Intelligence Oversight

We all rest a little easier in our beds, as the Democrats unveil the new leadership of the Congressional Intelligence Committee.

In the space of a few minutes, Chairperson Silvestre Reyes managed to describe Al Qaeda as a Shia organisation, and Iran as a Sunni state, before admitting that he had no idea what Hizbollah was or where it was based.

Other concepts Democrats find it hard to distinguish between include “right” and “wrong”, “mine” and “yours”, and most recently “victory” and “surrender”.

Not that the Republicans did much better. To quote the woman in charge of CIA spy recruitment: “The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa.”

What is it with Americans and abroad? I know many of them don’t have passports, but then again, when you live in a country as big as the US, there’s not much reason to leave. Just about any combination of climate and dusky-maiden skin-tone is available right here. Even so, surely they should be able to find a couple of dozen people out of their whole political class who know more about the world than what they’ve gleaned off of a handful of Snapple Facts?

Let’s hope these knuckleheads do a little background reading before they re-open for business in January.


Sylvestre Reyes displays his unrivalled grasp of foreign affairs, yesterday. Is that your final answer?

All work and no play

The Harvard Business Review indulges in a little schadenfreude, reporting that individuals in "extreme jobs" rake in the cash but only at the expense of their sex lives.

They define extreme jobs as entailing work weeks of 60 hours or more. 46 per cent of the corporate carnivores surveyed said that their jobs interfere with "having a strong relationship with my spouse/partner", with 50% having an unsatisfying sex life. The other 50% were presumably jumping their secretaries.

Excuse me while I unpack my violin. By that logic, I reckon I’m underpaid by a factor of ten. Tough line of reasoning to work into one's annual performance review, tho'…


Big big salary, teeny-weeny penis.

Top tips

Champagne corks are popping among the genital mutilation community, for the US National Institutes (sic) of Health has publicly recommended circumcision as a prophylactic against HIV infection.

No matter that the test was conducted in environments where cultural factors (ie, a tendency on the part of local males to knob anything that moves regardless of age, gender, consent or species) skews both the prevalence of the virus and the virulence with which it transmits itself. Apparently the best way to marginally cut infection rates in one of several transmission vectors for a rare disease that very few Americans will ever even be exposed to is to have all male children undergo a painful, unnecessary and desensitising surgery.

Sewing your eyelids shut is also an excellent prophylactic against snow blindness, but I don’t see the US National Institutes of Health handing out the surgical staples. Could this perhaps have something to do with the bizarre American fetish for circumcision? You betcha.

The voice of reason is nowhere to be found, but the WHO accidentally manages an approximation to it in its rather defensive response:

Dr Kevin De Cock, director of the HIV/Aids department of the World Health Organization told the BBC the results were a "significant scientific advance" but were not a magic bullet and would never replace existing prevention strategies.

Which is true so far as it goes, but is really just code for “Cut off as many of your dicks as you like – just keep our salaries coming”. By the way, if ever a name was destiny for its bearer, Dr De Cock’s is it…

One wonders where it will all end. Today your foreskin, tomorrow this? We’re on a slippery slope, my friends…


Whip 'em out, lads. One hundred and fifty million Americans can’t be wrong.

Welcome to Self-Awareness Corner

A serial incompetent and nepotist who repeatedly turned a blind eye to genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur chides the US for its unilateralism.

"No nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over others" intoned the shameless fraud, pissing on the memory of Harry S Truman by daring to show his face at the latter’s Presidential Library in Missouri instead of being run out of town on a rail.

Sadly, as the audience was 100% Democrats, BBC reporters, and other assorted traitors to human freedom, no-one thought to hold a whip round and buy him a ticket to Beijing, so he could deliver the same message regarding Taiwan and Tibet, or to Teheran, to give the mullahs a piece of his mind re Lebanon.

Kofi Annan was born in Ghana in 1938, and is still not dead.


Kofi Annan and friends, yesterday. One can’t exactly call his retirement “well-earnt”, but on the other hand the rest of the world certainly deserves a break from him and his leechlike cronies.

Small but perfectly formed

Indian men have complained that standard condoms are "too big" for them, bless.


You know, just because the silly fish jumps right into the barrel, we don’t have to shoot it…

Got to pick a pocket or two

The Home Office issues a report detailing Britain’s prison population in terms of prisoners' religious affiliation.

Fascinating stuff. Apparently Episcopalians are partial to sex crimes, Catholics to burglary, and Hindus to fraud. Thank God those Muslims are maintaining their traditional law-abiding low profile and not getting into any mischief.

No word on the Jews and their supposed over-representation among those convicted for starting all the wars in history. But you know those Red Sea Pedestrians. They probably just used their total control of the world’s media to hush it up.

Meanwhile, the atheists’ crime of choice is anything involving violence, from mugging through common assault all the way to GBH and murder. I tried to ask the world’s Number 1 Atheist, Richard Dawkins, how he squared that with his assertion that religion was corrupting whereas atheism brought ennobling freedom, but he just came after me with a Stanley knife.


Professor Dawkins, yesterday, getting to grips with the opposition, atheist-style. Good thing his wife was there. “Leave it aht, Dick – he’s not worf it… That’s enuff, ennit? He’s ‘ad enuff. Leave him, Dick. Leave it aht, I say…”

UPDATE! Britain's prison population tops 80,000 for the first time! Maybe the Plods have been rounding up the Scientologists to balance things out. After all, if stupidity were a crime, they'd all have been locked away long since...

Everyone’s a critic

I find my faith in natural justice momentarily restored as Sacha Baron Cohen is punched repeatedly in the face on a New York sidewalk.

Side-splitting funny-man Sacha decided on the spur of the moment to reprise his notorious Borat character on a passer-by, requesting to have sex with his clothes, whereupon the object of his attentions promptly beat him unconscious.

Seeing as mere eye-contact has been known to provoke pre-emptive stabbings from neurotic New Yorkers, many would argue that Borat got away lightly. Fortunately our very own Hugh Laurie, star of “House”, was there to salvage Sacha from the wreckage - a fake doctor rescuing a fake Kazakh from a very genuinely offended citizen. I’m sure there’s a clever metaphor on the ephemera of fame in there somewhere, but I’m just sorry that I wasn’t there myself to help out– by, say, holding Borat by the arms, or fetching a baseball bat.

The humblest copper in the land cannot pummel a dusky suspect without getting plastered all over YouTube nowadays, and yet no-one thought to capture this priceless piece of cinema verité on film. Where are the paparazzi when you need them?


Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat, yesterday. Now with authentically Kazakh-style missing teeth…

Diminishing returns

The Daily Telegraph entertains and informs again with its excellent “your view” section, where readers provide their considered opinions on the issues of the day.

I find a lively debate, inspired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, regarding whether full-time working mothers are detrimental to family cohesion and children’s welfare.

Among the predictable pearls thrown up by those with nothing better to do all day than take the Archbishop of Canterbury seriously, I alight upon this little gem, posted by a Mr Arnold Ward:

My wife and I both work around 75% which seems to work for us and our two children - maybe this is a model that should be more universally adopted.

Truly we are in the presence of genius. He continues…

Moreover, just because they are women does not mean that they are going make great mothers, my own mother was not temperamentally well suited to childcare - try as she might.

Evidently, she was not much cop at elementary statistics or basic logic, either. On the other hand, I do hope she’s still hale enough to hotfoot it round to his place and kick his sorry, ungrateful and mathematically-illiterate ass all over the room.

For his next trick, Mr Ward will solve income inequality by giving everyone a 10% pay rise…


Mr Ward’s grasp of numbers is eight today. Many happy returns!

Monstrous regiment

Proving once again that there’s nothing new under the Sun, the wives and girlfriends of Colombian gangsters have called a sex strike in an effort to get their men to - ahem - quit waving their pistols around.

The “Crossed Knees” strike, by women in the city of Pereira, is now in its second week. No word yet on whether local kleenex manufacturers have come out in sympathy.

Alert readers will spot the resemblance to the Ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes, where the women of Athens organise a similar strike with their counterparts in Sparta, to end a twenty-year-old war. Eventually successful in their aim, they relent, resulting in an eye-opening final scene when you consider that for such comedies the male characters sported three-foot-long leather cocks, and that the female characters were also played by men.

Let’s hope that the brave and self-disciplined women of Pereira can bring their own campaign to the same happy, if flushed and sticky, end. And that the men remember - in their haste to make up for lost time - to check for trannies…


The women of Athens take the oath, yesterday. Not that crossed knees would’ve done them much good, knowing the predilictions of Greek men…

Glass half full

Joy tempered by a vague cloud of suspicion, as three Mexican shark fishermen are found alive after nine months adrift at sea, surviving on raw fish and rain water.

Gaunt yet grateful, the threesome ascribe their continued existence to the Bible that they had on board with them. Now, that wouldn’t have been the first thing on my list when equipping a fishing expedition, but it’s probably not a bad choice, given a limited budget. We can’t all have GPS and decent radios, after all – otherwise how would we know if we were rich jerks or not?

Naturally, being Mexicans, they are not entirely trusted even by their rescuers. Some suggest that they were running drugs, while others ask whether their two dead colleagues did in fact die of thirst. Subliminal suggestions of cannibalism circle the unhappy trio like sharks around their rudderless boat.

Well, if they did chow down on their companions to survive, it wouldn’t be the first time. That’s the law of the sea – quite literally, as men have on several occasions been cleared of murder when, in the desperate circumstances of a shipwreck, they killed others to take their life jackets.

But maybe karma has already taken steps to restore the balance. After nine months of ripping the throats out of seagulls with their teeth, they end up on the Marshall Islands. The least fate could do was pitch them up on US shores. Santa Barbara, say, or even Seattle.

But if it’s any consolation to the families of the dead, we do know that the others didn’t eat them alive. After all, they weren’t driven ashore in LA, either…


Salvador Ordonez, Jesus Vidana and Lucio Rendon celebrate their arrival on land with one of their rescuers, yesterday, before treating the latter to “a slap-up meal”. Police are now anxious to trace the gentleman in question…

Neither a lender nor a borrower be

A touch of the Green-Eyed Monsters this morning, as we read of an unnamed 56-year-old who has somehow accumulated 57 credit cards, and a total debt of £416,000.

Apparently this fiscally-challenged individual managed to max out each and every one of these cards on fried chicken and lottery tickets, and then sat around watching daytime TV until the bailiffs turned up.

What a criminal waste. Why must it always be retards like this who get handed these golden opportunities? If I had 57 credit cards and nearly three quarters of a million dollars to play with, I’d just use a few hundred to buy a new identity, and disappear. After that my only worry would be how much to fritter away on having people killed.

But there we are. It’s all a matter of perverse incentives. In the end, credit card companies make their money off of those too stupid to compare interest rates, so they’re not motivated to hand them out to conservative types like me.

Strange that a government so keen to meddle in every other sphere of personal life should be so loath to enforce a little discipline in this one. But then again, maybe it’s not so strange after all…


An unnamed 53-year-old, yesterday, having trouble managing his loans. Alas - sad double-whammy - he’s also morally bankrupt.

Overpopulation: just enough of me, way too much of you

More Teutonic hand-wringing, as Germany turns up bottom of the European fertility league, with a score so low that there might be none of them left by the end of the century.

What a tragedy.

In fact, Germany comes out second-last in the entire world, propped up only by Hong Kong, where everyone is riddled with chronic gonorrhea. One can’t help but notice that it’s all the most dysfunctional basket cases that are breeding like pond-life. The US limps in at 137, and the EU doesn’t get a look-in until France at #151.

Current birthrates have been compared to the population explosion in Britain in the early Victorian era, where crippling child mortality was first overcome. But that was endogenous – accompanied by native social and economic progress that allowed Britain to support the increased population by, for example, exporting it to the colonies to machine-gun the locals. What’s happening here is of an entirely different order.

Nowadays some meddling medic turns up in Buttafuque, Chad, and hands out aid-funded antibiotics willy-nilly, with no concomitant effort on the part of the locals to open their economies, clean up their governments, or even to learn to read. And so within twenty years they’re all slaughtering each other over the last twig of firewood and blaming the Great Satan for it.

Bono and Bill Gates want us to do something for the poor? Well, the very first thing we can do is stop sending them medical aid.


Medicin Sans Frontieres ply their evil trade, yesterday. Bloody do-gooders…

If we beat them again, do we get to keep them?

Ooops.

When will the Germans stop banging on about the war? It’s really very tiresome. You don’t catch us Brits bringing it up left and right. It’s all water under the bridge to us, of course.

And what the hell is Grass beating himself up for anyway? He was a seventeen year old conscript, for Christ’s sake – not Himmler’s personal Jew-baiter.

Seems the only people who aren’t allowed to obsess about the war are the ones who actually won it. Oh no. That would be “triumphalism”.


The SS Panzer Division Frundsberg website, yesterday. No word on whether they’ll be inviting Guenter along as yet…

47% of Frenchmen “very stupid” says Le Monde

A sad day for France, as Libération publishes a poll wherein 47% of Frenchmen declare Jacques Chirac’s presidency to have been good for France. Even the spineless, poetry-spouting euro-trash aristo Dominique de Villepin garners a quite unjustified 36% approval rating. Has the heat gone to their smoke-addled heads?

Le Monde speculates that the unexpectedly strong showing of the French national soccer team in Germany might have inspired the voters to take a more benign view of their slimy leaders. Crook, tax cheat, fiddler of state funds to pay for a mistress and child in Japan – all is apparently forgiven as long as les bleus can still poke a winner past Portugal in extra time.

I suppose we should be grateful that they lost the final, or we might be stuck with that insufferable prick for yet another five years. Just don’t get me started on the horrible implications if England had won…

"Have you noticed how we only win the World Cup under a Labour Government?"

Villepin blue, Chirac whiter-than-white.

40% of people “would lie to pollsters” – Poll

Shock and awe as Money Magazine reveals that men will lie to their wives about big purchases, and women about small ones. Not that size is important, of course. Or so I am assured.

Frankly, I find all these statistics equally bogus. All the various options on offer ultimately boil down to the same question – namely, “how much do you lie to your beloved life partner, you weaselly slimeball/chiselling bitch?”

I might pay more attention if there was some indication as to what percentage of the population would make a purchase under $100 without telling their spouse and then give some random pollster the finger? That figure is sadly not supplied…


A pollster, yesterday. Could you lie to those puppy-dog eyes?

Danish Bacon

The world throws us yet another curve-ball as it emerges that Denmark is 'the happiest place on earth'. One wonders what makes a Dane laugh. Obviously not their cartoonists, if those Mohammed efforts were any guide. They were pants.

Switzerland, Austria and Iceland round out the top four, with sunnier climes only getting a look in at #5 in the shape of the Bahamas. This suggests a strong correlation between happiness and some undefined aspect of Teutonic culture. Danish and Icelandic girls are reputed to go like the clappers, so maybe that’s it. I hadn’t heard the same of their Swiss and Austrian sisters, but I dare say that someone out there can testify on their behalf.

I’m pretty sure Heidi has milked a few bulls in her time, for a start, but then again there’s not much else to do in those isolated Alpine pastures. She is more to be pitied than to be condemned, and in any case it would be a bit hypocritical of us to give her a hard time when so many of us enjoy the results. After all, haven’t you ever wondered why the Milka Cow is purple?


Heidi hard at work yesterday, fresh from putting a smile on the faces of the local males. Note how she hides her right arm, which is now the size of Arnold Schwartzenegger’s. Try not to stare…

Had we but world enough, and time

More “dog bites man” news this morning, as we read that one in nine women prefers chores to sex. When survey companies resort to laboriously “proving” such staple fare of third-rate comedians worldwide, it is a sure sign that business is slow and the silly season is upon us.

“like any other household chore”
“an irritating annoyance”
“only enjoyable for men”

Naturally, the temptation is to blame the men for these problems, and it does not help that one’s first sight of the naked male generally engenders reminders to put brussel sprouts on the shopping list. But one can’t help but wonder whether we are not confusing cause and effect here. After all, if one goes into something expecting to be bored, one is very likely to be proven right.

In my younger years, I found myself on several occasions putting considerable effort into pleasing a young lady in a variety of ways met with rave reviews elsewhere, only to founder against their native disinterest in the act itself. My repertoire exhausted and the cliffs unbreached, these encounters invariably ended with the girl’s impatient invitation to “go ahead – don’t wait for me”, whereupon passion flopped lifeless on that cruel and rocky shore.

Of course, I might just be a poor picker. I certainly seemed to have a knack for choosing lesbians, if the number who were lesbians the next morning was anything to go by.

“The Welsh, both men and women, said they were having sex more frequently than adults in other regions.” Doesn’t say with what, tho’.


Lubricious Wales, yesterday. Just one big al-fresco brothel, that place…

Robbing Hood

Matching its recent coronation as Britain’s capital of gun crime, Nottingham triumphs again as the city with the highest burglary rate in the country, according to a new study by Endsleigh Insurance. It’s hard not to conclude that the town’s long association with that famous medieval mugger Robin Hood has fatally weakened the distinction between meum et tuum in the minds of its feral inhabitants.

If only the shapely young ladies of Coventry were similarly inspired by the example of Lady Godiva. Now that’s what I call a role model.


Liverpool does not appear on the list at all, mostly because Endsleigh’s brave researchers were car-jacked, stripped to their underpants and left for dead within minutes of their arrival. Very few independent observers have ventured into the city in the last twenty years, but experts theorise that by now the entire population has regressed to a Morlock-like existence dwelling in caves, therefore falling outside the scope of current burglary legislation.

Are you from Nottingham? Or perhaps you’re just a bit dodgy anyway? How many burglaries have you committed?


Robin Hood yesterday. Hand over the cell phone, bitch, or I’ll cut you.

Church Militant

Every now and then, among the endless stream of stupidity and low-grade evil that comprise the average day’s stories, one sees the bright golden glimmer that denotes a nugget of pure good news – a little item that restores one’s faith, however briefly, that God is in his Heaven, and all right with the world.

And so it is that today we thank the Lord for the existence of Bill Stuart-White, and appropriately enough, for he is a genuine vicar and so predisposed to that sort of thing.

It seems that three alcopopped hoodies wandered into Evensong and made off with a parishioner’s handbag, only to find the Vicar in hot pursuit, his robes streaming behind him tanquam vexilla regis prodeunt inferni. After a brief chase, the bag was recovered and the hapless chavs delivered into the hands of the local constabulary.

It is always a mistake on the part of the criminal classes to presume too much on the forgiving nature of Christians. Even Anglicans have a respectable tradition of tough love that still occasionally surfaces, as in the case of the Rev Stuart-White. I am put in mind of an acquaintance at university twenty years ago – a wispy little man in the Christian Socialist tradition who, being goaded beyond endurance by the blasphemies of a grinning Trotskyite, suddenly gave the cheeky commie a decent uppercut. Backpedalling desperately, the startled Trot attempted to make light of the matter by offering to “turn the other cheek” – whereupon with the immortal words “Sod you, I’m C of E”, my friend followed up with a righteous haymaker, dislodging both a trendy Guevarista beret and several expensive items of dental hardware.

I had not thought to see his like again.


The Rev W Stuart-White yesterday. You’re fuckin’ *nicked* my son…