The rictus grin

(shudder)

This is all our Prime Mentalist could do when getting the well deserved dressing down of a lifetime from Daniel Hannan earlier last week.

He really is pathologically incapable of being normal.

"Waiter! There's a hoon in my soup!"

Poor old Derek... haha

Expelled from his university and now made to look a right arrogant and obnoxious idiot on the Daily Politics show - tremendous.

Told off for interrupting by the hosts, and Guido went in for the political kill about his accusations of Dale's "racism" and the collusion between Draper and spindoctor Damien McBride.

Good to get Derek to confess live on TV that he's being paid by Labour sympathisers and regular Labour donors.

In the end, Derek got nasty e.g. he reverted to his natural self by trying to smear Guido, failed and ended up looking like a bigger hoon than we all thought was capable.

I feared for Guido thinking it was going to be a BBC Labour-led stitchup, but it looked like Andrew and his co-presenter were keen to stick the knife into that over-qualified tramp.

And the first attempt by the BBC to present the Dan Han video, although the were backpedalling wildly as to why they hadn't shown it.

Well done Guido, and bye bye Derek.

Dan Hannan says Gordon is "...pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things..."

Probably one of the most wanted, needed and best speeches I have heard for some time.

Please link, post, email... anything - just get these liebour hoons out now.

Green shoots of drudgery

I heard on the radio and on the news this morning talk about the "green shoots of recovery" that were taking place. Although most of those being interviewed were profusely sweating estate agents saying they were seeing “...much more activity than last month...” but obviously declined to mention exactly how much of this "activity" had turned into transactions.

The Grauniad has a delusional piece on liebour still winning the election alongside the news of unemployment accelerating past the 2 million mark.

Could this be the signs that Gordon is gearing up the electorate for an early election? Make the economic news artificially good, declare himself as the UK’s personal saviour, throw the last credit card at a “Gordon is good” marketing campaign and have a quick election when the weather is good?

I think the first planted question in PMQs will be something along the lines of:

“With the first signs of economic recovery showing, would my right honourable friend like to hear another apology from the Tories for not realising his economic mastery?”

Hello darkness my old friend

No, it's not a future projected picture of Dolly in one of the Gillian "another dodgy qualification" McKeith programs to shock you into eating paper, grass and water for the rest of your life after she carried out the grand revealing of your stools. It's a picture from an online game I played the other night called Left4Dead which is the cliched but enjoyable shooting of amusingly animated Zombies, shouting and laughing with your mates while drinking beer.

The girlfriend of one friend stood in while he refilled his pint glass and she efficiently covered the rearguard. She also had a remarkably charming voice on the crystal clear Skype conference call.

Although I’m a little cautious at using that as an overall true judge and jury of character as I used to have the hots for my dad’s secretary when I was a teenager. I'd never met her before but she had this super-sexy, silky 100 Rothman’s RP voice of a vixen and between the sheets in those hormone fuelled “nuit de passion” between myself and my imagination, I assumed she to be the Jeanne Moreau of my film noir dreams.

My dad just laughed at me – she was about 60 years old and my illusion was shattered.

Mind you, there have been some awful, beaten with the ugly stick, nagging fillies, when not braying into my ear but were confusing the delicate art of fellatio with the process of ripping corn from its cob with their incisors, where I had an epiphany and truly appreciated the meaning of Art and Paul’s stunning, selfless biblical message to the followers of flares, that within the sound of silence, darkness was indeed my friend.

"derekdraper is following you"

Er, not any more he's not. Poor old Dolly, once again, like Jonah, his grandious plans for his masters to control the blogosphere have taken another turn for the worse. According to twitter, Dolly offended by violating these T&Cs:-

• a large number of people block the profile in question
  
• a large number of people write in with spam complaints for a specific profile
  
• aggressive following (a large number of people are followed in a short amount of time)
  
• extremely imbalanced follower/following ratio
  

Problem is, Dolly thinks he can treat the internet like any other traditional media - you know, phone it up, get all aggressive, bully and shout and threaten so he can get his own way.

It's Dolly's way. It's Labour's way.

The Internet? No way.

(h/t Guido)

The curse of Jonah strikes again

One minute Gordon is telling congress that Kennedy is to receive an honoury knighthood:

“Northern Ireland today is at peace,” Brown said. “More Americans have health care. Children around the world are going to school. And for all those things, we owe a great debt to the life and courage of Senator Edward Kennedy.”

Next minute, all hell breaks loose in Northern Ireland...

Bloomberg

Grauniad

Why LabourList will fail

As I haven't been there for several weeks, I had a quick look at Dolly's Labourlost blog, you know, the one that is "a place for labour-minded people to come together online and discuss politics".

Except that there isn't a great deal of discussion going on, just posts that mirror the labour party message du jour. Nothing about ID cards, crime figures, gordon's culpability of the demise of the horn of plenty etc Just a daily piece of propaganda from the labour bunker.

The whole raison d'être of a blog is to provide a platform to encourage discussion. To argue. To throw ideas around. To share viewpoints. To score points and to expose some other not necessarily tasteful human behaviours.

The problem with the old question: "why are labour so appallingly unsucessful at everything, including blogs?" can be answered with one word. Control.

Everything about labour can be distilled down into top down control.

You have a problem? Don't worry, the state will look after you.

Not sure what to eat? The state will tell you what you must and must not eat.

It's in their mindsets. It's in their DNA. It's their tribalist genes. The control. A blog without moderation and discussion is anathma to them. They can't allow people to disagree with the party line. They can't allow people to discuss freely their ideas. You must believe with all your heart that the state is right. And punishment for those that dare to differ and be individual.

So back to the image at the top of this article. This was in response to the drearily, obviously written by a wonk, Kerry "I agree with everything labour say and do without argument" McCarthy article about the argument for the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

Out of the pitifully small handful of replies that tried to deride labour's obvious attempts at spinning this awkward dilemma, only one person touched on the real reason behind this and...

... was promptly deleted as it was off-message.

That’s not a blog.

That’s Pravda. And we’ve already got one of those in Portland Place, London.

"She thinks it's all over, it is now..."

The picture that says it all in today's PMQs: Harman's realisation that she may have just lost her chance of succeeding Gordon in the race for the next Leader of the Opposition for several decades.

Note how the two stooges on either side, Miliband being a hopeful contender, are laughing at Harman's discomfort at Hague questioning her loyalty to "the man that never says sorry".

Another Pig Snuffling at the Trough

As Iain Dale, Guido and The Penguin have posted, Unite's Derek Simpson has been wallowing in the 5 star Waldorf hotel rather than catching the train 35 mins or being driven wee, wee, wee all the way home in his chauffeur driven car.

Simpson, who has joined the braying Mary Shelley extras in the demonising of “fat-cat” bankers, is up for re-election next week as leader of the Amicus half of the union.

A Unite spokesvermin vomited forth some lame justification about “being operationally appropriate” which ranks high amongst the disgust I have for weasel words such as “it is the right thing to do”, “lessons have been learnt” and “quantitative easing”.

Another runt likely to be voted out then, to be swapped by another gagging for the trough of plenty.

Hypocrites.

R.I.P Ivan Cameron

Terrible, terrible sad news.

Our thoughts and prayers are with you David and Samantha.

"There's no such thing as society"

Ah yes, the much bandied about soundbite so often parroted by non-thinking, tribalist lefties. Often used while one of them is reaching their "full froth and spitting" climax trying to blame Thatcher for the woes of Britain, rather than new labour's disasterous application of their misguided, cultural Marxist experiment.

Still, why let facts get in the way of watching them approaching a vile, hate-fuelled, comically animated and class-envied embolism.

The soundbite in its full context from Peter Oborne’s article in the Spectator magazine in August 2002:

"I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society.

And, you know, there is no such thing as society.

There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."

Dolly's Downfall

An absolutely fantastic rendition of Bernd Eichinger's Downfall depicting the cockwaffery of the ex-tax payer funded precocious upstart that had the arrogance once to proclaim:

"There are 17 people who count in this government. And to say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century."

Draper's pitiful attempt to dominate the blogosphere whilst flying the socialist flag have so far failed dismally because as always, he can't stop his internal rage from dominating his atrophied intellect.

(h/t Donal Blaney)

Good Old Honest Labelling

I see the Tories are introducing a new campaign called Honest Food which although I agree with, I think it shrinks into insignificance when we contemplate the demise of UK plc.

Proper labelling of food is important for consumer choice as buying “British Pork” for instance could mean under current regulations that it has been imported from Eastern Europe and processed here which quite frankly does not mean British Pork.

Correct labelling has nothing to do with free trade or protectionism: it’s simply identifying where the product came from, without exploiting EU loopholes. In as a far as people expect to have the free choice of where to give money to their charity of choice, they should expect to pick and choose from where they buy their food from.

Sadly, the majority of people will choose on price and price alone and in the world of cut-throat supermarkets, quality often takes a back seat.

I tend to cook everything from fresh and avoid most processed foods, fast foods and don’t eat out that often in restaurants or gastro-pubs. I used to be Mr Microwave man and would think of nothing of buying a stack of 12 microwave meals from M&S and living off those, despite the horrific £500 monthly bills from my M&S charge card.

Those days are long gone and I enjoy cooking, love exploring different flavour combinations and find cooking a meal after a long day of stress quite therapeutic. It has become another hobby, or if I’m truthful about it, an obsession.

I make my own bread, my own pizzas, pasta, my own stir fries, mousses, pates, chutneys, desserts, Thai, Hungarian, Indian, soufflés, anything really. A great roast beef marinated in Indian spices with saffron roast potatoes and homemade Yorkshire in t’bread tin is a renown favourite of mine.

My initial cooking experiments consisted of constructing some cuisinary nightmares that resulted in dishes that would pummel your taste buds into submission before dragging your tongue out for a trip around Dante’s hell before immersing it into the Red Sea, some dishes that looked like a rejected Picassos, some that looked colourful (Beetroot hummus!) but had the consistency and taste like putty...

After many years I manage to tone everything done and just had two or three complimentary and sometimes contrasting flavours in my dishes. Things like scallops and shallots in a creamy tarragon and white wine sauce, homemade beef and Guinness pie, Thai salads with cashews, soy and honey dressing.

People always say that they would cook more but find it takes too long. Well, I can pick up a few salad leaves, pine nuts, onions and perhaps cook a little pancetta and in 10 mins, you have a great healthy salad. Takes 5 mins to fry a tuna steak and 15 mins to cook some rice.

Some people say it’s more expensive, especially when you say you get your meat from a butchers. This simply is not true – my local butcher gets in some great tasting meat and meats that aren’t found in the supermarkets. Why? Because they are cheap and don’t make much money and probably are off-putting for the general public.

I got some pig’s trotters for free as no-one was buying them from our butchers. Great cooked with paprika with traditional Hungarian recipe. Also, nice chuck steak mince, cheaper than the supermarkets because it was not that ultra-lean, tasteless crap that people think is such a healthy option. The other thing, is when I want a treat, rather than buying fillet steak, I buy a rump steak that has been matured for 28 days. Now people always say they don’t like rump steak because it’s chewy and fatty. Well, that’s true if you buy meat generally from a supermarket. From a butcher however, you’re looking at £3.50 for a large rump steak, fried either side for a minute on a super hot griddle and you have the most wonderful, soft, magnificent flavoured steak. Oh, and his bacon doesn’t shrivel to the size of postage stamps when you fry them as I’ve found a fair amount of the supermarket offering contain so much water.

People will always say that they want to buy the cheapest value chicken to feed their families as they cannot afford it. Well, my thoughts are, why keep feeding your family meat every day? Pasta (3 eggs, flour, 10 mins to make, a couple of hours to dry), salads, fruits, soups, bread are incredibly cheap to make and taste great. You can then treat yourself to one or two meat dishes during the day.

I used to eat meat every day. Well, I used to buy processed meat every day: “I feel like chicken every f***ing night” – that was me. Now, I just cook fresh food, more veg and salad than meat and I feel better and financially better for it.

So, go to your local butcher and check out his meat, go to your local grocer’s or pick your own farm (great for kids) and get fresh, local, great tasting seasonal food and learn how to cook it.

You’ll find the cost of your food shopping reduces significantly and you can get the whole family to help out too.

IT Consultancies Feeling The Pinch

It looks like Siemens has joined the growing number of large companies that are cancelling third-party consultants’ contracts

One of my main petrochemical clients had a drive to cut costs at the beginning of last year and ended up bringing in one of those “Grim Reaper” style management consultants for six months which caused a cacophony of carnage and resulted in half the staff losing their jobs, work being channelled to external teams and all budgets frozen.

Needless to say, our main area of project work had been targeted for termination and resulted in us desperately running around trying to generate some more business, especially as a large piece of work we were about to sign had suddenly been canned at the 11th hour.

The disenfranchised petrochemical team that remained were livid at seeing these management consultants break apart their work, ignore their concerns and make changes that seemed to be for the sake of changing things rather than having a deep understanding of the business.

The particular piece of work that we designed and were supporting at that time was moved offshore without the consultants or the recipient team even finding out who was currently supporting it.

There were plenty of demoralised staff accusing the cost saving fiasco as nothing more than a “being seen to be doing something” especially when you considered how much money could have been saved by not using this management consultancy in the first place. This sounds remarkably similar to the behaviour that our glorious Supreme Leader has been undertaking recently (courtesy of Burning our Money)

Like most SMEs, we tend to sense the whiff of a depression sooner than most and ”survival of the quickest” is a maxim worth remembering.