The ThunderDragon

Yesterday, I highlighted a couple of stories from the classic “silly season” August newsdesk over on ‘Bites. Both involving nudity looking back on them now - but that wasn’t intentional.

Anyway, I thought I thought I might as well spread them about it, by posting over here instead to give you this spicy story to take away.

The sauce for a spicy Italian sandwich was apparently a must have for one Florida man.

The man, Reginald Peterson, called 911 twice after a sandwich shop left off the sauce.

Peterson initially called the emergency number Thursday so that officers could have his subs made correctly, according to a police report. The second call was to complain that police officers weren’t arriving fast enough. (CantonRep.com)

It’s all well and good to say that soldiers should act morally at all times, this is really taking it to the extreme:

Part of a soldier’s job is to kill. If they go into battle, what should they be doing:

(a) checking their morality handbook, or
(b) trying to stay alive and kill the enemy.

Which would you do? Me too.

This really is an absurd idea. Ensuring that soldiers understand what is acceptable moral behaviour and what isn’t is surely good practice. But expecting them to carry around a guide to moral behaviour is ridiculous and demeaning to our soldiers.

No-one can apologise for something that someone else did. I can’t apologise for something you did, and you can’t apologise for something I’ve done. And neither of us can apologise for something someone else did. Any apology we did make wouldn’t mean anything since we didn’t do it and so have nothing to be sorry for.

This is an obvious fact, right?

So why do politicians persist in apologising for things that happened before they were in power, grown up, or in some cases even born? How can Kevin Rudd apologise for Australia for the “profound grief, suffering and loss” inflicted by successive Australian governments on the indigenous Aboriginal population? Just like Blair or Livingstone can’t apologise for the brief period in history where Britain perpetuated the slave trade [and the same goes for the Papua New Guinea tribe and the cannibalism of their ancestors]. Not with any real sincerity can they.

They can regret what happened, but they can’t apologise for it. Regretting an incident is fine and not a problem. We all have some regrets about past issues. But we can’t apologise for something we didn’t do. Any apology made is just an empty and meaningless gesture. If we carry this idea on, children born of rape will be apologising to their mothers for their father’s actions, and ultimately everyone will have to apologise to everyone for something that some long-forgotten ancestor did.

However, Rudd does have slightly more legitimacy in making his apology than Blair or Livingstone for theirs, since the period his apology covers goes right up to the 1960s. But even that is a long time ago. Way too long. Just let all this stuff go for crying out loud and let’s move on a equal people, not looking back over our shoulders at past slights!

Via Mike Rouse, who nicked it from an internet forum:

Elf and Safety? Literally so in this case, as it affects their boss, Santa Claus. He must now be “strapped into a full body harness in case he falls out of his sleigh as it is towed by a Land Rover at the gentle speed of five miles an hour.”

Absolutely fucking absurd.

Christmas is one of the times when the health and safety police should fuck right off and let us actually enjoy ourselves. I have no problem with the intelligent “as safe as necessary” position, but this sort of thing is just completely and utterly absurd. Reason and common sense should be used to make reduce risk where possible.

After all, the idea of Santa riding in a sleigh at five miles and hour without a full body harness is hardly shocking. It’s hardly like holding up a huge Christmas light display with a couple of drawing pins is it! Instead of coming out with this kind of bonkers conkers ideas, any who has any claim on being a “health and safety professional” or has any intention on making any health and safety decisions of giving any related advice should sit back any apply common sense before anything else. Then, hopefully, there wouldn’t be this sort of story for the media to produce.

Source: The Telegraph

WTF? That is an absolutely absurd idea. The Union Flag is an iconic image, and there’s hardly an easy way in which to combine the Welsh dragon into it without it looking absolutely stupid. A flag is just a symbol, it isn’t a direct representation of a nation. All flags are symbols - after all, what else can you do with a rectangle and about three different colours?

As much as I like the aesthetics of the Welsh flag, how could it be adapted into the Union Flag without looking ridiculous? The Union Flag is our flag, and to want to change it just because is just plain stupid.

Source: BBC

Facebook really does seem to be getting more media coverage than any social networking site really deserves. Is it really newsworthy that Facebook is to remove the mandatory “is” from status updates?
No, it isn’t. It’s not news at all except for the minority of people who use Facebook and really care about having to think up a status that grammatically follows “[Name] is” or just settling on an ungrammatical status instead.

Really, who cares? It might make users go “oh, that’s good” but then they would get on with their lives. To whom is it really a big issue? So why has it got such a large article - or any at all?

On the Telegraph website, right now this story is just below one titled “Father and son, 5, drown in Spain” and just above an article on former attorney general Lord Goldsmith saying that he would have quit if parliament had ratified to government’s preferred pre-charge detention limit of 90 days.

Really, why?

Source: The Telegraph

Regular readers will know that I don’t normally swear [mainly because I just could never match the peerless swearblogging of Devil's Kitchen or Mr Eugenides as you can see here], but this warrants a good number of swear words.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. What is it with this stupid fucking government that makes them think that making delinquents stay in school for two years longer will actually help them in any way? I mean, the kids who leave school at sixteen tend to be the same little shits who hold everyone else back by mucking around in class. They’re the non-academically gifted kids who just don’t want to stay in school for longer, but want to go and do something useful to them and their future.

This idea is a fucking stupid one, thought up by a bunch of statist cunts who think two more years of compulsory schooling will make up for their failings in their last eleven. Bollocks will it. All it will do is hold back those who do want to work, as the twats who piss around in class will still be there disrupting everyone else. When those bastards left after GCSEs, school became far better as those who were left had chosen to do so, and so put in more work and pissed around in class less.

Frankly, there are no benefits to making kids stay in school until they are eighteen. At all. All it will do is cause mass truancy, and then criminalise those truants for having the gall to decide what is best for them!

But ah you say, “under the plans pupils would not have to continue with academic lessons but would be required to receive training.” But who the fuck going to provide this training? What is it going to be in? What purpose is it to have? How are you going to make them attend? The practical problems in this are fucking immense - and I certainly wouldn’t trust any government - and certainly not this bunch of cunts - to implement such a scheme with any real thought to the practical considerations.

Apprenticeships and training for school-leavers already exist. Companies take on apprentices and train them up already. The difference is that the apprentices they have have chosen - at least to a far greater degree - to go into this trade. Thus, those who want to stay in school already can and do - after all, it’s free unlike university. And those who want to get into a trade can and do so as well. And the ones who don’t will just be a distraction to those in school and just lower the educational standard on the country or just be useless little shits if forced into an apprenticeship.

When it comes down to it, not everyone can do a skilled job anyway. It simply isn’t possible. Someone needs to clean the streets and the toilets, stock the supermarket shelves, and wait tables, etc. after all. Every single job has to be done by someone. The best way to get 16-18 year-olds to get off their fat lazy arses and either get a job or stay in school is to cut their dole. Say they can only get half or even not a single fucking penny until they are 18.

Conscripting 16-18 year-olds into longer educational is a seriously fucking stupid idea. Instead of pumping money into educating them when they don’t want to learn anything, put it into adult education for when they have decided that they’re fed up of doing a shit job and do want to learn. When it comes down to it, you can’t physically make every 16-18 year-old stay in school. it’s not possible, and is just absurd to even suggest, yet alone include in the Queen’s Speech!

So, Blinky Balls and Cyclops Brown, and the other authoritarian statist cunts in the government - fuck off. Just fuck right off.

For more on this subject, visit the group blog Educational Conscription.