AMERICA NAILS ITS DOORS TO TALK ABOUT BIRD FLU

This email was broadcast yesterday across America as a ''typical'' concern about bird flu on prime time ABC network news, without irony.
The contents were not discussed or disputed, and the text was read out by the news reader and described as typical of the emails received.
Note the other emails illustrated behind the quote on the screen, suggesting how many people are locking their doors for fear of a bird flu pandemic.
However, before we laugh at'mr-oh-shit-my-house-is-on-fire-and-i've-nailed-the-doors-shut', let's consider that the American government has sent out lists of suggested ''emergency supplies'' that citizens should get in, in case of a world pandemic because of bird flu, restricting food supplies and killing millions.
As the US Government will say, you have been warned.

IRAQ, 3 Years On... Welcome to judgement day, Tony

Tony Blair says ultimately God will judge him about his decision to go to war in Iraq.

Well, unfortunately, E.R. isn't God.

Yet.

But knowing what we think we know about what Tony meant, lets do him a favour, look at the facts, and see what we think ''Jesus would do''.

Hmm, no United Nations mandate, no chemical weapons, no direct threat, no end to Al-Qaeda, the invasion of a sovereign state more democratic (despite its despot) than its neighbours we trade with, there is still no end in sight to ethnic divisions within Iraq, billions and billions of dollars have been spent on keeping over 110,000 men with guns running a country they don't belong in, tens of thousands of people have been murdered by bombs fired by people who have never met them.
Plus there's still some old bloke called Saddam taking the piss out of judges in court.
Three glorious years.
Click the post header for the numbers. It's a lot of dead people. Especially if you had to look at them all, in a row, with their families crying around them. You'd need a few weeks to meet them all.
God would like that, Tony.
For an estimated body count of civilians and police, click the post's header. Don't miss the figure for Bagdad.

Picture Of The Day:

OR maybe you're not worthless, eh Anita?
E.R. was shocked to hear that yesterday, The Body Shop, which once pioneered ethical trading, recycling, fair trade, and at least did not sponsor animal cruelty, was bought for $1 billion by L'Oreal, who according to Peta, are a key player in the testing of cosmetics on animals.
One of L'Oreal's key stakeholders is Nestle, who are known for their cynical marketing of breast milk to the third world, and their attempt to sue Ethiopa for compensation regarding the nationalisation of one of its businesses.
While Bob Geldof was raising money at Live Aid, Nestle was suing the Ethiopian government for more than the amount raised at Wembley that day, despite knowing the country was in famine and unable to feed its people.
Ethical trading always ends when it comes to selling, dontchathink?
I think I would've held out, given that probably the $228 million she got (her share ownership) or, say, $178 million for someone half decent buying it, wouldn't make that much difference to me.
Especially considering my life's work was supposedly being about ethical trading and now I've just looked like a complete cynical cunt who's taken the highest price and flushed all my values down the toilet.
Except the smell never flushes away...
Roddick is the final piece in the hippy capitalist shitbag jigsaw.
She used to tell us it was raining, and now she's pissed in our boots.
Picture yet again robbed but visit www.banksy.co.uk to see much more brilliant work.

PRINCE CHARLES SECRET HONG KONG JOURNALS: VERDICT JUST IN

They're rubbish.

Clucking bastards: The thruth about bird flu

If you, like me, thought that bird flu was being spread by wild birds flying migratory routes, then think again.
There is clear evidence that the culprits are not wild birds - now risking extinction due to measures to restrict their movement - but our old favourite, intensive farming.
Yes, it has been swans turning up dead around Europe - but the likelyhood is that the intensive farming food chain is to blame.
Countries with intensive poultry farms - which then use that chicken shit on their fields - are spreading out the disease to wild birds that then feed on the fields. Then the swans fly off - and cop it in another country.
If migratory birds had been to blame the pattern would follow their flight. Instead it's followed a trail East to West across intensive poultry farms. In Laos, one of the homes of bird flu, 42 of the 45 farms infected were intensive poultry farms.
It seems that rather like people, if you keep chickens in a space the size of their own bodies crapping on each other and never letting them see the light of day, feeding them cardboard mixed with the bodies of their dead cousins, well, they develop a bad lurgy.
Funny that.
Anyway, let some bloke from the BBC, tell you properly by clicking the link, and he's even supported by the US National Academy of Science.

GET AWAY FROM IT ALL Picture Of The Day:

The government this week introduced a transport bill that will put biometric images on driving licences, and to network CCTV cameras across Britain that recognize biometric images. This will initially be used to trap speeding motorists between different destinations.
Britain already has one CCTV camera for every 12 of the population, higher than any other country in the world.
The House of Lords yesterday again rejected Government plans for compulsory biometric imaging on passports and ID cards, but the bill is still likely to succeed, despite going against a Labour pledge that it would be a voluntary system.
Image pic-nicked from the wonderful www.banksy.co.uk, and used without permission, but lots of respect.

Unlucky for some. 13 Things About Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed

1. His name isn't Mohammed Al Fayed. He put the Al in to sound more regally Arabic when he came to Britain in 1974.
2. He sold cans Coca Cola and later sewing machines on the streets of Egypt when he was young.
3. He married into money and earnt his cash by arms dealing for his brother in law. He imported arms into Saudi Arabia, the home of Al-Queda.
4. He set up a shipping company and became the financial consultant to the Sultan of Bruneii.
5. He bought the Ritz hotel in the 70s, and with his brother, Harrods, in the 80s. He has never been given a British passport, despite wanting one for 30 years.
6. After buying Harrods he was accused of stealing jewels from Tiny Roland's own safety deposit box at the store. Roland was the head of mining giants Lonro and former associate of Fayed. Roland was furious the Fayeds had beaten him to the purchase of Harrods, and accused its new owners of stealing the jewels.
Fayed lost his appeal for wrongful arrest for his part in the loss of the jewels, and after Roland's death he made a private settlement for their loss with Lonro's widow. The jewels were worth millions.
7. It was Fayed that offered money and gifts in kind to Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken in the 'cash for questions' dirt of the Conservative government. He smoozed the most unpleasant Conservative politicians in the hope of a UK passport coming his way.
8. His son, Dodi, was a cocaine snorting 'film producer' that wanted to marry Princess Di, but died when neither he or his girlfriend were wearing seat-belts and their car crashed doing three times the speed limit on a Paris street while its driver was on drugs.
9. He has accused the royal family and MI5 of conspiring to kill them both.
10. He owns Fulham Football Club
11. In 2003 he moved to Switzerland after a dispute about how much income tax he should pay in the UK.
12. Last year a newspaper reported he had now moved to tax-free Monaco.
13. Today, Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed announced he wants to be Mayor of London.

ALIENS LAND UFO AT AUSSIE COMMONWEALTH GAMES OPENING - No one "noticed", no one "cared"

The curiously dressed aliens that landed in Melbourne said they "came" in "peace".
They were quite good at running and jumping and stuff and won most of the events, but anything tricky like the crossbow or shooting they were all over the place. Hockey was awful.
The horse jumping? Complete joke.

ARCHER HOME ''VICTIM'' OF GREAT GRAFFITI TRAIN VANDAL

Vandals today sent a message to airbourne passengers passing what looked like Jeffrey Archer's model home.
The Vicarage, in Grantchester, is home FLJA and his fragrant wife Mary. A model of the home is owned by Archer, and was featured in today's Guardian as one of his most treasured ''possessions''.
Speaking exclusively to E.R., the vandal involved, found still holding a ballpoint on a train passing through Norwood Junction, told us: ''It's unlikely that I'll get in trouble. All I've done is deface a national newspaper. You should try it sometime.'' And with that, he left, alighting at Sydenham.
The newspaper said it was ''unlikely'' it would apologise to FLJA about the ''vandalism'', since it couldn't be held responsible for its readers actions otherwise they'd be in all kinds of trouble ''every day'', ''apparently''.

Picture of the Day: ALL WE NEED IS THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE

And they're even fucking that up.

Oil on canvas. Copyright the artist, courtesy IBID PROJECTS, London and Vilnius Collection of Magnus Edensvard, London. Photography by Andy Keats.
by: Christopher Orr. Showing at the Tate Britain until May 14.

Let me tell you how it will be, 19 for you and one for me, you're a rich man...

FOUR accountancy firms (stay asleep at the back) - delloites, kpmg, price waterhouse and ernst & young, earn millions out of making sure their rich clients don't pay for our schools and hospitals.
In total, tax avoidance in the uk totals £10 billion pounds.
One tax lawyer says that he saves his clients £3 million pounds per day alone. He said himself, ''I'm somewhere between a conman and a crook - and a magician."
Well at least he's almost right. There's nothing magical about a £10 billion hole in our finances every year though.
That's the thin line between a soft landing and a recession every year.
In the 70s tax avoidance was fairly honest - you moved to America and if you were famous enough they'd let you stay and pay 15%. But at least we didn't have to look at Mick Jagger, so it had its upside.
Then when city bonuses kicked in big style, in the 80s, the money sharks paid each other in gold, fine wine (by the cellar load) - any safe bet you could pay in kind and sell on in cash. Loophole after loophole came up and hence the better lawyer you've got, the more you saved in cash. Many of these were working class kids taking the piss thanks to middle class lawyers and accounts who knew their bonuses would grow if they hooked on like leeches to the nouveau rich who had hated tax because the papers said it took away their freedoms.
Roughly you saved all your 'tax' (about 25%), so you just paid 9 or 10% national insurance. On £2 million a year that saved you something like half a million quid.
Now look at some 21st Century tax avoidance: Philip Green, who paid his family in BHS share dividends owned by his wife who "lives" in Monaco. So the Greens earn a billion pounds out something (that certainly used to be) called British Home Stores, and neither of them pay a penny in tax on it, saving them £230 million.
Just that family alone.
It's not avoiding tax because no tax is due! It's that easy.
So for the price of 300 of those poxy tv campaigns paid with our taxes on tv about squealing up the painter and decorator in the pub that doesn't pay tax, why the fuck dont they do something about Philip Green Inc alone and save a quarter of a billion quid?
I mean, why don't they have a ''I dont care what you say, after a million quid, if it's got anything to do with you, and you spend most of your time here, you pay 30% tax and then we'll talk to your account/lawyer about the rest.''
Simple.
No grey areas - and probably 50 big new hospitals paid for while we're at it. National Lottery? Fuck off, let's tax this lot once and for all and pay for the stuff we need.
This lot would pay for ten times the lottery fund - every year.
It's a national disgrace. We should be naming and shaming these people in our newspapers!
This is a great campaign for us all to get behind - boycotts of tax dodgers so their shares fuck up and they have to pay themselves within the tax system like the rest of us!It's a perfect campaign because anyone who does pay tax is jealous of people who don't. But rather than squealing the painter and decorator whose made a sharp 100 quid avoidance this week, let's boycott BHS or any store that doesn't pay tax back to us, one way or another, through tax.
A bit like a co-op, except all we're asking is not that they share their profits, just that they pay the same rate of tax as their customers. Is that too much to expect?
A class national newspaper, name and shame, topless tax girls, buy-us-a-hospital banners, you-the-jury, the works, tax avoidance bingo. Whatever.
Except of course our newspapers won't do that.
They are owned mostly by those who do not pay tax in the uk.

It's odd. When I worked in a different place, and got promoted into "management", all this extra money in bonuses and shares would appear. Nothing like the stuff talked about above, but not only did my pay jump, but my benefits hit the roof.
I always wondered why it was not only such a well-kept secret (unlike the staff, management never talk about pay with each other unless they were really annoyed), but that why the tax bonuses involved in some of the schemes weren't offered to me when i was working just as hard but just not in ''management''.
And why my staff weren't offered them now.
It's a ridiculous, greedy, cliquey culture thats somehow turned the redistribution of wealth into a pathetic nasty cynical game.
Anyway, how much for cash?
Hurry up, these slightly dodgy DVDs won't be around forever...

ELECTRICKERY

Took five hours to set up wireless at E.R. offices today after investing the revenue stream from the recent site monetisation ($1.50 - thanks guys) into new hardware, all part of the plan to offer a better service to you, our loyal web community.
''Just five easy steps'' it says on the box. ''Connect in minutes''.
First three steps? Five minutes. Fair enough.
Next two steps? 4 hours 55 cocking minutes.
Bastards. All of them.

ITALY: POLICE OPEN FIRST VIRTUAL POLICE STATION

Virtual criminals virtually piss themselves laughing.

THE DA VINCI CODE: WHAT IT MEANS

That the last book you bought was Harry Potter perhaps?

BE AFRAID. IT'S POST 101

Welcome to Post 101. As this is the 101st post of this blog, I thought I'd celebrate with a story that tells you about my Room 101:

I'm standing in cell, room 101.
The room contains thousands of tiny flesh-coloured creatures, the size of small beatles, clinging to the walls.
They cover the surface, like bees in a beehive, on top of each other, making the walls heave to and fro.
The floor is scattered completely with broken glass, and I'm standing in the middle of it, in the centre of the room.
The only place where there isn't broken glass is beneath my feet, so i can't move.
The tiny creatures begin to crawl down from the walls, over, between and around the glass, and reach my feet in a hungry swarm.
They start to eat me.
Not chewing, but razor sharp jaws clip through skin and bone, like pirahnas. But the odd thing is that even though after a few minutes they have eat my feet, I'm still standing, and as they work their way up my legs I start to understand what's happening.
Where they eat me, they replace my flesh and bone with their own bodies, reforming my feet and legs in their original shape, while i scream in agony above them.
More and more of them work their way up through my guts and then I stop screaming as they finally eat my lungs, heart, neck and head.
And then all that's left of me looks almost like a wax statue of me, but its moving, as the creatures crawl around in the space which once held my body.
Then the statue disintergrates from the top to the botoom back down back across the floor.
The the creatures crawl back over the glass, fat with my flesh, and assume their place back on the wall.
In the room, the floor can now been seen, just partly, in the shape of two glass-less footprints in the centre.
The walls are silent.

Nice eh? Either that or five minutes stuck in a room having to listen to that Fucking Liar Jeffrey Archer.
Sleep well.

CELEBRITY IS DEAD (Somebody tell Davina)

The BBC's attempt to turn Davina into Terry Wogan are succeeding... at this rate she'll have the same amount of viewers on BBC1 prime time as the old Irish fat duffer does in his UK Gold repeats cable show.
Hardly surprising when her last ''big name'' - that Sky breakfast presenter and general Man U bore Eamonn Holmes - spent the show slagging off GMTV. It was painful, like watching someone have a slow long shit live on tv.
Celebrity interviews are dead unless you a) take the piss out of them or have been out on the piss with them (like Rossy, sometimes), or b) don't interview them, just listen to them when they aren't looking (like, duh... Celebrity Big Brother).
The rest is TV vanilla that even a flake like Davina can't bring back to life...

If they don't like it, it must be worth doing...

The Metropolitan Police have joined such open institutions as the Saudi Arabian and Chinese governments and the US military in Iraq by restricting blogging by its officers in the UK. Click the post header for the story.

THE RISE AND FALL OF SIGUR ROS IN SIX EASY STAGES

1.What's that annoying plinky rubbish they are playing on the radio?
2. Hmm, I think I quite like this plinky rubbish after all, don't think I'll buy it though.
3. Ooh that's pretty, they've done a nice trailer for Attenborough's new supernature show Planet Earth using that plinky Icelandic stuff I quite like with beautiful images of the wonderful world we live in. I might even buy the album.
4. Hmm... now they are using the plinky stuff on every sports show where someone clutches victory from the jaws of defeat, in the slow-mo compilation at the end.
5. I'm really bored of hearing that bloody annoying Icelandic plinky rubbish, especially now they're using it in Car Boot Challenge, Cash In The Attic and even the bit where the couple with two kids in the council house return to a wrecked empty home with only 3 dirty dollys and a broken scalextrix set left in it in Beat The Bailiff. I'm almost starting to miss Moby.
6. Oh for the love of God, they're advertising the thing on the TV. Be gone Icelandic plinky stuff!

WORDS PEOPLE SHOULD USE MORE OFTEN, PARTICULARLY ON MONDAY MORNINGS#1

Nookie.

Police Chief taps phone call with Attourney General about police tapping and Attourney General gets upset about tapping call being tapped by police

What a joke.

CLICK HERE FOR SOUND EFFECTS

Police have helpfully provided online sound effects to accompany their driving, to show young people what a car sounds like when it crashes at high speed in a busy London street.
Whether or not we'll get to see yesterday's CCTV footage of exactly how the police driver of this car "thought to be answering a 999 call" managed to park it like this remains to be seen.
Fortunately no one was seriously hurt, though three people were taken to hospital.
However, you'll be able to get a taste of what it might have sounded like in a bizarre "YOUTH ZONE" of the Metropolitan Police's official website.
Obviously convinced young people like "noisy things" and stuff, kids are encouraged to listen to police sirens (ok I get that one), car alarms (hmm ok, can hear plenty of them anyway, thanks), store alarms (er?), police dogs (it's a dog, barking) and, appropriately, the sound of a car crash.
What every "youth" wants to hear, almost certainly, though possibly not in the middle of London on a Saturday afternoon.
Click the post's header for the "evidence".
Coppers are weird.

People You Wouldn't Think I've Met, But I Have #3

Beatles' Producer George Martin, 1987.