That is all...

Today's Twitter tweets:

• 20:20 is reading tinyurl.com/mzbfv9 -- "Basiji Hunting" seems a dangerous sport! #iranelection #gr88 #

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I quote from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/iran-demonstrations-viole_n_215189.html

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4:16 PM ET -- "Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed." A blog post in Persian, translated by the NIAC.

"I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I'm listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It's worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I'm two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow's children..."

--

Whiny self-obsessed students around the world take note. It seems not impossible that in Tehran tomorrow a million or perhaps two million people of all ages and social classes are going to knowingly and steadfastly march in peaceful and serene silence, straight into a hail of Republican Guard and Basiji machine gun bullets. And that many are already coming to terms with the very real risk of not seeing the sun rise on Sunday.



Humbling and emotive stuff.

Today's Twitter tweets:

• 19:41 is still sniggering at this... petehisameme.wordpress.com Tweet in haste (and total stupidity), repent at leisure... #

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Today's Twitter tweets:

• 20:16 #helpiranelection - show support for democracy in Iran add green overlay to your Twitter avatar with 1-click - helpiranelection.com/ #

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Today's Twitter tweets:

• 11:54 I have just relocated to Tehran as part of the global effort to confuse the cyber-security apparatus of the theocracy. #iranelection #gr88 #
• 12:04 RT @trinitro: Now I am an Iranian #iranelection (via @twazzup) Today we are *all* Iranians! #gr88 #

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Today's Twitter tweets:

• 19:52 RadioTT just announced that priz-giving behind the grandstand tonight has been abandoned... #iomtt #

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SOCIALISM

You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.


COMMUNISM

You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.


FASCISM

You have 2 cows
The State takes both and sells you some milk.


NAZISM

You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.


BUREAUCRATISM

You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.


TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM

You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.


SURREALISM

You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons. 
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.


ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND VENTURE CAPITALISM

You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of Credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull..


A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.


A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and Produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called 'Cowkimon' and market it worldwide.


A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.


AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.


A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.


A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows.
None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.


A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.


AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.


A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
One is mad and the other has had to be put in storage because of the health and safety risks of milking it.


AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
Nobody believes you, so they bomb the crap out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.


AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.


A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.


THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ECONOMIC MODEL
You are an MP and have one cow.
Your boss says he can't give you a pay raise as it wouldn't go down well with the voters.
Instead he tells you to buy a second cow on credit and charge the interest to expenses, then milk it for all it's worth.
You buy a moat to prevent it from escaping and put a floating duck house in the moat so the cow has the company of wildlife.
You buy a a three piece antique leather suite to sit on so you can be comfortable while milking the cow and of course a 50" plasma TV and two DVD players.
Then you redecorate the cow.
All of which you claim on expenses.
Now you 'FLIP' your cows, and milk your original cow for all it's worth too.
This time you buy it several imitation Tudor oak beams, an italian portico and a BBQ for those fine summer evenings, oh plus a couple of porn videos and a bath plug.
Now you flip your cows again to avoid Capital Gains Tax, treat the secondary one as a cash cow, and sell it for a large profit, pocketing all the money.
Continue claiming interest on the cost of the cow you sold 6 months earlier, then retire on the very large pension the public have so kindly, if unknowingly, provided for you.

Today's Twitter tweets:

• 21:57 RT @iomttraces: ITV 4 TT schedules here bit.ly/r2vz7 #

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...I observe the following:

The political class clearly cannot use the following two common excuses together as they are mutually exclusive. This hasn't stopped them trying.


a) "'My expenses claims where indeed vast and literally outrageous, but within the rules as they were writ, so ner ner na ner ner. It was the rules wot dunnit, guv!"

...which sits badly with...

b) "Yes, I should never have claimed for that item, and I over claimed for that one as well, and yes they do break the rules, but these really were small technical errors on my part and I'll pay the money back anyway now you've caught me out so what's the problem?".


No. Epic fail.

Get your bloated corrupt carcass out of the cabinet, out of parliament and into jail if we are lucky. Claiming £700 or so that you are not entitled to while occupying the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer may not be financially significant compared to your supposedly not-irregular 'second home flipping' antics, but I would call for you to be treated in exactly the same way by the law and the authorities as a housing benefit claimant on a sink estate who was found to have over claimed by the same amount would be.

A political campaign we can all support. Or perhaps it's just sad old pervs like me?

PS: I was intending to vote Libertas before cheap stunts like this, for rather more substantive reasons than the fact that they use blue-painted page-three models in their party-political stunts. Normally I'm against cheap political stunts, but in this case all I can say is 'More! More!'.

Who said I'm shallow?

Today's Twitter tweets:

• 16:02 RT @alandavies1: bit.ly/Bk7dV ha ha ha ha ha ha! - Ha ha ha indeed! #

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I mean really, my ghast has been flabbered many times at the grasping venality of the British political class these last few weeks, but that really must take the gold award for chinless fuckwittery...

Sir Peter Viggers, you grasping boss-eyed drooling twat, explain to me how you ever imagined that this was consistent with the green book criteria in any conceivable way?

Actually, don't bother, I hear that you've already been summarily deselected and will be paying the money back. Go and be an idiot somewhere other than parliament and on somebody else's payroll rather than ours...

Meanwhile, and far less strikingly (but with far more potential impact), news of Ruth Kelly's damage payout (and the question of whether or not she also claimed on her insurance for the incident), not to mention the question of whether Hoon the hoon actually paid any CGT on his massive taxpayer funded second-home based property empire, keep me interested in all this.

It's also the case that for every depth this story plumbs, so far there has always been a more abysmal depth still to be discovered...

Last year some time I discovered the internerd meme that is 'Twitter' and thought it was an interesting micro-blogging medium. I was following about three people and started using twitter for micro-blog posts and to update my facebook status. Not that anybody cares about the minutiae of my life, but then that's true of 99.99% of all blogs.

At the time, some of my LJ friends were using Loudtwitter to post their tweets to LJ, and I followed suit. Thus my occasional tweets hit my LJ as posts, and all was well. Then I started following a few more people and found that some of what I was posting were banal and context free comments to others, so I tweaked the Loudtwitter configuration to put my comments behind a cut, and carried on.

Without me noticing particularly, the number of people I am following on Twitter has grown exponentially, and the volume of replies I post, not to mention the ratio between replies and original tweets, is such that my journal had become absolutely clogged with a continuous stream of 'Tweets behind this cut...' posts, most of which (if you looked behind the cut) contained replies that meant nothing anyway!

Anyway, today I noticed this and did something about it. I've deleted pretty much every past Loudtwitter post from my journal, and reconfigured Loudtwitter so that it will no longer post replies to other people's tweets to my LJ. I'm also abandoning the LJ Cut, since the volume of fresh tweets I post is so low, and it is therefore more reader friendly not to have a cut that requires clicking on...

Sorry about that - it had all got a bit out of hand!!!

Found this on Advrider (not that it is bike related) and thought it was brilliant...

Edit: Roll your own here... http://jamesholden.net/billboard/