We "care"

There have been some rather disturbing events in Norway as of late. Not wishing to distract from the scale and magnitude of events, nor their geopolitical influence if any (the man appears to be plain deprived of his senses, no religion involved). I will focus instead on how we, supposedly, care.

It is common for my generation to respond to a crisis with a very typical form of gesture. This gesture is held in high regard on the vastness that is the internet. What you do is simply to attach some form of symbolic imagery of the event, and attach it to your profile picture on Facebook. Once this is completed your moral duties have been satisfied and you and others will labour under the aegis that you are a magnanimous and compassionate being. This imagery is usually removed within a week, the time usually allocated for a media event to pass, so that the MSM can spin into frenzy over something new, something which sells and preferably something which is utterly sensationalist to satisfy our fix for human misery. Not our misery of course, but someone else's.

It is a disgusting practise.

It is disgusting because no one really does care, but they want people to think that they do, they want to conjure an idealistic portrait of themselves in the minds of their patrons and friends. The latter will follow suite of course, they will be drawn to this gesture like mosquitos to a fire light. It is like drugs for the self-righteous brigade. For of course were you to point out this hypocrisy, were you to underline the notion that they are reaping the benefits of misery and destruction for their own personal gain, to say just to what extent it is wrong... you are castigated and castrated of any voice and reason you once had.

Challenging the accepted notion of false adolescent compassion is akin to social suicide.

For how could they truly 'care', how could they possibly attach any form of sentiment to people thousands of miles away, people they do not know, never met but briefly on BBC1. It is a common trait amongst traditionalists to highlight the strength of the human spirit in adversity and pain. There might have been true compassion once, a long time ago, when there was more to life than your appearance and what shows you follow on E4.

No, my generation cares so much for the victims in Norway that they place a little norwegian flag in the bottom of their profile picture, let it sit there for about a week, then they revert back to what they had prior to this incident, which they have so cleverly exploited for seven days. They revert back to the time in place where they were comfortable, happy and their conscience was as it is now; untarnished and untroubled by minions of people blown to bloody pieces thousands of miles away in a foreign country which they cannot even place on a map let alone pronounce.

That is the true extent of the human spirit in 2011; sympathy without compassion.

Balls

I am guessing that no British politician has the balls to do anything about this.

The fall of Cameron? I am taking bets

So dear friends and readers; who think this might just lead to the fall of Cameron? (fingers crossed, touch wood, and all that bollocks)

£5 says it does.

Any takers?

Bollocked by Hague via the EU

What a joke you are, Hague. Do you not realise the exponentialisation in the number of Conservative and ex-Conservative voters who hold you in contempt and who have no intention ever of voting Tory again without the promise of a referendum on withdrawal within three months of the next election?

I have voted Conservative in every general election since my enfranchisement (several) and I would rather stay at home and see Labour burn the economy to the ground than vote for quislings like you.

You are a damned idiot. There is an electoral premium to offering voters a referendum. Do you think you are going to win our votes by telling us in a Telegraph article that we are in the EU to help spread the EU's special brand of freedom? You are ****ing deranged if you think that your pompous and delusional words will do anything but sicken the millions of right and left wing people in the UK who have no illusions about what the EU is.

Who wrote that article for you? They should be shot. Did you write it? Do you really think we are buying this bull "In the EU but not run by the EU". We are imprisoned by a myriad EU laws; your new little law is like a prisoner in a prison cell making a declaration that he will accept no further shackles on his body.

Take your article and shove it. I can barely believe how much the Conservative Party sickens me these days, though I can barely believe what a pathetic excuse for a leader you are. I thought I'd vote Tory until the day I died, but I didn't figure that spineless, gutless, delusional quislings would take over the party and fail to secure this nation's future by not having the guts to extricate us from the EU quicksand which is threatening our prosperity and freedom. Are those little red boxes really worth it, Hague? Are your dinner dates with EU friends really worth sacrificing your principles and this country, Cameron?

We should be in EFTA, not the EU, or negotiate a separate bilateral trade treaty that suits us perfectly, and then we can get on with rehabilitating our country as a Hong Kong style economic tiger on the edge of the continent. Funnily, Norway and Switzerland get by outside the EU. And you, William Hague, should go down to Beachy Head and follow the Conservatives' electoral prospects in 2015 down to where they deserve to go for so long as you ignore and deride the will of the British people to leave the European Union.

H/T Fausty

Hacking and Tapping

I would just like to inform interested readers about the technological details the media seems to ignore. Now, as far as I am aware there has been no hacking but there has been tapping of telephones. This might be a battle of semantics but lets see where it gets us.

Hacking a phone is very difficult. Most of our politicians use the BlackBerry for a very specific reason: it is very impossible to hack. So difficult indeed that Indian spooks gave up and forced RIM (the makers of BlackBerry) to give them the 'keys' for the phone (i.e. the software encryption code). This should give the reader some clue as to level of intricacy involved in hacking mobile phones, and BlackBerrys in particular, used by all government and major corporations because they are deceptively hard to enter without permission.

What you need to ask yourself now is this: could a NoTW private investigator accomplish what the entire Indian secret service could not? The smart money is on 'no'. Hence we can but conclude that the media, as always when it comes to technology, got it wrong. Whenever they talk about malign computer breaches they speak of 'hackers' as well even though the correct term is 'cracker' - two very different sides of the coin.

What they with all certainty did do was not phone hacking (because they do not have the brains nor the equipment to do that - GCHQ does but they are a government funded spy department with 20,000+ employees and a billion pound+ budget). What they did do was phone tapping which Wikipedia defines as 'the monitoring of telephone and Internet conversations by a third party, often by covert means.' This is much more within the confines of their technological expertise. It is not particularly hard to do if you have the right stuff. Joe Bloggs on the street could do it with some basic instructions. And by the looks of it Joe Bloggs on the street did do the tapping, judging by the fantastic mess they have created as a result of their amateurism.

A snippet of news

Lets take a sample from the current political news and see how much of it is EU inspired malaise and rot. Ah, the Telegraph seems a reasonable place to start (and end).

Taxpayer handed huge bills for compensation claims; Our good old friend the ECHR which is supposedly not part of the EU even though the ECJ refers to it in its ruling and paradoxically enough, the ECHR refers to the ECJ in its rulings...

Give Scots more power, says Major; Devolution such an excellent idea. It has been the intent of the EU, since time immemorial, to break-up the United Kingdom. They are doing a good job of it.

First trucks, now trains: how EU rules kill off our industries; This is probably my favourite. EU procurement rules which only the UK seems to apply, and are at the same time stupid enough to not realise that there is no such things as a 'good european' - the EU contracts are not exactly piling up, now are they Mr Cameron?

Farage on good form, shame about UKIP

H/T Calling England

We need to talk about the EU, eh sorry, Kevin?

One should attempt to introduce a piece with humour if possible. I did so with this piece in trying to spoof the highly successful We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shrivel. I found the novel remarkably boring when I read it some years ago but it has the virtue of having a very useful title with which one can lay the groundwork for more important matters such as the vexations upon the British, well, everything related to Brussels.

Now there has been one could say an upsurge as of late, telling the hoi polloi that our cabinet is suddenly drawn into the hellfire, the hellfire of euroscepticism with such heavy weights as Steve Hilton and Oliver Letwin, apparently, concluding that we should withdraw. I will echo the words of Mr North, of EU Referendum, who was the inspiration for starting this blog two years ago, when I say that for our dear leaders to all of a sudden reinvent their eurosceptic credentials is complete and utter bullshit. They know that they cannot run this country because they have given away all power required to do so. Though I contradict myself with a previous post, our MPs must truly be morons if they all of a sudden are not content with the status quo with which they have entangled themselves. They did this, they know what needs to be done to get out of it but with Cameron in charge with his rag-tag gang of ministers we wont be seeing any change soon.

And thus we reach the purpose of this post which hopes to have the chutzpah to come to ends with certain anomalies we face. Lets consider some likely events which will feature in future volumes of the country.

1. Cameron will not call and EU Referendum
2. Red Ed will most certainly step down as Labour leader
3. Parliament will eventually have to accept the will of the people.

You might consider point number three odd given the track record of this ignominious parliament who spits in the face of its benefactors (the people) before relenting to its will. But I have faith in its worth given the vicissitudes of life meaning we live not in an isotropic world. It changes.

Now Mr North and other bloggers notably Autonomous Mind do not share my optimism with regard to the EU; I believe that within 10-15 years the UK will have left the EU for good. Their scepticism is warranted given that they have seen so much more of the leviathan that is the EU than I have, and have lived through some of the most awkward moments of our relationship with it. Which, we can conclude, has led to nothing but Pyrrhic victories for Britain and the Commonwealth. For all their faults (and sometimes they just want to make you break down and cry) I have faith in the British people.

Reverting back to point number one; Cameron will not call a referendum but will his successor? There are two men who are in a position to claim the Tory throne after Cameron, and possibly one woman. First we talk obviously of Osborne and Boris. First of all we have to accept that UKIP on current form wont be taking us anywhere near the exit. Sad but true. We have to place our hope with the Tories unfortunately and maybe, in the future, Labour.

Would George Osborne call an EU referendum? Tough question, the man must be fully aware regarding the infuriating amounts of gold we pay this pointless piece of huff-puff in return for nothing. He must know just how much money could be saved by simply withdrawing, by reinvigorating the economy, renewed fishing fleets, reinvented industries freed from Brussels red-tape, a financial services industry not subservient to the ones in France and Germany and perhaps even an art-market where we are not consistently denied competition because of EU rules. And perhaps most, there would hopefully not be any fucking carbon trading or any other bollocks like that. Wishful thinking anyway. Osborne knows the numbers but it all boils down to whether he has the backbone to do anything about it. My answer to that would be no. He likes to be part of an elite, a club for the powerful, paid for by the not so powerful. Like Cameron he has never held a real job. One should be most cautious of such people. They lack perspective of how difficult money can be to come by.

What of Boris Johnson?

At this point I couldn't be bothered to continue this post because it is pointless.

Rage Returns with Term

I am on summer intermission/hiatus where the broad theme of freedom will be heavily considered: how is it that a state and its government, which cannot even keep the pavements clean, have the right to tell its citizens what they can and cannot eat? It reminds me of a certain quote by one William Ralph Inge "In dealing with Englishmen you can be sure of one thing only, that the logical solution will not be adopted."

We need to step up our game ladies and gentlemen.