The Ugly Face of Beauty

I just caught a bit of an awful Channel 4 plastic surgery gone wrong show. They’ve presented it as a human interest story which is a joke in itself. It used to be if you got operated on the cheap in the some third world hell like Congo or Pakistan or France and they put your tits on your back cause the Doctor was really a vet, that you could still make a living on the freak show circuit or as a carnival side show attraction “roll up roll up see Glenda the girl with 3 tits on her back, so awful you’ll hurl your lunch! Take a look folks, a fiver a glance”

At some point some however the malevolent powers that be have decided that this is insensitive, and now we have this slew of awful programs where you stare at people who have suffered tragedy. Of course instead of “Sky’s Televised Freak Show Pay Per View Extravaganza” they make out it some sort of struggle against adversity “next on 4 the scummy kid with no skin” The victim is exploited exactly the same way as with the freak show, only this time Channel 4 or whoever’s freak scouts found the story (I think they call them researchers now?) gets the money he would have been paid, and they edit this into an hour long 12 year old’s attempt at a documentary and they play sad music or a bit of eminem’s lose yourself over the top and they cake some normal person in makeup and send them off to see what it’s like to going shopping for scarves when you have no skin and they blither on about how this is a struggle against adversity and how it’s an inspiration and we all feel better that we’re not a 14 year old kid living in constant agony and doomed to die young cause our body is incapable of manufacturing skin.

And you know what it’s not inspirational, it’s not anything good or a comment on the ability of people to triumph in the face of adversity because it’s not going to change what anyone does. People might talk about it the next day at the water cooler, “hey did you see that girl with tits on her back? Hell yeah, she’d still get it” but that’s it. Nobody is watching it and then thinking “well fuck me, I’m inspired, I’ll go out and invent a cure for cancer” This shit, this fucking slow drip of culture poison is the fucking cancer! And if you watch these things you need to shoot yourself.

(Halfway through ranting this I realised this rant is inspired by Doug Stanhope’s Oprah is PT Barnham piece for Newswipe )

Tits are awesome

Khmer Rouge Official Jailed

The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who were the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan.

This organization is remembered primarily for its policy of social engineering and the genocide this caused. Its attempts at agricultural reform led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, even in the supply of medicine, led to the deaths of thousands from treatable diseases (such as malaria). Brutal and arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during purges of its own ranks between 1976 and 1978, are considered to have constituted a genocide


Bearing that in mind, this is a welcome result 

In the first judicial verdict on the genocide committed by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, a former official of the regime was on Monday pronounced guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to 35 years of imprisonment.

Full story in The Hindu here

Fuck a saurus Rex! What has happened to Kennedys?

Yeah, erm, I see why Halliwells sunk now, Jeebus fcuk!

On Freedom

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. (1900 - 1965), Speech in Detroit, 7 Oct. 1952

Is Mrs Hull on holiday?

3 quick updates at Whataboutclients, all in essence hot girl eye candy for the middle aged american gent market, Mrs Hull on holiday? I think so.


If you manage to get past that there is a good piece titled Reminder: Work-life balance, and Mediocrity, are no longer Cool. Not sure they had to shoot big bird though, he taught me not to hate people that live in the bins.

Tits are awesome

V for Vendetta - Valerie's Letter

Dear Rightards, being free does not mean giving free reign to mega national companies!

I hate the terms right and left. These terms are imaginary, lazy, media constructed and helpful to clueless moronic reporters to package complex problems only. Generally Libertarians rant about how bad conservatives are (and for proof of this see conservative states, i.e. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) then shout oh but apart from that we are on the right because against all evidence to the contrary, conservatives have something to do with freedom, even if it is convenient economic freedom rather than any notion of personal freedom, oh an also because we hate communists and socialists and all those people who put labour in their party names even more, cause our dad had to fill in a form once despite being a small business man (and really to be fair who wants to be born in China or North Korea).

It is an utter nonsense, and is helpful to nobody but vested political interests in various parties, to define politics on a scale essentially of how much tax your chosen affiliation traditionally draws in. You end up with nothing but partisan idiots who vote on a sort of football team loyalty mentality instead of considering who will make things the least bad.
Now that said, there is a depressing, mad raving, ‘we’re hard right’ libertarian streak that goes frothing fcuking mental at the though of a private citizen not taking responsibility for themselves but in the same breath rants and raves about corporate interests being given free reign and little or even no regulation because it is economically convenient to compromise their principles of responsibility when it comes to economic growth.
Historically the advent of the limited liability corporation was staunchly opposed and it should be viewed with considerable unease. The entire point of company law is to allow a businessman to set up a fake fall guy ‘probably called Businessman Limited’ who takes the fall when things go wrong. Creditors get dumped, employees get dumped, liabilities vanish. The Businessman walks away to do the same horrific scam again (Salomon v Salomon is good case to refresh at this point) This encourages a bit of innovation and risk taking and protects investors or entrepreneurs from massive personal loss.
I completely agree that a sole trader or a partnership, who have their own necks on the line should anything go wrong, should be almost completely exempt from. There is considerable pressure and consequence for such individuals to make sure things go right, their employees don't do anything stupid and their contracts are met because if they go wrong the business man is personally liable and looking at bankruptcy.
For a company to be subject to next to no regulation is ridiculous. Sure, we'll get a boom and a lot of people will have some extra cash in their back pockets as corporates free of red tape flourish but we'll also get a horrible bust, when something goes wrong and the guiding intelligence behind a raft of companies, with disinterested managers secure in their indemnity insurance and limited liability and 6 years of $$$s, simply walk away without consequence.
We can't get rid of companies and company law, nor would it be desirable to do so, it would be economic Armageddon and they are useful vehicles. But these things require tough and stringent regulation far in excess of the plucky sole trader or partnership. To suggest otherwise while applying the mantra that the private citizen must be responsible for any and all actions creates a logical divide and turns ordinary private citizens away from the argument that people should repatriate their freedoms from central and local government.

Battleships (or in this case a Battlecruiser) are cool

And you gaycakes flyboys will just have to deal with the fact that you all suck and are being replaced with robots anyway.

On Liberty

 Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward.

Patricia Sampson

Still no word on that cure for cancer then

But thank fcuk the scientific community (although Mrs S goes mental at the lumping of all scientists together) has figured out which came first, the chicken or the egg. 


You useless fcuks! the chinese are working on super clone soldiers and you fcuks give us this! 

Tits are awesome

Especially if the girl they are attached to is a Kitchen minx

Litigation culture is 'unfair' warns KPMG accounting head

From the Torygraph


Boo, Fcuking, hoo, for top accountants happy to charge a mint for near worthless auditors reports in the boom times who cry and moan when things go bad. Not withstanding that it is pretty hard to sue auditors in the first place. What the fcuk do you want Bill? The standard City tantrum of 'take all the credit and cash in a boom' say you were away during the boom when the bust you completely failed to notice creeping up rolls round?


Let's have a look at the legal sector.  UK law firms have gotten fat off the M&A boom and you didn't ring any  warning bells that firms were over-leveraged and utterly dependent on business that requires hot money to keep it going. You self entitled responsibility dodging khunts. 

Capitalists at Work notices on rushing Bank Lobbygeddon

Capitalists at Work is usually a really good site, sometimes a bit "Oh won't someone think of the city!" but on the whole pretty fair and balanced. 


They've picked up that the Banks appear to be gearing up to lobby hard against new government rules and regs here. I've snatched a snippet below but the whole site is well worth browsing.


- From the Telegraph: HSBC doesn't want to be broken up

- Osborne is praised for rebuffing the EC on banking regulation (and quite right too)

- RBS doesn't want to be thought of as socially useless (and we certainly can't move for NatWest 'Helpful Banking' ads these days, can we ?)

- The Indy suggests that Osborne has already been nobbled

- From the Observer: PWC worries (on behalf of whom, we wonder ?) that if banks are made to hold more risk capital we'll all suffer (this is a really juicy issue we shall certainly be coming back to)

- And from the Scotsman, this time it's the Scottish wing of PWC worrying that, errr, Scotland will suffer (thus proving that it's part of a coordinated lobbying campaign)


Now, if you are a "I think I know about business and the economy and shares and stuff cause I am a lawyer and I work in a big office and I buy but don't read the FT but really, I know fcuk all about anything not in a statute or covered on family guy and am too afraid to say" type person then you could do much worse than pop across and have a root through some of their stuff. 

Tits are awesome

I do love the sort of girl who you can't sleep heavily next to least you wake up stabbed. 

Another Monday looms large

Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.

Voltaire, Candide, 1759

Spaced, I like Spaced

Tim: So what happened last night then?

Daisy: Well we went to see an interesting piece of contemporary theatre, drank an enormous amount of free wine, ate our body-weight in Twiglets and you punched an artist in the face.

Tim: Shit, I'm not supposed to eat Twiglets

Daisy: Why not?

Tim: They make me violent

Hurry up with Darksiders 2!

Why do the police shit everywhere?

Police horses regularly toddle down my road, I don't know why, I live in a city centre flat and there can't be anywhere handy to keep a half ton of horse or two. 


Anywhose, setting aside the fact that I hate horses and think riding them is the ultimate expression of 'playing with your food', weekly there is a massive trail of horse shit down my road. I don't really understand why the cops get  away with this when if someone misses a smear of dog shitt they go direct to chokey. 


fcuking police

Play time is over for Transaction Lawyers

And to be fair the sundry other hangers on in the formerly booming M&A market.


Robert Peston is reporting Vince Cable, The Business Seccie's plans to put the brakes on M&As. Granted the City of London will scream bluddy blue murder about this and lobby like a good un to get any change watered right down or killed off but even so, seems lasting change is on the way.

So what will the new business secretary, Vince Cable, do about all this?



Well three things.


First he may insist that all big deals are subject to a period of lengthier advance notification scrutiny, by competition and other regulators, as well as by investors, before a formal offer is put on the table and the formal takeover clock starts ticking. The pros and cons of the deal could then be discussed in a less fraught and pressurised climate than that which pertains once the deadline looms for shareholders to say yea or nay.


Second he may massively push up the so-called merger fees payable to the Office of Fair Trading for examining the competition implications of any deal. These are currently a maximum of £90,000, which isn't even big enough to be described as a rounding error for any takeover.


My understanding is that these fees are likely to be increased sufficiently to add a bit of grit in the takeover wheel, to increase the costs of a takeover sufficiently so that the acquiring management thinks a bit harder and longer before pouncing on prey.


And finally he'll keep an eye on the Takeover Panel's review of the rules of the takeover game, and if it doesn't tilt the playing field to make it harder for deals to be completed, well he could legislate.

From Peston's Picks

4th of July Tits are Awesome

Okay, so it's the 5th today but in my defence, I'm not American so I don't really care, it's just an excuse to post a busty girl in a small bikini

Libertarian Party Unleashes New Campaign Poster

Hyperbole and a Half

Okay, so it is written by a girl but it is really funny.

Hyperboleandahalf

Of course if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear, expect the cops shoving you down the stairs and asserting you are a paedo