Boris

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

I have no trail bike at the moment - looking at getting a KLR650 next year for some longer distance riding. When I was in Yorkshire I had a Yam DT125, as over the tops was the quickest way to half the places I wanted to go. Light was good as I was picking it up a lot!
Land access not an issue here, however you do not have bears or wolves ;)

[Magnus]

Back to BoJo. I rather like him. At least he brought out cuppas to the journos hounding his doorstep.

[Boac]

Hmm! Since it is largely the 'journos' who are to all intents 'mis-quoting' him to make a bigger issue I think I would have made them 'special tea'

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

The journos are helping him by what they are doing, though they are too self-interested to realise it. They'll probably get bikkis as well next time, possibly even bourbons* ;)
Do not interrupt your enemy whilst he is making a mistake.

*Not chocolate hob-nobs though. Even they would be able to realise they were being 'had' if they were given chocolate hob-nobs

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Guido pointing out that the BBC Politics page has six anti-Boris stories*, yet is completely ignoring proof that Corbyn laid a wreath at the graves of the Munich massacre terrorists (and that he lied and is lying about it).
They have no shame.
https://order-order.com/2018/08/13/corb ... h-killers/

* I've just checked. It does.

[ExSp33db1rd]

The covered face issue is public safety, the turban is personal safety.

With respect ... I think you are missing my point ? Nothing to do with personal safety, in fact my "Corker" helmet of the day didn't even have a visor.

It had been made UK LAW that a helmet had to be worn when riding a motor bike, so why were Sikhs allowed to by-pass the law ?

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

I don't think I'm missing your point. The burka question is one of general public safety - everyone is more at risk from criminals using burkas as a disguise (as we know they do). With helmets, it's the safety of the wearer that is affected, not anyone else. It costs the taxpayer a bit more (arguably. One of the reasons for the law was the cost of medical treatment for injured riders, though the motorcycle groups will tell you that if you do the math properly, there's no benefit there), but doesn't increase general risk. Therefore, a decision to give an exception to a group can more reasonably be made. I would argue the exceptions made for muslims for Ramadan should be looked at again, since there seems to be considerable evidence that many are driving and operating machinery whilst incapable of doing so to normal safety standards due to fasting. That does have general safety risks.
That the helmet law (and lots of other laws) doesn't make sense in itself is another matter again.

[OFSO]

In Spain the quarter million or so Moslem women wear head scarves which inhibit looking to left or right, and when driving you soon learn to treat one of these ladies at the wheel of a car with great respect 'cos they just do not see you.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Can't say I've seen any native Spanish women looking left or right much anyway. The glareshield vanity mirror mainly...their phones the rest of the time.

[Woody]

An interview with Boris’s replacement,the ever popular Jeremy Hunt

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45266360

[Woody]

Hopefully the walking sound bite, will be finished off by these disgraceful comments

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-45462900

[Boac]

Indeed - we do not need our own Donald Trump.

[Cacophonix]

The useless slug, is worse the underpants skid mark on life.

If I was going to promulgate a revolution here I would hang and draw him and then set the carcass on fire on Tower bridge "pour encourager les autres!"

Caco

[Smeagol]

I like Boris, just like the Donald, he says the unsayable ie he says it like it is. That may or may not make him a viable politician but it is a change from all the other pollies who are just full of weasel words and *****.
Best take cover now I suppose.

[Cacophonix]

I like Boris, just like the Donald, he says the unsayable ie he says it like it is. That may or may not make him a viable politician but it is a change from all the other pollies who are just full of weasel words and *****.
Best take cover now I suppose.

Hear that high pitched whine in your headphones! That is the missile locking on!

Caco

[Cacophonix]

Take back control – buy water, bin the Daily Telegraph

It is very easy to sneer and criticise without offering any viable solutions yourself. And I should know. I have been doing it for the best part of three decades now myself, across a variety of media, to deadlines, for money, like a snowflake Clarkson.

But I am a shallow and cynical entertainer, not a politician who is supposed to believe in anything. And so, I suspect, when all is said and done, is Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson. And why not? It worked for Donald Trump.

Each morning in the small hours, Donald Trump’s bladder slowly fills with urine. The president wakes and looks at his phone in the bathroom while fumbling in his silken sleeping pants for the flesh pyracantha of his genital. He sees something true online and instantly sends off a combative Tweet. Sad! Bleary journalists panic and the fairy tinkling of Donald Trump’s cold night penis dominates the daily American news cycle once more.


Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson obviously aims to surf the British news wave in a similar fashion to the orange goblin. But unlike the instantaneous nocturnal pee pee spatterings of Trump, the massive faecal log of Watermelon’s weekly column in the Daily Telegraph takes a full seven days to bake.

Straining his handbag-pug face into a purple Eton mess each Monday morning, Watermelon temporarily blocks the U-bend of the British news bog with his latest stinking offering, before standing next to the bowl, and gesturing at his produce, like a delighted toddler expecting parental praise for his mastery of basic bowel functions.

The Daily Telegraph clickbait trap is set, Watermelon its mouse-murdering cheese, and the paper’s front-page news headlines duly retrumpet the controversy that the falsehoods of the Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson column its own editor chose to run inside have ignited, in an endless loop of lies.

In the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, the state-sponsored assassin-rapist 007 thwarts an evil global multi-platform news agency that uses covert actions to generate newsworthy crises, which it then profits from covering. Twenty-one years ago, this plotline seemed as implausible as Roger Moore’s third nipple. But it now appears to be the actual modus operandi of the Daily Telegraph.

And who can blame the paper for paying Watermelon £275,000 a year to disseminate lies, to drive the sewage of its readership through the sluice gates of both its print and online editions. These are tough times for newspapers, and before the Daily Telegraph re-employed Watermelon as a lifeline it was pinning all its sales hopes on our humble friend… water.

For years, it seemed, whenever I tried to buy a bottle of water in a railway station WH Smith, the cashier would suggest I bought a copy of the Daily Telegraph instead, which cost less than the water and came with free water. But taking the free water while buying a copy of the Daily Telegraph increases the apparent circulation figures of the Daily Telegraph, and by association its financial clout, and its power to influence and manipulate the vermin that read it.

When I demanded, at WH Smiths in October 2016, to take only the water the poor assistant had to call her manager.

As someone who has suffered personally as a result of the Daily Telegraph’s half-truths, I always insisted on paying for the water and not taking the Daily Telegraph with the free water gift instead. Even though, as the confused WH Smith assistant always insisted, as if reciting a script she was forced to learn at gunpoint by Charles Moore, buying the Daily Telegraph and getting the water free was less costly than buying the water alone and not having the Daily Telegraph with it.

When I finally cracked and demanded, at Paddington’s WH Smith in October 2016, to take only the water and not the Daily Telegraph also, the poor assistant, an innocent victim here too, let’s not forget, had to call her manager over. She explained to him that she had tried to sell me the Daily Telegraph, as instructed, but that I would only take the water, as he looked on disapprovingly, an unwanted copy of the Daily Telegraph flapping on the counter, like a dying and poisonous fish.

It was a Kafkaesque situation. Much of what I write in these columns is exaggerated for comic effect (I am not, for example, a confidante of a Danish man who supplies 85% of the semen imported into Britain, as I claimed last week), but this went down just as described. The frightened young girl was eventually absolved by the manager and I was allowed to refuse my compulsory Daily Telegraph purchase.

But surely a world where innocent children are forced to buy the Daily Telegraph, when all they wanted was water, is exactly the kind of authoritarian, anti-individual society the libertarian think-monkeys of the Daily Telegraph don’t want? Take back control!

Tragically, the unsustainable mania for marketing bottled water that the Daily Telegraph exploited to peddle its lies is one factor driving the planet towards being a lifeless, arid wasteland. One day the only way you will be able to get water will be by buying a copy of the Daily Telegraph, which, after the cockroach and the comparably resilient Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson, may be the last recognisable traces of the world we knew. It’s typical of the strange contradictions of Brexit Britain that the Daily Mail’s anti-plastic straw campaign makes it a definable defender of the very world the Daily Telegraph seems determined to destroy.

But the tide may yet be turning against the planet-murdering, lying Daily Telegraph and its lying public face, as the Overton window of Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson’s accession to the throne of broken Brexit Britain narrows. Last Monday, Watermelon’s latest empty anti-EU Daily Telegraph missive barely even provoked outrage, just looks of tired despair in the faces of those charged with delivering the impossible Brexit Watermelon himself once promised.

Stewart Lee

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ph-johnson

Caco

[Boac]

Do I detect that Mr Lee does not really like Boris?

[Capetonian]

I suspect that Mr Lee is a typical sandal wearing tree hugging lefty who doesn't really like anybody except his own type.

[Cacophonix]

Do I detect that Mr Lee does not really like Boris?

Just a little bit methinks Boac but his contempt for the man cannot come close to the infinity of my loahting for the wretched charlatan!

A Brexit suporting friend of mine who was given an opportunity to dicuss Johnson live on LBC this week had this to say about the shyster.

Not that we don't have our own mounting problems here in Blighty, albeit of a different tenor. I got live on air on national talk radio (LBC) on Sunday evening in a programme they were doing on leadership challenge issues in the two main parties. One of the questions on which they wanted comment was whether Boris Johnson could be viewed as a realistic challenger to the hapless Theresa May. In the few minutes available, I did my best to articulate my own "critique" of Johnson - an appalling, relentlessly (and recklessly) ambitious man (the buffoonery is unedifying... but also deceptive) who stands for nothing of any real substance. A man who (with culpable backing from the current editor of the Telegraph) likes to strike Churchillian poses in armoured fighting vehicles or patrol boats etc but, unlike the great man himself, never went anywhere near the military or any real danger. I concluded, that Johnson is "no Churchill... but a charlatan." (To be clear, my views have nothing to do with his position on Brexit as I was myself in the leave camp.)

I am pleased to say that the presenter, Tom Swarbrick, commented on concluding the piece that they had a switch-board full of callers lining up to express similar views and that it appeared that people do increasingly see through Johnson. Hopefully so. Certainly, if either Johnson (or, God forbid, Jeremy Corbyn) were to become P.M., I think it would be time to pack the bags..

The chap, my friend, who wrote that is an honorable man who served with distinction in the army, unlike Johnson, has more than an excuse to strike a Churchillian pose but wouldn't think of doing so! Thus we have the difference between a man and the wretched abomination that Johnson is.

Caco

[Undried Plum]

Lovely piece, Caco.