#Every time he acts threatening it's just undermined by how much of a moron he is

[kuzann]

Reasons I have a hard time taking canon Vlad 100% seriously:

His nemesis is a freaking 14 year old this is self-explanatory

Keeps getting beaten/outsmarted by a gaggle of teens

Blew up his own house because he couldn't be bothered to do general maintenance on a piece of very valuable and potentially explosive lab equipment

Got bodied by Jack that one time and decided to never fight him again, Jack is canonically 1-0 in a direct 1v1 fight against Plasmius and that is too funny

Gets bodied by his own idiot schemes

Somehow couldn't figure out how to hire a hitman to take out the guy he's hated for years and sends the one thing Jack is supposed to be good at fighting to do the job instead. Are you trying to fail, Vlad?

Got eaten by a monster that one time. Embarrassing.

Did not do his homework when it came to how strong a ghost was at least twice and endangered the entire world and Ghost Zone because of this

In the bad timeline he caused the apocalypse because he is that bad at parenting and somehow didn't think to just send the kid to therapy and grief counseling instead of jumping straight to the mad scientist shit

There's probably more but these are the ones I can think of at the moment. Like he's absolutely done horrible things, no question about it, but then I remember the above and I'm just. All I can do is laugh.

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: January 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of January 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

It seems that Rachel Riley is quite smart at maths but a complete moron at anything else, what with her accusing Noam Chomsky of antisemitism in spite of the fact that Chomsky is a little bit Jewish, before following it up by encouraging her far-right Twitter followers to dogpile onto anyone voicing different opinions to her - which mainly involved a 16-year old girl bearing the brunt of it.  However she wasn’t finished there, as when she was rightly being criticised for encouraging her followers to dogpile onto people she then went whinging to the press about being bullied by left-wing trolls before announcing she needed personal security for when she was attending Countdown tapings, which sounds uncannily similar to the same stunt Laura Kuenssberg pulled a couple of years ago

Starting the year with a bang we had Chris Grayling first try and defend the Seaborne Freight farce by saying he was supporting up-and-coming British business (while omitting the parts about them being owned by the brother of a significant Tory donor, or not having any ships or trading history, let alone the fact the contract wasn’t even put out to tender) and followed that up by claiming the rail fare hikes are entirely the fault of the unions and definitely nothing to do with shareholder dividends or years of rail services taking the piss with fare hikes on January 2nd every year.  Of course, Grayling being Grayling, he also helped out the Britait debate by saying that a second referendum shouldn’t take place because if the result came back in support of Remain it would go against The Will Of The People™ - which apparently said people willingly voting to remain wouldn’t be

It didn't help Grayling that those checking the Seaborne Freight website found that their Ts & Cs were from the template used when setting up a website for a takeaway food outlet, the timetable for services was blank (and, for some reason, in Latin), while their privacy page had forgotten that the fields marked [Business Name] are supposed to be filled with the name of the business using the website

Overly sensitive snowflake Piers Moron Morgan spent a hell of a lot of time and energy yelling from the rooftops how appalling it was that Greggs are selling vegan sausage rolls, which is apparently the downfall of humanity as we know it and definitely not the hourly cry for attention from an attention-seeking lunatic - and while some claimed it was a stunt because he and Greggs share a PR agency, that theory appears to have been ever so slightly undermined by him then spouting off about McDonalds selling vegan Happy Meals

It’s funny how James Goddard demonstrated just how much of a difference a day makes, with him threatening Anna Soubry and Owen Jones on January 7th and bellowing at police officers that if they so much as touched him he’d start a a war...yet on January 8th he was bawling his eyes out on Twitter because his Facebook and PayPal accounts had been terminated

Lying (through his teeth) in front of a tractor Boris Johnson claimed he never mentioned Turkey at any point during the EU Referendum campaign - and when confronted with his numerous comments about Turkish immigrants flocking into the UK if the country voted Remain by Channel 4 journalist Michael Crick, he ran away to hide like an utter coward

Proving that gaslighting is the in thing at the BBC, Director General Tony Hall stated in an interview with the Financial Times that there is no need to discipline Andrew Neil for referring to Carole Cadwalladr as a “mad cat woman” as he had apologised - except for the fact that, while it may be plausible that Neil apologised to the BBC, there has not been a public apology for his comments

Sticking with the BBC, it took just two editions of Question Time before Fiona Bruce showed her true colours as she spent ten minutes making jokes about Diane Abbott (including suggesting that she only became Shadow Home Secretary because she once slept with Jeremy Corbyn) prior to one edition which Abbott was a guest on, and for the remainder of the episode constantly talked over Abbott while letting the other guests speak uninterrupted, including allowing Isabel Oakeshott to not just make a patently false statement but use said patently false statement to attack Abbott.  It wasn’t helped that when the BBC finally got around to admitting fault almost two weeks later, their statement actually said it was a joke - you know, like the school bully tries to claim when they get caught

Oh boy, there were so many triggered manbabies were up in arms about a Gillette advert for suggesting that maybe, just maybe, being a toxic dickhead isn’t any way to behave - to which they responded by acting like a bunch of toxic dickheads throwing a temper tantrum all over social media not seen since Nike featured Colin Kaepernick in an ad campaign

I’m going to assume AnonymousQ1776 thought they were being really, really clever when posting that video clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez coupled with their sneering comment that made them sound uncannily like a teenage edgelord who doesn't know what communism is but throws the word around a lot.  I’m also going to assume they weren’t happy when the stunt backfired on them by not only making Ocasio-Cortez look like a normal human being who does normal things, but doing so also reopened the can of worms about what Brett Kavanaugh was up to when he was younger...

Middle England’s favourite edgelord Rod Liddle obviously needed to be extra quote-unquote provocative this month after using his column in The Sun to suggest that what Britain needs is a new political party that represents traditional values - which means neither Muslims nor the entire LGBT spectrum are not allowed

Just when you thought John Humphreys couldn’t sound any more like a pompous windbag with the credibility of a arthritic toad, he only goes to suggest that the Republic of Ireland should rejoin the UK - because who gives a toss about centuries of history or the minor inconvenience of 92% of irish people preferring to remain in the EU when Radio 4′s most jumped-up presenter suggests they swallow their pride and return to the warm chokehold of the British Empire? 

It appeared The Daily Star had a real scoop when they printed an interview with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in which he made scathing comments about the “snowflake generation” and how they were “looking for reasons to be offended” - that is until Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson issued a statement saying that not only did he not say those things, but he also never gave that interview

It seems The Board of Deputies of British Jews never got around to reading The Crucible judging by their going Full Baddiel and accusing Tottenham fans of antisemitism and, in the same statement, said they should follow the model of Chelsea fans - yes, the same Chelsea fans who have subjected Spurs fans to songs about Hitler and gas chambers for decades, who just so happen to be under investigation by UEFA for their anti semitic chanting during a Europa League match against Vidi in December

This month’s worst case of Trump Derangement Syndrome comes from Sarah Huckabee Sanders after she said that God wanted Donald Trump to become President in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network

Lucky for Lara Kollab there’s nothing in the hippocratic oath forbidding being an anti semitic bigot on Twitter.  On the other hand, there certainly was in the employment contract at the hospital she worked at, which is why they fired her

Somehow the British Army paid £1.5m on an recruitment ad campaign that was so successful that it led to members of the army quitting when finding out their photos were used to recruit “Snow flakes" (sic) and “Me me me millennials” - but that didn’t stop Gavin Williamson claiming it was “a powerful call to action” (rather than “bloody patronising”) while James Cleverly mouthed off like an idiot on Twitter in support because mouthing off like an idiot on Twitter is all that somebody who makes their surname fair game on a regular basis like James Cleverley knows how to do

It took a while but Jake Paul finally found a way to reclaim his crown of Most Odious Paul Brother by hitting upon a loot box scheme to encourage his viewers to, in effect, gamble - because apparently he (and Ricegum) only paid attention to the part where the likes of Electronic Arts were making money hand over fist when they were shoving loot boxes in all their games, but didn’t bother listening when various gambling commissions began looking into the practise

To prove my point James Cleverly took it upon himself to take to Twitter and sneer “You do realise that it’s not a documentary” when I, Daniel Blake was airing on TV - because it's better to score points on Twitter than admit that a UN report late last year was damning of the Tory government’s treatment of their less well-off citizens, isn’t it?

Trying to explain away his dickheadishness saw Wayne Hennessey claim he wasn’t doing a Nazi salute in a photo that happened to be taken by German teammate Max Meyer, he was actually waving at somebody - and the reason he had his finger on his top lip wasn’t the well-known mimicry of Hitler’s ‘tache but he was putting his hand to his mouth so somebody on the other side of the room could hear him.  For some strange reason nobody was convinced...

Attention-seeking loon Laura Loomer didn’t learn from the humiliation conga line that was her so-called protest at Twitter HQ judging by her protest against illegal immigration that involved her climbing over the fence around Nancy Pelosi’s property and setting up a stall on Pelosi’s lawn - at which point she appears to have forgotten what she was protesting about and instead kept yelling for Pelosi to respond to her, even though anyone with C-SPAN would’ve told her Pelosi was currently in the Senate

In order to promote her UK tour Azealia Banks thought the best idea was to vomit a long string of invective about the Irish on her social media all because she got irked by one Aer Lingus flight attendant

Can somebody tell Bill Maher that he doesn’t make himself sound more correct every time he regurgitates the “adults shouldn’t read comics” rant he first brought it up in the wake of Stan Lee’s death?  Because it appears nobody has

Out of curiosity, is Gregory Prytyka Jr. still popping over here in an attempt to find material to try and attack me with because they can’t handle the fact I called them out for their tedious shitposting, or have they crawled back under the rock they usually live under?

And finally, harrumphing to himself in a way that everyone can hear (although they wish they couldn’t) is Donald Trump and his banquets that look suspiciously like those given by the megalomaniacal villain of Kingsmen, continuing to throw a diplomatic temper tantrum over a wall he said Mexico would pay for

[ezairick]

Unpopular opinions about NCIS

When NCIS first began, I loved the show. It had interesting characters and cases, and there was more focus on the interaction of the characters than with the other relatively new show, CSI. This didn’t mean I was blind to problems with the show, but they were relatively minor compared to the show just a few seasons later. The small problems became big problems and though the show can still be entertaining, though I must admit that I haven’t watched any of the newer episodes after Tony left, so can’t speak to anything after that.

The cases themselves changed. For the first two seasons, while they certainly dealt with terrorism, the cases of the first two season were mainly crimes committed by ordinary people because of grief, love, envy, money, stupidity and so on. However, ever since Ziva joined the team, it felt like every case was about terrorism. I know that is not entirely true, but it seemed like every episode started with a bomb going off, and then instead of an interesting episode of guessing who could have done the murder, and why, now you instead wondered which terrorist group was going to get mentioned this time, and for what ideology. And honestly, it got boring real fast.

Which brings me to the characters of the show.

Gibbs is probably the most iconic character on the show, but let’s be honest, if NCIS was real he would have been fired years ago. Comparing Gibbs of season 1 and 2 to the rest of the show, it is easy to see that Gibbs was changed, and not just because of the amnesia. He was always a bastard but in the first two seasons, he had more principles, he didn’t break the law, he certainly bent it but he didn’t break it, and he didn’t commit crimes or let others get away with it. The whole plot surrounding his Shannon and Kelly, and murdering the guy who killed them, was not thought up, before the change in the management, which happened between season 2 and 3.

There are many issues with Gibbs, some of which were there from the start. There is his behaviour towards his team. No one should be allowed to head slap a colleague, besides being abusive it shows disrespect. And I feel this is part of the reason that Kate, McGee, and Ziva did not take DiNozzo seriously. Another reason for this is that Gibbs set DiNozzo up for fail. Because he created a flat structure, McGee and Ziva saw themselves equal to DiNozzo in terms of rank, even though he was the Senior Field Agent. And as the SFA he was supposed to be in charge when Gibbs wasn’t there but because Gibbs didn’t respect the position, and treated all three as if they were of equal rank, DiNozzo was often undermined by the others, and therefore incapable of doing part of his job.

Though Gibbs took pride in being a bastard, he should never have been allowed to run his team, like that, nor should he have been allowed to keep them at work for so many hours as he did. After all agents who haven’t slept nor eaten are far more likely to commit serious mistakes. Another difference between the first two seasons and later is that in the first two seasons we often see Gibbs, helping with the collection of evidence, sketching, and taking photos, but now he just mainly stand around asking, Ducky for a time of death, and drink coffee.

Further, just why is it Gibbs is treated like a god at NCIS? The directors of NCIS, except for Tom Morrow, who kept Gibbs at his proper place as the team leader of MCRT, though if truly proper place he should just have fired him, Jenny and Vance seem to treat Gibbs as if he can do nothing wrong, even when he is causing more problems. Gibbs completely run over them and acts like he is the director of NCIS and everything must go his way, and what is worse the directors let him. He is constantly given access to things he should not, and make decisions way above his pay grade. He is treated more like a co-director than anything else. And this is the same guy, who killed the man who killed his family, way to start your law enforcement career, who helped Mike Franks smuggle in immigrants, again not necessarily bad but he works for a law enforcement agency, allowed Mike Franks to not only get away with assaulting his agent, DiNozzo, but also allowed him to get away with murder, seriously the only way you can tell Gibbs is supposed to be the good guy, is that he has a badge.

Gibbs also constantly live by the rule – Do as I say not as I do – and as seen requiem it nearly let to the death of himself and a civilian, but he didn’t seem to have learned anything from that.

The team might have the highest closing rates, because of Gibbs, but it will naturally also have the lowest conviction rates of any teams at NCIS. I know we don’t get to see the aftermath of a case after Gibbs have gotten his confession, but if we did it would be of a flustered prosecutor, trying to convince the jury that the guy at trial is a bad guy, because Gibbs said he is. And that would be what the prosecutor had to work with, when trying to get a conviction. Gibbs often don’t have the time to get a warrant, even seems to think he is above such things, but that means that everything they find in the houses or other privately owned places they enter without warrants Is inadmissible in court and so is everything else found based on those finds. And the same applies with McGee’s and Abby’s hacking. Further the confession can be tossed because of Gibbs threatening behaviour in the interrogation room.

Gibbs is mostly known for being a bastard and seems to take pride in it, but how can he be such a role model, and why don’t the show realise that there is something wrong with having a team leader, who treats his team with disrespect, especially DiNozzo, who has serious issues with control, as in throwing tantrums when not the person in control of things, a person who is willing to actively sabotage other people’s cases just so he can close his case, and a person who seems incapable of handling any form of competition, and always have to be the best, in his own definition of the word.

For Tony DiNozzo I would like to give a huge shout out to Michael Weatherly, who managed to make Tony a comprehensive and cohesive character despite his character either being a complete moron only there as the comic relief, or an extremely competent investigator, lightyears ahead of the others, depending on who wrote the script for that week, so props to that. Tony is my favourite character on the show, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand when people see him as annoying. He can be. He is constantly going through people’s things, and he wants to know everything he can about them and what they are doing. He also plays various pranks on his team mates, however he is not abusing nor bullying the others. Those descriptions fit Abby, Ziva, and McGee better.

Starting in season 3 DiNozzo has been dumbed down to, I suspect, make the other characters look that much more impressive. Despite this DiNozzo is still the best at investigating, also when you look at their educations. Phys. Ed. Isn’t just about sports, they are also required to know anatomy and psychology, add to that his many years in law enforcement as a detective. On the other hand, Ziva and McGee, who both had a few seasons where they seemed to think that they are so much better than DiNozzo, and were more suited to be the SFA, are actually less prepared to be investigators. McGee is a better fit for the Cyber Crime Unit as that is all his education qualifies him for, and though Ziva was trained by the Mossad, they are not an investigation agency, they do espionage. That is like saying because I ride horses, and horses are often on grass fields, I must be exceptional at golf, because it also takes place on grass. Besides as a liaison officer assigned to NCIS she would never have been made SFA, nor should she ever have been allowed on the team. I sort of like Ziva, but every time I start really liking her, the writers pulled a new stunt, that just worked against her. And unlike McGee and Abby we didn’t have those seasons and episodes to help us like her more.

I talked before about how Abby, McGee, and Ziva were bullies without explaining how. Now as before I stated that DiNozzo could be annoying and I can certainly see that and understand how that can be frustrating having to work with him, but DiNozzo has never questioned the qualifications of his fellow colleagues, which those three have done repeatedly, or said that the only reason they had the position they had was because of how long they had been there and not because they were qualified and competent, nor has he ever considered them incompetent and incapable of doing their jobs, Abby and her training stickers amongst general statements made by the others. He has never second guessed them in front of witnesses or argued with them about his work in front of other colleagues or witnesses. He has never pulled a gun on them and threatened to shoot them, and he has never ever left them without backup and then treated that significant breach in trust as a joke. If I had to choose I would rather work with someone who could be annoying than work with people who routinely questioned my ability to do my job and my position on the team.

I actually like Bishop, it took a while to settle her character, but she is not as antagonistic as Ziva and Kate, which makes for a nice change, and she seems to respect the chain of command. The show has settled down some between Tony, McGee, Ellie, as there aren’t as much in fighting and backstabbing as there was before with Ziva, and to some respect Kate, on the team. It’s nice that the team can be seen more like friends instead of colleagues who hate each other. 

Ziva and McGee broke the fundamental rule of law enforcement, you don’t leave your partner without backup, which they did in the episode Dead Air, and for the rest of the episode it was treated like the greatest joke ever, after all, leaving your partner unable to call for help should he need it, when looking for a terrorist who has already killed three people and are saying that more are to come, is just do damn funny. I will say I have read some fanfiction dealing with this episode, and though for the most part I like them, one thing that puzzles me about it, is that the authors of these stories often put the majority of the blame on Ziva and then redeem McGee. I think the reason for that is that as I stated before that we have episodes of naïve baby McGee who listened to Tony to fall back on, while Ziva started out as the sister of Ari, who killed Kate, and a short time later, was the new colleague who thought it a good idea to invite every person of the extended team except Tony, and then the woman who refused to give vital information to Tony, and instead decided that she would only tell Gibbs about Rivkin, and then as the grieving woman who pulled a gun on Tony, to the woman who paid Tony back for saving her from Somalia by leaving him without backup. Unless you’re a Ziva or Tiva fan it is easy to see why she gets the punishment while McGee who is just as guilty is given redemption.

Which brings me to the bane of NCIS: Tiva. I get it, both Tony and Ziva are played by attractive people, and the writers certainly ended up pushing it down our throats. Or at least for us who don’t like Tiva. Normally I get that people have different tastes and therefore ship different pairings, and I am fine with that. I am not the shipping police, but let’s be honest when it comes to Tiva, it’s just plain wrong. If Ziva was played by someone not attractive or it was Tony who had pulled all that shit on Ziva instead of the other way around, people would have been busy shouting about the obvious abusive relationship, but it is not so and instead the relationship seem to be a fan favourite.

I have never understood that and especially after Dead Air. How can you possible justify a loving and respectful relationship between them when Ziva was very much willing to let Tony die, when she left him without backup. How can there be a relationship between them, a good healthy and respectful relationship, when it is obvious from just watching a few episodes that Ziva does not in any way respect Tony nor respect his position on the team? If you are unable to respect your partner at work, then how can you possibly respect them at home? And why would they even be together? Why would Ziva be with Tony when she doesn’t respect Tony at work, and routinely disrespect him and questions his competence and orders? And why would Tony like someone who doesn’t respect him, has pulled a gun on him, have actually shot him, although by mistake, and someone who left him without backup and then laughed about it?

There are many more things that are bugging me about NCIS, but this is the end of this rant. Sorry for the ramblings.

[the-desolated-quill]

Death In Heaven - Doctor Who blog (Fuck You Moffat)

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Remember when I said The Name Of The Doctor was the worst series finale in New Who. Turns out I was wrong. This is the worst series finale in New Who. And I do hope Moffat isn’t interpreting this as a challenge, trying to come up with finales worse than the previous year’s. How about writing some good shit for once in your career?

Dark Water was an incredibly bad episode, but Death In Heaven takes it to new, insulting extremes. It’s utter bollocks from start to finish. It’s a mountain of bullshit so rock hard, not even diamond tipped drills could penetrate it. It’s an entire hurricane of piss. It’s... It’s... I didn’t like it.

Having fucked up the Daleks back in the previous series, it seems Moffat is now determined to ruin the second most popular monsters in the show the Cybermen, and he succeeds with flying colours. Is there anything the Cybermen can’t do now? They can fly, they can convert the dead, they can create clouds of Cyber-pollen, and apparently every atom of a Cyber body contains a program to upgrade the human race. At this stage the Cybermen have become so over-powered that they’ve just become utterly boring, evading anything the Doctor throws at them by pulling another random superpower out of their arses.

Also, like I said in my previous review, why are they converting the dead? Why not convert the living like they usually do? And why, once they’ve been converted, do they just stand around doing bugger all? It’s a bit hard to find Cybermen threatening when they pose no fucking threat whatsoever.

And then, as if you couldn’t undermine the Cybermen anymore than he already has, Moffat decides to go in for the kill with Danny Pink. I’m sorry, but Danny the droopy Cyberman has got to be one of the most pathetic sights I’ve ever seen. He wants to erase his emotions because of Clara (which seems like an overreaction to me) and asks Clara to do it for him even though there’s no reason why he can’t just do it himself. It must be out of spite. That’s the only reason I can think of. Oh, but Moffat still wants us to think that Danny and Clara are the perfect couple as opposed to a highly dysfunctional and toxic pairing that would seem more at home on The Jeremy Kyle Show than Doctor Who. 

Also, even in Cyber form, Danny can’t resist chastising the Doctor even though he’s actually trying to help the ungrateful bastard. In fact there’s a lot of Doctor-blaming going on in this episode and I really don’t get why because, as far as I can see, he hasn’t actually done anything wrong. At this stage I wanted nothing more than for Danny to fuck off and die, and I thankfully got my wish, except it had to take the form of a stupid, heroic self sacrifice. This isn’t the first time the Cybermen have been defeated by the power of love, and it’s always been really stupid every time, but this has got to be the most nonsensical. Danny’s love for Clara reverses the Cyber conditioning? Are you seriously telling me that Danny is the only person in the entire world who has loved someone enough to want to save the world? And if that’s not bad enough, Danny gets not one, but TWO stupid self sacrifices when it’s revealed the Master’s teleport randomly only has enough power for one trip (bit fucking convenient) and so he chooses to save that kid that died in that war zone. A series worth of buildup for this cliched pile of shit? Cheers Moffat!

Since I’ve mentioned the Master (I categorically refuse to call her Missy), let’s talk about her. I didn’t think it was possible to be more annoying than John Simm, but Michelle Gomez somehow managed to pull it off. I utterly detested her in this. I’ve never really liked the Master anyway, but I swear the character never used to be this fucking childish. She’s weird, obnoxious and goofy for no other reason other than she’s ker-RAYzay. (seriously, is that the only way Moffat knows how to write villains? She’s basically Andrew Scott’s shitty version of Moriaty in a dress). What’s worse is that the only way to make her come across as even remotely threatening is by making the characters around her act like fucking morons. UNIT have met the Master before. They know how dangerous she is. Why do the soldiers guarding her not react when she very visibly activates her bracelet, breaks out of her restraints and puts on her lipstick? Why does Osgood, who has apparently read all the dossiers about the Master, get so close to her to listen to her whisper and not scarper when the Master threatens to kill her?

Also, what is the Master’s plan exactly? Why Cybermen? Considering these Cybermen have pretty much nothing in common with actual Cybermen, I can only assume they’re there for rubbish fanservice and that Moffat is too fucking lazy to come up with his own ideas.

Apparently the Master wants to give the Doctor his own army to prove the two aren’t so different. It appears Moffat is going for a Killing Joke vibe, but it doesn’t work because while Batman and the Joker are two sides of the same coin, the Doctor and the Master are so diametrically opposed that this whole plot point becomes fucking laughable. It has the same whiff of bullshit that Journey’s End had with Davros chastising the Doctor for ‘taking ordinary people and fashioning them into weapons.’ Like I said about that episode, there’s a world of difference between turning people into weapons and encouraging people to defend themselves. The Doctor is very much the latter, so spare me the ‘we’re not so different, you and I’ crap. Is the Doctor better than the Master? ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY!

Yes, once again, it turns out this episode is all about the Doctor. That’s all this bastard series has been about. Characters talking relentlessly about whether the Doctor is a good man or not. It’s utterly tedious to sit through because we all already know the bloody answer. Hopefully the Doctor’s speech about how he’s just an idiot in a box with a screwdriver will finally put it to rest. Not that I’m praising the speech mind. Peter Capaldi does his best, but it’s badly written and stupidly over the top, plus it’s hard to really feel the emotional weight of this speech when all it does is state the fucking obvious. The Doctor isn’t a soldier or a hero. He’s just some guy. Yeah. We know. What, have you only just worked that out Moffat? Why are you boring us to death with shit everyone and their mums already fucking know? Can we move on?

If there’s one thing I hate more than Moffat trying to spin the bleeding obvious as surprising revelations, it’s the bullshit lies and fake outs. Why are the Doctor and Clara lying to each other at the end? What purpose does it serve? (Also trust Moffat for coming up with a pretentious bullshit reason why hugs are bad. It couldn’t possibly be as simple as this Doctor just doesn’t like hugs). What was the point of Clara pretending to be the Doctor to trick the Cybermen? That never goes anywhere. Oh no! Danny is going to be Cyberfied... oh wait. He’s okay. Oh no, Kate Stewart has fallen out of the aeroplane... oh wait, she’s fine. OMG, the Doctor is actually going to kill the Master... oh wait, that wasn’t an orange light. It was a blue light, which means she’s teleported, so she’s probably okay. Wow, the Doctor is finally going to find Gallifrey... oh wait. No. The Master was lying.

Like I said in my previous review, keep wrong-footing the audience and eventually we’ll get sick of the bullshit and stop trusting what we see. I mean look at Osgood’s death. That should have been shocking, but not only is she a one dimensional character that I don’t give even a sub-atomic particle of shit about and is clearly too stupid to live, the fact is none of Moffat’s characters ever actually stay dead, do they? Rory. River Song. Strax. Jenny. Clara. Nobody really dies in the Moffat era, so why bother getting upset about Osgood? She’s probably going to come back in the next series.

But the thing that angered me the most about Death In Heaven is the utter contempt and disrespect Moffat shows to classic series fans. And don’t pretend you don’t know what scene I’m referring to.

Cybermen are converting the dead. The Brigadier is dead. Moffat is an insecure, egocentric hack who desperately wants to stand out from the Who rabble. Take a random guess what happens.

I’ve seen bad Doctor Who episodes before. I’ve been pissed off by Doctor Who before. But never before has an episode filled me with such utter rage. Not even Kill The Moon managed that, and you all know how much I despised that load of garbage. I didn’t take the idea of the Brigadier being a Cyberman particularly well, and I’m not exactly proud to say this, but my reaction was quite extreme. I basically had a full blown screaming fit. I was so angry and so upset by this. I couldn’t believe Moffat would do something so fucking crass and so fucking disrespectful. Yes it’s just a TV show, but the Brigadier was one of my favourite characters in Classic Who and indeed one of the most beloved characters in the entire show. And when a talentless, arrogant smartarse like Moffat comes along and tramples all over those happy, nostalgic memories, I think you have every right to take it personally. This has got to be the most insulting thing Moffat has ever done, and if I wasn’t committed to reviewing the rest of these episodes, I think I can safely say I wouldn’t be watching this show anymore after that.

Death In Heaven is a fucking terrible finale to what has been a fucking terrible series. Yes some episodes had decent elements in them, but it’s largely been awful. Series 8′s only saving grace has been Peter Capaldi, who has done an amazing job in the role despite the material he’s had to work with.

Moffat, go flush your head down the fucking toilet.

[pyjamapolitics]

4.01 News Cycle

Prescient as always, Madam Secretary opens it’s fourth season by reaffirming it will not shy away from current and pressing real world issues. Despite talking place in an alternate universe where the President of the United States is not a giant orange moron, (or f***ing moron as his Secretary of State likes to refer to him) Secretary Elizabeth McCord is confronted with the growing threat of Fake News. When a foreign official dies suspiciously during a one on one meeting with Elizabeth at the United Nations General Assembly, she becomes the subject of a Fake News story identifying her as the murderer.

‘Fake News’ is a term that is thrown around far too often in the current political climate as a catchall to dismiss any negative story. In this episode the true definition of Fake News is well illustrated and it’s danger highlighted. Disinformation has always played a role in the body politic and the world at large, but with the advent of social media it has become a prevalent and powerful tool of bad actors and ordinary citizens alike. From the Brexit referendum to the elections in the United States, France, Germany and others, Fake News and the weaponisation of information through social media have influenced people and events on an unprecedented scale. But now Fake News has evolved to become a weapon, not only of elections, but of anyone with a message to push and a platform from which to push it. with the sole purpose of attacking truth and reason to erode trust in democratic institutions and democracy itself.  

Two of the three most important scenes in this episode are Nadine explaining the source of the Fake News story to the Secretary before her interview, and the Secretary’s interview itself.

“It began on a conspiracy mongering fringe website called Champion of Facts, it spread through social media at an alarmingly fast rate, has been retweeted and shared through countless sources. What’s not helping is the hundred plus phone calls that Mr Bento made to our office… apparently you were avoiding him because he had something on you. Then you became hysterical, revealing choice of words, so you stabbed him in the chest during an unscheduled closed door meeting with him at the UN.”

Fake News stories, perhaps not of this magnitude, are created in exactly the same way every single day, in an attempt to influence people on almost every issue. A small shred of truth is taken, twisted into something sinister and spread across social media. The hundred calls to the State Department, Elizabeth being Ex-CIA, an unscheduled meeting, of course she murdered him. With her bare hands or was it a cocktail glass? Leave it up to the readers of this Fake News to decide, it doesn’t matter as long as the seed of “she’s a murderer’ has been sown. Something else worth noting is Nadine’s comment that “hysterical” was a revealing choice of words, which highlights the coded language used to describe women that act as a sexist dog whistle to those who subscribe to that kind of discriminatory thinking.

Before her interview Elizabeth tells Nadine she thinks “there’s still a strong divide between legitimate news sources and fringe based hooey.” but during the interview is ambushed with a statement by Senator Morejon threatening a congressional investigation into the incident.

“This is obvious crackpot theorising, which quite possibly is the work of a disinformation campaign by a foreign power. What Senator Morejon is doing by legitimising this story is not just immoral and unethical, it undermines the stability of democratic government. Reliable information is the bedrock of any institution, be it science, government or private enterprise, if citizens can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction then the entire project of civilisation turns to dust… By bringing legitimacy to a ridiculous murder claim against me he’s using the tactics not just of dirty politics but of warfare, because it’s dictatorial, it’s autocratic and it’s un-american. Furthermore a mainstream media outlet ought to have a better understanding of it’s responsibility to the public and refuse to signal boost these kinds of outright lies.”

The mainstream media, who in our world as well as the world of Madam Secretary, largely continue to abdicate their responsibility to place the truth above all else in favour of ratings and increased advertising revenue, no longer act as the so called fourth estate. False equivalencies between the facts and blatant lies are made on almost every issue and presented as a balanced debate. There are not two sides to every issue. Framing everything as a debate and leaving the public to draw their own conclusions is a dereliction of journalism’s duty. Journalism should be objective, but not to the point that it excludes what is true and what can be proven.

One of the things that makes Madam Secretary such a refreshing show of the political persuasion is the State Department senior staff. We’ve seen relationships and bonds grow in and amongst Elizabeth and her staff for 3 seasons now, reaching a level of familiarity and comfort with their roles and backstories. The battle of the Chiefs of Staff made for a funny yet full circle moment when Elizabeth’s Chief of Staff, Nadine met the White House Chief of Staff Russell Jackson’s angry outburst with one of her own, thinking back to the first season it’s hard to imagine Nadine defending Elizabeth with such fervour yet now she is as protective of Elizabeth as Russell is of the President. It’s also hard to imagine Blake not making wonderfully pithy comments every episode, a favourite of mine this episode being “I believe that’s Mr Jackson’s knock ma’am.”

Russell does raise some important points during his dressing-down, however angrily they were delivered. “In the age of the internet a lot of nut jobs reach just as wide an audience as the Secretary of State.” with the fact that 22% of the American people believe Elizabeth is a murderer being testament to that. Elizabeth’s ability to effectively do her job does hinge on her credibility and so Nadine makes her finest point ““Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” the only way we can possibly fight this rumour is with the truth.”

The truth in this case becomes rather complicated. The deceased Mr Bento who was the assistant vice minister of Timor-Leste, a Southeast Asian nation, had been trying to contact Elizabeth to blow the whistle on the impending sale of island atoll’s to a powerful Mexican drug cartel. The cartel had infiltrated Timor-Leste’s government at the highest level, threatening it’s President into the sale to establish a shipping base, leaving Timor-Leste in danger of becoming a narco-state. The cartel poisoned Mr Bento using a rare compound that only the Russian’s and they were known to use for homicide, the State Department team managed to piece the story together from this fact.

Once the team’s theory is corroborated Elizabeth believes the situation in Timor-Leste can begin to be righted with both American and Chinese intervention. Elizabeth meets with Foreign Minister Chen to gain Chinese backing and while doing so highlights the increasing globalisation of Fake News and the need for international cooperation to combat it.

“This has something to do with everyone’s troubles in the news… this is what we’re all facing if we don’t fight back against bad actors weaponising the news, the Colima cartel is manipulating this narrative. Right now they’re focused on me, tomorrow? Could be you… even your regulations won’t stop some guy in Macedonia being paid to manufacture clickbait, we’re all going to lose this battle if we don’t stand together and call it out.”

No episode of Madam Secretary is complete without some Team McCord time. The other very serious event Elizabeth dealt with this episode is Alison leaving for college and her inability to be there to help her move in. While it started out as a sweet display of motherly fretting that she was missing this parental right of passage, we learn that Elizabeth’s feelings go deeper than that. When she tells her brother how hard she found moving into college alone by herself as an orphan, her desire to help Ali move in takes on greater significance. Elizabeth’s recollection of her own experience underscores her commitment to be as involved and loving a mother as she can be, and we know she is. When Elizabeth manages to meet Ali and Henry there the delight is palpable and made for a special Team McCord moment.

The third of what i consider to be the three most important scenes of this episode was Elizabeth coming home. The man beside the woman as Dr Henry McCord once dubbed himself, proved once again why he is the best fictional husband currently on television. Henry and Elizabeth talked out the episode’s events, with Henry informing his wife that a snap poll now showed only 12% of American’s thinking that she’s murderer and listening to Elizabeth voice her fear that “It’s scary how fast everyone jumped aboard that train, even scarier to think that a drug syndicate can use the power of Fake News to rattle a country and convince them to lose faith in their government officials.” presenting one of the biggest challenges democracy now faces. Henry promised he’s working on it then provides the perfect distraction for the beleaguered Secretary of State. This balance of communication, deep understanding, support and affection is a true representation of a healthy marriage and what makes us love the McCords so much.

The final scene, featuring a nice cameo by the episode’s director and MOFOTUS Morgan Freeman, where Elizabeth intends to warn Senator Morejon that he’s playing a dangerous game ends with him issuing his own warning.

“In this brave new world of scattered partisan media where unscrupulous outlets are desperate for any juicy new story and political plot twist that they can find, i believe i can chip away at Dalton’s approval ratings quickly and efficiently. 12% of the American public thinks that you’re a murderer Madam Secretary. I can work with that.”

The Senator hits on a key aspect of Fake News, it’s power lies in it’s ability to affect the way people think. To make them doubt and mistrust institutions, elected officials and mainstream media outlets. To sow discord and divisiveness amongst citizens. To make people question reality and replace it with a fabrication. Regardless if a story is eventually debunked or not, once those who are susceptible to Fake News believe it, they will not be convinced otherwise. Whether or not Fake News is a continuing theme in Madam Secretary, it is a dangerous daily threat to democracy and free thought in all our lives.

[inaneinthenextplane]

American Amnesia: A Case For Why Trump’s Administrative Evils Do Not Make bush Good

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/357109-poll-dems-have-favorable-view-of-george-w-bush

It's come to my attention lately that my fears have been verified, that a bunch of nice celebrity guest appearances and speeches condemning the obvious evils of white supremacy has worn away at American contempt towards one of their most vicious and prolific abusers. The news cycle has noticeably begun to handle this assassin of American moral character with kid gloves and in the ire & fire of public outrage against out current manchild-in-chief, his image has been successfully re-rehabilitated.

This is not okay.

Lets just go over some things this man has done:

The authorization of military force that has been used for years well into the Obama and now Trump administration to 'fight the war on terror' was tasked originally with hunting down Osama Bin Laden and deconstructing Al Quaeda, both of which were adequately accomplished. This same declaration fresh after 9/11 has been used to justify the executive branch occupying the countries of Afghanistan, Niger, Iraq, Libya (during the ousting of Ghaddafi), and many other countries. Normally wars have to be authorized via a congressional declaration of war, but the lawful lawlessness of every executive branch in the use of military force since Could Not have happened without this man.

This man also capitalized on 9/11 to push through the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, an act which has effectively suspended habeus corpus & our fourth amendment rights, allowing the government clearance to access our personal information via a rubber stamp covering large swaths of many millions of Americans or if just suspected to be an enemy of the state.

The deployment of the Cuban naval station Guantanamo Bay as an extra-judicial prison designed to hold (largely foreign) captured enemies of the state in cruel conditions, & often subject to periods of torture during interrogation, began in 2002 not long after this man was elected. Part of Obama's path to the whitehouse was the broken promise of closing this HellHole, which stands in opposition to anything we ever say about human rights on an international stage.

This man was the progenitor of the drone program which left mechanized aerial warfare to what are fundamentally death machines in the sky. A military tactic we've used for taking out targets of interest, & that has resulted in the murder of many thousands of people unrelated to threats to our national security, for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time & they are used to murder doctors, rescuers, and mourners after the job is sloppily done

https://www.salon.com/…/u_s_drones_targeting_rescuers_and_…/

I normally hate a lot about Salon.com, but Glen Greenwalds article & the information presented in it can be corroborated by many sources.

The double-tap drone strike designed to hurt civilians is a war crime, it threatens our safety on the world stage, and it is us allowing our government cannibalize any sense of honor we hold claim to.

Footage of helicopters killing 10 men in a street of Baghdad (including two journalists for Reuters) were leaked by the private Bradley Manning to Wikileaks and published under the title 'collateral murder'. A van stopped to assist the wounded and was fired upon, two children were wounded and their father was murdered. Nothing happened to the people who committed this act.

Private Manning was imprisoned under conditions of solitary confinement, subject to torture & humiliation, and was essentially until the ass end of the Obama administration thrown away for life for bringing to light this and other leaks to inform the American people of a war crime committed by their government.

During the election that 'won' him the presidency, the state of Florida (then governed by Jeb Bush) purged 50,000 black votes in an election that was critically close in terms of delegates. The supreme court would decide the outcome of the lawsuit that would follow, filed by Al Gore, two court judges both having been appointed by this mans father George H.W. Bush. Not to mention, this man attempted to appoint his own personal lawyer as a SC justice.

This man infected the educational system of the United States with curriculum centered around unscientific ideas such as intelligent design in direct opposition to evolutionary biology, abstinence only sex education which resulted in continued upward teen birthrates, and with the institution of No Child Left Behind the emphasis on education was placed upon student performance on standardized testing. This resulted in failing students dropping from public school, low scoring schools being punished in terms of funding, and the general destruction of well rounded educations designed in part to teach critical thinking skills.

This man carpet bagged someone whose primary experience was in the Rodeo Show business to be the head of FEMA who would then oversee a failure to appropriately respond to the disaster of hurricane Katrina. Chaos would ensue in New Orleans & it was a dramatic blow to American confidence in disaster repose.

This man withdrew from the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gasses & undermined American regulation on the environment by defunding enforcement agencies, & disbanding a pledge to tax carbon emissions. This has set the United States back basically a generation in terms of the environment on top of what we now have with Trump.

This man had the audacity to cut funding for veterans he was sending out to war, gutting services to them by billions of dollars.

In fact, this man so skyrocketed the use of mercenaries that at the height of the Iraq war there were more private military contractors in Iraq than actual army soldiers. These mercenary companies like Blackwater would be implicated in various war crimes, where civilians would be, again, slaughtered by men who would face no fucking punishment or trial.

This man used false evidence through then defense secretary Colin Powell to justify an illegal war in the face of UN opposition, implicating Iraq in the events of 9/11 and as having amassed weapons of mass destruction with intent to kill Americans on the US mainland. Also using the testimony of an acrimonious political prisoner of Saddam Hussein code-named 'Curveball' to implicate the regime in Iraq further in falsified WMD claims.

This man had twice as many CIA (not FBI) agents fighting the failed war on drugs than he did tasked with even investigating terrorism.

This man was the first president to initiate 'free speech zones', not content to just monitor our speech but to tell us how we were allowed to protest and where.

This man assaulted abortion rights for women, defunding family planning institutions designed to help those who needed abortions. An actual ban was instituted on stem cell research, which set medical research back for years (they even made a South Park episode about it). He opposed gay marriage and continued DACA, maintaining the homophobic-ally motivated national ban on same sex marriage.

the bright side of his being president was the fact that he decided to leave when he had to.

This man was a national embarrassment, his capacity for constant gaffes even created the popularization of the 'bushism', these brought us humiliation whenever we made the mistake of turning on the news-you could look them up but I'll link here a compilation that demonstrates his capacity to fuck up worse than even Trump https://youtu.be/Be6tunbRcs8

This man is now LIKED BY THE MAJORITY OF DEMOCRATS & I know what this is, this is that Democrats are typically younger and don't remember what went on. And hey, nobody has to agree with me that as far as impact on social/economic/legal/foreign issues his administration is worse than currently is Donald Trumps by miles, & definitely the Obama administration.

But he's not 'good'. If there is a hell, this man is as good as there already. The evil shit that he was up to, I mean, you just aren't informed to me if you have a positive opinion of him at this point. I question your political judgement in all things if you like the shit was doing, or think at all that some bullshit speeches taking swipes at the man that tossed his brother around like a RagDoll compensates for the institutionalized suffering of human lives & the environment committed by him. I don't even think you can have sincerely held liberal or even libertarian principles if you like him, he appeals to a very authoritarian and ultra-conservative side of politics and exercised those tendencies in the ugliest of ways. He is a war criminal who should remain shunned by all media circles, & you should be distrustful of Anyone who gives him a platform in the media.

I don't even capitalize his name when I type it, this man is and will always be george w. bush to me. This borderline illiterate moron with his entire family dynasty has ruined much of what actually made our country great.

I don't normally like to make posts this long and drawn out in details, but I just found out about this & its verified my fears about the re-calcification of positive sentiment towards bush in the mainstream media, & this is just intensely demoralizing for me on a visceral level. I am frustrated with the political amnesia of my countrymen, and also their underlying lack of political principle. I don't want to harp too much on this but let this post be a testament to the fact that I have no tolerance for this man & neither should any of you Even if you have political beliefs aligned with him on some of the social issues or on things like taxes, (which I didn't even mention the bush tax cuts) but there's probably like a thousand ways this guy could have fucked up in a single year I could talk about.

Bottom line: things are ugly right now.

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: April 2020

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of April 2020 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

Remember when Donald Trump thought he knew better than the WHO and said the CDC would do all Covid-19 testing...because nobody told him that would set back testing by at least three weeks?  You did?  Well that’s a problem, because he’s cut WHO funding because he’s trying to blame them for the risking death toll in the US rather than accept that it may have been his own incompetence that should be held accountable

...and you know he fucked up given Kellyanne Conway was dug up to speak absolute bollocks to try and pin the blame on the WHO by ignoring the fact that it;s called Covid-19 as the disease was discovered in 2019 and instead trying to claim that the WHO didn't tell us about eighteen previous outbreaks so Daddy Trump is justified in being a sociopath

But the President of Jonestown The United States Donald Trump didn’t stop there, as his next genius idea was to suggest that people inject disinfectant into their veins to combat Covid-19, apparently unaware that a 100ml dose of Dettol is...what’s that word again?  Oh yeah, now I remember: lethal

Does anyone remember that Matt Hancock tested positive for Covid-19 on March 27th?  I have to ask, because on 2nd April he was on press conference duty instead of self-isolating, and because he was on press conference duty he was risking infection of the two people flanking him during the conference who had to squeeze past him on their way to their lecterns

It says a lot about the British press and their motivations that they were all running headlines saying “Huzzah!” because Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson had recovered from Covid-19 after spending two nights in intensive care...with no mention whatsoever to the fact that, on both of the days he was in intensive care, the UK death rate was over 900

...of course we shouldn’t be surprised that Alison Pearson responded to the news of proven liar Boris Johnson being moved out of intensive care with an even more enthusiastic “Huzzah!” than her boot-licking peers, but to make a direct equation between his health and the health of the nation is the sort of thing usually reserved for works of dystopian fiction

Yet as soon as proven liar Boris Johnson slithered back into Downing Street after self-isolating the first thing he spoke of was “our apparent success” - because 20,000 deaths, and that’s just the number in hospital (aka the official figure) is a “success” now and definitely not a reason to ask why the fuck the absolute fucking cretin sat on his backside for six weeks and skived off a string of COBRA meetings instead of, oh I don’t know, bother to come up with a fucking plan for an impending pandemic

There was something utterly bizarre about how the Department of Health and Social Care responded to the revelation that one of Dominic Cummings’ troll farms had created dozens of Twitter profiles purporting to be those of NHS staff but were actually a group of his underlings using fake profiles to direct the day’s media narrative by claiming that the story was “categorically false” in spite of the wealth of evidence that the story was categorically true, especially in the case of the figurehead of this latest dirty tricks campaign “NHS Susan” as the profile photo was clearly of somebody clearly not named Susan that was nicked off of Unison’s website

So not only does Matt Hancock say it is not the time to talk about increasing NHS salaries at the exact time when they’re overworked due to having to try and stem the tide of the Tory’s lackadaisical attitude to preparing for Covid-19, but he also thinks he can blame NHS staff for their lack of protective equipment by saying it;s their fault they don’t have enough as they’re not using what little equipment they have until it’s literally falling to pieces...which is hardly what any normal human being would call “protective”, is it?

Mayor of Amity Island Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis continued his campaign of being the villain of every disaster movie ever when he decided that WWE shall be classified as “essential business” in Florida, which of course has nothing to do with DeSantis being in Trump’s pocket and the wife of the bloke running WWE being in Trump’s cabinet

...although Racoon City Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman soon one-upped even this stupidity when she suggested re-opening Vegas’ casinos not just so people could get back to work, but also so there would be a control group to test just how necessary social distancing measures really are amidst widespread protests from ignorant cretins loudly demanding a haircut

Yet after the $18m bung from WWE had cleared and they were classified as an “essential business” in Florida, the next phase of the plan was releasing a glut of talent from their contracts - which is certainly not related to how WWE head honcho Vince McMahon lied to WWE stockholders about how WWE definitely did not hold a stake in the revived XFL...only for it to come out when the XFL went belly up for a second time in twenty years that WWE held a 23.5% stake in the franchise

Naturally the response from the “centrists” of Twitter when Labour Leaks got out wasn’t one of the dawning realisation that they had been duped by those who so vociferously campaigned against Jeremy Corbyn after a wealth of evidence that the likes of Tom Watson, Mike Gapes, West Streeting and Chris Leslie were among the names sinking to new lows trying to force out Jeremy Corbyn up to and including gaslighting MPs, tipping off journalists to the whereabouts of Diane Abbott so the press could keep hounding her and actively slowing down investigations into antisemitism to make Corbyn look bad - no, instead their response was howling indignantly that somebody would dare blow the whistle on everything that was going on behind the scenes that had long been suspected but now there was proof that those suspicions didn't even scratch the surface

...which was less baffling than Emilie Oldknow responding to her being revealed as one of those responsible for the hounding of Abbott and various other attempts to cost Labour the 2017 election by threatening to sue the Labour Party, as if the information about what she, Iain McNicol, Tracey Allen, Julie Lawrence, Simon Mills, Patrick Heneghan, Sarah Mulholland, and John Stolliday were up to - as if the leak didn’t come from one of that group forwarding their entire WhatsApp log to their Labour email account  

Are we supposed to ignore how Matt Hancock said that four doctors “and some nurses” dying of Covid-19 made it look uncannily like he was saying that nurses were expendable?  Just like we’re supposed to ignore Matt Hancock saying that 19 NHS staff have died of Covid-19, at a time when the figure was somewhere between 28-31?

...but of course smirking cretin Priti Patel crawled out of the hermetically-sealed bunker she spent several weeks hiding in to announce "Three hundred thousand and thirty four, nine hundred and seventy four thousand tests” for Covid-19 had been carried out across the UK, which somehow hasn’t led to three years of dogpiling for flubbing her figures like Diane Abbott got

After all the talk form Keir Starmer saying he would unite the Labour party, when choosing his shadow cabinet he made it quite clear that he had no intention of doing so: the likes of Lisa Nandy, Jess Phillips and Wes Streeting all got nice jobs after years of sniping at Jeremy Corbyn, Rebecca Long-bailey and Emily Thornberry got clear demotions, which was better than what Barry Gardiner, Dawn Butler, Andy McDonald and Richard Burgon got as they were all dispatched to the backbenches PDQ

A book can be written about how Stephen Moore somehow equated those protesting stay-at-home orders with Rosa Parks, for the simple reason that an entire book needs to be written to try and engage with the complete lack of anything approaching knowledge, logic or common sense that would enable to say something so utterly moronic that it’s legitimately painful to read

The worst thing about the selfish cretins who hate lockdown taking to the streets...okay, that’s a multiple choice question on its own, but the fact they keep hollering into people’s faces that being in lockdown violates their Freedom of Speech because they can’t have some minimum wage peon cut their hair on the third Tuesday of every month like they used to is so utterly pathetic that it means there’s two reasons why guards at the Michigan capitol should have opened fire when the selfish morons descended upon them

Smirking cretin Priti Patel decided that, just as it was announced that 20,000 people had died in hospital of Covid-19 in the UK, the best idea was to announce that there had been a decrease in arrests for shoplifting in the UK compared to this time last year.  Just a thought: maybe it’s because there’s been a dramatic decrease in shops to shoplift from compared to this time last year due to the vast majority of them being closed?

When it dawned on the Professional Footballers Association that their stance of telling players to not accept any wage cut at a time where clubs were furloughing staff, they took the only available option to them: act like a bunch of spineless cowards and claim that, if footballers took a 30% wage cut, that would mean money was being taken out of the NHS’s pocket...a claim that was slightly undermined by them clearly pulling a figure out of their backsides when trying to say how much money that would be 

Not even a pandemic can stop Margaret Hodge and her tiresome vendetta against Jeremy Corbyn, judging by how as soon as Keir Starmer got his feet under the desk as Labour leader she was demanding a full and thorough investigation into how Jeremy Corbyn owned her at a public event in the mid-90s and made her look like a shrieking harpy with no understanding on any subject

While me singling out Amanda Holden for making herself the public face of the batshit insane 5G Truthers is a little bit mean, the fact that she made herself the public face of the 5G Truthers justifies her inclusion - with Eamonn Holmes also deciding to get in on that action a week or so later

...although she was soon put in her place when David Icke resurfaced to show people what batshit insane looks like and made himself the face of the 5G Truther movement while screaming how he’s being censored after vomiting misinformation in a livestream that Youtube promptly took down

Of course Alan Sugar was going to give his £0.02 about the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown at some point, at he didn’t disappoint when his take on the whole thing was journalists shouldn’t question the government (as if that’s been an issue in the last ten years...) and everyone should just shut up and not complain as if the 20,000+ deaths are a mere inconvenience and shouldn’t be referenced at any point because we are so much better off with a Tory government, even one that can’t be fucking bothered to do things such as prepare in any way for an impending pandemic reaching the country

It’s natural that Guido Blog responded to that NHS doctor who put his name and face to criticism of the government’s complete lack of supplying the NHS with enough protective equipment to keep NHS staff safe during a pandemic in the most Guido Blog way possible: by pointing the finger and calling him “anti-Britait”, “anti-Israel”, “pro-Palestine” (as if one doesn’t usually go without the other...) and a “socialist” - which simply asks the question that, if he was a pro-Leave, pro-Israel capitalist, would they actually be criticising them?

NASCAR’s virtual season hit a bump in the road after Kyle Larson momentarily mistook himself for PewDipShit and used a racial slur during the stream, getting himself suspended by both NASCAR and his team - and also got bitched out by literally every other NASCAR driver who was in the live chat

Apparently the worst thing that Paul Joseph Watson has had to endure in recent weeks isn’t the worldwide pandemic that’s affecting everyone but the most lunkheaded of people who hate not having minimum wage peons serving them every day, instead the worst he had to endure was getting blocked on Twitter by Piers Moron - and boy, did he have one hell of a meltdown about it...

Nothing sums up the “journalism” provided by The Sun than their front page bellowing how pubs might not reopen until Christmas, a front page embellished with the quote “596 dead: see page four” superimposed on a Covid-19 microbe graphic in the small piece of real estate left by the headline.  If ever there was an image that summed up why their hacks are taking to Twitter to literally beg people to buy their rag, this would be it

The determination of Alison Pearson to be on the wrong side of every story continued apace with her tweeting about a couple of her friends leaving lockdown due to being bored, and when asked if she would report them her response was to harrumph that they’ll be fine as they’re healthy people in their 40s and 50s...the problem being that, a few weeks before this, she was posting an article in the Telegraph howling about the selfishness of people who believe that self-isolation need not apply to them

Of course Randy Pitchford waited before the focus was elsewhere, such as the Covid-19 epidemic, before telling the Gearbox employees who worked on Borderlands 3 that, actually, those bonuses they were promised wouldn’t be coming as the game didn’t perform as expected even though their bonuses weren’t tied to sales or review scores, but of course if they had a problem with this they were free to quit...and by complete coincidence that would see them forfeit the scaled-back bonus entirely

On the one hand Steve Rotheram may have a point about Atletico Madrid fans flying into Liverpool for their Champions League tie being responsible for bringing Covid-19 onto Merseyside...but on the other hand, isn’t it funny how he made no mention whatsoever of the Liverpool fans going to Madrid two weeks earlier potentially bringing it back with them?

Irrelevant twat LeafyIsHere decided that now was the best time to make his return to Youtube, in which he made it clear he's still not over getting torn several new ones in by Idubbbz three years ago, somehow failing to understand that by making it obvious he cut his own throat as soon as he started

And finally, adding piracy to his resume is Donald Trump judging by him thinking that stealing Covid-19 supplies destined for Germany for American use is the sort of thing that doesn’t make him look like a dictatorial twat, nor does it sound like the sort of thing wars have legitimately started wars in the past