Ongoing #8

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Ongoing #4

Mitt Romney 'Gaffe' - "I like being able to fire people"

While this is certainly a dumb thing to say during a presidential race it's not exactly untrue - when you get terrible service from someone you have to think that best course of action is a good old-fashioned sacking or re-deployment to a position where basic courtesy isn't a requirement. Some people are willing to get downright litigious for the smallest of things, which if successful would generally have the same result of somebody losing their job.

So if the underlying sentiment is truthful and identifiable, why this is a gaffe? Romney is super-rich which kind of makes it sound like he's a Business Dick who loves nothing more than to tell a hard-working blue collar family man to have his desk cleared by the end of the day. Only that's not what's happening; he loves nothing more than to tell slackers to do that. And with his party's base being the do-it-yourself pulled-bootstraps hard-graft type, I'm not sure there's a conflict. Similarly, he could appear anti-jobs by wanting to remove that person's job - but he wants to give it to a hard-working blue collar family man or woman (actually, maybe not woman, he just gives me that impression). He wants America to have that job.

My conclusion then has to be that it's a gaffe because he said it. Mitt Romney says plenty and it all has the same clumsy phrasing, cheesy grin and pause for laughter that never comes so I'm still not sure why this is special, but it was definitely given a kick-start into gaffe territory by coming out of his mouth in the first place

David Cameron: my vision for a fair Britain

WARNING: Jesus Christ, every article about David Cameron seems to be accompanied by a massive image of his face in some sort of ridiculous contortion, which has been photographed and then printed out for someone to wear as a mask, which has then been photographed for use in an otherwise unassuming article. My heart can't handle many more of these 'surprises'.

Here's that promise again; does it constitute part of the same promise as before or is it just an abstract moment while he defines his "vision"? Visions don't interpret straight into reality very often, so I'm figuring that this one is on artistic licence.

Mr Cameron said he would use 2012 to convince people that he had a “vision at the end of this, of a fairer, better economy... blah?"

Well this makes sense, because he has only just been made prime minister so obviously he couldn't have used any year other than 2012, where nobody who is capable of cognition should trust him, to do this. It really is a genius plan, I am glad this guy is in charge.

A personal commitment to water down the power of European human rights judges who had been at the centre of controversies with rulings that seemed at odds with public opinion.

An especially strange policy when one's own decisions have been vastly opposed by the public. When you require 40% cuts of public sector working class jobs, but are only just attempting to tackle those obvious figures scampering off into the distance with bags of cash, it's particularly hard to judge your priorities as anything other than warped.

What I find most amusing is that Cameron's definition of "people power" is shareholders. Shareholders are not your average working person. Shareholders are able to afford investment while the majority can barely muster savings. I'm not sure if this is entirely unclear to him but either way it makes rather a convenient blind spot..

Ongoing #3

Mitt Romney wins Iowa caucuses by eight votes

Republican voters display the well-polled but now proven lack of cohesion and incredible apathy at their candidate choices by giving Mitt Romney the narrowest of what is offensive to call 'wins'. He's clearly the best chance for those who want to oust Obama but when not even his own party wants him, how good a position can that be?

He's the "wrong religion", lacks sincerity and is too rich for the common man to fathom; belief that he is convincing regular people he's one of them qualifies as crazed behaviour at this point. But the main problem that has been exposed through the media's use of recording devices, is that nobody knows what Romney really believes about anything. Like John McCain before him, he's contradicting his past self without acknowledging the existence of cameras. I don't want to mock this too cruelly, it could be a special offshoot of Mormonism.

I would normally be wary of the prospect of an unknown US president but really - what's the worst he could do? Re-invade Iraq? Put baskets of guns outside every school and church in a pledge to the gun lobby? Purposefully kill thousands of Americans by removing the healthcare bill allowing them to get care that they were previously denied, just to pander to a bloodthirsty "grass roots" base and distance himself from what is essentially his own healthcare plan that he now has to pretend to hate because Obama also likes it? Oh shit, maybe that one.

Boy 'tortured and drowned' over witchcraft claims, court told

One might expect this to have its basis in deepest Africa or with a newly-discovered island tribe who had been deprived the luxury of societal development, but shockingly this horrific act took place in a flat in London. While you are going to get 'all kinds' in such a cultural stew, people who literally believe in witchcraft should not be one of the ingredients. I don't have an answer to how we would oust the bad parts, although I'm pretty sure checking for prior form would be a decent start.

How such ignorance could fester unchecked and unchanged by our modern world is baffling. People whose foundational truths include the existence of sorcery must not only have been educationally stunted at conception, but surely in constant terror at the boxed magic around them. Having survived in the big city long enough to be residents with such appallingly idiotic belief systems, how did they participate in our society without thinking that every teenager, road sign and bus stop was a witch / haunted / other utter fucking nonsense?

This one-by-one system of letting people do something bad is a terribly inefficient way to excise human matter from the melting pot, resulting as it does in at least one sickening act occurring per sickening person. I wouldn't propose a Minority Report future but precognition is not required to identify some people as dangerous. It might require 'paperwork' and 'keeping decent records' though. I know - who thought preventing the horrendous deaths of helpless innocents could be so boring?