Archive for July 2008

Blogging Etiquette

This shouldn’t really need to be said but just a quick reminder on the two most important rules of blogging etiquette …

  1. Always quote your sources, preferably with a link
  2. Don’t pass off someone elses work as your own

Like 99.9% of bloggers, I really don’t care if what I write is copied and posted elsewhere (as long as it’s not every post I write) but I do expect to see at least my name mentioned, if not a backlink.  I certainly don’t expect to see something I’ve written passed off as someone elses work, that’s just not on.

I might forget what day of the week it is half the time but even after … plucking a date out of the air … 3 years, 1 month and 5 days, I can still recognise my own writing.
There, I’ve got that off my chest, now let’s move on.  Thank you for your time.

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Money for extremists

According to the BBC, Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland alone had net income of over £1m from donations and grants whilst the DUP – which leads the Northern Ireland Assembly – made a loss of £27k.

This might explain why the DUP were so keen to join the Conswervatives who are in a far better financial position than Liebour or the Illiberal Dipshits.

It seems that the only way a party can hope to get serious money (other than selling peerages, of course) is to sit on an extreme fringe.  Sinn Féin advocated the use of terrorism to further their agenda and were rewarded with vast amounts of cash, a lot of which was raised in that bastion of democracy and anti-terrorist fervour, the US.  The BNP advocate forced repatriation of immigrants and curtailing freedom of the press and are rewarded with bucket loads of cash from all over the place, again including the US.

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British government want to censor the internet

DK talks about the latest murmurings about regulating the content of websites and blogs and suggests several, quite obscene and medical things, that the British government can do with their idea of curtailing freedom of speech.

If the British government intends to censor the internet with draconian, illiberal legislation then I’ll just do what Guido and others do and host and publish my blog overseas.

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PACT

Last night I went to a PACT meeting in my local area.  These things aren’t particularly well advertised so most of you won’t have heard of them – it’s basically a meeting for local residents, a representative from the council, a CSO, a representative from the housing trust and a councillor.  This is a national initiative so the chances are there is one operating in your area.

Only the CSO and the Neghbourhood Co-ordinator from the council turned up to the one I went to last night, the housing trust woman was awol and the councillor sent his apologies (probably for the best, guess who it was 😉 ).

It was quite an eye-opener for me for two reasons – firstly, I think the pretendy-copper label given to CSO’s is a bit unfair because it was quite apparent from the meeting last night that they actually work quite hard; and secondly, stuff that I’ve whinged about loads of times will be addressed by the PACT meeting next month.

It also transpires that a suggestion I made yonks ago about different departments being able to find the location of street lamps from the serial numbers is being implemented as I type.  The housing estate I live on is like a rabbit warren as you get closer to the centre (luckily I live on the outside) and often it’s impossible to tell which road you’re next to if you see fly tipping or broken fences, etc. but every street light – in theory – has a unique serial number.  If you don’t know where you are then you should be able to tell any council worker (or the emergency services, for that matter) the serial number of a street lamp and they should be able to tell where you are.

On a vagulely related (or at least topical) note, walking the dog last night I found a dog waste bin that had been set on fire outside the local primary school.  It was only smouldering, there were no flames, so I phoned the police thinking they would send someone with a fire extinguisher rather than dragging a fire engine out to a dustbin that wasn’t actually on fire but no, I was told to ring 999.  They sent a land rover which is better than an engine but even so, that land rover could have been needed elsewhere, why do people do these things?

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Blank passports stolen

The Identity & Passport Service has lost 3,000 blank passports and visas after thieves robbed a security van while the driver was in the newsagents.

The NO2ID Pledge - have YOU made it yet?

The IPS said that the passports can’t be used because of the security chip but this is utter bollocks.  They can be used at home and abroad as ID and could be used to travel abroad through ports that don’t use the chipped passports.  They can also be read by commercially available, perfectly legal RFID scanners and cracked with open-source, perfectly legal software.  The personal details and photo on a passport are stored in the chip and can be read without even taking it out of its envelope.  I don’t believe that every port on the planet is going to be connected up to our passport database so I assume that the data read off the chip will be displayed on a screen to be compared with what’s on the passport and if the data can be read off the RFID chip, it can also be written to the RFID chip … a new photo for instance, or a new set of biometric data.  

Despite IPS’ assertion that the passports are worthless, they have valued them at £2.5m on the black market.

And this is the British government department that wants us to trust our biometric data to them for use in ID cards.

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Girl wins Sikh bangle ban case

A Welsh Sikh girl has won a High Court challenge to her school’s decision to exclude her for wearing a Sikh bangle to school in defiance of their ban on jewelery.

The school considered the bangle to be nothing more than an item of jewelery but the High Court ruled that it was a religious symbol and she was entitled to wear it.

Predictably, the case has been seized on by the “human rights” fanatics who are saying that it’s the first step in the fight against racial and religious discrimination.

As much as it pains me to say this, the French have got the right idea when it comes to religion and schools – they don’t mix.  Schools don’t display any religious symbols, not even the crucifix.  Pupils aren’t allowed to go to school in turbans, burkha’s or any other type of outwardly religious clothing or symbols.

When the BA employee sent home for wearing a crucifix took her case to court she got nowhere so what’s the difference?  Other than the fact that the girl is a Sikh, there’s no difference at all.  If the courts are going to make these kind of rulings then it should be applied equally to Christians as well as any other religion.

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Rain arrives … 24 hours late

Surprise, surprise – the terrible weather predicted for last night didn’t happen.

We have had a fair bit of thunder and lightening and heavy rain tonight but not the horrendous storms predicted by the Met Office.

So the weathermen can’t get the forecast right for teatime at lunchtime on the same day but they expect us to take their bullshit claims on global warming seriously?  I think not.

The weather is messing with my interweb connection so it’s time to take the dog for a walk while the rain has eased off and then get some sleep.

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Google-beater? Don’t make me laugh!

A handful of ex-Googlies have set up a new search engine which they reckon is going to beat Google.

Hmmm.  Well, I saw this mentioned on BBC News earlier today but didn’t bother checking it out.  Then I saw a thread about it on Telford Live so I thought I’d best give it a whirl seeing as how people are talking about it.

What a sack of cack.

A seach for Telford Live comes up with an image that has no relevance to the website.  Searching for “wonkos world” comes up with some random sites but “wonko’s world” comes up with this place and a couple of images from the sidebar.  The mathematically-calculated “relevant” image isn’t guessed that well and even if it worked it wouldn’t add all that much to the experience.  Certainly not enough to make up for the slow, slow response times and poor search results.

Really, I don’t see the point in Cuil and I don’t see it lasting very long.  It’s not a patch on Google – it’s slow, the search results aren’t very good and the only front-end gimmick Cuil has doesn’t work properly.

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The sun is shining and there’s a light breeze in the air …

The last few days have seen some fantastic weather – mid 20’s (sorry, I can only do metric temperatures), glorious sunshine and barely a cloud in the sky.  The only thing that’s spoiled it is the incessant yapping of the neighbour’s dog (I got a bit ratty yesterday and ended up bawling at said neighbour’s front door to shut his dog up).

As someone who suffers from arthritis this sort of weather is great, with a bit of luck the changing climate will bring more of the same.

The aforementioned light breeze is picking up a bit as I type and the clouds are homing in on sunny Shropshire.  The good weather had to end some time of course and the Met Office says that we can expect some heavy rain and thunderstorms in an hour or so.

Interestingly, the light aircraft and microlight I’ve just seen in the distance don’t seem too bothered about the weather forecast.  Either that or they didn’t bother looking to see if the good weather was going to hold up.

Anyway, enough of the rambling and onto some serious stuff.  Believe it or not, there are severe weather warnings out for the next few hours which I will translate from their native European “regions” and metric measurements.

If you live in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Northants, Bucks, Hertfordshire, Essex, Bedfordshire or Cambridgshire the Met Office is advising you to baton down the hatches.  They are predicting up to an inch or so of rain per hour in some places and warn of some flooding and disruption to roads and motorways.

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Nick Clegg thinks elections are less important than the price of bread

I already wrote about the Glasgow East by-election result on the CEP blog this morning so I won’t do it again here except to comment on what an enormously stupid muppet Nick Clegg is for failing to lay the boot in to Gordon Brown like anyone with an ounce of political sense would do.

While David Cameron and Alex the Salmon are calling for leadership and general elections, Nick Clegg said:

[it is not] time to play politics with people’s lives […] when so many people are worried about the price of a loaf of bread, how to fill their car with a tank of petrol

Who agreed to Federal Europe’s suggestion that all diesel sold must contain a certain amount of biofuel, leading to worldwide shortages of cereal crops used to make bread (amongst other staple food stuffs) as poor farmers turn their fields over to biofuel production?

Who has refused to cut the duty on fuel, preferring to rake in countless billions of pounds extra in fuel duty to fund a pre-election spending bonanza next year instead of shielding us from rising oil prices?

Liebour and their unelected Prime Minister, that’s who.  I don’t think an election which gives us an opportunity to choose who we think is best for the job of running our country is playing politics with peoples’ lives.  The people running the country are directly responsible for the price of bread the price of petrol and our ability to pay for both.  Could Cleggover be more worried about how the Illiberal Dumbocrats will fare in an election based on last night’s result than democracy?  Do bears shit in the woods?

Liberal Democrats: making a mockery of politics since 1988

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Absolute power corrupts absolutely

Public bodies used “anti-terrorism” laws to make over half a million requests for information like phone and internet records last year.

In 2006 only 350,000 requests for information were made by public bodies, in 2007 that had risen to 519,000.

The legislation that lets public bodies such as local councils get this information and carry out surveillence is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which was brought in to help tackle serious and organised crime and terrorism.  Since then it has predictably degenerated into a free for all with councils using it to mount surveillence operations on people suspected of not picking up dog shit and parents they suspect of lying about being in a school catchment area.

And while all this happens we are told to trust the state with these powers.  We are told that we don’t need to worry that the British government now has the power to detain somebody for a month and a half without charge on suspicion of terrorist offences because it’ll only be used in extreme circumstances and only for real terrorist offences, not the multitude of offences under the Terrorism Act that aren’t terrorism but are covered by the internment law.

We are told not to worry about having more CCTV than any other country in the world because it’s just for our protection, to keep our streets safe.  But CCTV is now being used to prosecute motorists for parking offences without anyone having to put a ticket on the vehicle and potentially weeks after the alleged offence has occured when the driver will have forgotten what the circumstances were.

The police routinely collect fingerprints and DNA samples of everyone they interview and keep those details forever.  The law had to be changed to allow them to do this because they illegally kept details for hundreds of thousands of innocent people that they had obtained under a law that required them to remove the details if the subject was innocent.

We are all to be required to submit our biometric data – fingerprints, iris scans, DNA – to a centralised database so that the British government can use ID cards to track our movements.  Don’t worry about the fact that fingerprints and iris scans can be falsified very easily if you wanted to put in the effort or that you can buy card readers off the internet now that will read an ID card.  Don’t worry about the fact that you can buy a card reader off eBay that will read the contents of the ID chip on a passport from inside a sealed envelope.

Just how fucking stupid do you have to be to believe that all this is for our own good, for our protection?  What kind of a retard genuinely believes that every new law that infringes civil liberties won’t be abused from the day it becomes law?

We are the most illiberal, spied-on state on the planet yet we let the power-mad despots running the country pass more and more of these laws.  We can’t even go to London and protest about it any more because the police will shove cameras in our faces and arrest us for terrorist offences!

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Federal Europe bans acre

Well, it was bound to happen eventually – the acre has fallen to the forces of Europeanism.

Federal Europe has issued a directive on the harmonisation of measuring open spaces which specifically bans the use of the acre from 2010.  The directive was given the nod by the eurofederalist minister for the south east euroregion of England and junior DEFRA minister, Jonathan Shaw.
The word acre is derived from the old English word “æcer” which meant an open field and was measured as the amount of land a man could plough with an ox in one day.  It started being used in the 13th Century in England and was much later adopted by the celts.

But no more, another piece of English history, tradition and culture has been wiped out by Federal Europe.

I wonder if Federal Europe will be pressing Israel to rename Acre and rewriting our history books to teach kids about the Battle of 0.4047 Hectares in 1291.  Winnie the Pooh books will have to be changed as well because Pooh will soon be living in the 40.47 Hectare Wood.  The rural support network, Action with Communities in Rural England, will have to changes it’s name in 2010 too – it’s going to be a bugger finding a meaningful acronym for 40.47HECTARE.

Federal Europe – give them 2.5cm and they’ll take 9.14 decimetres.

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Radovan Carrotbitch arrested

The former Serbian general and world’s most wanted war criminal, Radovan Karadzic Carrotbitch, has been found and arrested in Serbia.  On a bus.

Carrotbitch obviously let his subscription to Genocidal Maniacs Monthly lapse and missed Saddam Hussein’s column last year giving tips on finding a big hole to live in while the American pig-dogs are trying to hunt you down.

Apparently, Carrotbitch has been living openly in Belgrade, working in an alternative medicine clinic cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and a beard.

Note:
Radovan Carrotbitch is not affilliated with the Church of the Lunar Carrot

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Impartiality my arse

OFCOM has ruled that Channel 4 failed in its duty to be impartial and reflect a range of views when it broadcast the Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary that set out to expose the lies around man made global warming.

But, strangely, Al Gore’s climate change propaganda, An Inconvenient Truth, can be shown in schools as long as the teacher tells the children that it doesn’t represent an alternative viewpoint.

Where’s the impartiality in that?

Global warming isn’t happening and that’s a fact.  It’s a fact that is confirmed by climate scientists on both sides of the climate change scam – sceptics and propagandists alike.  The lead author of the IPPC report on climate change was exposed as an ouright lying propagandist when he tried to whip up hysteria earlier this year by telling the worlds media that the Wilkins Ice Shelf was “hanging on by a thread” and in danger of collapsing because of climate change when it had already collapsed a decade previously.  Al Gore’s propaganda film was based on the IPPC report, as is the climate change policy of Federal Europe and its puppet governments.

The Manhattan Declaration, signed by 500 climatologists and other climate experts and the Oregon Petition, signed by over 31,000 scientists (9,000 of which are PhD’s), both refute the claims of the climate change propagandists and criticise Al Gore’s propaganda film yet they are ignored entirely in favour of a report authored by a liar, paid to “prove” climate change is down to human activity and apparently endorsed by only 2,500 scientists, 400 of which said that their names were added to the report without their knowledge.

Where’s the impartiality in that?

There is no fucking impartiality because if the truth was allowed to be broadcast, the lying propagandist scum who are helping to cause a global recession, the destruction of the global economy and hiking up taxes on the basis of a lie will be royally fucked.

Come the revolution, they will all be up against the wall.  Especially the Bishop of Stafford.  I’ve got a special lamp post reserved just for him.

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El Gordo Caption Competition

Guido has already started a caption competition for this picture of El Gordo but any contribution you make will be lost in the 300 comments which will mostly contain arguments, insults to other commenters, complaints about his prize policy for this week (will he, won’t he, does anyone get the prize anyway?) and the occassional high brow caption that everyone will laugh at but nobody will get.

So, feel free to post your caption in the relatively spam, insult and high-brow free comments here …

Here are mine for a starter:

  • By Election campaigning hots up in Glasgow East
  • Gordon Brown asks Maggie for advice on breaking unions
  • PM breaks council worker picket line at Westminster
  • Brown unveils plans to tackle knife crime

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Now Liebour are stealing my ideas!

Back in October I posted about how I would make people work – basically forcing them to work for the local authority street cleanging, clearing up graffiti, etc. in return for benefits.

Then in May, Chris Grayling, the Shadow Work & Pensions Secretary, proposed a slightly watered-down version of the same policy.

Now the real Work & Pensions Secretary, James Purnell, has nicked my idea which he has declared “revolutionary”!

No James, it’s not revolutionary, it’s just common sense and it wasn’t even your idea in the first place.

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Liebour think tank says Britishness won’t unite us

The Joseph Rowntree Trust, a Liebour think tank, has concluded that “a fixed notion of Britishness” will not help to unite the population of the dis-United Kingdom.

The report says that ideas like swearing allegiance to the Queen, Britishness lessons and a Britishness Day public holiday won’t help people feel British, making an arse out of No Mandate Brown’s pathetic obsession with ramming Britishness down English childrens’ throats.

The BBC has devoted over half of its article on the Joseph Rowntree report to the previous report by another Liebour think tank, Civitas, that recommended teaching pro-British propaganda to English children and quoting that report’s author several times.

Education and communities and culture are devolved meaning that any decisions on the teaching of British propaganda in schools or indoctrinating children will apply only in England.

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If you could have dinner with 3 people …

These kind of memes are always kicking around but I quite like this one.  If you could choose any 3 people from history (alive or dead) to have dinner with, who would they be, why and which single burning question would you ask them?

Here’s mine for a start …

Freddie Mercury because he was just such an amazing musical genius and an incredibly brave person.  I’d want to find out if there was anything about his life that he didn’t put in a song.  And why fried chicken?

Terry Pratchett because he is, without doubt, the most inspired, funny and clever author in living memory.  I’ve read every novel he’s published several times and every time I read one I find something I didn’t notice last time.  My question would be: Nobby or Carrot, which one is it?

George Orwell because I think he’d have really useful advice on how to survive in a world that is marching towards fulfilling his prophecy.  I’d ask him if his disturbingly accurate predictions were a Nostradamus-like vision of the future or a lucky (or should that be unlucky?) guess.

As is usual in these things, here’s a list of the lucky people I’m nominating to answer the same …

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EDP activist arrested for harassment?

According to a thread on the British Democracy Forum senior English Democrats Party activist, Steve Uncles, has been arrested for harassment of Matt O’Conner’s family.

O’Conner was the EDP’s candidate for Mayor of London and was the founder of Fathers 4 Justice.  The EDP’s decision seems to have been a popular one in the EDP but in the wider English nationalist community it was met with some concern.  O’Conner has no previous on these issues and there was concern that he would turn out to be a bit of a loose cannon.  He subsequently pulled out of the election at the last minute which the EDP said was down to drinking and mental problems.

Now someone on the British Democracy Forum has posted what is supposed to be an email from Fathers 4 Justice confirming that Steve Uncles has been arrested for harassing O’Conner’s family and that Robin Tilbrook would also be interviewed in connection with harassing him.

I can quite believe that Steve Uncles would do such a thing, he’s turned into a bit of a fruit loop lately winding people up with deranged accusations of being BNP moles and even claiming the Campaign for an English Parliament is a BNP front organisation or some such bizarre figment of his imagination.  But Robin seems quite well adjusted and as a practising solicitor I can’t see him breaking the law and risking losing his job over someone who is supposed to be a mentally unstable drunk.

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Toe Knee Heart

You would be mistaken for thinking that I had just scanned in the latest wax crayon masterpiece by my 3 year old daughter but no, this is the work of a grown man.  He does come from Milton Keynes, though, which might explain a few things.

This is 60 year old John Yates’ proposed new British flag, the answer to 30 years of agonising over the exclusion of Wales from the butchers apron.

I had struggled with the idea of a new Union Flag for over 30 years but it was at the Eisteddfod that I saw someone selling the St David’s flags. It was like an answer to a maiden’s prayer.

Someone needs a hobby I think.  Or a new one, at least.

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