13th Spitfire

Socialism

2012-01-26T10:55:00.002Z

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.... (substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little..

The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. It could not be any simpler than that.

Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections.

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

It is not just Oxford who have lost their glory

2012-01-24T00:32:00.004Z

This is an interesting story I find on academic standards at Oxford, interesting I find because it resonates very well with what I have experienced during my time at a "top 5" or "G5" university in the UK. It is a depressing picture I will paint for you indeed, very depressing. To say that standards have dropped is a bloody understatement. Standards have not dropped they have quite frankly disappeared.

First of all, to not get a first these days, at least from my course, would place you amongst the failures in this world. That said it is by no means an easy course to get into: you need at least 40 IB points (out of a maximum possible 45) and at least A*A*A with the two A*s in Maths and Physics and the third A-level should preferably be in Further Maths. The graduate tutors struggle to find good people unfortunately. We started of as a group of 80 students. 20 have since disappeared. Some have changed course but most have failed, which means either retaking a year or leaving the university. Most opt for the former but it is out of their own purse.

The status of our coursework is not much better, some of us try to produce original work but are placed in a very depressed situation when one finds that a lot of people have simply copied from the previous years. Seemingly without anyone noticing. This is so common that it is standard now. They have plagiarism software but it is totally useless; you could probably get away with claiming all of MacBeth as your own. It would never notice. Some lab rapports might as well be taken from a standard template. Zero thinking involved, only copying.

Then we have exams. This is the truly most depressing area of them all. Now, the reader should note that your humble narrator is by no means on course for a first. He is a pretty feeble academic superstar, a goon amongst the aces if you will. A first is not his business, he is not that clever. However I do appreciate a good challenge for my brain and we get that sometimes but mostly not. You see the way we and most people revise for exams is not by learning and understanding the material, no, we revise by exclusively doing past papers. Yes, you can throw in a few tutorials as well if you want to mix things up. But first and foremost people do past papers to pass the current papers. This manifests itself in a very strange way, particularly when the examiner has attempted to actually examine us and refuses to be part of the degree making machine. When they truly examine us, when they truly make original questions, people fail. They fail because they cannot think outside the box, they fail because they have learned a model answer and they fail because they have not actually learned anything at all, only a method. A way of doing things, not how or why it works, only that it does. Because that, it in the end, is what goes on your transcript; a mark which says that you know how to do X in Y way. And if Z presents itself you best get another scientist 'cause this one don't know of a method to solve this slightly different problem.

There is nothing original with our degrees anymore at least, they are nothing but certificates with a lot of really fancy sounding names on them.

Oh and I should also mention the funniest thing that the department does when a majority has failed an exam; they scale the marks. Instead of asking themselves why they failed, or if the students genuinely know anything in their respective subject, they scale the marks. An exegesis of the student's actual academic fortitude is ostracised.

Britain will buy French Rafales - guaranteed

2012-01-16T08:09:00.004Z

This is how it starts, an 'official leak' has been instigated, showing that the Americans have some serious doubts about the F35. As they quite rightly should. That it has reached British media is a coincidence.

Reports on this security level are not just "leaked" as if it were another NOTW story. If it actually were that easy then the Russians and Iranians, the Chinese and god knows who else, would be all over it. In reality this sort of classified information barely gets out of the building in which it was compiled. Hence, this is not a 'leak story'.

We wont be able to buy the F35 simply because it will cost us too much, it is a hugely complex aircraft which might fly some day, but not on their budget nor timeline. It will fly but not under our flag.

As you might understand, this unfortunate situation lends itself to the rather politically embarrassing scenario where we have: two aircraft carriers, one which we have mothballed straight away because we cannot afford planes to fly from it and the other does not have any planes at all because they do not work. What is the quick solution? Navalised HAWKs possibly yes, but they have virtually no weaponry to speak of, pretty A/C though. We could buy Americans F18 Hornets, and loads of them for probably a reduced price. But no, we will buy French because, as you know, we are now in a strategic alliance with the French. This means that they will buy the second mothballed carrier and put their Rafales on them, and we will buy their Rafales to put on ours. A neat but very dishonest solution. As such it fits very nicely with the British political landscape, where there has not been an honest voice since the end of WW2.

That's fair...

2012-01-15T13:10:00.002Z

Annual salary of an MP: £65,738

Private, British Army, Level 1: £17,265

To note

2012-01-12T02:33:00.000Z

It is in the nature of institutions to seek to extend their power. Always.

HS2

2012-01-12T02:28:00.001Z

£33bn to travel to Birmingham...

Who the fuck wants to go to Birmingham?

Compare the Navies! (no this is not about the movie Avatar)

2012-01-03T13:22:00.001Z

IRAN

28,000 personnel
65 aircraft
5 Frigates
3 Corvettes
26 Submarines
24 Fast Attack Craft
98 Large Patrol craft
+100 light missile boat
16 Hovercraft

USA

324,466 active duty personnel
284 ships
3,700+ aircraft
11 Aircraft carriers
9 Amphibious assault ships
8 Amphibious transport docks
12 Dock landing ships
22 Cruisers
60 Destroyers
27 Frigates
75 Submarines

Who would 'win'?

What a stupid stupid woman...

2011-12-31T12:04:00.003Z

No, it is not Marry fucking Riddell actually it is the Toynbee woman this time.

In my political lifetime, I have never seen a more callous or inept crew in charge

Or, in my political lifetime I have never seen a government dealt such a rotten hand, with no easy solutions, no money to spend, no joy to bring and nothing feasible to offer but misery.

Still, let's pretend that's not true eh?

Though I suppose the article might be half convincing if:

a) other countries all over the world were boosting welfare spending. In reality most are imposing far more severe cuts than the present UK government,

b) Ms Toynbee ever had a good word to say about any Tory leader still alive, and

c) the prevalence of a culture where people see others live off a multiplicity of benefits which rewards them far more than any job they have any serious prospect of holding down is truly the myth that it is widely claimed to be by all leftist social commentators (and which directly contradicts the experience of most 'normal' citizens).

Probably one of the greatest pieces this month

2011-12-30T16:18:00.002Z

Here is the link.

And here's the full piece.

Twenty-one years after being overthrown by her party's pro-euro faction, Margaret Thatcher still continues to exert an enormous gravitational pull on British political life. With The Iron Lady film soon to be released, there has already been much speculation about whether she should be given a state funeral (in fact, and sadly for Labour, Thatcher's death is more interesting than Ed Miliband's entire life).

As Charles Moore recently wrote, what other modern British prime minister, aside from Churchill, would be worthy of a biopic? (Blair has been portrayed on several occasions, but always as a slightly comedic salesman or trendy vicar.)

So it's entirely fitting that, as official papers now reveal, Mrs Thatcher was so modest that she insisted on paying £19 for an ironing board. As this paper reports:

Files released by the National Archives under the 30-year rule include a note about the cost of refurbishing the Prime Minister’s official residence, in which Baroness Thatcher pointed out that she and her husband, Denis, used only one bedroom and already had their own crockery.
She wrote: “I will pay for the ironing boards and other things, like sufficient linen for the one bedroom we use. The rest can go back into stock. MT”

As a rule the great leaders are not made great by having the most lavish balls, the swankiest private jets or the grandest titles. Looking back, it was obvious that the New Labour project would end in dismal failure when its leaders began lavishing a fortune on new wallpaper, sofas, and grace and favour mansions. And David Cameron – the £680,000 of taxpayer's money he spent refurbishing Downing Street does not bode well.

Of course we can't entirely blame Cameron, just as we can't entirely blame MPs for making the taxpayers fund their lifestyles. Thatcher grew up in an era of hardship and penny-pinching, but she also lived in an age of high social solidarity and restraint. Politicians rarely cheated because they were more likely to see the taxpayers as people like them; there were also a greater sense of national solidarity, and though religion was in decline, the general climate was still strongly influenced by Biblical prohibitions. When did all this change? Depending on political allegiances, once can either blame the 1960s or the 1980s, although personally I think things started to change in the 1990s, when conspicuous consumption became the norm, bling came into fashion, and the typical song format changed from "I love you" to "I love me".

It is not that people are more selfish – there is still plenty of altruism about, as the case of the woman who gave a kidney to a lady she met at a dinner party illustrates – but rather there are no social restraints or taboos or pressures forcing not-very-altruistic people to behave themselves. Like when Thatcher came to power, we're entering a period of austerity, when hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs and belts are being tightened across the land. Yet we also have among the richest Cabinets in history, with a prime minister worth somewhere in the low eight figures.

In Ireland the shock of financial meltdown has been met, by many accounts, with surprising levels of social solidarity; people have agreed to defer loans to people who might lose their homes; civil servants have handed over money from their pensions to help pay off the national debt. It's not quite Bedford Falls, the setting for Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life; that film continues to bring tears to tipsy eyes every Christmas because it shows how much social solidarity can help a community overcome financial hardship, but it's heading in the right direction. In contrast, Britain now displays one of the major symptoms of low social capital – when the rich do not feel obliged to help out those less fortunate to them. In the past decade less than £10,000 has been gifted to the exchequer by British citizens; why aren't any of our mega-rich Cabinet donating money? David Cameron's catchphrase "we're all in it together" was so pathetic (in the old sense of the world) because it was so plainly untrue.

Maybe I'm doing the man down, and secret papers will reveal in 30 years' time that he spent all his weekend caring for Aids orphans and puppies: but Cameron, unlike Thatcher, seems a fitting leader for our age.

Stolen Christmas Falklands Thoughts

2011-12-22T19:50:00.002Z

1. What makes anybody think the US will help us?
2. They stitched us up in Suez.
3. They sat on their hands in the Falklands.
4. They sent guns to the IRA.

That is indeed a very special relationship, much like the one where the spouse is trying to, slowly, but surely, suffocate, his other half.

Really, why does Britain have so many useful idiots?

For example...

Christmas

2011-12-21T17:03:00.000Z

All I want for Christmas is for the LibDems to be destroyed at the next poll. Merry Christmas.

Nick Clegg

2011-12-12T13:45:00.000Z

...speaks five languages and rubbish in everyone of them. In the parlance of the good old British Army, what a mong.

The 'yoof' of today

2011-12-10T17:54:00.004Z

I would just like to entertain fellow readers by showing them the following remark, issued by a privately-schooled relative of mine, a young lad in his late teens. The sort of person who, unfortunately, is the future of this country.

Hate dikheads that think there all big but clearly there not!!

Now I believe that if my analysis is correct, what he was trying to say was

'I hate dick-heads, that think they are all big, but clearly they are not!!'.

Thank you Labour. Well done.

What now and what of UKIP?

2011-12-09T14:56:00.003Z

How on earth will this affect UKIP? I am totally at loss, perhaps we can call it "FU" or "FUUK" as in 'Fuck You United Kingdom' or 'Fiscal Union without United Kingdom'? Reader suggestions are welcome.

"Their views on immigration are stupid and myopic, but that is true of much of the public." - Amol Rajan

2011-11-18T18:11:00.004Z

Ukip has policies far beyond Europe, and its members are generally patriotic, pinstriped types. Their views on immigration are stupid and myopic, but that is true of much of the public. As the whole European federalist project disintegrates, Ukip will appear prescient, and voters will give them credit.

Source to the person who thinks the general public is stupid. Clearly a vote winner that one.

11.11.11

2011-11-11T18:58:00.001Z

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

We can see you...

2011-09-14T19:42:00.007+01:00

This blog has been going strong now for a good few years, in fact throughout my time at university which is slowly nearing its end. It was set-up with the intent of promoting the destruction of the EU in every form, having realised early on that such a sinister project and ploy had been given far too much space by pushy politicians with broken moral compasses.

And to this we add the latest gimmick that there is suddenly a new grouping in Westminster that is supposedly 'eurosceptic' (don't flatter yourself boys; real eurosceptics know what a kin looks like and you are not one). First of all before we go into to the details of this absolutely non-sensical prospect lets consider the media.

Whenever ministers or a group of say more than 10 people aspire to convene or project something akin to real conservative principles the media have something not too dissimilar to a political erection. The like and metaphor of which would not even be tolerated in the most violent pornographic flicks. Even the adult entertainment world has the sense not to go too far in its sexual exploration for it can be dangerous to accommodate every single fetich in the world. By strange comparison the British media has no such reservations with its response to political events. Instead they go 'all-in' and respond with grandiose and euphemistic pieces of how all of a sudden, we have a minister, a true leader, who has finally seen the light and wisdom of the electorate.

Yet they do not even wonder why it has taken more than 38 years for a seemingly clever person to reach the conclusion that the EU is not good for Europe nor mankind and particularly not the latter.

Hence one should always take the media with a couple of pounds of salts for they are unbelievably gullible and are very much signed up to the party line, and as such will offer no real journalism and criticism where it is truly due and needed.

We do not need celebratory gunshots from hacks who think they have spotted what might be perceived as a bit of right-wing leg, we want to know that if that is really what it is then why the flaming feck has it not been shown before? Why all of a sudden? Do they think we are so stupid that we can see or feel political expediency when it is being shoved down or neck on a daily basis?

Then of course we have the hacks who have had a sudden epiphany, a change or heart or a change in salary is more likely. Either way one must question the reason for reading such tosh when the authors revise one of their most fundamental principles (vis a vis that the EU is a force for good) in the face of mounting opposition from, well, everyone. But it is not just that, a truly brave journalist, and one worth reading, would be he who dared stand his ground and defend his principles. Surely, one must be allowed to trust in and believe in the EU as a force for good, most electorates of most countries would disagree, but a brave man nonetheless. And one whose's opinions would be worth reading.

But this, this sudden outburst or patriotism? Jingoism? Bellicosity? I do not know what to call it. Either way this government has given away more power to the EU in a shorter timeframe than any other government before them, yet they want us to believe that overnight they rediscovered their people, their real political creed, the flag and most importantly their principles.

They truly do take us for fools.

I am often rather upset by Mr North's constant cynicism towards the ultimate goal of cutting loose the chimera that is the EU from the UK. Surely someone somewhere must be doing something good to further that goal? I am always pleasantly surprised whenever I read anything regarding a politician picking a fight with the EU, and then of course I go to Mr North's blog to find out what is actually going on. The truth is he has been playing this game much longer than me, and he knows the EU better than quite frankly anyone. Though I fully intend to have an autonomous mind, I am of the opinion that when a man has been vindicated as many times as Mr North one should really start to heed his words. And they are easy enough to replicate; this is the most europhile government we have ever had, the Tories are not eurosceptic and they will never ever hold an in/out referendum.

Thought of the day

2011-09-12T13:39:00.002+01:00

We do not need a "closer union" we need a closed-down union.

Amazing what greatness can come to you during a lunch break.

Smear by Association

2011-09-09T12:27:00.000+01:00

UKIP scares the bejeesus out of the three main parties and their shills in the media because on their big single issue they better represent the opinion of the majority of the British public, as demonstrated in opinion poll after opinion poll. It's therefore necessary to denigrate them wherever possible and to portray a party which represents a wholly mainstream view of the EU as "xenophobic" if not outright "racist" in order to make it seem beyond the pale and unacceptable by association.

This media strategy is so blindingly obvious and, to judge from those same opinion polls on public attitudes towards the EU, not in the least successful.

Autumn Update

2011-09-06T18:14:00.004+01:00

Dear fellow bloggers, I would just like to add a quick update on my extended absence. My internship, as it turns out, is far longer that most of my peers' hence my time and energy on this blog is limited as of now. However term starts in just under a month and the 'informed' ranting will start again. Political events which I highly suggest you attend (I plan to) include Congress for an EU Referendum - hopefully you are not too cynical about us leaving the EU. I maintain that it will happen within 10-15 years.

French Riots

2011-08-10T19:10:00.001+01:00

Might I just draw the attention of my fellow bloggers to the fact that French riots of 2005 lasted for a month and they were infinitely more violent than ours. Regardless of how you pitch it the French will always be crappier than us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France

Side by Side

2011-08-09T22:39:00.002+01:00

It is somewhat heartening to see that normal people are helping the police chase down the nimrods.

Link

London Calling

2011-08-08T21:56:00.005+01:00

Nobody says you must laugh, but a sense of humor can help you overlook the unattractive, tolerate the unpleasant, cope with the unexpected, and smile through the day.

Our politicians are smiling in blissful ignorance for they wont do the necessary to quell the unreasonable walking the streets of London. And lest someone should like to play the racial card I advice you to look at the pictures. Black, white, yellow, brown and mixed - every ethnical colour of the rainbow is represented this ominous evening, and all the nimrods of each race are running a riot whilst our politicians look as paralysed as the French did a few years ago. Might it perhaps be an idea to ask the French how they sorted themselves out?

Hear the voice of those brave enough to venture out into the blistering infernos

Well as I write, various parts of London, Croydon and Birmingham are burning. But fear not, I have just read in the Guardian that the Home Affairs Select Committee are going to launch an inquiry into the rioting so that should resolve it PDQ.

This is no longer anything to do with the police shooting a gangster in Tottenham. It is nothing to do with police and community relations. It is nothing to do with police racism. This is about 30 years of a liberal ineffective education system. This is about people being allowed to behave as they wish without any consequences. This is about pandering to to peoples rights with no regard to responsibilities. This is about a criminal justice system that is totally ineffective and that holds no fear for criminals. This is about failing to imprison violent and persistent offenders.

This is the legacy of Blair, Brown, Cameron etc. This is the legacy of the liberal hand wringers who just want to help all these poor offenders and never set boundaries or consequences. Your chickens have come home to roost. The blame for all this will no doubt be pointed elsewhere. Last week the police were criticised for being too hard on protesters. This week we are too soft. When the ashes are raked over this will need a wholesale change in policies not just laying the blame at the door of the police, a la MacPherson.

This is not a popular uprising such as the Arab states as some cretin suggested. This is about 2% of the population who have been taking the piss for years with impunity from the justice system. The police can sort it out but the liberal hand wringers might have to accept baton rounds and a few cracked skulls. If you cannot accept that then let them carry on. The Government might have to have a rethink on cutting police officer numbers, and before they cut payments to officers for being riot trained and for being called back to work they need to think that one through. Thousands of police officers have been called in to help tackle the rioting tonight. Cut the payments and next time you will find no one answering the phones. Most of us are devoted to the job and are happy to take all the crap and criticism and inevitable shaftings, but don't expect it for nothing.

And to round it all off we have Mary fucking Riddell.

We "care"

2011-07-23T01:17:00.005+01:00

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

2011-07-22T22:32:00.002+01:00

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

The fall of Cameron? I am taking bets

2011-07-19T21:13:00.002+01:00

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

2011-07-17T11:02:00.001+01:00

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

2011-07-11T08:50:00.007+01:00

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

2011-07-09T23:17:00.008+01:00

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

2011-07-06T11:04:00.002+01:00

H/T Calling England

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

2011-07-04T09:04:00.004+01:00

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.

Cameron will not call and EU Referendum
Red Ed will most certainly step down as Labour leader
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

2011-07-03T00:02:00.004+01:00

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.

Who will you vote for?

2011-06-17T12:30:00.007+01:00

Seeing as the Coalition has turned into precisely what we in the blogosphere said it would; New Labour all but in name, who are you going to vote for in 2015 (if not earlier)?

One should not bask in the glory of self righteousness but there is, inevitably, something regal, not to say grand, about being right again, again and again... Fret not, for I jest, but turning on a note of seriousness instead; every serious blogger from Mr North to Guy Fawkes said that this venture would go tits-up and they would just frolic in Blair's shadow, for secretly they adore him. That is highly inconvenient for us who don't, those of us who cannot find a single person who has been more detrimental to life in Britain, on every echelon, as a suitable analogy for comparison.

He truly is a nation-state destroyer.

The Americans have a very special military honour bestowed upon officers of absolute distinction. The honour is known as 'General of the Armies' and it is the equivalent of being a six-star general which is an exorbitantly high rank by modern day comparison. I mention this because Blair and New Labour ought to be bestowed this regal order for their dis-services to the United Kingdom. But what is more, the Coalition should do some deep soul searching before they enter the next election. Either they fight in Blair's shadow with the empty mimicry and zero principle approach to politics that was his zest. Or, they fight on their principles, from the spirit of their hearts; for what they truly believe in and for what is right.

I do not believe that 646 people who are well above average intelligence cannot see the problem with bowing to a foreign court, to disable the defences of the realm, to give money to those who do not deserve it, to those who would rather rip of the arm that feeds them, let alone bite it. It cannot be that 646 people of such statute, who have fought a campaign into that Mother of all Parliaments, should just lay down their arms and accept that status quo. I cannot accept such frugal subservience to power. People must have higher aspirations for their country, and especially MPs, than what currently passes for informed governance of Great Britain.

For make no mistake, if they do not change their ways, we will change their place come the next election. Right now there is no discernible difference between the three main parties, all we know is that the country would be better run without any of them.

HMS Invincible

2011-06-16T13:53:00.003+01:00

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Quote of the day

2011-05-29T13:17:00.001+01:00

"We are so liberal we will eventually disappear"

A nugget of truth

2011-05-17T00:23:00.001+01:00

The reason you get paid for a job is because they generally suck. If they were enjoyable you would do them for free with a smile or even pay to do them.

And this is the essence of life.

Scottish Independence implies English Independence

2011-05-06T11:10:00.008+01:00

This is from the European Communities Act 1972, the bill with which Edward Heath, then PM, took the United Kingdom of Great Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC) as it was then known, and which has now transmogrified into the European Union.

This is from the introductory text from the above mentioned bill

An Act to make provision in connection with the enlargement of the European Communities to include the United Kingdom, together with (for certain purposes) the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and Gibraltar.

You will notice my emphasis in bold. As has most likely struck most other ardent euro-withdrawalists, like myself, today's election outcome in Scotland puts the break-up of the United Kingdom back on the table.

If the United Kingdom ceases to exists as a political and sovereign entity then its commitment to the international acts and agreements signed in its name must be rendered moot, since there is no longer an entity in existence which can honour the accords within those agreements.

If Scotland breaks up the union we have one almighty constitutional crisis on our hands. Creating (or re-establishing) countries is usually seen as the business of Africa, but we are not South Sudan. This is and probably will continue to be a nation which, however much the socialists don't want it, shapes the events of the world to some extent. You will need to be a fantastic cynic or an unchangeable pessimist to deny this. If you still do then let me give you two events; Olympics 2012 and the Libyan crisis.

Moving on, if the United Kingdom is left to the books of history then England's membership of the EU will have to re-evaluated, it will have to be put to a new referendum. For there is no way that any politician could survive, today, signing up England to the EU. It simply is political suicide and they all know that as do we. For all Milliband's faults I think he is clever enough to realise that this would be a vote winner if actively put into their manifesto. And if they do put it into their manifesto so would every other party.

Hence it would appear, that the EU's policy of breaking up the UK (and that is their policy - Tony Blair did not grant Scotland devolution out of his good-natured heart) will lead to the EU losing one of its biggest sponsors namely England. One must not be too surprised at this stupendous policy; this is after all the EU. They employ only the greatest of fools and the most naive of politicians.

The wrong cast-iron guarantee

2011-05-04T20:05:00.001+01:00

Will Scottish enthusiasm trumpet English indifference?

How very true...

2011-04-30T13:43:00.001+01:00

The constitution

Quote of the Day

2011-04-29T14:38:00.000+01:00

"Those who imagine that a politician would make a better figurehead than a hereditary monarch might perhaps make the acquaintance of more politicians."

- Margaret Thatcher

Monarchy

2011-04-28T23:57:00.004+01:00

As is probably obvious by now, this humble blogger is a fervent monarchist when most of the world seems to be insisting that we change over to a republic to 'enter' the 21st century as it were. These are normally European countries who have republics or other forms of non-constitutional monarchy. They cannot really fathom why the Royal Family is held in such high regard, they sneer at their supposedly empty veneer, highlight their vices but conveniently forget their virtues. Virtues such as almost the entire family being members of the armed forces.

At the apex of feel-good spirit for the monarchy they still fail to see the attraction, and if they cannot see it now they probably never will. This country is a fervent monarchy and of that I am proud. It takes a lot of courage and a deep-rooted sense of conviction for a peoples to stay attached to such an old institution when seemingly all odds are against them. Of what odds do I speak? Those crafted by Mesrrs Blair and Brown.

They wonder why they were not invited. It was for a few very simple reasons.

Blair and Brown hate this country and their presence at the wedding would have turned the whole thing into a political gimmick for Blair, who loves the spotlight, and Brown who most likely would gone around accusing foreign dignitaries of being bigots. Their deliberate decision to open the floodgates and actively encourage unprecedented and irreversible nation-changing immigration, merely to 'rub the rights' nose in it' is a crime that should see them charged with treason. Their meddling with devolution has fragmented the home nations leading to inequity and resentment, and I would suppose, unfortunately, the eventual break-up of the United Kingdom. Their appalling handling of the economy has led to the worst economic situation in decades. Their obsession with multiculturalism and political correctness have ripped the unity of our once cohesive society and obliterated common sense from 'official' Britain. They took us into a war on a pack of lies, and underfunded our armed forces whilst doing so.

United we stand divided we fall; the monarchy has somehow managed to survive these two highly embarrassing excuses for statesmen. Which is remarkable for they arguable wielded more political power than the Lord Protector Cromwell ever did, and he was the first and only person ever to have instituted a republic on these isles.

Forever a Rebel?

2011-04-24T18:47:00.001+01:00

Coming soon...

St George's Day; who are we?

2011-04-23T11:03:00.003+01:00

This is a long standing issue which evokes a lot of arguments from both sides as to the answer to this question. It seeks to define a sort of line between patriotism and nationalism - where ones gratitude of the nation is flirting with ones disgust for the same. That is if we are to believe the status quo of course.

“Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest," but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.”
- Sydney J. Harris quotes (American Journalist and Author, He wrote a syndicated column, Strictly Personal, from 1944-86. 1917-1986)

I think this definition of the both types of 'pride' strikes the issue on the head.

Today is St. George's day but as is common in the UK you are not allowed to be proud of your culture for fear of insulting other cultures. That said, I would just like to state some recent polls: 72% identified themselves as Christians when asked what they identified themselves as - another 2% identified themselves as Muslim. The majority is thus not allowed to assert themselves for they might insult a Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Jedi, Sikh or why not a Hindu. The problem is though that these groups are also English/British and they live under the English/British flag of government and carry a British passport so why are they raising qualms about English culture? That is precisely it though, most of them do not and are perfectly happy to wave the flag and join in the culture - it is the very vocal minorities however who are given media time and further hyped up and 'sensationalised' by the press which make it seem that the entire grouping has their opinions. In some cases it may be more than just a select minority but in most cases it is not and the government does not have the backbone to stand up to its own people because of religious sensitivities. I have of course not raised the most annoying issue that when minorities seek to celebrate their culture all doors are open regardless of whom they might insult, denying them their celebration is denying them their culture which is awful I completely agree but why is this so vigorously imposed upon Christians (i.e. most people) but not on the minority religions? Another shortcoming of this government, what a surprise.

Further the left is sorely not acknowledging that in other countries not asserting the national culture would be an act of great insult. I am sure you can think of some countries for yourself but just to name a few; USA, China or India are a few examples. Their gratitude for their nation is at times (quite often I should say) rather jingoist or why not say bellicose chauvinism - they often have the problem, as Harris points out, that they cannot comprehend or down right deny the country's deficiencies. But regardless of this, and the elements within, the population which deny the shortcomings are still proud of their nation irrespective of what we might think of them.

This is a typical conversation that often pops up here and there.

1 - "Gosh, I am proud to be English!"
2 - "Why are you proud of something you cannot control?"
1 - "What do you mean?"
2 - "You never chose to be born in England but you are proud to be an Englishmen - it makes no sense to be proud of something which is beyond your control."

The above conversation opens up a very difficult and profound discussion about existentialism. Nr. 2 presumes that Nr. 1 cannot possibly be proud over something, a decision, which is beyond his control - this argument is used a lot, I have heard it myself several times and find it equally ridiculous each time. But here comes the fallacy of Nr. 2's argument he presumes that he knows that we did not have a choice i.e. he is assuming, through his argument, that the choice of birth place is outside of our control. In doing so he assumes knowledge about life before birth. This is precisely as ridiculous as it sounds. How can he possibly know about life before this? He cannot, but he is claiming to do so through his use of argument which makes it a rather dim argument (not to say a rather dim conversationalist).

If one were to get even more drawn into this debate we could for arguments sake say that possibly we did have a choice in choosing our birth place. For example we chose England because in our previous life we led a very poor and monotonous life as a suricate on the steps of Africa, this time we would like to try something more exiting e.g. as a human being on the hills of Shropshire. You might say this is a ridiculous line of thought but then I must remind you that Hinduism (including Yoga, Vaishnavism, and Shaivism) is based upon a similar principle: If they lead bad lives as human beings they will be reincarnated as a lesser creature. It is all based on karma which is literally the sum of one's actions. Bad karma means bad reincarnation, if we for example deem lice as bad then it would be quite sad for the person in question to reincarnated as this. Perceptions also have to be taken into account of course. Good and Bad is not a universal scale but is decided upon by the individual. Just because society teaches us that some actions are bad and others good that does not mean that it really is so, there is no empirical evidence to claim that one action is preferable to another based merely upon human emotional response to the actions.

Going back to St. George's day and if we were to give Nr. 2's argument the benefit of the doubt, then we can and should reply with; if we indeed have no choice of our birth place then we should at least be grateful that we had the good fortune to end up in England - whatever means of power, logic, randomness etcetera got us here. New Labour with much help from the Tories, it must be said, have quite successfully wrecked Britain as a standing nation-she is now on her knees-but there are still far worse places out there into which one could have been born, based upon the predisposition that we indeed have no control as to this plight (if one believes in destiny or is agnostic, then it would be mighty rude to the higher powers that be, to be ungrateful of their actions in placing us in England - they could just as well have dumped us in North Korea and then we would really be in the thick of it).

All in all, be proud to be English even if "society" tells you not to, they are wrong. For all the monologues thrown about in the world, in the blogosphere, in the media, in Whitehall and in the street, we have yet to create a dialogue on this issue. This is England and we are quite adverse to the kind of patriotism advocated by America but we do not like the non-patriotism as exhibited by Finland, somewhere in between lies England but until everyone stops talking and starts listening we wont rediscover 'our' brand of patriotism.

Immigration and the cap

2011-04-15T20:47:00.005+01:00

Seeing as we are 'allowed' to talk about immigration again, and the cat is out of the bag and all that, is it not odd that politicians are still lying to us?

The figure, not quoted by Mr Cameron, which tells you more about what is really happening, is the annual one for non-EU arrivals. For a long time now, that has been in the order of 300,000 a year. Add to it the illegals – 155,000 of whom, says Mr Cameron, were found to have been illegally claiming benefits. Then add EU citizens, who all have an absolute right to come here and use our public services. In sum, you have a society which, in large areas, would have been unrecognisable only 20 years ago. When Mr Blair declared, with apparent absurdity, in 1997, that Britain was a “young country”, perhaps he meant that he intended it to be something it had never been before. If so, he succeeded.

The upside is, I suppose, that voters appear to be privy to this state of affairs as well. None of the comments on this topic believe Cameron will do anything substantial (why are dependents of students given visas?) and if they do, they point out that it is far too late.

Only time will tell if they are right.

Oxymoron

2011-04-13T10:38:00.000+01:00

'Socialist Worker' ...

Surely an oxymoron if there ever was one?

Thick as a Brick and still getting a degree. Welcome to the UK.

2011-04-09T00:08:00.008+01:00

How long before someone musters the balls to say what everyone is thinking; Not everyone is clever enough to go to university. The sooner they realise this the more money they can save by stopping people studying mickey mouse degrees. And instead stick them in real vocational courses which will actually benefit them and their intellect. Oh yes I did go there; lo and behold, only a very tiny cohort of the population are clever enough to study STEM subjects. The rest are not. Do you know why? Because they are hard, very hard; it is not a coincidence that every great scientist and inventor hitherto had an intellect the size of Belgium. It is not a coincidence that all our literary works and historical accounts are written by people with an almost bizarre flare for language. History, Maths, Physics, Classics or what have you require commitment. Scholarship for the masses? Pull the other leg. How many people between 20-25 years of age, do you think are prepared to spend four years of their lives writing a thesis? Very few because it is very hard, very arduous, strenuous, nerve wrecking, stressful, harmful, damaging to your health. The only reward you get is a semi-pamphlet with your name on it written in golden letters, and a title - a title which only a handful of people in the world know enough about to provide informed judgement. That is the reward for scholarship.

But hey what do I know, why train scientists, engineers, writers, historians, musicians and doctors when it is clearly holistic therapists and puppeteers that Britain needs. We all know that they make enough cash to keep the welfare state going...

Update:

Having received two very incisive comments I thought I would share my experience of applying for bank internships this summer. Now before we go there I would just like to say that I am forced to apply to banks because my academic guideline (my tutor) is a complete moron. And for various reasons, best left undisclosed, I could not apply to what I really wanted to this summer. But such is life.

Banks have little time or regard for the politically correct liberal BS system that today is education in the UK. They do not believe in "soft" degrees such as Business Studies or Management. If you want to get a job with a top bank they will laugh at you if you present that. No, 9 out of 10 times the applicant has a degree in either Economics, Computer Science, Maths, Engineering, Physics or some combination or derivative of these. Naturally the banks are obliged to say that they do consider 'other' subjects as well. But this is largely smoke and mirrors. Very few if any interns have done any other degree that those stated above.

But it gets better.

On initial screening they effectively weed out all but people who are from 'target universities' - now there remains some uncertainty which these actually are. It is without doubt Oxbridge, LSE, Imperial and UCL. But then internet forums on this issue tend do disagree whether banks view Warwick and Durham as target universities as well. Safe to say only a very small number of people from non-target universities get through the initial screening process. Naturally some do, and good on them for theirs is an uphill struggle.

Then they move on to grades.

They are very blunt in this regard; top grades or nothing. They have a section where you can write about your special circumstances should your grades not be up to scratch [some banks - not all]. They look at your extra curricular, your societies, your charity support - they even have a special section for this, i.e. it is assumed that you do charity work. Naturally a lot of applicant make this section up for most do not do charity work. But it just goes to show what kind of people they expect to recruit.

Then they go on to psychometric testing.

To ensure that the applicant is not just lying on his application and CV (which they will check if you are successful) they make you do tests in maths and logic. These are timed tests. Typically it is a 20 minute test with 23 questions which require a lot of calculation. Rumour has it that the benchmark is quite low because they are so hard. The logic bit can be either reading and context or figure logic. Fun but demanding. Naturally you could get a friend to do this for you but they make you retake these tests at the assessment centre should you be invited.

Then there is a telephone interview.

This is to ensure that you are not Mr. BS and actually know a thing or two about banking and that you are who you say you are. This is quite easy most of the time, some people manage to fail it which is rather amazing, but most who have got to this stage pass it (so I am led to believe). They tend to ask mostly competency based questions and few technical, mostly because it is usually administered by the HR department of the company. Hence they know of nothing technical.

Then there is an assessment centre if you have got this far.

These tend to start at 0830 in the morning and end late in the afternoon. Where you are subject to two to three interviews by senior management, ranging from competency to technical interviews. Group discussions to test your ability to interact, presentations before managers, more psychometric testing. Also you tend to get lunch which is nice.

Depending if you suck or not they give you an offer. Mind you, they usually invite about 20 people to an assessment centre but only 30% of those get offers. But this differs from bank to bank.

Such is life in the sector which does not care about the government's multicultural targets, its diversity objectives and political correctness. Equality? They laugh at the word. They want the brightest people and will go through any length to get them.

3%

2011-04-02T11:03:00.003+01:00

(Very hard resisting clicking on that link, is it not?)

My Emails with UK Uncut

2011-03-29T11:55:00.006+01:00

Email Nr 1, almost entirely lifted from George Pitcher

Dear UK Uncut,

Further education is hardly worth the Government investing in, if the standard of research behind Saturday’s student demo against spending cuts is anything to go by.

The breakaway group that headed for Piccadilly had evidently chosen their target, or “secret location”, well in advance: the grocers to Her Majesty, Fortnum & Mason. This target presumably represented to you, the inheritors of the finest traditions of direct action everything that was Cameronesque, fat-cat, exploitative and privileged.

To which the only reasonable response is the one that students might most readily recognise: “Duh!”

Fortnums is owned by the Weston family, which probably ranks third behind the Wellcome Foundation and all the Sainsbury trusts added together in the amount of money it gives away – yes, gives away in addition to the tax it pays – to exactly the causes that are close to the heart of UKUncut and the services that it was supposedly marching to maintain.

Now, pay attention at the back, especially the youth that I spotted in the Fortnums atrium holding a sign saying “Share the Wealth” without any apparent sense of irony. The Garfield Weston Foundation owns nearly 80 per cent of Wittington Investments, a company registered in the UK, which is the ultimate holding company of Associated British Foods, Fortnum & Mason and interior stylist Heal’s. Dividends flow upwards to the Foundation, principally from ABF given that retail is having a tough time and Fortnums has just been through a major investment programme, which then distributes grants (a word students may still be familiar with).

Typically, the Foundation distributes about £40 million a year, though in good times much more. A glance at the trustees’ report – I presume UKUncut’s organisers know how to use the internet – would reveal that the Foundation gives grants to schools and universities, as well as to hospitals and housing associations. The Weston Foundation gave £25 million, for instance, to Oxford University last year alone for the development of the Bodleian Library, so I hope any Oxford students who “occupied” Fortnums will honourably refrain out of shame from using that facility for the remainder of their studies, out of respect for the Westons.

There is barely a new college benefactors’ plaque in the country that doesn’t bear the Weston name. So much for “Share the Wealth” (you muppet). And it’s difficult to think of an institution more likely to step in to the gap left by Government funding. The trustees’ in their latest report explicitly say that they have prudently made some reserves because they “have also been mindful of the possibility of requests for urgent funding being made by charities which have had their funding from other sources cut due to the difficult economic conditions”.

So well done, you students. Of all the locations you could have picked, you’ve actually chosen to bite one of the hands that promises to feed you – and one of the most generous hands at that.
Not that these were particularly hungry protesters. Not exactly in the Jarrow tradition. I hear these sons and daughters of our bourgoisie made their way through the food halls to loot the fine wines and Champagne. Clearly close to the the harsh realities of the 21st-century.

Incidentally, I also hear that afternoon tea was served throughout on the fourth floor, with André undisturbed at the piano. Which I suppose means that it really was a thoroughly middle-class riot throughout – while the children played downstairs, their mummies and daddies were properly “kettled” upstairs.

So all I can say is 'thank you' for having comprehensibly pulled off one of the dumbest protests ever, and I must say I do not think I have ever seen such a pathetic spokesperson as was on BBC tonight – she was even more evasive than a real politician and that is saying something. You never even got a flying start, shame really, perhaps next time when you have learnt a thing or two about economics your impact might be more sustainable.

Kind Regards

XXXX XXXX

PS. Again I must just marvel at the sheer incompetence of the whole operation. I do not think I have ever seen anything quite so stupid.

Email Nr 2

Further I just noticed that you have put up a blog post titled 'Why Fortnum & Mason' http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/blog/blog-why-we-sat-in-fortnum—mason

Presumably you did this to screen yourselves from the incompetence you have shown in not doing ANY target research, seeing as the date of the blog is dated the 28th. It would have increased your credibility if you had posted it during the protest rather than after; retrospective defence is rather vacuous (google that word if you do not understand it, and I trust you understand how to use google), particularly since people like me and others have since the protest informed about the actual roots of F&M.

But again, thank you so much for the comedy it's been pleasure, truly.

Kind Regards

XXXX XXXX

UK Uncut Reply (who would have thunk it)

Listen XXXX, it is a little hard to post up blogs during a protest, and after it everyone got arrested and was in jail for over 24 hours. We did it as soon as we could.

We released a press released on the day, and there were also speeches inside F &M which explained our prior research with tax experts.

D

You see UK Uncut is such an organised gathering of intelligentsia (read: rag-tag random gathering of wannabe marxists on benefits with private education) that even its press officers get arrested. It is mighty funny that they did not ask their "experts" how to not get arrested in the first place. This of course being the same experts who told them to attack a charity...

I think I will have to extend them a big fat wet kiss if I ever see them, this really is priceless comedy.

UK Uncut Blog Post

(back to applying to banks.)

Graeme Archer; My Hero x

2011-03-28T22:57:00.000+01:00

We don't visit the West End much, being adopted East Enders; but, just like characters in the Walford soap opera, we do make occasional forays Up West. Get yourself a treat, love, Keith says, tossing me a tenner. Get a cab 'ome. (OK I made that up). On Saturday I began to wonder what curse we were born under, because both occasions on which we've ventured into a W postcode recently have coincided with the descent into central London of several thousand violent hooligans. To make matters worse, other than in prompting me to write this piece, we appear to be cast as icons of the Tory middle-class, either (the first time) picking our way past chanting 'students' in order to buy a new table-lamp from John Lewis, or (Saturday) trying to take a cab to St Martin's Lane for the theatre (Ghost Stories, since you ask, and yes, it's very good). We had to walk from Holborn, thanks to the protestors. And this made me think.

Because, of course, whatever else Keith & I are, we're neither properly middle-class, nor characters of Austen-esque gentility. Neither am I by instinct anti-protest. In the 80s, I went on a spectacularly unsuccessful 'kiss-in' to protest the iniquity of Section 28 (no-one wanted to kiss me, predictably enough, which left the 'demo' somewhat lame). We both turned out to shout our disgust at Gordon Brown's fawning over the Chinese Olympic torch, as it made its shameful procession through our streets. My feelings towards climate-change camp border too strongly towards fondness for most readers of this website, I'd bet. And I have written, here, about my concerns over the leadership of the Metropolitan police. Watching the riots on Saturday, however, as we prepared to make our way into town, my over-riding feeling was gloominess. And something else it took a while to put my finger on.

You see, I read about the Miliband family's property empire, and reflect that our own household is never more than a handful of salary payments from homelessness. I listen to trades union leaders' hysterical speeches about very mild changes to public sector pension schemes, and am reminded that our guaranteed income in old age, other than what the state will give us, is (despite saving more than a quarter of our salaries every month into 'defined contribution' schemes): nothing. I watch BBC journalists breathlessly mouth their horror at the prospect of a small reduction in public sector staffing levels, and remember the thousands of colleagues I've lost to redundancy in the last few years. I wade my way through Polly Toynbee's sanctimonious and hypocritical rages about Tory tax-avoiders, and remember that I'm in that lucky band of people who are taxed at a rate you wouldn't believe (trust me: there is a bigger problem in our tax banding than the 50% rate), and that thanks to the Lib Dems, I can't look forward to this ever being reduced.

And then I saw Ed Miliband's boyish little face on the screen, mouthing platitudes to the crowd, at the same time as real violence started to happen. (Is this is one of life's rules? I wondered: Labour lose an election, so a cohort of the Left starts to vandalise central London, repeatedly?). And I thought about Keith, not just for the obvious reasons (we were going to the theatre to celebrate his birthday, and I could already feel I was going to write this piece, and he hates it when I mention him), but because he's my living, solid link to what Labour in government did to working-class men and women.

Every housing benefit payment that's higher than the mortgage of the people who fund it: the working-class pays for them. Every skilled job whose wage is suppressed by the immigration deliberately engineered by Labour: the working-class pays for them. Every school with more first languages than you can shake a stick at: the working-class pays for them. Every fat-cat council chief executive, every knighthood for services to banking awarded to any spiv who caught Mandelson's eye, every penny on every trillion of the debt interest: the working-class pays for them. Most of Blair's wars too: the working-class certainly pays for them.

And I thought, watching the blaze take hold at Oxford Circus: this is no more real than the play we're going to St Martin's Lane to see this evening. You don't get angry enough to throw a brick at the Ritz because of small reductions in the future growth of public sector spending. You can see it in Miliband's face: he's excited, yes, like any actor receiving the adulation of a multitude, but he's not enraged. He must have to practice really hard to simulate the emotion of anger.

I don't. Not any more, not after Saturday. Ed Miliband, until your party faces up to the squalid way it has treated the working-class; to admit that it has become a cypher for trades union bosses, student activists and various Hampstead millionaires; to wonder just what happened to your historic mission to empower the working man; until you've apologised for all this, then you can burn as many stupid paper horses, you can glue yourself to as many Top Shop windows, you can rant about Eton as much as you like. For nothing. We don't mind paying to watch a horror story in a West End theatre. But we'll never vote to put one into power at Westminster.

Source

Labour loves the TUC, whilst the rest of just wished they got a room

2011-03-26T15:14:00.011Z

David Cameron must be so happy that his opponents are so comprehensibly stupid. Milliband speaks at the TUC rally and Balls has the balls to propose that there is another way even though they planned to HALVE the deficit in this parliament with their proposals. In the meantime of course the violent element of the TUC, the anarchist if you will, are attacking the police and the logical discourse is to connect them with Labour. Labour will of course condemn any form of violence, lefties always do (yet look at any major conflict in the past century and see how many were caused as a direct result of left-wing ideology; and I dare you mention the nazis at your own peril), but the fact remains that they willingly associated themselves with a violent demonstration that had a significant element of destruction embedded within.

Never get involved with trade unions.

My fellow blogger and equally nerdy political geek Dizzy has succinctly wound up the matter.

In the meantime I am going to continue to read my book called 'All you need to know about the city' by Stoakes. All-in-all fuck you, you tax-eating, good for nothing lefty-wankers.

(Just to round-off with some irony; Marx's seminal work was called 'Das Capital' and it spans three volumes).

An addendum, I am going to write this from my perspective as a proper student once more. Most people in my class have got internships this summer with some very large companies and a lot of banks. Some have already landed their first permanent job offers. It would be fair to say, arrogantly of course (but you must surely be used to that by now), that the majority of my class will be net contributors to society via the extortionate amount of tax the government already makes us pay. But let me ask you this; do you think we will stick around forever and wait around for these tax rises to remove every hard-earned penny we have? Do you think I am going to work 80 hours a week in a bank just so that I can see my money being spent on £197bn worth of a British well fare state? The answer is no, I will leave and take my skills with me and so will others, and we wont return until the tax regime is more favourable. Where we get to keep the majority of our earnings. Why the flaming fuck should the government be allowed to take 50% of my money just because it happens to be above some arbitrary threshold, a threshold which they themselves could never aspire to reach because they have studied unproductive subjects like english and history. Do not get me wrong we need writers, historians and artists, but why is it so wrong to start a company and make money from that venture? Why is it wrong to work hard and see your ideas come to fruition? Why is it wrong to be clever and use your talent in a company (or, shock and horror, in a bank!)?

Who is going to fund your socialist shit hole once we are gone?

Daniel Hannan is spot on as well.

US, UK and France go to War* in Libya

2011-03-18T00:08:00.005Z

Here

...would be quite nifty if we had some planes to do with. It is not entirely out of order to suggest that the British defence review must surely, by now, hold the speed record for becoming outdated.

*This is a declaration of war, a nation which does not control its airspace does not control the nation.

EU Referendum Campaigns - which one?

2011-03-15T21:49:00.005Z

Am I the only one who is currently a bit confused by all the EU referendum campaigns which are currently running along side each other? To date I can count;

Now as far as I can understand these three bullet points are all interlinked in some way. But I am not entirely sure how, all I know is that it is very confusing and if they truly hope to consolidate and concentrate support then surely that would be a lot easier with ONE website and not three.

If anyone is in direct relation to the campaign please forward these concerns to them.

Downtime

2011-03-13T11:21:00.002Z

One does sincerely apologise for not gracing the world with his incisive commentary on the day-to-day cock-ups of the people in charge. University is gearing up with several reports due in before revision period starts, and after revision period we all know that exams usually tend to follow. This makes for a potent mix of despair which I can but bow before but will not kneel.

Thank god for our politicians

2011-03-07T00:37:00.001Z

Thank God for this. I am not a smoker and I have always been afraid to go into my local newsagent to buy anything in case I catch a glimpse of a cunningly designed cigarette packet that will compel me to buy one and light up.

Interesting...

2011-03-06T12:39:00.003Z

H/T Guido

Cheating at University

2011-03-05T23:45:00.007Z

I think this is a very interesting article. It is on the subject of academic malevolence one could call it, others call it cheating. It is funny since we have that to an extent as well, but more than people just tend to copy work from friends from the years above.

Apparently they think they wont get caught out but what is more they do not seem to realise whilst their mark may be sky-high once they come to that all-so-important job interview they will be exposed for what they really are; cheaters who have no place in a serious workspace.

Our exams are a different story altogether though. We had one exam just after we arrived back after christmas holidays. It was interesting to say the least. The fellow on my right left after 15 minutes and the chap to the right after about 30 minutes - both laughing. When people opened the test most people let out a yelp of amusement or at least bemusement. Everyone started laughing when the invigilator left the room for five minutes, which he really is not supposed to for then people can cheat and that is exactly what happened in this exam, or at least it was attempted.

What was the source of all this amusement you might one, university exams are normally very serious business particularly at a real university like my own.

It was very simple; people were laughing, I was laughing, because the exam was so hard that no one could do it. Half the room was empty after 45 minutes and it was a two hour exam. Some of us decided to soldier on, to little or no avail most likely. But such was the extent of the exam that some 60 very bright minds, all scientists with straight As at A-level, just could not do what was put before us because it was too hard. It was several magnitudes harder than the previous year. When the invigilator left, conversation broke out amongst students, a serious breach of examination regulations; they could not even help each other that is how hard it was.

What do you do when you realise that you have failed an exam minutes after attempting it? You laugh.

Advice for the EU Referendum campaign

2011-03-03T11:36:00.006Z

It is now becoming increasingly clear even to the people outside of London, that we must leave the EU or we will be consumed into it. Some people like this and some don't I and many others are part of the latter community. However there needs to be a more concerted effort to make people join the campaign for the EU referendum. We have already seen the Daily Express putting on a valiant cape of defiance when it delivered more than 350,000+ pieces of opinions to Nr. 10 saying that we bloody well should have a referendum on the leviathan that now controls our lives more than the local police.

The insurance industry is the latest clique to have been assaulted by the EU preceded by doctors, fishers, nurses, bankers etcetera. What needs to be done by the campaigners is fairly simple. They must, nay need to, capitalise on the sudden outburst of fury that inevitably will strike into the minds of senior management and directors. There is blatant fury within the banking industry as a result of the EU takeover, but they cannot speak out for fear of being seen as 'anti-Europe' the same story goes for every other sector which is being increasingly regulated by the EU and not Parliament and its constituent bodies.

Send out emails to all sectors, mangers, directors and even the workers. Go there and inform them very simply what needs to be done, and why they should lend their support and their funds. I hear the campaign is amassing thousands of new signature every weeks so it is doing well already. Make sure that they know that there is a concerted effort to have a referendum. The government can ignore the people now but once the numbers start piling on and we are reaching figures of millions who want a referendum then it will be hard to ignore the masses. It is obvious that there will be a bust up over Europe sooner or later and the government needs to choose a side fairly soon, and pray that they choose the right one. It will be a nasty day indeed when they stand apart from their own people and stand against them. The latter will not be forgiving to say the least.

My own impression is that many people feel there's nothing they can do about the EU so they'd rather not think about it. They may even resent being reminded about it, because to remind them of the extent to which their country and their lives are now subject to EU rule is to remind them of their own impotence. I would include a fair number of MPs among those people who've simply given up in the face of main party leaderships which are united in their conviction that the British people should not be permitted to govern their own country and their determination to prevent that ever happening.

roamrage

EU hypocricy

2011-03-03T11:32:00.000Z

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39998

Just one month after the U.N. and EU launched a furious campaign against Israel's security fence, culminating in the International Court of Justice ruling that the fence is illegal, the EU announced it's planning to build a separation fence of its own, and invited Israel to participate in the construction.

H/T Mr. North

Defence Cuts and Libya

2011-02-28T19:29:00.012Z

I have looked around everywhere for a post or article on this topic; the SDSR with regards to Libya. It seems that people are avoiding this topic like the plague, perhaps because it is monumentally obvious that if we are going to play any part in military action against Libya then we simply cannot go ahead with certain parts of the SDSR. It simply is not possible, why I will explain in a few minutes. First consider in full, again, the cuts as envisaged in the SDSR courtesy of Wikipedia.

British Army

Challenger 2 tanks will be cut by 40%.
The British Army presence in Germany will end by 2020.
Overall personnel numbers will drop by 7,000 to 95,500.
The number of Challenger 2 tanks will be cut by 40% to an estimated number of just over 200.
The number of AS-90 heavy artillery will be cut by 35%to an estimated 87.

Royal Air Force

The Harrier will be retired in order to maintain the Tornado as the RAF's main strike aircraft until the Typhoon matures. The latter and the F-35 Lightning II will constitute the RAF's fast jet fleet in the future.
Personnel will be reduced by 5,000 to 33,000.
Nimrod MRA4 project, after spending £3.2 billion and the first aircraft being completed, to be scrapped. RAF Kinloss, where the aircraft were to be based, will close.
Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft procurement will go ahead, as will the Airbus A400M. These aircraft, along with the current C-17s, will form the future air transport fleet. The VC10 and TriStars are approaching the end of their service lives and the C-130 fleet will be retired 10 years earlier than planned.
12 Boeing Chinooks will be added to the current fleet, a cut to the original order for 22.
The Harrier GR9 will be withdrawn during 2011.
The RAF's future fast jet fleet will be based on the Typhoon and the F-35 Lightning II. The latter, which will also be flown by the Royal Navy, will be the more capable and cheaper F-35C version. The UK has originally planned to buy the F-35B, a Short Take Off and Vertical Landing aircraft. The F-35C has longer range, greater payload capability and the MOD envisages life cycle costs to be 25% cheaper than the F-35B.
The Sentinel R1 will be retired once it is no longer required to support forces in Afghanistan.

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy flagship aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal, will be decommissioned "almost immediately" rather than in 2014. The Joint Force Harrier aircraft will be retired. Both of these measures will save money for the purchase of the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers.
One of the Albion class landing platform dock ships will be placed at extended readiness.
Either HMS Ocean or HMS Illustrious to be decommissioned, whichever is least capable as a helicopter carrier.This was decided in December 2010, Liam Fox stated "HMS Ocean should be retained to provide our landing platform helicopter capability for the longer term. HMS Illustrious will be withdrawn from service in 2014".
One of the Bay class landing ship dock vessels (later identified as RFA Largs Bay) would be decommissioned.
Replacement of the UK's nuclear deterrent, based on the Vanguard class ballistic missile submarines, will be delayed by four years, deferring £500 million in spending. Changes to the size of the missile tubes will save £250 million.
7 Astute class submarines will be built as previously planned.
The surface fleet of frigates and destroyers will be reduced to nineteen ships; the current thirteen Type 23 frigates, the three active Type 45 destroyers, and the three Type 45 destroyers currently under construction. The remaining Type 22 frigates and Type 42 destroyers are to be disposed of. "As soon as possible after 2020", the Type 23 frigates will be replaced by new Type 26 frigates.
The strength of the RN will be reduced by 5,000 (to a total of about 30,000)

And that is it, few might wonder why we even bother having an armed force when there is no one in it, not our politicians of course they do not wonder any such sensible thoughts.

What is currently being planned to stop Gaddafi going all 15th century on his people, is to impose a no-fly zone. What is this? A no-fly zone is a territory over which aircraft are not permitted to fly. Such zones are usually set up in a military context, somewhat like a demilitarized zone in the sky.

Now the Geography of Libya is somewhat arduous if we are to contemplate using post-SDSR resources to corner Gaddafi. As you will see from the map on the left, Libya is not exactly surrounded by tea-loving cricket monkeys; Tunisia, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Egypt are not our best international allies bluntly put. In the north there is water, a lot of water, so much water in fact that you need a ship. A big ship, something on the scale of an aircraft carrier. Why? Well, the americans have a lot of bases dotted around that region which can accommodate fighters jets of our pedigree, and they also have the tech needed to service them. Moreover the closest ally which uses the Typhoon is Italy, though they might not be over-joyed by the prospect of lending their bases to pesky Brits they would probably relent if leaned upon a bit. But that is a big 'if' and the italians have not been known to favour big expeditionary military missions since about two millennia ago - crossing the Rubicon and all of that. They are more embroiled in their Prime Minister's latest shenanigans. Hence were we to take part in the no-fly zone operation it would almost, without question, be with the help of the Americans. But then one must ask, why should we take part at all when they US Marines boast more fighters jets than our Navy and Airforce combined? Wont we just be in the way of a properly equipped fighting force? Chances are that this would be the case since we have no means of fielding any heavy equipment of our own except for choppers.

We still have a lot of craft which can accommodate choppers, and substantial numbers of them as well; that said a chopper is peanuts compared to a fighter jet and it is like comparing apples and oranges if you are to analyse a no-fly zone whilst only keeping choppers as your option. They are useful for close support but certainly not for patrolling an area four times the size of the UK.

The current UK flag-ship is HMS Albion, a grand lady indeed, but she cannot carry aeroplanes only choppers.

We have sold, scrapped or decommissioned the following Invincible class carriers; HMS Ark Royal and HMS Invincible. What remains is HMS Illustrious due for decommissioning in 2014 after HMS Ocean has undergone extensive refits.

Lets make this abundantly clear to those of you who do not yet realise the significance of an aircraft carrier. It is a floating bit of sovereign space. It is a tiny floating UK which can blow stuff up very quickly should circumstances so require it. Circumstances are not requiring it yet in Libya but if every armed conflict to date is anything to go by, they will. There is a difference between being belligerent and pragmatic and knowing your history and ignoring it. We are terribly good at forgetting our history in the UK and as a result tend to repeat an awful lot of mistakes which could have been avoided if people in command where not being so optimistic about the prospects.

They know that they need Illustrious more than ever, they know that they can halt the sale of HMS Invincible to a Turkish scrapyard and re-install the Rolls-Royce engines at the blink of an eye. But they wont for the simple reason that they will look weak and incompetent for having completed botched the SDSR. If any of them are reading this let me make this very clear; you already look like amateurs for thinking that no aircraft carriers would be needed during an entire decade. It took four months -four months- for your defence review to become obsolete. To save some face, or at the very least, listen to the people in the know, you can reverse some of these decisions. There is waste in the MoD, yes no one denies this, but there is also a time when you have admit and consent that you were wrong. Own up to your shortcomings and move on. These assets are gravely needed for a no-fly zone cannot be established without them, it simply is not possible since no one, down there, likes us enough to lend us their airbases and we would just be in the way of the americans as said.

What is more; the Typhoon cannot fly off aircraft carriers, it is not a carrier jet like the French Mirrage 2000. The Harrier GR9 can, but like everything else useful, it is being scrapped to save money. The Harrier and the Carriers are perhaps our most valuable asset right now, one cannot topple Gaddafi with nuclear submarines nor with Cyber Commands no matter how intriguing the prospect of that might sound.

The Government knows what they have to do in order to remain a significant player in the world, but they wont since they will loose face if they do. We have had so many politicians like that who were afraid to do the right thing, and as a result history only remembers them for their failure to do the right thing. Not for all the good they also did. What will the Coalition be? A Chamberlain or a Churchill?

Update:

Word is catching on...

Since the Libyan crisis began, the Coalition has faced repeated criticism over the decision last year to decommission HMS Ark Royal and the Royal Navy’s Harrier jets, leaving Britain without a functioning aircraft carrier. Dr Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, insisted that such criticism was a “red herring” because the base in Cyprus meant Britain could still operate jets over Libya if required. And would it, pray, still be a "red herring" if this had happened in Zambia instead, where are no conveniently placed RAF stations. I cannot believe that this man is using geography as a defence for scrapping HMS Ark Royal. What an idiot. A five year old could pick holes in that defence.

And for our daily dose of idiotic comments, the Guardian never disappoints when it cannot understand why special forces operations are kept secret and furthermore argues that they should be publicised. Why are lefties so fucking stupid?

Mr. Mercer you EU mong

2011-02-27T13:50:00.000Z

Mr. Mercer,

As an elected representative of the British people, it is your duty to explain to us why our govt. has agreed to replace the British military with an EU Military, without our approval, consultation, or consent.

In particular, I ask the following:

Why did our govt. sign this EU-SOFA agreement (UK sig. on page 10), which merges the militaries of European nations into an EU Military?

Link: EU-SOFA agreement, signed by UK

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2003:321:0006:0016:EN:PDF

Why did our govt. agree to ATHENA, an EU mechanism to administer the 'common costs' of military operations on behalf of 'Europe' ?

Link: ATHENA

http://www.consilium.europa.eu/showPage.aspx?id=746〈=EN

Why did our govt agree to ERASMUS MILITARE, an EU mechanism to create a common defence culture via exchange of young military officers within training colleges around the EU ?

And why did our govt agree to the EUROPEAN SECURITY and DEFENCE COLLEGE to train military personnel from EU member states for a mission defined as 'To support a Common Security and Defence Policy and to promote a common European security culture.' ?

MP Mercer, this is not only a betrayal, it's a pre-meditated, wilful a betrayal by stealth.

I suspect that there will soon come a day where the British people remind those they perceive as traitors that betrayals of this magnitude have a way of consuming, in very unsavoury ways, those who perpetrate them.

Defence Policy; Coalition vs. UKIP

2011-02-24T23:00:00.018Z

It must be a bitter pill to swallow for the coalition when "a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists" have a more realistic and grown-up defence policy than the government. I sincerely agree with Labour and Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary when he added his voice to those calling for the SDSR to be reopened. He said it already looked "out of date" and that many of the assumptions about it had been "shaken over the past month". True, Labour is the majority party responsible for this shambolic state of affairs in the MoD but it was the coalition's choice to slash %7.5 of the annual defence budget, and they decided to do so in one of the most mysterious ways yet known to man; e.g. rip apart newly constructed surveillance aircraft with CAT diggers... WTF? What did the Nimrods ever do to Dr. Fox to deserve such an inglorious end?

Hence I reproduce here the full result, thus far, of the Coalition's approach to defence and if you scroll down a bit further you will see that of UKIP. I know which party I would like in power if my country went to war.

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)
Sacking 25% of RAF trainee pilots
Reducing size of army to an estimated 80,000 troops, after the Afghanistan campaign

And from UKIP's website is the following:

UKIP promises:

To defend our national interests, maintain the NATO alliance, support our traditional partners. We want to disentangle our forces from the EU and moves towards EU armed forces. UKIP will keep our independence by retaining – always – ultimate command and control over our national forces.

To stop trying to buy defence on the cheap UKIP will spend an extra 1% GDP per year on defence – an increase of 40% on current budgets ( a £14.76 billion increase ). UKIP believes in establishing a defence budget which will properly sustain Britain’s defence commitments. To keep defence costs down by smarter defence procurement, and with more involvement of British industry wherever possible.

To increase the Army to at least 125,000 personnel (trained requirement) in order to enable it to cope with its existing deployment and roles. To double the Territorial Army in size from 37,000 to 75,000 soldiers.

To restore the Navy to its 2001 strength, with 3 new aircraft carriers (one extra), 4 assault ships, 30 destroyers and frigates, 12 Fleet Submarines, 25 coastal vessels and 50 Merlin helicopters, with around 7,000 extra personnel to 42,000 (2003–41,550). UKIP would guarantee the futures of naval ports Plymouth and Portsmouth and base ships permanently in Rosyth and so return it to a proper naval port status.

To increase the Air Force’s capabilities by enlarging the tanker fleet, modernising the transport fleet, buying more helicopters and 50 extra JSF aircraft, and increasing RAF personnel to 50,000.

To restore many traditional regiments, such as the Black Watch and Staffords, subsumed as battalions of EU-inspired ‘super-regional’ regiments such as the Royal Welsh, Royal Mercian and Royal Regiment of Scotland, in order to serve in EU battlegroups.

To renew the Covenant between the Country and those who are asked to risk their lives on its behalf: through better pay, generous compensation for injury, restoration of Crown immunity, private medical and dental care, reinstatement of military hospitals, decent accommodation, an offence of treason for those UK citizens who seriously attack serving personnel, and above all, respect and support. We will also introduce a National Service Medal to be awarded to all servicemen and women to thank those who have seen combat, and those who have not, in their service of their country.

To reappraise our operations in Afghanistan to a single clear and achievable mission or seek to negotiate a withdrawal with our NATO partners.

To maintain Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent with existing Trident submarines, and then replace them with four British-built US missile armed submarines.

To retain and increase Army and Territorial Army personnel through better pay, free medical and dental care for them and their families, retention ‘warrants’, school recruitment and other incentives.

To introduce a National Defence Medal to recognise ‘Forgotten Heroes’.

One can promise a lot when in opposition, but their mettle can surely not be worse than the Coalition's.

What is all of this born out of? Our pathetic excuse for assisting British nationals in Libya. Utter humiliation. What is becoming more apparent though is that there are no military assets to send out there because it would appear that we have scrapped everything even remotely useful. Word is doing the rounds that a no-fly zone should be imposed on Libya but of course that would necessitate an aircraft carrier as there is no way a country out there would play friendly host to a squadron of British fighter jets. We do not have any aircraft carriers anymore. The coalition in their infinite wisdom scrapped them. You can see whence the argument travels from here.

In essence for every year you travel back in time the probability that we could have managed this shit storm of a situation, professionally and authoritatively, increases exponentially. In 1950 the Royal Navy would have had an entire carrier group out there by now, and in 1980 at least one Invincible class carrier would have watched the Libyans with fiery eyes, Harriers at the ready and Nimrods on the go (though remember 'could' does not imply 'would' since there is geopolitics to take into consideration as well). There would be no beating about the bush, no incompetence, people who risked other people's lives would have been sacked quicker that you can say 'BBC'.

But what is really, truly, amazing is that the news channels are focusing solely on the hardships of a few Brits who are stranded in the back and beyond. I sympathise with them of course but in the background people are being slaughtered for what they believe in. Poor little Brits cannot get out, boho, whereas the Libyan people are having their own armed forces used upon them, mercenaries brought in to make them toe the line, air-to-surface missiles used on a crowds of people, humans, like you and me, non-combatans, non-lethal, non-hostile, or at least not hostile enough to ever warrant the use of laser guided precision weapons, normally employed to neutralise tanks.

No, who cares about that? Lets focus on the gallant HMS Cumberland which has just "rescued" stranded nationals in the most pathetic of manners. To top it off, she is being decommissioned after this final operation. What if this had happened 6 months from now?

Finally do you know what the really tragic thing is? Somewhere someone down the line will have to rebuild all this capacity since this simply wont fly. All of this scrapping is thus pointless and wont save any money in the long term since it will just need to be rebuilt anyway.

Excellent

2011-02-21T12:59:00.003Z

Think Defence

Labour, EU and the Independent - what the flunk?

2011-02-19T12:59:00.001Z

Yeah I am as confused as you are.

Celebrity Support?

2011-02-18T08:48:00.007Z

In my mind there seems to be a logical fallacy somewhere in announcing that you have celebrity support. The AV campaign has committed actors Helena Bonham Carter, Colin Firth and Stephen Fry. And surely others. Sea Shepard, a whaling conservation society, counts among its advisers Pierce Brosnan and Sean Penn.

What the fuck?

What on earth does Pierce Brosnan know about bloody whales to make him qualified to be an 'advisor' to a wildlife conservationist? Is he a marine biologist, is he a scientist, does he attack Japanese whaling ships in his free time? No, he is James Bond and that is it.

Colin Firth backs the AV 'yes' side presumably because he falls for every populist political ploy that the system wants him to back (see his previous support for the LibDems quickly retracted whence they backed the tuition fee rise). But lets assume not. Lets ask this; is he a constitutional historian, does he have a degree in international relations, has he done a dissertation on the merits of AV alongside FPTP? No, he is George VI and over and above that his support for either side should make little or no difference.

Do you know who I count amongst my advisers when I write my scientific reports on the most abstract of concepts? Babar, Lady and the Tramp, Paddington, Doctor Who (obviously), Luke Skywalker (his knowledge of particle physics dynamics is second to none), Darth Vader (Luke's arch nemesis, yes, but give them a cup of tea and Darth will tell you everything there is to know on sub-molecular fission interactions) and how could I forget; the gummy bears - savvier engineers you will not find, their approach to elasticity and aerodynamic viscosity problems would make any thermodynamics professor blush.

Bang on, bang on...

2011-02-14T16:25:00.005Z

Courtesy of the European Commissions' Eurobarometer. Knowing the EU I can guarantee you that even the above results have been "updated".

Ruled by Retards

2011-02-14T00:10:00.007Z

We truly are ruled by incompetent fucking retards. Not even Labour were this stupid. This particularly pisses me off, since a fair few of my friends were intending to go down this route. Bloody fucking idiots that is all I can say, the party of the armed forces my fucking arse. This is their record so far, try convince anyone to vote for them come the next election. UKIP are going to have a field day.

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)
Sacking 25% of RAF trainee pilots

A conservative is someone who believes in reform. But not now. Just slash and slash and slash until the blood is flowing, and then the wolves will come... I am all for cutting public spending but not at the cost of national security.

Military Procurement; US-style vs. EU-style

2011-02-11T23:27:00.002Z

This is of course not a commanding example and more sample data is need to draw conclusions, but it is fair to say that when dealing with the US you get more of your stuff in time, on budget and it does what is says on the tin. Again I know that this does not apply to everything (see JSF e.g.) but compared to cooperation projects with other European nations (to foster some spurious belief in a future EU armed forces, and supposedly to reduce costs), the Americans drift across the pond like white feathers whereas the European partners are more like bowling balls (which sink).

Boeing has announced that it has successfully completed -- ahead of schedule -- its industrial participation (IP) programs for the first five C-17 Globemaster III aircraft operated by the Royal Air Force (RAF).

Lets compare this with

According to a February report to the French Senate, the A400M is €5 billion over budget, 3 to 4 years behind schedule, and 12 tons overweight; aerospace experts estimate it is also costing Airbus between €1 billion and €1.5 billion a year.

Not exactly the fiat of business integrity.

British Politicians, the small print and the EU

2011-02-11T13:29:00.002Z

There is no point in me writing a post on this myself, Mary Riddell has done a fine job of that already.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, rhubarb, rhubarb, order in the House, 'physically ill' and the rest of it. All I can say to the Commons over this votes for prisoners dispute is: just shut up and pull the trigger and get out of the Council of Europe. Or admit you are too timid to pull the trigger, so shut up anyway and submit in the manner that suits men who are cowards.

This noise about how Britain may now stand against to the council's European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is at best naive and in most cases (yes, you, David Cameron) is synthetic. What Cameron has done on this one is pretend this is the crucial line he won't cross. Meanwhile, very much more quietly and apparently without a moment of squeamishness (odd that, how selective the prime minister's stomach is on parliamentary sovereignty), his Government hands over more and more power to the European Union.

What he has done by stirring up this prisoners' votes business is simply give the euro-anxious Tories a different kind of 'European' bone on which to chew. Yet this issue is not the meat. The ECHR and its decisions are not the things most endangering Britain's sovereignty now.

Still, if MPs are really so determined to stop this so-called 'encroachment' by Strasbourg, maybe a technical note first. Britain freely (and foolishly) agreed long ago to give the court at Strasbourg all the powers that the ECHR has since been using. This so-called 'court' at has never invaded Britain -- the supine British opened the gates to all these European 'justices' and their powers to decide Britain's laws.

The angry cries, even among my colleagues, that there has been 'remorseless undermining' of Britain's parliament and courts implies that the ECHR has been tunnelling away under the stone walls of Britain, rather in the manner of medieval seige warfare. It hasn't. The ECHR has done only and exactly what decades of euro-supine British politicians have allowed it to do. The drawbridge has been down all along, with 'We are all Europeans now' written on cloth-of-gold and slung from the battlements.

All parliament has to do if it really does want to stop the powers of this 'court' is just vote to pull out of the Council of Europe, ECHR and all. Then this absurdity of votes for prisoners, and every other ECHR so-called 'human rights' absurdity, goes away; or at least -- and this is what Cameron is hiding in this debate -- until Brussels reminds the United Kingdom that by signing up to Lisbon Treaty and the rest, powers across the Channel can go on imposing these 'human rights' on Britain whether the UK tries to derogate from the ECHR decisions or leaves the Council of Europe altogether.

Cameron, being so very busy having a public relations-designed 'physcal illness' over the issue, won't admit that the problem with exactly this kind of control by foreign powers over Britain's legislation will continue as long as Britain stays in the EU: even if Britain now refuses votes for prisoners -- and it won't; in the end, some man caught with 10,000 child porn images on his laptop will have the liberty to cancel out your vote -- ultimately the EU will have ways of getting the same decision reached in the European Court of Justice (the EU 'court,' this one in Luxembourg with the power to enforce EU law in member states). All that will be necessary is for some other ex-con lowlife to bring another case, this time in Luxembourg not Strasbourg.

The Lisbon Treaty, among many other poisonous things, gave the EU 'legal personality' for the first time. That means it can sign international agreements, not as an agent for a group of 27 sovereign states, but as a state in its own right. And as this new country called Europe, it is going to join the Council of Europe. It will be a member just as the United Kingdom is now.

What that means is that Britain, even if it pulls out of the Council of Europe, will still be bound to the damned thing as a part of the EU: remember, Lisbon made us all 'citizens of the EU' now. If you are a native of England, Scotland Wales or Ireland, your nationality is now 'European' whether you want it or not. The treaty says so, and the treaty, thanks to the refusal by Cameron and William Hague to fight it, is law.

Treaties and other international agreements now signed by the EU will be directly binding on the UK and have primacy over all UK laws and the British constitution. And, no, Britain does not have a veto over most of the things the EU might sign treaties on.

Slightly delicious note: I gather the EU's signing for the membership has been held up because the EU is demanding that decisions of the ECHR cannot over-rule the decisions of the ECJ. In other words, Brussels is demanding that its own court have supremacy over the ECHR, something Britain has surrendered for its own Supreme Court.

So there could be turf conflicts between the euro-courts. As Open Europe notes in its briefing this week on the votes for prisoners dispute, the EU has its own catalogue of justiciable rights -- '' 'the so-called Charter of Fundamental Rights, enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty. The Charter allows citizens to contest rights set down in EU law at the European Court of Justice, and, in future, possibly also the ECHR (when the EU accedes to it).'

This will make it 'increasingly difficult for the UK to negotiate a carve-out from European human rights legislation.'

As for the detail of this particular case of prisoners' votes, 'Withdrawal from the ECHR would allow the UK to ignore ECHR rulings on prisoners votes when it come to general elections. However, as voting rights in European Parliament and local elections are covered by EU law as well as national law, their application in the UK could in future be challenged at the ECHR or the ECJ.'

Oh, and as for the Cameron fudge about limiting the vote to prisoners serving four years or less, the ECHR has already struck down that notion in a similar case, Scoppola v Italy. It decided that the prisoner's rights were violated because Italian law barred him from voting on the basis of his sentence. So they will knock down Cameron's four years, too, and I'd suspect he knows it.

Which is why the noise in the Commons over this is just noise. Either parliament is sovereign or it's not, and until the MPs vote to take Britain out of the EU, it's not: the 'legal personality' called the 'European Union' is sovereign.

So the MPs might as well go home; or go around to the 'Scrubs for a bit of canvassing.

...And back to me. Peter Oborne has this funny statement on his blog

But it just isn’t going to happen. Even if he launched on this kamikaze mission, he wouldn’t complete it. Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, has already advised Downing Street that banning votes for prisoners is illegal. I guess he would resign, along with Ken Clarke. I am told that most of the supreme court judges would follow Clarke out of the door, launching Britain into a full-scale constitutional crisis. Not only that, Nick Clegg, who has been strangely silent on all this, would walk out of the Coalition.

Who cares if Dominic Grieve, Ken Clarke and the Supreme Court judges walk out? They are doing so on their principles not ours and they are supposed to represent us and our parliament. It is not a constitutional crisis when the people that walk out have no support form the electorate anyway. If they had the support of voters and truly trumpeted the vox populi, the story would be different. Hence I cannot see where this "constitutional crisis" would be coming from, simply because no one would care and a few would cheer.

Privatise universities, or they will do it themselves

2011-02-08T09:01:00.003Z

This kind of bullshit social engineering is what will lead to widespread privatisation of Britain's top universities.

Thank god this is already in the pipeline for most of the ones still worthy of calling themselves universities.

Cambridge

LSE

Imperial College

To have the cheek to even mention the word "fair" and HE in the same sentence, from minsters who have almost exclusively only ever attended private schools and Oxbridge, is quite frankly beyond belief. What fucking hypocrisy.

Some free advice

2011-02-06T23:41:00.008Z

Given that the probability that anyone with any form of influence will actually read this blog, is fairly slim. I am fairly comfortable posting my personal advice here for the benefit of politicians who think they know how the real world works.

What has been bothering me as of late is that the government is not able to put across what they really want to do. I do not really care much for their policies (the coalition's) since a) the Liberal Democrats had a hand in writing them, and I despise them as a political entity, b) the Conservative party does not seem to know what it is conserving anymore and might as well re-name itself to something more appropriate akin to the centre left/right policies it now subscribes to.

Me; I am very conservative and never went through the socialist stage which most youngsters seem destined to pass through, as a right of passage, before reaching maturity and embracing a pragmatic and grown-up outlook on the world (and realise that you cannot simply dish-out other people's hard earned money on your bullshit socialist utopia). As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who just got arrested. I have never been arrested nor mugged, when I have, I shall update you on my political credence.

But back to the main point behind this post. If you cannot communicate your vision then you will be defined by your enemies. It is a very simple concept. But it seems as if ministers are currently just trying to leave something, anything, just for the sake of changing society, but not saying why they want to change it. Why on earth sell off the forests for example? Who ever asked for that? It is not as if logging is big business in the UK (no it really is not so don't go posting some statistics saying that it is for then I will retort with a statistic from Sweden or Finland, which will dwarf any lumber figure put forth by any of my potential enemies).

It is fairly simple to get past this; formulate what the hell is wrong with the current system be it the armed forces or the NHS. And really hit home why it needs to change. Be a coward and ignore the EU at your own peril, there is still a lot of domestic policy (the EU is domestic policy now as well) which is still quite frankly shit. Noticed lately that no NHS doctors wear white coats? But in every other country in the world with an advanced medical service this is the case. Do some googling on that and you will see for what retard reason those were dropped and subsequently leading to various outbreaks of dangerous viruses. This is a minor issue though; there is a lot more which needs to be changed before the doctors get their coats back. Question is will ministers listen to the people or will they peddle on into oblivion and certain electoral defeat, lest they tell everyone what they are trying to achieve?

Melanchtron takes tone

2011-02-03T22:21:00.001Z

So let’s see. The government grants a free vote on votes for prisoners (no choice, really). The measure goes down 500 votes against, 80 for. We then have five thousand prisoners complain that their human rights have been violated, and they sue for compensation. The courts rule in their favour at – what shall we say? - £10,000 each including costs? So that’s £50m.

The government then has to decide whether to pay. But in Parliament MPs are already putting down motions forbidding the government from paying any such compensation. The current motion may not get any air time, but someone will soon work out how to deliver such a motion properly, and it will surely pass with a huge majority, since, when families are struggling to pay increased taxes and with their benefits being cut, who is seriously going to vote in favour of paying out tens of millions in pounds to prisoners? So then the courts instruct the government to pay compensation, and Parliament forbids it.

A constitutional crisis, clearly.

Is there a way out? Well, the Council of Europe has already condemned the government for taking more than five years to comply with the 2005 judgement involving John Hirst, giving the government six months to comply. So we can’t just wait and hope it goes away. The British judges will be itching to rule against the government anyway. Surely the only ways forward are to comply or to change Britain’s relationship to the European Court of Human Rights and to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Suppose we could get that latter option past Nick Clegg. We’d then have to get it past the European Council. But complying with the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights is an obligation of the Lisbon Treaty for membership of the Council of Europe, and hence of the EU. I suppose we could just not comply and dare the Council of Europe to kick us out – but then how would we prevent the UK judges from ruling government officials guilty of malfeasance for failing to comply with obligations under a ratified Treaty? The only way to avoid that would appear to renegotiate the Treaty. But could we get that past Nick Clegg?

In the grand scheme of Democracy

2011-01-23T23:58:00.005Z

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

2011-01-23T21:24:00.005Z

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

2011-01-23T17:05:00.005Z

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

2011-01-20T22:35:00.003Z

...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

2011-01-20T11:48:00.004Z

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

2011-01-19T20:33:00.009Z

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

2011-01-19T14:09:00.003Z

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

2011-01-18T13:43:00.003Z

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...

2011-01-17T22:24:00.007Z

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

2011-01-15T16:47:00.008Z

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...

2011-01-14T00:06:00.005Z

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

2011-01-13T14:46:00.000Z

...and Marry Riddell should implode.

Spot On

2011-01-13T12:08:00.002Z

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

2011-01-11T22:34:00.004Z

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

2011-01-11T00:47:00.005Z

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

2011-01-10T22:08:00.005Z

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

2011-01-10T09:01:00.003Z

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

2011-01-08T11:15:00.005Z

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

2011-01-03T22:45:00.002Z

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.

100,000 voices

2010-12-30T13:38:00.005Z

Yours truly does apologise for his unseemly long absences from this blog. University is taking its toll particularly since this blogger is attending a real university and doing a real course (which his arrogance never falters to mention). Exams are due after Christmas holidays so this post in itself is an outlier. But nonetheless things need to be said and since our pointless MSM continues to be just that, we have to say it ourselves, we the people.

100,000 voices will be required to get motions debated in parliament. A lot of people do not like this, one of my favourite bloggers Mr. North at EU Referendum does not like it either. Yet one of my favourite politicians Mr. Hannan likes it so it would appear we are having a good old bout of difference of opinion. I like it not because I am naive enough to think that it will actually improve democracy in this country but because it is a very useful tool for politicians to shot themselves in the foot with. And since our ruling class is monumentally stupid as it is, you can be quite sure that given the opportunity to shot themselves in their feet; they will.

Politicians nowadays despise the electorate, our current ruling class is a testament to this fact. No one voted for the coalition yet the coalition now votes for us. That is not democracy and certainly not representative democracy where they are supposed to represent us, instead they represent themselves since under the aegis of 'coalition' they threw out their election manifestos, wrote a new one and forced it onto the people under the guise of 'compromise'. We were stupid enough, as always, to swallow that, line, hook and sinker.

Thankfully the public will always outshine private politicians. We have the benefit of 60 million minds and they only have 646 of our kind, not even our best kind, a rather mediocre staple they come from. With few scholars, officers and entrepreneurs. They are by and large sheep and followers, not leaders. Hence it is not a surprise at all that they now think this gimmick of a measure is going to help shore up their popularity (read 'the LibDems popularity').

What will happen is this: we will suggest loads of things we want debated and changed by our "sovereign" parliament. We will submit the HRA for expulsion from the legislature, we will demand that immigration is significantly reduced, we will demand a referendum on the EU, we will enforce very convincingly our commitment to the Armed Forces, we will demand the termination of the Human Rights Commission and we will most likely demand that a number of services such rail traffic and postal services are returned to the public sector. And many others.

They will of course ignore every single one of our requests, when we come, cap in hand, and beg that our masters listen to us.

But what they do not seem to have factored into this ploy is that there will be a lot of these 'citizen's initiatives' - because we, as a whole, despise our politicians and what they have done to this country. When the hoi polloi start to realise that their vox populi is being ignored en masse, even they will realise that their politicians are not serving their best interests.

Hence it will follow; motion after motion will be rejected because it is truly what the people want, people's disillusionment with the ruling class will only grow and grow, the ruling class will become more and more aware of their disillusionment until they one day feel compelled to act on one of the requests.

Alas, this act is a pointless play to the galleries for is should not be needed, politicians should by definition hold the executive to account. They should by definition have balls and a firm spine. But what this act will do is to force the public balls and spine onto our politicians, and there is not a single thing they can do about it.

Unfortunately we are a nation which is going nowhere.

Very unfair

2010-12-14T17:41:00.001Z

You will find no one who is more against the current "student" protestors, but introducing water cannons is cheating in my opinion.

The police

2010-12-11T22:13:00.002Z

The police would do well to remember than when justice is not brought to bear, they are not serving the interests of the public under whose aegis and custodian they serve. When the public feel that the full force of the law is not brought down upon those onto which it was designed, they will take matters into their own hands, to make absolutely sure that vengeance does strike down upon those who pray on the weak.

My fellow "students"

2010-12-10T00:41:00.001Z

They have done it again. This is nothing but a massive stroke of luck for the Coalition. All these scenes of pathetic vandalism and attacks on the police are music to their ears. Yet again the mindless militant left comes to the rescue. The vast majority of voters will not look at the policies in detail, the ludicrous situation where the English are shafted once again. They will just see the lefty muppets on the telly and support the Government. Cameron will be laughing all the way home.

Of spies, students and universities

2010-12-07T08:10:00.014Z

The newly announced spy in the House of Commons is most certainly not alone, she is joined by some 1,000 other pass-holders, who are not British citizens, who also are free to roam the halls of our "sovereign parliament" (I hate when they say that, because anyone who ever does instantly displays that he is an academic cock). British security at its finest would you not know.

Now our little spy studied at the 'University of Bradford' that bastion of academic starlight founded in our year of the lord 1966. I happen to know a fair bit about that university, not because I have studied there (roll on academic arrogance and elitism), no because one of my friends has. My friend is very bright. So bright in fact that he got royally ticked of with Bradford and applied to our current university because, lo and behold, Bradford was shit. As it turns out his equivalent course at our university covered the same and more material than they do in one year at Bradford, in three months in London.

Dare I say it? If we introduced a more rigorous academic framework would we be able to weed out all the phonies who seek only to abuse the system? Perhaps that is to autocratic for the liberal-left and socialist-workers-party-supporting people? Nay, I strongly maintain that university is but for the brightest and that only a small proportion of the population should be able to go, as to help the rest of the people who were not served with brilliance at birth. Granted, this would probably result in my not being able to go either (I am most certainly not clever), but that is a small price to pay for a functional and proper higher education system, which incorporates governance of people actually coming here to study under the right premises. This would thus exclude potential russian spies, it would exclude the bogus students from all over the world who come to the UK to study english, it would include the brightest foreign students who should be encouraged to come here and study and funded to that end as well.

Think how productive a craftsman really can be, some of them manage to turn out absolute works of art be it chimneys or glassworks. Think instead how productive a craftsman with a real degree could be - call him an entrepreneur if you will, his economic prowess would be relatively endless seen from the Treasury compared to the current lock, stock and barrel, who are apparently going to drag us all out of recession with their brilliance.

Certainly, one might ask, what cannot 30,000 media-studies graduates do?

There are now roughly 2 million British students at UK universities, and some 0.5 million foreign students including EU students. This is why there is no money left to fund the whole damn higher education system; there are too many fucking students and most of them are not doing anything remotely productive.

Why do we always do it? Why do we always fiddle with the system? We KNOW what the successful system is, we used to have it here before we gave a few dozen politicians the chance to play God with our kids futures. Remember the following:

Posh Independent
Grammar
Comprehensive

Technical College
Polytechnic
University

Put bluntly, the brightest kids went to Eton, smart kids went to Grammar and the mongs went to the Comp.

Brainboxes went to University, technically good kids went to tech and normal kids went to Poly. It worked.

Industry and commerce knew exactly where to find the people it needed and we flourished (and if you think that just because the government has decided that everyone should go to university that means the same for industry, you are utterly wrong. Basically it works like this now; some companies recruit people solely from the G5* universities and some exclusively from the Russell Group - they are blissfully aware that most other universities produce shit graduates because you cannot artificially make the population clever). We made things. Ships, cars, aircraft. We produced scientists, engineers, creatives and entrepreneurs. The rebels could study art and many of them did exceptionally well at it. We ruled the world in fashion, music, photography, film making and art.

IT WORKED.

The Germans have an excellent education system because Politicians can't get their hands on it. It is based on three types of school.

The Gymnasium is designed to prepare pupils for university education and finishes with the final examination, Abitur, after grade 12 or 13.
The Realschule has a broader range of emphasis for intermediate pupils and finishes with the final examination, Mittlere Reife, after grade 10
The Hauptschule prepares pupils for vocational education and finishes with the final examination, Hauptschulabschluss, after grade 9 or 10

See that? And what does Germany produce? Cars, ships, power stations, railways, aircraft, infrastructure. No fucking about in Germany. If you're thick, no WAY are you going to University to study to become a Nail Technician. You'll do an apprenticeship at 17 that will pay pretty much bugger all and then you'll get a job that will keep you and your family fed for life. We used to do the same here until the Socialists decided that was not the way to a progressive future.

And all because Germany has the courage to say to it's citizens

You're smart, you're average and you're thick. Don't worry, we have something for all of you.

And most of all, they keep their education system away from the clutches of Politicians. Their kids are far too important for a few dozen idiots to ruin. It's time we learned to be honest with our population again. We OWE it to them.

Whilst we import German cars, kitchens and machines because they are so fucking excellent, I can see no better argument for a return to sanity in our education system. Who knows, in 30 years, the Germans might be buying our cars whilst they push bits of imaginary paper around a banking system for a living.

* The G5 group of universities consist of: University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, LSE, UCL and Imperial College.

Quote of the day

2010-12-03T16:50:00.001Z

On similarly aligned bloggers there is Ana, she is good with words:

I love tradition, I love monarchy, I love the ancient folk ways of this country, I love its eccentricity and its differences; I love to hunt on winter mornings and punt on spring days. I dislike reform for the sake of reform, government for the sake of government. If you think I cannot be a libertarian and a conservative you are very much mistaken. A patriot is a person who loves the nation, not the state. And there is a huge difference.

Where is the PC brigade I wonder?

Global Warming Apology?

2010-12-02T10:05:00.003Z

I suppose it is too much to ask for an apology from the crazy warmists?

Ours is not a 'House of Commons' - commoners have common sense from whence the parlance is derived. Ours is a House of Fools for they do not represent the people and have not represented the people for a few decades now. Whilst the Union is craving for some proper leadership in tune with the fiddles of the people, we are given nothing but pathetic puppets who would not be able to tell the difference between a spine and a crime, where they forced to do so.

Remarkably they seem to harbour under the illusion that the current status quo will continue.

Third Time Student Protests

2010-11-30T22:03:00.004Z

My parents both worked when they were at university. One of them worked in a pea factory and was a tutor, the other in a pub, as a tutor and a delivery boy. The spare time they had, they had to study. They both left with good degrees and no debt. I work as well during my degree, granted it is not enough but one does try.

Look at all the photos of today's protests and you will see that generally these are people from the 'Socialist Worker's Party' student section. I tore down their posters at my university because they were an incitement of violence. I speculated as to whether I should leave my email or not so that they could contact me, but I decided against it. Somehow I cannot see 'fair-play' being in their dictionary. Yes, I know it does not really square with my liberal tendencies but they are really starting to piss me off right now.

We are not all like this, do remember that, most fellow student bloggers that I know share my disposition and disgust towards our "comrades" who have taken to the streets. These "students" should just get over themselves. Most countries do not pay grants or give loans to students, so they have to pay their own way. Look at America, apart froma very few scholarships, students work their way through college/university, usually at menial jobs. Like my parents, mine is not menial at all, I quite enjoy my job actually, and they are not hard to come by what I do.

What these "students" protestors all have in common is that most of them have probably never done a single days worth of honest labour in their lives. Yet they have the stomach to call for free education. Why they fuck should it be free? If you want it you pay for it.

Wikileaks

2010-11-30T00:28:00.006Z

It is interesting to note that all the pundits in the MSM cannot seem to be able to take a stance on the Wikileaks issue. They are all, quite rhetorically it seems, asking whether Wikileaks "are the defenders of democracy or the nemesis of establishment" - take a bloody stance you spineless apparatchicks. Is that not supposedly why you got into media in the first place, to make the big scoops, to defend democracy, to show the people the 'real' world - yet when someone finally does you hide behind the curtains of ambiguity.

You spineless fucking hypocrites.

From your point of view it should be perfectly obvious that Wikileaks has done you a favour. Only problem is that you are too thick to see it or too afraid.

And yes this is most certainly a rant.

UPDATE: What do I think? I think this is a good thing because big government is getting away with too much nowadays.

Why I left Amnesty

2010-11-29T15:44:00.004Z

Alex Singleton is bang on the money

The Swiss know how to stand up for themselves. In a referendum yesterday, they voted in favour of the automatic deportation of foreigners who commit serious crimes. Needless to say, the latte liberals at Amnesty International are appalled and – revealing their utter contempt for democracy – are calling on Swiss politicians to ignore the will of the people.

Amnesty’s reasoning is that deportations could cause convicts to be sent back to countries where they could face persecution. But this is a ridiculous argument: no one is forcing visitors to Switzerland to commit offences. If people don’t want to be sent back home, why don’t they just desist from rape, robbery, murder and fraud?

This is why I stopped supporting Amnesty a few years back, having become a member during my early teens; they despise democracy when it doesn't suit their political agenda.

Full article here.