Tag Archives: Stupidity

If I wanted to blow up a train this isn’t going to stop me

Barcelona Estació de França - CC / Flickr

Barcelona Estació de França - CC / Flickr

I’ve seen some idiotic security controls in my time, but yesterday at Estació de França, Barcelona, beats all of them.

The station, as the name implies, is the old terminus station for trains from the north of Catalonia towards France, and it’s also the station where night trains for France depart. The station has a dozen platforms and used to have three main exits to and from the street.

Two of those exits now have a simple string barrier preventing entry and exit, and the third has a magnetic bag scanner and a single security guard sitting beside it and scowling at passengers. Every bag is supposed to go through there, even if you’re a commuter, and hence there’s a queue to get into the station.

So what can you not take on a regular train? Remember we’re not talking about Eurostar here.

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ECR Group: the worst Twitter strategy I’ve ever seen (after no website for 3 months)

ecr-groupIt took them 3 months to get a website together, and not before I had hit them with a bit of cyber squatting. Now the ECR Group in the EP is at it again with its catastrophic IT – this time applying it to Twitter. 3 weeks ago I noticed that @ecrgroup on Twitter follows zero people, and tweeted this:

@ecrgroup on Twitter about as inept as the group itself – following ZERO, yes 0 people on Twitter. Clueless.

So have they got the message? No, of course not! In fact I am the only person *ever* to have @replied to ecrgroup as far as I can tell. That’s despite them having 127 followers and pumping out a load of propaganda interesting information a couple of times a week.

It has been a matter for debate here about how many people to follow on Twitter, but zero is absolutely the wrong answer! Their IT is complete and utter failure.

Just for the avoidance of doubt: @ecrgroup is the official ECR Group account on Twitter, it’s linked at the bottom right of their official homepage.

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Henry Porter in The Observer: you are a lazy f**kwit too

Crucifix - CC / Flickr

Crucifix - CC / Flickr

It’s not just the Daily Mail at fault for utterly lazy, shit and f**king crap journalism about European Politics. Henry Porter in today’s Observer is horribly, dreadfully, shockingly awful:

When the European Court of Human Rights announces a ban on crucifixes in Italian schools, you can either celebrate the liberal march of secularism or deplore the illiberal attack on religious expression and national tradition.

Perhaps there is a third option which is to say that this has nothing to do with rights and everything to do with the EU’s manic drive to standardise behaviour and attitudes, in the same way as it regulates the transportation of livestock and the safety specifications of new mowers.

The crucifix is none of the EU’s business and, as we celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall this weekend and the miraculous bravery and persistence of the Christian congregation of the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, who sparked the East German revolutions with candles and peace prayers every Monday evening, it is perhaps right to remember that the last Europeans to ban the display of religious symbolism in schools belonged to the communist regimes of the east.

Whatever you think of the merits of the case or not, the European Court of Human Rights is NOT, note IS NOT, part of the European Union. It is the human rights court of the Council of Europe. Henry Porter, thicko journalist, get this into your dumb skull. Yes, I know it might be fun to poke fun at the European Union and standardization, but get your damned facts right!

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