Misleading £1 bus claim lacks ambition

Don't even think about making a dodgy claim about a £1 bus ticket. People will be outraged and you'll be forced to retract:

MEGABUS ads offering fares from £1 have been banned after the company admitted as little as one seat per coach was available for the price...

...Two people complained, saying they could not find fares at that price.

Megabus said the number of fares available at £1 varied due to factors such as the number of intermediate stops and whether tickets were booked for partial or full routes.

The Advertising Standards Authority said: ‘We noted in particular that only one of the £1 fares on the London to Bath route was for the full length.’ It ruled that the ads must not appear again in their current form.

Plaster a dodgy claim about £350 million windfall on a bus and nobody can stop you driving the bugger around the country for months.

Herr Goebbels must be chortling in his grave:

"The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."

Money troubles

One good reason for not entrusting the future of the country to the people who think leaving the European Union will solve everything, is that those people look rubbish at handling money. First, if we're to believe the latest allegations, Vote Leave had more wonga than it could legally use, so breached electoral law by laundering its spending via a tiny unofficial campaign run by a 23 year old fashion student.

In contrast, the people who started this whole sorry business, Ukip, are so short of money that they've been reduced to a crowdfunding campaign to keep the clown car on the road. They apparently need £100,000 "to save Ukip whilst it restructures its position." Last week they'd raised just £610 of that figure. This week they're up to ...

... £620. At this rate, by my reckoning, they'll have raised enough money to save the UK branch of the Vladimir Putin Appreciation Society in about 190 years.

Admittedly the party's youth wing, Young Independence, has taken a bit of time off from trying to organise rallies for failed neo-Nazis to cough up £2,000 towards the crisis appeal, but even with two grand from the Batten-Jugend, they're only up to two and a half percent of their target.

Mind control, using the smell of golf

In hindsight, it was obvious that an outfit like Cambridge Analytica would turn out to be run by a an over-privileged bunch of shady chancers, lurching from one dodgy comic caper to the next. But what about CA's parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL)?

Of course it's the same. Of course it was set up by a chap called Nigel. Of course his parents are landowners from Chipping Norton. Of course he went to Eton. Of course he once dated a minor royal. Of course he claimed to have studied psychology at University College London, although UCL say they've no record of him ever being a UCL student. And of course, before he got into data mining and covert political manipulation, he was into a whole load of other weird, dodgy-sounding stuff. Like smell-based marketing:

...Marketing Aromatics, the world's first designer fragrance agency, devoted to persuading companies that along with their corporate image they need a corporate smell. Smells can influence attitudes and therefore behaviour, Nigel Oakes, the agency's managing director, said. And we know that behaviour, whether in employees or customers, is the dominant deciding factor in corporate achievement. At the launch he demonstrated a range of smells, including autumn, coconut, new-mown meadow, ocean, red wine, and golf - a subtle mixture of pine and sweat.

Like parent, like child:

You read the stories about Cambridge Analytica and you think, Damn, these guys are total geniuses who can control our minds. You watch the undercover video of the Cambridge Analytica execs and you think, Damn, these guys are seriously some clown-ass schmucks. Like always, believe what you see.

Meanwhile, in the real world, undercover police have been informing on health and safety reps and union activists, so construction industry bosses can put them on an employment blacklist and protesters are being prosecuted as terrorists.

Welcome to the "United" Kingdom, a nation divided and ruled by scary clowns.

Fake news factory fooled fake intellectual with fake office

There's a rich vein of social comedy in the Cambridge Analytica affair. Here's how wily old Etonian cad, Alexander James Ashburner Nix, conned that gullible American pseudo-intellectual, Steve Bannon, by appealing to his philosopher king fantasies of dreaming spires and elite institutions:

So keen was the firm to impress Mr Bannon it opened a satellite office near the University of Cambridge after Mr Bannon expressed an interest in visiting the city.

"We created this fake office in Cambridge and brought a bunch of people to set up this office beside the university to make it look like 'This is our Cambridge site. Our Potemkin Cambridge office," Mr Wylie said.

"And later, when the Mercers bought in and they appointed Steve to set up the company, he decided he should call it Cambridge Analytica... as a tip of the hat to our deep links to the University of Cambridge. And so a false reality was infused into the name Cambridge Analytica."

It's not being fooled that hurts. It's being fooled by fools like this.

Afterthought - maybe Hobo Trump got fired because, for all Bannon's intellectual pretensions, his boss already knew more than he did about this kind of bullshit:

Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal describes a stunt in which he lured Holiday Inn executives into investing in an Atlantic City casino by directing his construction manager to rent dozens of pieces of heavy equipment, in advance of a visit by the executives, to move dirt around on the proposed casino site, creating the illusion that construction was underway.

The Register belts Cambridge Analytica with double whammy

1. Best headline: "ICO surprise Cambridge Analytica raid delayed: Nobody expects the information commissioner! Oh wait, yes they do"

2. Best response in the comments: "Anyone would think that the establishment are trying to give CA enough of a chance to clean their house* before they have a snoop around."

I'm sure that Arron Banks, who boasted about Leave.EU using CA, before changing his story and denying they'd ever used CA, will be following developments with interest...





*Update - of course, the process of Spring cleaning started waay before the ICO gave CA a head start, so they could get on with burying the remaining bodies...

Where can you go from there, Boris?

Boris Johnson has likened the way President Putin is promoting the World Cup in Russia to Hitler's notorious use of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The foreign secretary said Labour MP Ian Austin was "completely right" to say Russia's president wanted to "gloss over [his] brutal corrupt regime".

A man with an expensive classical education like Boris should really have a wider range of historical precedents to draw on. But no, if your opponent is thuggish, repressive, undemocratic, there's apparently only ever one valid comparison. Hitler, Hitler, always bloody Hitler. But the thing is, once you've turned your rhetoric all the way up to Hitler, where do you go from there? Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel could have told him:

Nigel Tufnel: ...You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly.*

And "Nowhere" is exactly these comparisons usually lead.

Anthony Eden wasn't afraid to talk the talk about Nasser being the new Hitler, but when it came to walking the walk ... well, let's just say that Suez wasn't exactly a replay of our finest hour. Then there was the drum beat to the Iraq War, when you were either with us or some kind of craven Munich-style appeaser. Surprise, surprise, it took more than overheated rhetoric and a dodgy dossier to liberate Iraq and victory, when it came, brought a settlement that was more Mad Max than Marshall Plan. And who can forget Boris's fellow ex-London mayor, Ken Livingstone, doubling down on his stupid comments about Hitler being a Zionist? That didn't exactly bring peace to the Middle East, or achieve anything, apart from indelibly staining Ken's reputation.

If you have to use the "H" word, save it for actual Nazis, like the sort of far-right Holocaust-denying cranks Putin's Russia has  been funding and supporting in its transparent, and relatively successful, efforts to destabilise Europe. That's about as close to a justified Putin-Hitler connection as you're going to get. Otherwise, Putin is just another one of the world's thuggish autocrats, in the same mould as Erdoğan, or the UK's best buddy, Prince Salman. They're all objectively horrible, but not in the same league as a mass murderer who gloried in killing tens of millions by war and genocide.

The more Hitler comparisons I hear, the more sympathy I have for the crudest version of Godwin's Law ("If you're the first one to mention Hitler, you lose").





*Of course, in Spinal Tap, they solved the problem of having nowhere higher than ten to go by painting the number "eleven" on the amp dial. I'm not quite sure how Boris could take it all the way up to eleven - maybe he could compare Putin to Darth Vader, who had a whole planet and its population blown up just for the evulz, which would sort of make him even worse than Hitler, if only he'd actually existed...

Never believe anything until it is officially denied

"Toxic nothingburger: Cambridge Analytica exposé is dangerous political attack posing as journalism" screams RT  (formerly Russia Today). "Apart from that, how did you enjoy your toxic nothingburger, Mr Skripal?"

"‘No Impact’: Cambridge Analytica Uproar Much Ado About Common Election Practices" insists Sputnik.

"THE Facebook data scandal is being wildly exaggerated for political ends." claims Pravda The Sun. .