Talk at the IEA

So I was at a talk today at the IEA (Institute for Economic Affairs) which was... interesting. No, it was actually really good, though it was not really a debate since well, the speakers were not so much debating, but agreeing with one another on pretty much everything and each of them just making a little speech to celebrate the occasion of their, erm, speech.

The topic of the day was 'Can a big society be a free society?' naturally referring to the "Big Society" policy which Cameron whipped out a few weeks before the election much to everyone's surprise, since no one had a fucking clue where or why that came from. But out it came and it was a big policy disaster from the beginning to the end ("5000 voluntary community workers" it must have slipped Cameron's attention that there are already some 600,000 people doing voluntary work in this country - retard). And the speakers broadly agreed on this it would seem; all wanted a smaller state, some wanted no state at all and others thought that the surveillance state was just a big joke. The most interesting guy by far, and the most convincing, was someone in a pink shirt who's name escapes me and his point was basically 'can the government just leave us the fuck alone, please' and I agree with that. A century years ago the only time you met the state was when you were born, to get registered, and when you died; to take you off the register. Simples.

Anyhow, it was a good talk with some absolutely retarded questions in the Q&A session - it must have escaped some of those attending that this was a libertarian talk and here we have a guy who basically said that crime had gone down under Labour - and by doing so actually confirming his almost unbelievable naivety in believing government figures. No one believes government figures on anything, and everyone assumes they are lying to make them look better - even the proverbial 'man on the street'.

Then there were the two fucking loudmouthed cows in the back... I fucking hated them and had a good mind of telling them so as well. First they started of by completely disrupting Dr. Eamon Butler's opening speech by opening a fucking window, a loud window, a very loud window, and these were a couple of figures in their late sixties who really should know better than to interrupt someone when they are speaking, particular if it is someone who has been particularly invited to fucking speak! But no, on they went for a full 1.5 hours interrupting people, and speakers, when they were trying to talk and when they were trying to ask questions. The chairman had to shut them up a couple of times and so had some of the questioners as well. They really made a fool out of themselves. They rounded of their pathetic existence by making a little tirade where one of them basically said "bla bla where I live everything is so nice and we all get along, the aussies, the south africans, this and that bloke la la la la, there is nothing wrong where I live" (then the other one patted her on the back and said "good good you, well done" whereas I wanted to knock her clean out) - seemingly oblivious to the fact that the rest of the fucking country does not live in bat-woman-eutopia and that the rest of us (well, not me really since I am student and all we do is get pissed, supposedly, and spread STDs - if the media are to be believed) actually have some pretty serious issues that need some serious responses from the people in power. I really hate them, and I was unfortunate enough to be standing quite close to them as well.

All in all though, it was a good seminar well worth going to and I recommend that you attend the last two debates which are held on the 24th of June and the 29th of June. I will be there, 'banging on', as it were about the EU which incidentally not a single one of the speakers mentioned tonight. I was going to point this out but then the fucking loud mouthed bastard in wig went off on her 'ohh everything is so lovely where I live' - speech. She was what could be called an academic terrorist.

Independent Thought

Yesterday I was feeling particularly sheepish and I decided instead of studying (which I should be doing since this is revision period) I watched two documentaries instead.

One was called 'Capitalims: A love Story' - I am sure you know it, made by the now infamous film maker Michael Moore. I you want I can pass you on a link to where you can view the film online for free. Alternatively you could just google the title and get a link by yourself.

Now, secondly I watched the not equally famous film 'Religulous' by Larry Charles (the same guy who made 'Borat' actually). The Comedian Bill Maher travels to Israel, England, the Netherlands, Vatican City, and across America, speaking to people about faith and religion and takes the piss a lot. Both certainly worth seeing but be warned they are not in the high end of the documentary class and are made primarily to shock and entertain, and there is not so much an academic side to either. Now naturally they provide facts, or what they claim to be facts (I would advise anyone watching either to check the facts for themselves).

Both are very good documentaries for what they are, and they do not really ask much beyond themselves safe for the viewer to stop and ask himself what is what? Now what struck me with both movies/documentaries was how independent thought seems to have gone right out of the window. People are really so stupid nowadays that they take the majority of their interactions with life at face value, critical analysis of a statement, speech, claim, fact, book of what have you seems to be nonexistent. How on earth did that happen?

Certainly the story is different on the blogosphere where quite on the contrary, nothing is taken at face value and everything is instead analysed with a critical pair of spectacles. Perhaps that is the end result of crowd sourcing a crowd which is really very pissed of with the way their country has been dealt with over the past 3-4 decades. But the fundamental difference between bloggers and the rest of the people (this is of course a massive generalisation, there are swathes of non-bloggers who most certainly employ critical analysis on a very regular basis) is that the latter just believe anything and everything the media tells them to believe.

Now things are not going to well for the media it must be said, when people start realising that they being fed lies they act, the British unlike most other people seems to act on a retarded basis in that they do act but only in the very last minute. Apply this current Britain and you will quickly see that the majority have not acted yet, but things are a foot be quite sure. But on a more local level consider for example the Met Office which had been telling people, practically, that they were about to enter the next ice age, but that never happened and the Met Office is now the laughing stock of British society and no one takes them seriously. Much the same can be said of the Government and Parliament and pretty much the entire civil service.

We interact with them because we have to, but I think I am beginning to see more evil eyes being directed their way, than usual. That is not just in the metaphorical sense but also in real life. While we are long way of from being uniformly critical of our daily interactions with life and by extension our government, there sure as chips are far more bitter people around now. This is unfortunate for it should not be that way; people should be able to trust the people who work for them, who are paid for them, who have a job because of them but the receiving end have over the past two decades firmly decided that they are going to homogeneously screw the people - every last one of them until they are control of their money and not the other way around.

Which leaves us with a nation with bad weather and a bitter population, who feels betrayed by the army of servants whose soul purpose was to serve them, but have ended up being served by the population. This is a very very dangerous combination of events and results, but there appears to be no evidence showing that the political classes have learned a lesson. The only thing we can do thus is to not believe anything they say, ever.

Courageous and Cautious

Napoleon once said that the two things he most envied about the British were their Caution and their Courage, it made them invincible.

Where Napoleon left of scare tactics took up the reigns.

Y2K, AGW, Swine Flu and there will probably be another virus scare next year, just as we had SARS, Foot-and-Mouth, Avian Flu and Mad Cow Disease etc. The government’s response will be predictable — total over-reaction, again. I wish people could start seeing the trend on scare tactics. Suffice to say if Napoleon knew that this was all it took to bring the British to their knees, we would all be enjoying Chicken Marengo right now, in our freezing little huts seemingly flabbergasted at the gargantuan incompetence of our governments - present and past.

Free speech? Which one...

This sad little tale epitomises the problem of free speech in a supposedly free society. We are all allowed to express our opinions, and encouraged to tell the truth as we understand it - unless it's inconvenient for any reason.

By all means say what you think about foreign affairs. Oh, but wait a minute! For goodness' sake don't criticize our fine government, or show disrespect to our brave lads, or risk "giving comfort to the enemy".

Certainly give your free and open views about business and the economy. Oh, but we are facing a recession and huge government debt - so be sure not to "talk Britain down"!

Please of please engage in politics it is for the best of our society. But when talking about what most concerns people, immigration one is screamed down for being a dissenting racist scum.

There's always a reason to avoid upsetting people, implying criticism of the great or the good, or lowering public morale. And that can be used as a pretext to prevent the uttering of vital facts and figures.

I prefer the healthy attitude of the American Major General Carl Schurz: "Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right, when wrong to be put right." To respect your enemy is the first step to victory. How could you possibly win against an adversary which you thought inferior to yourself? Every military campaign in the history of military campaigns has stumbled on this lapse of megalomania; Napoleon, Hitler, Vietnam, Stalin, White's vs. Red's and so on and on...

Is Gordon Brown a robot - really?

Have you ever stopped to think about it really and then I mean really? What if we were to remove his face, just rip it of like that, with a big sharp knife like the one sported by Lt. Aldo Raines in Inglourious Basterds. Would we find flesh and blood or would we find a metal skeleton?

One must give this proposition serious thought for the "man" (if he really is one) really has got no shame at all. Consider it just for a second he sold the majority of our gold reserves when it was at a quarter of the price it is at now i.e. loosing us out on billions of pounds. He is personally responsible for besetting Britain with a debt in excess of a trillion pounds. He and his party have single-handedly brought Britain to her knees, there is not a single party in the history of the United Kingdom which has done this much damage to the UK there really is none. Do recall that there have been some pretty disastrous PM and parties prior to Tony and Gordon. For example these are some of the issues that have been created by the Labour government and they cannot be overstated.

• Foot and mouth crisis (twice)
• Farm payments
• Pensions theft
• Gold reserves
• Tax credits
• Iraq war
• Under funded ill-equipped Forces
• PFI
• Home Office failures
• Uncontrolled immigration
• NHS in tatters
• School standards at the lowest ever
• Thousands of knee jerk badly written laws
• Rampant EU fraud
• EU ignoring its own people
• EU referendum promise reneged
• Treaty/ constitution
• Northern Rock
• HMRC
• Lost data – child benefit and dvlc
• Donorgate
• Cash for Honours
• Single families
• Economy in complete tatters
• First time buyers taken out of market
• Rich and poor divide becoming bigger
• Plenty of tax rises – both direct and indirect
• Uncontrolled private sector
• Crime out of control
• Young deaths
• Guns on our streets
• No Election
• Catholics are to become Sovereigns annuling the Acts of Supremacy 1559 (actually there are so many things that New Labour have done which have annulled old acts that it really is pointless to make an issue of it. I just wanted to give this one as an example).
• Afghan war
• Quangos controlling parliament
• Financial crisis

And so on.

So I am thinking... What if he really, really really is a metal robot? Conspiracy theorist gone mad? Well maybe but is there really any other option? He is mad of course but maybe that is because someone is controlling him with a joystick!!!! Be aware I might not be able to post any more for I have revealed the awful truth and MI6 will be after me like Muslims after recognition of their victimisation.
It is late, give me a break.

Bonfire on Databases

I am not too sure what I am to write about today. It seems as if most things have been exhausted e.g. there is so preciously little we appear to be able to do about the malaise that infest our daily lives. When freedom and justice has died in the heart of man how are we, who still cultivate this belief, going to raise it from the dead like Jesus did Lazarus?

Why is it that no one cares anymore? Why is it permissible for the Independent Safeguarding Authority to even be set up - which sole purpose it is to check and see if people wanting to work with children are pedophiles or not. You might scream 'child protection' yet for all that we stand for, no other nation in the world has gone this overboard with databases. In Sweden your name appears, on average, on 300 databases ranging from private to public. Are we even to dare to estimate that number for the UK, I certainly would not like to know. It is one of these areas where ignorance truly is bliss where one is happier not knowing how many people know about my first failed exam - ever. Yet do you honestly think we will be safer if we are registered on 2000 databases or even 10,000 databases? Even if our name appeared on every single institutions' databases, that we came in contact with, that is not going to stop a wicked mind from being wicked. How could it?

What is wrong with us? Why is not Dave mentioning this when he is doing very well in making the easy choices, the superficial ones that will amount to a difference for you and me to the tune of naught. Yet the soon-to-be eradicated Labour Government have so much British blood on their hands it is almost difficult not to damn them for every act they have passed since coming into power. People make the argument that we elected them and as such have to stand by our choice. We made that choice on the premise that the people we elected were honest and descent, that is what it previously meant to be publicly elected. Yet we get a government that now is actively indulging in social engineering and is not ashamed of it, take Carol Ann Duffy's poem, 'Education for Leisure'. The exam board AQA has removed the poem from its GCSE anthology, and has asked schools to destroy old copies containing the poem, because it supposedly glorified knife crime.

What is poetry? There are as many definitions of poetry as there are poets. Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings;" Emily Dickinson said, "If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry;" and Dylan Thomas defined poetry this way: "Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing." Poetry is a lot of things to a lot of people. Poetry is what our heart tells us the words mean together, in their glorious, doomed escapade trying to explain and alleviate life in the eye of the beholder. Even if the message of a poem is so blindingly obvious - that in itself is a contradiction for being obvious is not a necessity of a poem nor is beauty only understanding. But understanding is also a personal concept, like meaning it cannot be thrust upon the stronger minds who seek to question the power lurking behind the cloak of words. That power however is now contained by the government which tells us, through decrees, what we can and cannot read. Recall that most films about autocracy always feature a 'blacklist' were artifacts of culture are hidden away from the public away because they are 'dangerous' and can corrupt feeble minds.

A cull on quangos indeed, all 1,162 of them. But what about these?

ContactPoint: To hold name, address, gender, date of birth, school and health provider of every child in England

National DNA database: Of 4.5m people whose genetic fingerprints are on the database, more than 500,000 are innocent, including 39,000 children

Communications database: Plan to centralise details of calls and websites visited from phone companies and internet providers, open to 510 public authorities

Onset: A profiling tool which examines a child's behaviour and social background to identify potential child offenders

Detailed Care Record: When rolled out, will allow hospitals, GPs nurses and social workers to update patient's records with unmonitored "wikipedia-style" entries

>>>>PROPOSED<<<<

Communications database Would bring together details of emails, telephone calls and web use

National Identity Register Will store biographical information and biometric data linked to ID cards

The NHS Detailed Care Record Will hold GP and hospital records

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, pointed to significant legal and practical problems with a further 29 databases, including the national childhood obesity one and the planned NHS summary care record system...

It goes without mentioning that the ones we "share" with the EU are not exactly libertarian either.

What is wrong with us? Perhaps that is the key question, perhaps that is the Magnus Opus feat of this government, this seemingly Herculean question, not so much the question itself but the very fact that we are now so desperately in need for guidance that the only people who cannot escape from the disaster, unlike this government and its immasculated purpose, who are responsible - we are those people. Their victory lies in us having to ask ourselves that question instead of those whom we elected.

I stole this from Old Holborn

Dr Vivienne Nathanson, the head of BMA science and ethics, said: "The BMA is not
anti-alcohol. As doctors our focus is to ensure that individuals drink sensibly so they do not put their health and lives in danger."

For which there is no more succinct reply that to quote from the Daily Mash:

Emma Bishop, a marketing executive from Twickenham, added: "How's about this? As an adult, I think a reasonable daily limit is me drinking as much as I fucking want.

"If it affects my work I'll get sacked. If it affects my relationships I'll be all lonely and sad.

"And as for my health, following a quick glance at my tax bill I've decided that the NHS will treat me and the government can keep its fucking opinions to itself."

With regards to this story over at Old Holdborn, highly recommended reading.

25 Acts of Parliament

60 New Powers

A breakdown of who really controls us

Courtesy of Nirj Deva MEP