In the grand scheme of Democracy

Today was another day when I, in my own mind, did something to improve democracy in this country. In my own mind. Let me have that.

I believe in an idea. I believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with a country when it pays a foreign body to make its laws for it. When it has outsourced democracy; when it takes away the 'demos' in democracy and leaves only 'cratos' - power. I believe this is not only bad for the country, the nation, but potentially terminal. But that is just me. A nation cannot survive without its people, for then it is not a nation, it is a mere assembly, an assembly with no common interest or goal. Which seeks not to promote its values but merely lives for the sake of itself. Without dreams or aspirations, just the same old same old. I believe this is wrong.

Am I wrong? Well that is not for me to decide. For all I know outsourcing democracy might be an excellent idea, but that is not important. What is important is that it feels wrong. A small part of you dies every time you see that it has acquired yet more power. Like the Lernaen Hydra it just grows every time you try to cut it down. It prospers from disaster, it feeds on misery; misery for which it is largely to blame. We are becoming disenfranchised.

“Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” this is how we are told to live our lives with regard to it. We are not to bang on about it, not question it, not disagree with it - just accept it. If we question it we are seen as eccentrics, if we point out the obvious contradictions we are told 'but'. It rules by commandments like Moses, no justification but pointing to a higher source of absolution, as adequate explanation for its intrusions. But this is not the Bible. These are not stories written in metaphors and symbolism, this is happening now but we are refused our voice to question it, to rationalise it down to the fallacy it is. People are being denied their right to speak. History tells us that such a state of affairs has always ended in violence, as will this. Yet we are still called eccentrics.

I handed out another hundred leaflets today in my patch of London. It felt good. Although it wont make a shred of difference, I can at least point back to these days in the future when our children will ask 'why didn't you do anything?'. I can proudly look back and say 'we did, but no one else.' This is and never will be an exercise in satisfying one's ego, to excel to some spurious echelon of self-righteousness. It is not meant to invoke hatred of malice, it is meant to plant an idea. An idea we once had but have now lost. Beneath all this rhetoric there is an idea and ideas are bulletproof. I believe in this idea but my great task is to persuade other's to believe it as well. If I can convince just one person, just a single lonely soul, that my idea is better than what he previously believed then it will all be worth it.

This is not a religion, there are no grand books filled with moral codes of how and why one should live their lives. It is but an idea. It is a very simple idea. I have already stated the idea, you already know what it is; it is in between the lines of this post. It is in you right now or at least it should be. You should have reacted to what was said above in two words which are anathema to each other, outsourcing democracy. Now you know what the idea is that we have lost.

I have not even mentioned it by name, yet you all know what I am talking about. That is a testament to how little control we have over our own lives today. You might be able to change the small things in your life but, in the grand scheme of democracy you are nothing. Because you are nothing, we are nothing and that is how democracy died.

Science and Facebook

Today I threw out 10 old notepads filled with maths; maths, maths and more maths. What joy. But thinking of the actual disposal, got me thinking about a parallel namely the movie known as 'The Social Network'. If you have seen it you will certainly have your own opinions of it, certainly it has it merits, actually it is rather good in my opinion. What I object to is how they seemingly just gloss over the supposed "hacking" bits of it. They have got it wrong, wrong wrong.

Cracker: This is the common term used to describe a malicious hacker. Crackers get into all kinds of mischief, including breaking or "cracking" copy protection on software programs, breaking into systems and causing harm, changing data, or stealing. Hackers regard crackers as a less educated group of individuals that cannot truly create their own work, and simply steal other people's work to cause mischief, or for personal gain."

Mark Zuckerberg is a CRACKER not a HACKER:

Hacker: This is someone that seeks to understand computer, phone or other systems strictly for the satisfaction of having that knowledge. Hackers wonder how things work, and have an incredible curiosity. Hackers will sometimes do questionable legal things, such as breaking into systems, but they generally will not cause harm once they break in. Contrast a hacker to the term cracker.

It is the same with skinheads and boneheads.

Bonehead: What traditional non-racist skinheads began to call scruffy glue-sniffing sleazeballs who pretended to be skinheads in the late 1970s. Now it specifically refers to neo-Nazi/white power skinhead imposters.

Skinhead: A movement started in Britain in the 60s when the mod scene met the hippy scene. The mod scene split, and the "hard mods", the ones who hated hippies, got harder. With a little influence from Jamacian rudeboys, the skinhead was born out of the hard mod. Most of the music was held over from the mod days, but there were ska and reggae imported from the rude boys.

This is not just about semantics, they haven't even remotely understood the concept of computer programming when they call every single person who 'looks like he knows' something a "hacker" - they do not. Programming is hard, most people cannot do it, HTML is not programming, blogger script is not programming. In fact most things which are programming, strictly speaking, are difficult to understand and most people cannot. What is more a hacker will never call himself a hacker, it is an earned term not something you go around and put on your business card or present yourself with 'Hi I am Joe Bloggs - the hacker' no, no, no and a million times no. That is not how it works. Just to give you an insight into the world of science. Oh and also the people who work at the Apple stores and are rather endearingly called 'geniuses' are not. It is common practise in science and engineering departments to take the mickey out of 'geniuses' - they are seen as a lesser form of people when they have that blue t-shirt on. Quite rightly to.

People, if we cannot even get our appellations correct then what is the point?

TSR2

Mr North has an excellent video of the TSR2 which I had not seen before, I shall re-post it here because I simply love this aeroplane which was so viciously clawed from us in what must be one of the lowest points in the 'special relationship' ever seen, at least to my mind (or at the very least in engineering terms).

Here is another very very long piece I wrote some time ago, on the TSR2, which is well worth the read if you are interested in aeronautics. One thing is for sure, Britain does some quite frankly amazing engineering, quite unmatched in any other country in the world. Unfortunately we also have the drawback of creating arguably the worst kind of politicians a country could ever have or need.

Ed Balls will be brilliant. David Cameron should be very afraid

...is this woman actually retarded (no really)?

I thought she was only trying to wind conservatives up, but she actually believes what she writes. I am honestly beginning to think that she is that stupid. I have even dedicated a tag to her now for her ignorance seems to know no bounds, hence they must be rolled out on the internet so people can see just what passes for serious commentary from the left today.

If Mary Riddell does not agree with government policy, that must mean they are doing something right

Poor little lady, she thinks it "wrong" and "reckless" to not give murders, rapists and pedophiles, the vote. Much sympathy from the nation I reckon she wont get.

She is as much a product of the society she claims to have informed opinion on as she is a part of that society, where it is now standard procedure to blame anyone but the perpetrator.

EMA

You think someone who actually wants to be in education is going to drop-out because they are not getting a state handout of £30/week? Labour you are having a fucking laugh, really, you incompetent mongs.

Do you know what we did before EMA? We worked, we took part-time jobs, we earned our way, now I know this will seem like a foreign concept to many of my younger compatriots in this country, but alas such was the awful state of affairs back in the dark ages. 16-year olds were forced to work, the sheer horror I can see on some people's faces when announcing this. The thought; 'Me work? Never, I might get dirty I might actually have to push myself, someone will tell me what to do - oh Lord why did the evil government scrap my "lifeline" that is the EMA'.

Here is some inside information for you, coming from someone who grew up in one of the worst parts of London (no not me); the EMA was used almost exclusively for leisure. Never anything even remotely relevant to study such as pens, books and software (most of which the school gives you anyway and kids these days are so IT savvy that they download anything they need illegally if so needs be - schools tend to have computers by the way, if they don't that's not the EMA's fault). It really would do well if the government just once in a fucking while figured out where all the money went. You know, just have a peak, just a sneak peak, maybe a little market research perhaps? Maybe see if those billions upon billions of pounds are actually having a tangible difference upon British society. Or worse, if they are having a detrimental effect upon the youth of today, who apparently now believe that you can glide through to the top, on the back of a BA in Media Studies (no really).

The worst part of this is not the grant in itself, it is the mere notion/concept that someone should need financial incentive to stay in school. There is something seriously fucking wrong with society if such is the case, where you instead of making the case for further education bribe pupils, in the hope that some will realise for themselves the benefits of knowing more than nothing, the nothing which is currently provided by the GCSEs (I taught GCSE maths last year and it was a bit of a joke lets just leave it at that).

If you could not be bothered to read the above and decided to skip to the end, then my views can be summarised as such; give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish you will feed him for a lifetime.

Thousands voice concern over Government's NHS reform bill

The pressure group NHS Support Federation said 10,000 members of the public have backed an online statement to voice concerns about the Government's health reforms.

The pressure group called 'The People of the United Kingdom' had roughly 200,000 member of the public back an online statement calling for the reintroduction of military hospitals. Do you know what the government did? They told them to sod off.

Unequivocal Equivocation – an open letter to Dr. Trenberth

A must-read essay for everyone...

The “null hypothesis” in science is the condition that would result if what you are trying to establish is not true. For example, if your hypothesis is that air pressure affects plant growth rates, the null hypothesis is that air pressure has no effect on plant growth rates. Once you have both hypotheses, then you can see which hypothesis is supported by the evidence.

UPDATE: I just sent the above essay to the Climate Change wing of our university, and told them, in no uncertain terms, to get a reality check and stop wasting our tuition fees. I will post their reply when and if I get it.

BBC rapes science reporting again, again and again...

H/T EU Referendum

I hope you will excuse me for being so late in jumping on the posting-bandwagon on this one. Now I think I am fairly well placed to comment on sciency issues, that is after all what I am studying. There will be a lot of professors popping up in the above video and there are a few things to note about the term and title of 'professor'.

You do not have to agree with them because of their position but you sure as hell will respect them. I told our economics lecturer that his entire discipline was pure bullshit in my opinion in my first year of university - but that was only my opinion. If people want to be stupid enough to study something so profoundly boring as economics then you must respect them for that (see; another opinion). Now professors will also have opinions, lo and behold, and they are not paragons of impartial reporting. They like every other human being have built-in bias that they cannot avoid for one reason or another.

With these professors above you are allowed to disagree, equally for those who propagate AGW as a leading truth you are also allowed to disagree and question. This is key; you must question. Do not ever take anything the MSM says as a given truth. It is not. There is far more to anything than one article, and even if you get a thousand, even a hundred thousand articles saying that the glaciers are going to melt in 10 years time that does not make it true. They are only writing what someone else with an intent has told them. Millions upon millions of pieces were written on the supposed Y2K crash of year 2000, that was supposedly going to wipe out the entire global computer network. That did not happen. Of course there was a small band of informed people who said it would not happen but no one listened to them. When they euro was introduced there was a small band of people who said that you cannot have fiscal union without political union for that would lead to a market crash. And look what happened to that; they were ignored as per usual by the media.

Whatever someone says have an autonomous mind. Professors do not know everything and they have opinions like anyone else, and they are highly conscious of getting their work published. Some by any means necessary. Academia is not some abstract castle of infinite good will, the truth is far far more depressing.

Thoughts of the day

Tax pays for those who don't feel like working; god bless 'em. Lucky you we're around otherwise socialism UK PLC (notice the oxymoron) would be buggered.

The Conservatives are "strong" on defence...

Lets see how strong they have been thus far:

• Reducing the planned purchase of 22 Chinooks to 12
• Delaying Trident for political reasons that will cost billions
• Cancelling Nimrod MRA4
• Reducing armour and artillery, if reports are to be believed, to the bone
• Reducing surface vessels
• Reducing Tornado
• Withdrawn Harrier GR9′s
• Withdrawing Sentinel
• Slashing allowances and expenses
• Setting up the armed forces for a post Afghanistan change in terms and conditions of service
• Implementing a 2 year pay freeze
• Reducing pensions
• Reducing service personnel by 17,000
• Reducing the MoD Civil Service by 25,000 which will likely result in more work for service personnel
• Removing the External Reference group from reporting on the Military Covenant
• Trying to convince everyone that the SDSR was a considered and balanced review (thats my favourite joke of the year)

H/T Think Defence

I cannot see any reasons left for anyone to vote Conservative anymore, not that there ever really was one, but I think I can confidently say that most us did not think they were going to be this bad once in government. There is more than one way to balance the books especially when your country it at war...

Prince william should stay out of politics

...and Marry Riddell should implode.

Spot On

I just heard someone say something rather excellent "the Tories are like Palestinians; they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" how bang on the money that is.

John McTernan

John McTernan; who is that you might ask? Well, you would be right in asking that question. He is a very pointless person in my opinion, who blogs for the Telegraph. Now if you go to the link that I have provided you will find a short synopsis about Mr. McTernan. It says

John McTernan is a commentator and political strategist who works internationally. He was Political Secretary to Tony Blair and has been an adviser on health, welfare, defence and Scotland.

Smack me senseless and call me Charlie, how on earth can he have been an adviser on health, welfare, defence and Scotland. Is he some kind of super academic, perhaps he holds several PhDs in these areas of interest? Maybe he is a savant? All in all he only has one degree from Edinburgh but maybe we are supposed to believe that it has modulus on everything in the whole wide world, hence he is 'qualified' to do anything.

The depressing truth is that he is just another pointless leftie with no real life-experience which could ever remit him even remotely qualified to 'advise' on the fields he has. It would for example be logical to assume that someone who advised on defence would have some military background, you know so that he could actually bring a qualified opinion to the table otherwise his advise is no more relevant than your average Joe on the street, without any military experience. That at least is what common sense suggests, but as you know, Britain no longer does common sense.

Ministers in important departments often have almost no understanding of the briefs they hold. We have had ministers of agriculture who think slurry is a home county. We have had ministers of defence who think a mess is something they must avoid creating. It is almost compulsory to have chancellors of the exchequer who know nothing about economics. What is really uncalled for, though, is when a government appoints to a semi-official position a politician who is not a minister, so has no responsibility apart from seeking attention, and is let loose on something of which he knows nothing. Simon Heffer is on the ball all right...

Now the only thing I can possibly imagine Mr. McTernan being qualified for is being scottish - his name rings of that, at least a bit. But for all I know he might as well be irish yet he still advised on Scotland for some inexplicable reason. Hopefully he'll one day read this blogpost and make a fuss about it - that would be fun.

It is now tomorrow

It is now tomorrow and it would appear that my prediction, below, was obviously right (how could it not have been?); the government will sail through the EU Bill.

It is odd this predicament we are in yet again, for we have been here before. Whenever the EU comes up for debate in one form or another in parliament we think 'ahh this is the one, the fight back starts now with the this bill, where we tell Brussels to go to hell'. But it never materialises. Now, I have only been doing this i.e. venting my frustrations online for the benefit of other people, for a fairly short period of time and the EU only started to really catch my attention a few years ago when I was still a teenager. But I can but imagine how fatalistic some people twice my age must feel on this issue, where Britain has caved in for 39 consecutive years.

It is strange. How can one not be cynical about the past, present and future British government when the track-record of all of them, is absolutely abhorrent? What is even stranger are those people who cling on to some kind of hope that just once, just this one time, the British Parliament will stand up to the EU and Brussels. But that just never happens does it? Personally I am slowly coming to the understanding that Parliament wont sort this mess out, and we wont stop banging on about the EU because it has never been fixed ergo we have to bang-on about it until it is fixed. But Parliament has no intention whatsoever to that end. They are happy with the current oligarchy which dresses up as democracy.

Most people probably never expected their MPs to actually represent them anyway, given that most people despise the EU, want immigration slashed, want money invested in the armed forces etcetera, they just join in for the merriment that is our charade-exercise in democracy called elections. The really interesting thing is what those at the top will do when presented with a big bag of paper bits, one million or more of those bits. Each bit of paper has a name on it, and each bit of paper represents a view and an opinion. It is a uniform opinion. Each piece of paper represents a person and that person is calling for our membership of the EU to be put to a plebiscite.

But what if they say no?

(Ministers should do their history; what always happens when you consistently ignore the wishes of the people.)

Pastor Martin Niemoller

They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.

You do not, and I repeat, you do not remove a political candidate from a venue just because you happen to disagree with his beliefs. That is not democracy. Remember what Orwell said you pathetic autocratic scum; if freedom of speech means anything it means telling people what they don't want to hear. You may not agree with the BNP but this is a slippery slope towards fascism when people are being ostracised for what they believe in, I don't support them either but like Voltaire never said I will defend their right to say it until death.

For the police to use a Nuremberg defence to justify their actions is beyond reproach, that is nothing but despicable. This country is loosing the plot quicker than under New Labour.

A prediction for tomorrow

Here is what I think is going to happen tomorrow, as always: The government is going to sail through the vote on the European Union Bill and it will turn out that all the supposed "rebellion" was only smoke and mirrors. They will even get a comfortable majority. We will all be supremely disappointed for the umpteenth time that these are the people who are supposed to represent us.

Those EU referendums

I am glad to see that Daily Express continues to make noise. Good for them, hopefully the misanthropic, pessimist old-schoolers will get off their fat arses and realise that all is not lost; we can beat the EU but it will require everyone's help. I have started to hand out leaflets in my patch of London, they will probably do sod all but if I can convince just one person who hitherto thought that the EU was a force for good, then that will have made it all worth it.

The broadsheets might scoff at their petty attempts to bring about change, but then I ask what the flying fuck are you doing about it besides from whining that the EU, doing this and that? Do something about it instead. It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is not an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment.

An Election Paradox

I am not sure if many people had noticed this but I just thought I would add it here to the general wonderings of things.

Supposedly David Cameron was the man who made the Conservative Party (notice small 'c') electable again. But they did not win the election... Of course people will then argue that if he had not taken the helm then things would have been even worse. That however is a very poor defence.