Friday, February 15, 2008

Government Knows Best You Moron

'£10 licence to smoke' proposed
Smokers would have to get a licence to light up under the planSmokers could be forced to pay £10 for a permit to buy tobacco if a government health advisory body gets its way.


Professor Le Grand, a former adviser to ex-PM Tony Blair, said cash raised by the proposed scheme would go to the NHS.

He said it was the inconvenience of getting a permit - as much as the cost - that would deter people from persisting with the smoking habit.

"You've got to get a form, a complex form - the government's good at complex forms; you have got to get a photograph.

"It's a little bit of a problem to actually do it, so you have got to make a conscious decision every year to opt in to being a smoker."

It seems there is a '£10 licence fee to think in England these days, but then it's '£10 cheaper to be mentally constipated. Government wide that is quite a saving.

Putin Endorses Clinton?

The former KGB lieutenant colonel appeared to lash out at U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton — a leading Democratic candidate for president — when one reporter quoted her as saying that former KGB officers have no soul:

"At a minimum, a head of state should have a head," Putin said.

"Vlad the Enjailer" isn't exciting sympathy for Hillary for nothing. Could he be showing his affection by picking on her?

St. Valentine Day Scavenger

From Tony Phyrillas' fine blog:

Valentine's Day thieves hit Victoria's Secret at Pa. mall

Police say lingerie lifted from a Victoria's Secret store in southeastern Pennsylvania wasn't just a last minute Valentine's gift.

The theft happened Thursday at Coventry Mall in Chester County, 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia. But police Sgt. Robert Malason says the magnitude of the undergarment grab is "beyond personal use."

North Coventry Township police count up the midday Valentine's Day haul at 250 pairs of women's undergarments including $1,875 worth of thongs and briefs.

Police say two men are being sought.

They're sentences could be brief.

Charles Sheeler - Ford Motor Plant 1928


In 1927-28 Sheeler was commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to document the Red River Plant in Michigan, a work that marked him as an admirer of machinery and industrial landscapes.

Rowan Is Rowing With One Oar

The gathering storm
An archbishop's outburst highlights a broader crisis in his church

“ANGLICANISM, it seems, is coming apart. It is ceasing to be, it is disintegrating...” Those cheery words, uttered two weeks ago by an American bishop, Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, drew cries of approval from traditionalists across the world who have little sympathy with the efforts of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to hold together the 80m-strong worldwide Anglican Communion.

The American prelate went on to predict that out of the fall of the “Elizabethan settlement” (the 16th-century bargain between the Tudor monarchs and England's national church) something truer to Christianity's roots would emerge, presumably based on an alliance between America's conservative minority, the Africans and evangelicals in other places like Australia.

Go here to read the rest. It almost reads as an obituary. Does that mean Rowan gets 72 virgins or a comped date with Sharia?