the Clinton camp.

Useless but untouchable
railway engine It's official — the Transport Dept. (ministers & civil servants), Notwork Rail and the railway companies are all unfit for purpose. But they are structured such that no one is responsible for anything and no one is to blame for the shambles following the May [the month, not the PM. Ed.] timetable cock-ups and general destruction of rail travel.

Tune in, turn-off, drop dead
Far Queue symbol Luvvies bashing President Trump at the Emmy Awards show didn't exactly do a lot for the advertisers which paid for the TV coverage. A drop in the ratings by 11% compared to last year shows just how much the public enjoys hearing Boo-Hoo Buggers delivering their own scripts instead of one written by an industry professional.

Bring me the head of Oily Robbins!
Theresa Maybullet Why does the PM have a face like a bashed crab? Why does she keep going "Grrrr!" all the time? Because she was lured to Salzburg with assurances that she was going to have a good time, only to be ganged up upon by the National Association of Losers members who boss the EU.
    She thought her Chequers Carve Up Scam for Brexit was the bee's knees. Her advisors, including the one who claims to have listening posts in Europe, told her the same. Okay, all the opposition parties in Parliament think it stinks, but they would, wouldn't they? Okay, a large chunk of her own party agrees with the opposition but they can be talked round, can't they? Big surprise all round when the EU didn't buy it and told her to have another referendum and get the result right this time.
   Looks like it's reality check time for Mrs. May now. Humiliate herself further or just walk away. Tough choice.

Far Queue symbol Ronald Ho getting sent off for an assault on another player in a football match? Wow! So much for Mr. Bulletproof.

 WEEK 4 

 
Sport for dopers only from now on?
bullet The World Anti-Doping Agency is to be stripped of its first 'A' following the executive committee's decision to go soft on the Putinocracy. Under the terms of the new deal with the Russians, the WDA will ignore the existence of the state-sponsored doping available to most Russian athletes and let the Russians do their own unsupervised testing of samples collected from their athletes in future.

bullet Labour kommissar J. Corbyn thinks the PM has shown herself incapable of delivering a good Brexit deal. So that's her done for!

The Untied States of Europe
Far Queue symbol French president E. MacRon has been reminded post Saltzburg that he's belittling the leader of the country with did its bit for France between 1939 and 1945 so that McRon has the freedom to make a complete prat of himself in 2018. So that's him told.

bullet Enemies of Britain — France, Ireland, Malta. Time for a trade boycott of everything originating in these countries.

Both ends and the middle
reader comment“France's dopey bird of a Europe minister, N. L'Oiseau, thinks all Brexiteers are anti-Semitic. Which fails to explain how J. Corbyn can be both for and against getting out of the EU.” [He's a politician. Ed.]

Put the Blame where it Belongs
reader comment“There is hope of salvation for Mrs. May. She can just blame the Chequers in Salzburg fiasco on her advisors, sack Oily and move off in a more acceptable direction for her party and the country at large. And screw what the EU wants. No deal, no £39 BILLION, remember.”

Prize specimen
bullet D. Abbott is being touted as Labour's next leader because of the number of boxes she ticks. Female, black, single parent, obese and she talks bollocks with an air of conviction even when she doesn't have a clue what she's going on about.

Unexpected bonus
bullet What do you get if you let Serco have the contract to maintain your hospital buildings? The staff at Fulbourne hospital in Cambridge found that they were sharing a building with 60,000 bees, and they had brick- and plasterwork oozing honey.

Situation normal, hypocrisy and waste
bullet The boss of the UN Environment Programme has been condemned by his own organization for being an air-travel junkie with a carbon footprint as big as all outdoors. He also has the haphazard and dictatorial management style worthy of an EU Commission waxwork, and he makes dodgy expenses claims. Sounds like a typical UN beauty.

Hello, you are now in our city, kindly sod off
bullet Venice has been nominated as Europe's least welcoming city for tourists. It has a mayor who spends his days thinking up new offences and new ways to slap fines on unwary visitors, and the city's eateries are notorious for shameless overcharging.

Put the blame where it belongs, if that's not too much trouble
bullet An undisclosed time ago, a Pakistani heart patient carrying a backpack and fitted with a computer-controlled cardiac pump was questioned by the police, who wanted to make sure he wasn't a suicide bomber. The usual suspects yelled racial profiling when they heard about the incident.
    In fact, the police stopped the bloke because he was driving a car with a defective rear light, and they felt entitled to ask questions when they saw the driver was wearing an electronic gadget (his computer).
    Is it fair that Asian Moslems blow themselves up to kill other people? Nope. Is it right that the police should make sure that Asians are not of the explosive type? Definitelyshitely yup!
    Which means that the guy with the heart pump should lodge any complaints with his own community and be grateful for the medical treatment, which included a heart transplant, which he got courtesy of the British taxpayer.
    As for the usual suspects, all they deserve is a routine invitation to drop dead.

Far Queue symbol The US deputy attorney general has denied trying to do the dirty on President Trump. His only problem now is getting people to believe him.

bullet MSPs would like more poor people to become lawyers. But wouldn't it be better for Scotland if they got proper jobs?

Guilty until proven guilty
bullet More lawyers, eh? The Can't Prosecute Service south of the border has decided that the best way to get more convictions in rape cases would be to train jurors to make them more likely to deliver a guilty verdict. Doing things like cleaning up the CPS act so that it does a proper job and stops abusing due process by withholding evidence from the defence is clearly not on the agenda.

Far Queue symbol J. Corbyn, the Wolfie Smith of Islington, has decided that the time is right to junk the pledge made in the last Labour election manifesto and back another referendum on EU membership in the hope that it will deliver political advantage.

Some choice!
reader comment“The Labour position on EU membership now appears to give their members a choice between letting the Tories ruin the country through Brexit and staying in the EU and letting the Europeons do it.” G.B.

Re-inventing the past
railway engine Steam locomotives on Britain's railways used to carry supplies of sand, which was blasted under the driving wheels when they encountered slippery sections of track. This solution is seen as the way forward in the battle with leaves on the line for current trains, which lack the weight/power combination of steam locos and get stuck a lot more easily.
reader comment“Next up — ‘We apologize for the delay to your train service, which is due to too much sand on the line.’ Bound to happen!” H.T.S.

Viva Venezuela!
reader comment“What do you do at the annual conference of a party that's unelectable because of its looney left leadership? Take the piss out of the comrades by giving them a chance to cheer promises to nationalize everything in sight (presumably, without compensation as the government won't have the cash to do it honestly), steal shares from any company which issues them and sack the fat cat bosses, impoverish pensioners by wrecking private pension funds and make what Gordon F. Broon did to the economy look like an exceedingly minor blip.” A.L.M.

Inappropriate Visuals
reader comment“I was watching TV with the sound turned down during the adverts when I saw this woman grating a plastic water bottle onto her kids' food. Something to do with a lobby called PassOnPlastic. Pass it on to your kids as a non-nutritional supplement? Weird!” L.G.R.

Give them what they deserve
reader comment“We all know what the agenda of the government is — to ratshit up Project Fear. The best way to react is to laugh at them. Bullies hate that.” L.M.

There is no news today – it has all been censored
cell bars The EU's administration tendency is preparing the ground for a Ministry of Truth, which will censor all broadcast, printed and on-line news media to remove items which paint the EU itself, its leaders, its institutions and its stooges in an unfavourable light.
bullet Looking on the brighter side, if the plan goes ahead, it will need sufficient staff to put a significant dent in the EU's unemployment problem.
bullet The EU would like us to accept that there is no connection between the justice commissioner's blanket censorship plan and the leaked revelation that the Euro Court of Justice has ruled that MEPs need not provide paperwork to support expenses claims on privacy grounds, leaving them free to steal from the taxpayer with even less conscience.

There is good news just around the corner
bullet Brilliant news for the struggling NHS! Life expectancy in post millennium Britain has hit the buffers. [I seem to remember hearing that before. But I suppose June was rather a long time ago. Ed.]
    It has got stuck at 79 years for men and 83 years for women. Which means that the problem of looking after the elderly won't get worse than it is now. Unless Labour gets in to government and ruins the economy again, of course.

Labour and referendums
red fist The Labour party seems to be heading for two Brexit referendums, according to what is coming out of the party conference. One will be about the type of Brexit only. The other will include Leave and Remain options.
    The number of options on the ballot paper could be 2, 3, 5 or more, with multiple choices possible if there are 3 or more options. The leadership of the Islington Liberation Army will choose which referendum will count according to the results obtained. And if the stoopid people don't deliver the right result, they'll just have to do it all over again. And again, if necessary, until they get it right.

Bellingcat investigates – and succeeds
bullet One of Putin's Poisoners has been outed as a Colonel Vlad Chepiga, 39, of the GRU. He travelled to Salisbury under the alias Ruslan Boshirov with another Kremlin stooge to kill defector Sergei Skripal and anyone near him. The botched job claimed only one life – that of Dawn Sturgess as collateral damage.
bullet The Putinocracy is sticking with the fake news it concocted at the time of the attack in March despite international derision.
bullet Bellingcat Investigations also confirmed that the Malaysian Airlines flight shot down over Ukraine in July 2014 was killed by Russians using Russian weapons on orders from their government in support of the insurgents in the east of Ukraine. This is something else about which the Russians continue to trot out their fake news.
bullet We were curious enough about the name Bellingcat to look it up on Wikipedia – it refers to the mediaeval tale about a group of mice who decided that they could make a cat harmless if they could put a bell around its neck; but none of them was brave enough to try it.

Baggage abuse
Far Queue symbol Will Manchester airport ban the sub-contractor, whose minions were filmed hurling suitcases about? It's unlikely that the customers will get any satisfaction as the goons were employed by Ryangrounded.
    Everyone in authority is reported to be taking the embarrassment very seriously, which means 'situation normal, it will be swept under the carpet after a suitable interval'.

Making the Green Belt vanish
bullet Manchester's mayor, the Stafford Hospital Guy, is in an arse-kicking contest with local councils. They want to build on the green belt, he promised to preserve it in his election manifesto. Which means that both parties will have to get busy backstage and concoct a face-saving dirty deal. But that will have to wait until after Burnham returns from his current jolly in China.

The Biopause explained (in part)
bullet A major reason for the current dead stop in life expectancy growth, named the British Biopause, is that people have abandoned an active lifestyle in favour of gawping at screens of one variety or another.
    The chief knowledge officer of the NHS reckons that inactivity is a silent killer. And also a possible saviour of an NHS unable to cope with an ageing population. But that's not something which a senior NHS official could ever admit.

 WEEK 5 

 
Stand up for what you believe in?
bullet The online greetings card and personalized gift firm moonpig.com is getting a lot of aggro from its customers, who can't be bothered to read the T&C. Maybe it's the impersonal world of online ordering and automated production that leads the customers to assume that anything goes and no one will notice if they put a shot of their naughty bits on a card, a mug or some other gift.
    They even ask Mr. Moonpig if he does pop-up cards, especially in the run up to St. Valentine's Day. Female customers are just as bad as male ones. Or in-betweens. But hey, it means gainful employment for whoever it is who has to screen all the orders for the obscene ones.

bulletYou're no one without a slogan
So how about:
       Bods, Buns & Buts
       made Britain Great

Would look good on a tee-shirt.

Far Queue symbol Austria's equivalent of our Home Sec. is doing the New Labour thing of preventing the police from talking to the news meeja — presumably to limit the extent of embarrassing disclosures about misconduct by public officials. Worked for New Labour, why not in Austria?

Far Queue symbol They certainly live up to their name. Ryangrounded didn't do lots of bits of Germany on the last Friday of the month because cabin crews and pilots were out on strike. The company isn't giving the unions enuf in its negotions to satisfy their greed, apparently. Belgium, Holland, Italy, Portugal and Spain also experienced ongoing Ryangrounded conditions.
bullet Not that going to the German capital was a particularly good idea at the end of the month. The Turkish president was on a state visit and the usual suspects were out in the streets causing trouble. And Kanzler Angular Mherkl is not much more popular than President Erdogan. Except with football fans, who were cheered by the news that Germany, not Turkey, won a close contest to host the Euro 2024 football tournament.

Small earthquake in Italy, not many dead
bullet Not any, in fact. It was only a R4.2 quake which gave a bit of a shaking to Calabria in the toe of Italy's boot. The quake was also felt in neighbouring Sicily. Three aftershocks of magnitude less than R2 were registered but probably not felt by anyone.
bullet The Civil Protection Agency of Italy was forced to deny rumours of a tsunami heading for the Violet Coast of Calabria, and if the agency ever finds out who started it, he/she will be in big trouble.
   Romiley, of course, is noted for its earthquakes, and the town is living in fear and trembling of the next Big One, as we have not had one which anyone has felt for a decade. Check out the reports here:
    Romiley's recent earthquakes

Okay, this is it, we're all doomed
bullet If Jezzer Corbyn and Momentum don't finish us off, monkeypox will. This species-jumping smallpox rival is being offered as the Next Big Thing after the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, which wiped out 3% of the world's population.
    But let us look on the bright side. If ultra-contagious, fast-mutating monkeypox follows its predicted lethal course, the government of the day won't have to worry about building more houses and schools. The ones in existence then will more than accommodate the reduced British population.

bulletWind Farmers Against Fascism
         Demand that YOU Donate NOW!

Lessons in Everything
bullet Nothing like having a spot of added value on offer from your university, especially if it charges the best part of 10 grand for a year's tuition. Sheffield University, for instance, offers its customers guideline on how to do their drugs.
    Makes you proud to be British.
bullet 50% of young adults are now going to university (but not always staying the course), according to official figures. What isn't mentioned is that 87% of them won't achieve anything like the benefits they expect to receive from having a degree.

A Question of Trust
bullet A survey by the Post Office has found that 90% of the population across the age spectrum does not want a cashless society. The main motivator for keeping pounds in the pocket appears to be the big banks' 'not me gov' attitude to victims of online fraud, and the ease with which fraudsters can move cash around temporary bank accounts to make it disappear. In these instances, the banks deploy the Corbyn Defence: 'We might have been present but we don't think we were involved'.

Nothing to do with either justice or competence
police helmet What happens when hissy top coppers out to get someone concoct a non-assault with the assistance of a 'victim', who had to admit in court that she didn't think a crime had been committed?
    The alleged perpetrator spends six months and counting on restricted duties during the investigation (and subsequent proceedings), and the judge tosses the case as having no substance on Day One of the trial. Along with some harsh words for the idiots at the CPS who brought the case and the idiot top cops who took the non-case to them.
Far Queue symbol No idiots were harmed or demoted or sacked as a result of this shambles.

Clown show
bullet The Boy Beckham is getting some stick for getting off a speeding charge because the Speeding Fines (Persecution of Motorists) Authority screwed up and didn't get the notification of the fine to him within 14 days, as the law requires.
   But Mr. Beckham was just a passenger in all this. It is his smart solicitor who is making a career out of spotting the blunders of the SF(PoM)A, whose staff appear to be entirely fireproof, no matter how often and how badly they screw up.

Danger! Intruder!
bullet Is that really a whale in the Kent stretch of the river Thames? Or is it a Russian spy submarine in a cunning disguise? The Port of London Authority has imposed a 100 metre precautionary exclusion zone around the 'whale' to keep tourists and whale-watchers at a safe distance, just in case.

Far Queue symbol D. 'Dregsky' Hatton, who was booted out of the Labour party in the Neil Pillock era for crashing Liverpool council with an illegal budget, has been welcomed back into Corbyn Labour as a comrade in arms.

bullet Reducing the legal limit for a driver's blood alcohol in Scotland from 80 mg to 50 mg/100 ml has had absolutely no effect on the rates of road accidents and fatalities.

Catalan Celebration
bullet Catalan separatists celebrated the first anniversary of their independence referendum with an outdoor art festival in the streets of Barcelona on the last Saturday of the month.
    Spanish riot police became the canvas for a monumental action painting. And very jolly they looked when the artists had finished with them!

Catalan live action art

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Created for Romiley Anarchists' League by workers in revolt against oppression
to set the record straight in the 3rd millennium. © RAL, September MM18.