Archive for May 2008

Mugabe will stay in power in Zimbabwe

The Chief of Staff of the Zimbabwean Army has told soldiers that if they don’t intend voting for Robert Mugabe in the presidential run-off next month, they should hand in their uniform.

The Zimbabwean army will be out in force with the police in the run-up to the presidential election run-off next month, as will Mugabe’s militia, “the veterans”, who have been issued with police uniforms and will be inside polling stations.

The Zimbabwean military have said that they won’t co-operate with Morgan Tsvangirai if he wins the election but I don’t see that being a problem now to be honest.  The presidency should be Morgan Tsvangirai’s but with the police, an armed militia in police uniforms and the army all roaming round the country beating the shit out of people and telling them to vote for Mugabe, I can’t see Tsvangirai winning.  And even if he does win, Mugabe won’t give up power and he’s got the army’s support.

And will the world police do anything about it?  Will they buggery – there’s no oil and they’re the wrong shade of brown.

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EU Cost/Benefit Analysis petition

The petition I started calling on the British government to commission a cost/benefit analysis on membership of Federal Europe now has 703 signatures.

It has until the 24th of July before it closes so a thousand signatures at least would be nice.  If you haven’t already signed the petition, please do so now and then pass it on to your contacts.  Whether you’re a eurofederalist, eurosceptic or undecided, commissioning an independent cost/benefit analysis is the right thing to do otherwise we’ll never know the true cost of membership.

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Culture Clash?

Just as the media have forgotten about the child from Handsworth that had been starved to death by her parents, another equally horrific story has made it into the news.

A 6 year old boy and 5 year old girl have been stabbed to death – apparently by their parents – and their 6 month old baby sister is in a serious condition in hospital suffering from stab wounds.

Like the parents from Handsworth that starved their children, the parents of these stabbed children aren’t from round these parts – they are Tamils, from Sri Lanka.

I’ve never been to Sri Lanka or India or any other Asian country and I’m pretty sure that this kind of thing isn’t considered “normal” there but two occasions of immigrants killing their children in quite appalling circumstances isn’t “normal” here either. Of course, we’ve had our share of child murderers and other unsavoury characters who have been born here but this is quite unusual. Is the life of a child becoming less sacrosanct within immigrant communities or is the fact that both sets of parents are immigrants a co-incidence?

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Football quota’s – good or bad thing?

I’m undecided on Sepp Blatter’s plans to impose quotas on foreign players in football teams.

  • On the plus side, it’s pissed off Federal Europe who have declared it illegal.
  • On the negative side, anything involving Sepp Blatter must be a bad thing.
  • On the plus side, it means English clubs will have to invest in English talent instead of relying on foreign players.
  • On the negative side, English teams will struggle for a while because not enough investment has been put into home grown talent unlike other countries.

So I’m torn – I can’t decide whether, on balance, it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

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Shropshire Star: Claims on climate an excuse for tax rises

Looks like the green lobby haven’t managed to bully the Shropshire Star into closing down the climate change debate yet …

Every week there seems to be another report by a scientist of some description which is proclaimed as “further evidence” of climate change.

There is no doubt that climate change is happening, it’s been happening for millions of years and will continue to happen long after the human race has bombed itself to extinction.

In March Dr David Vaughan, the lead author of the IPPC report on climate change, told the worlds media that the Wilkins Ice Shelf “hangs by a thread” and was about to collapse.  The Wilkins Ice Shelf had, in fact, already collapsed 10 years ago.

This is used as “evidence” that human activity is causing climate change and calling for increased taxation. [1]

In April scientists from Lancaster University claimed that there is no link between solar activity and climate change.  The BBC described this as “further compelling evidence” despite there being an abundance of data showing a clear link between the two.

Lancaster University used 20 years worth of data to “prove” that there is no link between solar activity and climate change events that take place over millions of years. [2]

In May, German scientists announced that we wouldn’t see any global warming for the next decade.  In fact, they have concluded that we will see global colling followed by a period of warming caused by what they called “natural climate cycles”. [3]

I am old enough to remember the doom-laden prophecies of an impending ice age right up until about 15 years ago.  Now the same data has apparently convinced todays scientists that the opposite is going to happen.

Climate change is nothing more to the British government than an excuse to increase taxes.  If it was anything but an excuse to put up taxes then it would be DEFRA commissioning reports and forming climate policy, not the Treasury!

It’s time to apply some common sense to the climate change debate (not that much debate is allowed any more) before the economy is fatally damaged on a false premise.

Stuart Parr

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7313264.stm (Antarctic shelf ‘hangs by a thread’)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/24/ice_shelf_collapse/ (Global warming cleared on ice shelf collapse rap)

[2] http://media.kusi.clickability.com/images/gwimage3.jpg
http://www.realclimate.org/images/SW2006b.jpg
http://www.unc.edu/~sstaff/images/craytemp.jpg
http://www.news2wkrn.com/jeff/Droughtlook-dr2-FMA-06.GIF

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7376301.stm (Next decade ‘may see no warming’)

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Gordo to bribe MPs on internment

No Mandate Brown is offering to bribe MPs to gain their support for 42 days internment.

The bribe to Liebour MPs is the lesser of two bribes being offered – the reduction of the amount of time the Police can use the temporary powers from 60 days to 30 days and to reduce the time taken for Parliament to debate and vote on the internment – the “safeguard” that the British government says will protect us – will reduce from a month (which is longer than the extra 14 days you can be detained for) to a fortnight.

The second bribe is the most serious.  No Mandate Brown is going to bribe DUP MPs by offering them seats on the Intelligence and Security Select Committee and to give money from the sale of British army land in Northern Ireland to Northern Ireland rather than the Treasury where it should be going.

It cannot be repeated often enough – and I intend to repeat it every time I write about internment – this is unconstitutional, illegal and unnecessary.  The British government has admitted that there have been no cases where the current 28 day limit on detention without charge, which is already the longest in the civillised world, has not been sufficient.  There is, to put it quite simply, no requirement to deprive us of our ancient and constitutional right not to be subject to detention without charge.

Gordo tried to bribe taxpayers in Crewe & Nantwich with a £2.7bn bribe for people they’ve driven to poverty by abolishing the 10p tax band and suffered a massive defeat.  According to Tony McNulty, the Goblin King would rather lose than back down on 42 days internment.  His last bribe resulted in an unprecedented defeat, let’s hope this next bribe does too.

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World peace my arse

Jesus guaranteed my mortage you know?Princess Tony has promised to devote the rest of his life to uniting the world’s religions. What a shame he didn’t decide to devote his life to religion some time around 1998 once he’d started fucking the country up.

Bliar reckons that religion can bring peace to the world and is even launching his own Faith Foundation. What a fucking joke. Throughout history we have seen wars and massacres and torture because of religion. Pretty much every war in history has been down to religion and most conflicts still happening today are down to religion. Religion bringing peace to the world? My fat hairy fucking arse.

If Bliar really believes that religion can bring about world peace then I look forward to seeing footage of him doing a meet and greet in Baghdad and getting blown to shit by some Jihadi nutjob in the name of religion.  Somehow I don’t think that grinning hag of a wife of his will see the irony – she’ll probably start a petition to get him canonised.

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Controlling immigration isn’t racist

Amnesty International has accused the Italian government of racism after they introduced new security laws making illegal immigration punishable by up to 4 years in prison, begging with minors by 3 years in prison and making it easier to deport illegal immigrants.

Amnesty International says the new laws are “heavy restrictions and new crimes that will target, above all, immigrants”. This is, of course, the kind of emotive lies you’d expect from a group like Amnesty International. The laws will target illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants. You can’t punish legal immigration because it’s legal.

This is a good move by the Italian government and something the British government should be doing. Illegal immigration is a real problem and we don’t even send asylum seekers who have come here via a friendly country back to that friendly country to claim asylum legally.

The problem, I think, is threefold. It’s partly down to the Scottish Raj’s desire to abolish English culture and identity, partly down to Federal Europe’s rules and partly down to the pathetic accusations of racism by groups like Amnesty International whenever the word immigration is uttered.

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The dead tree press catches up … eventually

Via Guido, the Guardian has noticed that Liebour has £13m of loans due this year despite being on the verge of bankruptcy.

They must be congratulated on their investigative journalism skills – after all, it only took them a week and a half to think of looking at the Electoral Commission website to see how much debt Liebour have got due for repayment this year.  It was the first thing I did after laughing at their misfortune.

Oh well, they caught up eventually.

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Whatever happened to the climate change consensus?

Wonko’s World regular, KeithS, very kindly sent me a link to this article on the First Post website: Whatever happened to the climate change consensus?

A very good question and an equally good article.  Excellent in fact.

The First Post points out that whilst the IPPC report on climate change (the lead author of which is a proven liar) and Al Gore’s propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth, gets extensive media coverage and quoted regularly by the media, the Oregon Petition and Manhattan Declaration are completely ignored.

The Oregon Petition has been signed by 31,000 scientists from around the world, 9,000 of which are PhD’s, rejecting the IPPC’s view on the cause of climate change.  The Manhattan Declaration was signed by over 500 climatologists, scientists and engineers and also rejected the IPPC’s view on the cause of climate change and An Inconvenient Truth.

Contrast the support for the Oregon Petition and the Manhattan Declaration with the IPPC report on climate change which was supposedly endorsed by 2,500 scientists.  However, 4,000 of them say that their names were attached to the report without their knowledge or consent and one even had to threaten legal action to get his name removed.
The First Post finishes with the opinion that the IPPC report was political, not scientific and that the UN and western media will very soon have to admit that have basically lied and fed us with propaganda.

Go and read the full article – it’s a shame the mainstream media don’t produce more of this type of content.

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Petition the PM: Reduce Fuel Duty

This petition is pretty popular – over 89,000 people have signed calling on No Mandate Brown to reduce fuel duty.

Definitely worth signing even though we all know it will be ignored.  The more the listening Prime Minister ignores petitions signed by tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, the bigger his defeat will be when it comes to the next election.

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Is Chris Grayling a reader of Wonko’s World?

I wonder, is the shadow Work & Pensions Secretary a closet reader of Wonko’s World?  Or did he perhaps co-incidentally come up with much the same policy that I proposed back in October for making unemployed people work?

The only problem with their proposal is that it doesn’t go far enough.

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Some of the details of what MPs were spending their second home allowances on were certainly an eye-opener.  Why No Mandate Brown needs the taxpayer to pay his Sky TV subscription as well as a £187k a year salary I don’t know, presumably he has an explanation as to why his £187k salary isn’t enough to live on when minimum wage is less than a tenth of that.

Speaker Martin opposed the disclosure of MPs expenses to the taxpayers who are footing the bill and lost.  But not to worry, he’s got a cunning plan – give all MPs a £23k grant in place of the second home allowance so taxpayers have no way of finding out what they’ve spent on their second homes.  Genius.

When a government will go to such extraordinary lengths to keep their spending of taxpayers money a secret there is something seriously and fatally wrong with the administration.  The British government runs the country because the people choose to subject themselves to its authority.  The principle of trust underpins the establishment – the British government trusts citizens to pay their taxes and be bound by the laws it passes and citizens trust the government to govern according to the wishes of their constituents and to act with honour and integrity.

This rotten government has torn up the contract of trust between the people and Parliament.  They have lied, they have cheated, they have stolen.  Every week sees a further erosion of civil liberties and centuries old rights and privileges.  Every week sees another exposé of sleaze and corruption from the heart of government.  And at every turn MPs insulate themselves further from scrutiny.  Every revelation of theft and corruption is met with more secrecy.

No more!  We need a government that is open to scrutiny and transparent in all it does.  There needs to be a culture at Westminster, at Holyrood, Cardiff Bay, Stormont and wherever the English Parliament decides to seat itself, of intense scrutiny, exposure and accountability to the electorate.  It is simply not acceptable for politicians to grant themselves tens, hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money without allowing the taxpayer to see where every penny of their money is being spent.  Rules on spending taxpayers money should be so tight that politicians are discouraged from spending anything for fear of breaking the rules and the consequence of any wilfull malfeasance should be a mandatory prison sentence.  Breaking into a politicians home and stealing their telly will land you with a lengthy spell at Her Majesty’s pleasure yet and MP stealing tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers money in fraudulent expenses is “punished” with a public apology or, if they’re expendable, a “resignation”.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  Well, me for one.

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Fuel protests in London and Cardiff

Hundreds of hauliers are heading to both London and Cardiff to protest at obscene fuel prices.

The Wales protest will be travelling from Llanelli to Cardiff and the London protest is going from Kent to London.

The British government blames high oil prices for the price of fuel but this is bollocks – about 80% of the price of fuel is down to tax and rising oil prices have given the Treasury a massive windfall from fuel duty. If they weren’t pissing it up the wall on fucking stupid things that we don’t want like the EU and ID cards there’d be plenty of money to plug any gap in the budget caused by dropping – or even abolishing – fuel duty. And that’s without even considering the boost to the economy from the reduction of any tax.

Hauliers can bring the country to its knees in days – all they have to do is stop delivering fuel and food and supermarkets will be empty and petrol stations will start running out of fuel. The country would grind to a halt and the British government would probably fail. Of course, that would require the likes of Eddie Stobart and Christian Salvesen to join the protests which is not particularly likely because they base most of their fleet either in France or in the South East of England where they can travel to France to fill up on cheap fuel.

If the hauliers get their way it won’t bring down car tax and it probably won’t bring down the cost of fuel for you and I but it will cut the cost of transport and that will cut the cost of producing and transporting food and other goods.

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Adobe Acrobat upgrader – shit software

Yesterday Adobe Acrobat popped up and told me that there was an upgrade available and would I mind ever so much if it went ahead and installed the upgrade as it had been asking me for a few weeks.

The upgrade was downloaded and the installer did its business. So did Spybot, asking me if I was happy for the upgrade to install a Browser Helper Object (yes) and a startup entry for the accelerated startup thingy (no). That was where I ran into a small problem.

Adobe Acrobat installer doesn’t like it if it can’t install the accelerated startup thingy and retries if it fails. Forever. In the end I had to hold down the power button of the laptop to turn it off.

Not what you expect from a company like Adobe.

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Happy days

Number 2 son had his final after-school golf lesson yesterday.  Well, when I say he had his final lesson, what I mean is he had half of it.  The other half was spent in the doctors’ surgery bleeding from the head wound caused by being hit at full swing with a golf club.

The doctor checked him over and put a paper stitch on the wound and sent him home.  This was roughly 4:30pm by the time we got him from school and to the doctors.  It wasn’t a huge cut but it had punctured the deep layer of skin and it bled quite a lot.  And continued to bleed hours later.

We phoned the out of hours doctor who told us that because their surgery is next door to the A&E at the hospital they wouldn’t put some fresh stitches on it.  So Mrs Sane toddled off to A&E with him at about 7:30pm and returned in tears 3 hours later because he’d still not been seen and the nurses kept telling her that he was next in line but sending through adults before him that appeared to have no symptoms at all.

Anyway, I took him back down and they’d just called him not long before we arrived for the second time when we got there so he went through pretty quickly, got seen by a doctor and had the cut glued.  We ended up getting home at about 1am.  Which is nice.

He’s fine anyway, no serious damage but he says he’s not going for golf lessons again!

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It’s not evidence, it’s data

Last night BBC News did a piece on a Canadian Arctic mission that has released video footage of large sections of ice breaking away which the BBC describes as evidence of climate change.

Now let’s be very clear about this – it’s not evidence of climate change, it’s data. Yes, it may indicate that the climate is changing (which of course it is) but it’s just data. The ice could have broken away for a number of reasons. It may have been as a result of climate change, tidal factors or maybe even little green men from Mars. What the data shows is that large blocks of ice are breaking away from the main continent, it doesn’t provide evidence of anything other than the fact that the ice is breaking away.

The BBC went on to tell us that the oldest ice is melting and that this is a terrible thing. But the Arctic ice is an environmental anomaly – it’s a freak leftover from the last ice age and it’s only a fluke that it’s still here now. Despite the prophecies of doom and dire warnings that the permafrost is melting and the ice caps are receding, they are still a long way off where they were during the medieval warm period or the time, about 2,000 years ago, when the vikings colonised Greenland and Newfoundland when it was warm enough to support grape vines for wine productions.

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Tories take Crewe … but don’t get too excited

Well, the predictable battering of Liebour in Crewe & Nantwich happened as predicted. And quite a battering it was too – a swing of about 14,000 votes.

Now, much is being said about the by-election and how the political balance will look come the general election as a result but it’s important to put this into context. In a general election people will vote for their party regardless of whether they’re disillusioned with them or not. This by-election was more about punishing Liebour than supporting the Conswervatives. To get a swing of 14,000 votes, traditional Liebour voters must have voted for the Conswervatives as a punishment to their party for doing non-Liebour things. It doesn’t mean they will vote for the Conswervatives in a couple of years.

I don’t doubt that the Conswervatives will continue to batter Liebour right up to the next election but people are inflicting punishment on Liebour. It must be remembered that a lot of people will vote for someone they don’t want to get rid of someone else they don’t want.

Look at the performance of the English Democrats and UKIP. Audlem, the village that recently voted in an unofficial poll to join Wales, is in the Crewe & Nantwich constituency. The question of proper representation for England and the unfair advantage devolution has brought to their very close neighbours is a subject of interest in Crewe & Nantwich but the EDP only got 275 votes, just 39 more than the Monster Raving Loony Party. The EU not-a-constitution is a subject of interest everywhere yet UKIP only secured 922 votes (although they were only projected to get about 370 so it was a better result than expected).

Until the next general election is done and dusted, nobody is going to get a look in. Some Liebour voters will cast punishment votes but the biggest asset the Conswervatives will have is people who don’t normally vote getting off their arses and voting just to make sure Liebour lose. As those voters return to their usual apathy following the general election, then the smaller parties will be able to make inroads into the entrenched 2.5 party establishment.

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Chelsea who?

I saw this outside the toilet door at work and had to take a picture.  Inspired.

Caution - John Terry

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Governed by Europe? The Tories will RAC to it!

That Tory Toff, Iain Dale, he’s a card.

Under the title “UKIP: Going nowhere in Crewe” is this picture:

The Land Rover there belongs to Councillor Jill Seymour who took time out from running her business with her husband to take the Land Rover from Telford to Crewe to support the UKIP candidate, Mike Nattrass.  I wonder how many “normal” Conswervative Party members have made a 120 mile daily round trip to Crewe to support their candidate.  Sure, people like Iain and various cabinet members have toddled off the Crewe but politics is their day job – they’re not taking time out from their jobs and businesses to support their man.

Fair play, the picture is just begging for a caption but at least give credit where credit is due.  They’ve even put a poster up while they’re waiting!

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