ThunderDragon Blog

Is age-rating the internet:

a) impossible,

b) impractical.

c) pointless,

d) censorship, or

e) all of the above.

The correct answer is of course option (e). Maybe someone should inform Andy Burnham.

Image: Beau Bo D’Or

Apparently our road sign depicting the elderly is “insulting ” because it “doesn’t represent older people as they are today”.

So what?

It is a stereotype. It is a image that can be instantly recognised by a motorist. It doesn’t mean or even suggest that all elderly people are hunched over and walk with a stick, in the same way that cars, buses, lorries and motorbikes etc don’t look like their pictorial representations.

There is simply no point wasting effort and money re-designing this sign. Age Concern and Help the Aged will just have to accept that it is a less-than-flattering depiction, but one that will not change.

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)

… according to the BBC anyway.

After getting home from my camp this weekend and having missed Doctor Who on Saturday night, I went to download it on BBC iPlayer… only to get the message below.

Is Watford no longer part of the UK? Have I missed something that happened over the last couple of days? Or are the BBC just being thick?

Click to enlarge

UPDATE: BBC iPlayer has now decided that I am in the UK after all - but that it’s servers are busy. Which doesn’t really help me much in my desire to download and watch the programme! It does appear to just be crap now, since it obviously doesn’t have the capacity to cope with the demand.

Click to enlarge

It appears that being a teacher really is no guarantee that you’re not a fucking moron, as demonstrated by the National Union Teachers. They want to ban the Ministry of Defence from giving talks to students on a potential career in the military, because they use “misleading propaganda”.

Apparently they don’t give a true enough picture of life in the armed forces. Bollocks. Besides, any half-intelligent person would, y’know, check up on the details before they took a job.

And they really did come out with some complete bollocks:

Any one who can say this with a straight face really is too stupid to be a teacher. Even a PE teacher.

It isn’t up to teachers to decide what careers their students should consider. It is their duty as educators to provide all the information to their students to enable them to make their own informed and intelligent choices - not just the ones their teachers would prefer them to make.

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach go to NUT conferences and pass idiotic Leftist motions like this.

UPDATE: Two teachers object to the NUT’s statements.

ASBOs have failed. Rather than deterrents, they have become badges of honour among young thugs. So what is the government’s response? To roll them out over young potentials as well:

So they just haven’t learnt from their mistakes, have they? Handing out “baby ASBOs” to even younger children - especially those who haven’t even done anything very bad at all.

The name of the scheme that is to to deal with this just sums up Labour’s entire style of government: Family Intervention Projects. Why do they feel that they have the right to intervene in out lives?

When this comes alongside the proposal to put young children who “exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life” on the DNA database. I mean, WTF? Since when has being a behaving badly ever been a good enough reason for your DNA to be added to their Big Brother database?

Have we finally abandoned the idea of innocent until proven guilty? Do you no longer actually have to commit a crime before you can be convicted for it?

Baby ASBOs and adding disruptive children’s details to the DNA database will not prevent them feom becoming criminals, but the opposite - pushing them in to a life of crime, since that seems to be what is expected of them!

Ok, that’s not quite true. Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas party, actually said:

Erm… so if earthquakes are the fault of the gays, what happened to the whole tectonic plates thing? Or did Shlomo Benizri just skip basic geography, and headed straight to the bigoted religious nut class?

And if his conclusion is indeed true, why are those countries who offer gay marriage/civil partnerships not experiencing earthquakes to a far greater extent than Israel who is merely recognising them? Or is that just too much like logic?

In other news, Iain Dale promises to avoid shaking his genitals in future. Something I think we can all be thankful for.

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!

Idiocy of the day:

Imposing a tax to foster a more giving culture? WTF? On what planet is he living where you can impose a tax to foster a culture of giving? That makes bugger-all sense. You can’t force someone to do something and then expect them to do choose to do it.

The reason that the relationship between the Edwardian philanthropists and charity has become “fractured” is because the State has taken on so many of those tasks and is just having the same people pay for it, just through coercive taxes rather than by charitable giving. It’s a pretty simple equation: the more you take by force in taxes, the less they give by choice as charity.
More taxes = Less charity. So get that through your thick head, Frank.

Of course Mike Ion thinks it “has real merit”. But then, he would.

Image: Frank Field MP