How to cut £50bn

The Taxpayers Alliance have been doing the sums and have published how it is possible to cut £50 billion in public expenditure.
Read it in full here
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/campaign/2010/04/what-to-cut-the-essential-guide.html

Some highlights
Section 1: Tackling areas of spending that are not performing - Total: £7,705 million

1.1 Abolish the Bus Service Operators’ Grant - £451 million

1.2 End the ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ grants - £15 million

1.3 Abolish Sure Start - £1,150 million

1.4 Abolish Building Schools for the Future - £2,300 million

1.5 Abolish the Education Maintenance Allowance - £530 million

1.6 Reduce ‘business skills’ support - £757 million

1.7 Halt further orders and upgrades for the Eurofighter - £740 million

1.8 Abolish England’s regional development agencies - £1,762 million

That is 7billion for a start. And you wouldn't even notice that they'd been axed.

Richard Thompson "The New St George"

Richard Thompson is in my top 2 guitarists ever. This track is from his 1972 debut album "Henry the Human Fly". I was one of the few who bought the album when it was released and I wore it out through repeat playings. RT has the ability to tap deep into the subject he sings about, so that the words resonate with truth and never seem to date. I just wish Id found this video last week for St Georges Day.



"Don't believe pretenders who say they would defend us
While they flash their teeth and wave the other hand is being paid
They choke the air and bleed us, these noble men who lead us
Leave the factory leave the forge and dance to the New St George"

Jeff Beck & Tal Wilkenfeld

Jeff Beck is in my top 2 guitarists of all time. (The other is Richard Thompson).
I bought Beck's album "Blow by Blow" in the mid 70s and it stillsounds fresh today, no doubt due to the production by George Martin, but mostly because of Beck's awesome guitar talent.
Both Beck and Thompson are able to play instrumental solos without once resorting to riffs, fillers or cliches.
This is Jeff Beck filmed at Ronnie Scott's a couple of years ago. I'm knocked out by his bass player Tal Wilkenfeld who looks about 14, but was 21 when this was filmed.
Watching Beck and Thompson play guitar makes me want to give up. Ive been trying to play this song "Cos we've ended as lovers for more than 30 years but I can't get the variety of tone or attack that Beck manages effortlessly.
I've also been playing bass a lot, but seeing Tal strut her stuff, and look like she's having so much fun- well, I better take up kazoo.

Give me strength

461 Ocean Boulevard was one of my albums of the seventies. I havent heard it in years. I was reminded of this track today so I searched on Youtube and here it is in all its simple glory.

Gordons gaffe

The one eyed gurner was caught out again today. The mad fool forgot that he was still wired up to the Sky news cameras and told the listening world what he really thought about the woman he d been speaking to a few seconds before.
The Daily Mash has a great twist to the story here-
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/tories-will-scrap-free-tv-licence-for-bigoted-old-hags%2c-says-brown-201004282688/

I particularly like this bit
"Senior Labour figures have expressed unease at Mr Brown's new tactic but there are suggestions that unbridled verbal assaults on elderly widows could strengthen the party's position with the thousands of educated, middle class voters who are embarrassed by their own parents.

One Labour source said: "We'll have to wait for the overnight numbers, but if it's working then from now until polling day we'll be targeting defenceless old ladies, preferably wheelchair-bound after a violent robbery.

"Perhaps he could hit one of them in the face with a spanner."

UPDATE
The Daily Motion has this Downfall parody. Very rude and very funny

The importance of being important

Alan Yentob is all over the Grauniad defending why he has to travel business class. He says he wouldnt be able to do his job if he had to travel with the ordinary folk in steerage.
You can read about it here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/28/bbc-alan-yentob-job-business-class

Why is he flying at all? The BBC are so committed to Global Warming/Climate Change that they take every available opportunity to tell us how bad CO2 and air travel is for the planet.
But that is only for the sheeple. Important people like Alan Botney (he should spell his name backwards so that it sound more like a man of the people)have to travel by air because they are important.

Its the USSR all over again. Peasants with carts on rutted roads while the important people have whole lanes of the motorways for the own personal use.

Important people are important because they are important. Its important you know that.

Why AGW is the new religion

I've been posting on other forums recently and one topic led to a discussion where I drew comparisons between the modern day religion of global warming/climate change and the pre-reformation Catholic Church.
Both were intolerant of dissent, although AGW heretics haven't been burnt at the stake- yet. They have however been denied funding and patronage in the same way as early scientists who refused to believe the church's official stance that the sun and stars revolved around the earth, which was at the centre of the universe. Any dissent from this official view meant imprisonment.
Wikipedia states that "Galileo's championing of Copernicanism was controversial within his lifetime, when a large majority of philosophers and astronomers still subscribed (at least outwardly) to the geocentric view that the Earth is at the centre of the universe. After 1610, when he began publicly supporting the heliocentric view, which placed the Sun at the centre of the universe, he met with bitter opposition from some philosophers and clerics, and two of the latter eventually denounced him to the Roman Inquisition early in 1615. In February 1616, although he had been cleared of any offence, the Catholic Church nevertheless condemned heliocentrism as "false and contrary to Scripture", and Galileo was warned to abandon his support for it—which he promised to do. When he later defended his views in his most famous work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, he was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy," forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest."
Nowadays the only way one can get science funding is if you accept global warming as a fact. Being a sceptic means no career.

So the first similarity between AGW and pre-reformation Christianity is to do with partonage and heresy.

The second similarity is to do with money.
Indulgences were a pardon for certain types of sin that was sold by the Catholic Church in the late medieval period. The sale of indulgences motivated Martin Luther to post the "95 Theses, which led to the Reformation.
These days they're called carbon credits. Carbon transactions is a booming market, worth $126 billion last year alone. The eureferendum.blogspot site says this "The larger part of the market actually comprises the EU's mandatory Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – and other very much smaller allowance schemes - accounting for 73 percent of trading volume in 2008.
This mechanism was formally created in 1997 by the Kyoto climate treaty and started operating in a very small way in 1998 building to 78 million "credits" (or Certified Emission Reductions, CERs, as they are formally known) to 333 million this year with a projection of 1.7 billion by the end of 2012."

Both the Christian faith and Climate Science started out as honest institutions that were gradually infiltrated and corrupted by the power hungry and greedy.
The Christian church underwent a painful and bloody reformation that resulted in many dead saints.

Science has been devalued and dragged through the mud by the corruption. Nothing less than a revolution will clean it up and put it back on track.

Vote Mebyon Kernow

I was born in Cornwall and go back there as often as I can. If I lived there I would support these people.

X-Factor politics

The Last ditch has an excellent post about the current election and the fact that we have three parties all sharing the same centre ground. You can read it here.
http://lastditch.typepad.com/lastditch/2010/04/the-same-difference.html#comment-6a00d83451f09b69e20133ece34e04970b

I just posted this on my Facebook page "Ayn Rand said this "There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil." And we have three political parties all competing for the middle ground."

The author of The Last Ditch has this to say-

As voters peer and struggle to discern the differences between the parties now in contention, the truth is that - in key respects - they are the same. They are all Party X.
Vote for party X and this will happen:

1. You will work (if you work) for half the year for the government
2. The government will take the fruits of your labour and give them to the least deserving people of the world, whether they be African dictators (to buy weapons to use against their people), domestic criminals (to buy weapons to use against you when they burgle your house) or busybodies (to equip them to interfere in your life).
3. The government will believe that it knows what is best for you, despite being staffed by people every bit as prone to error as you are yourself.
4. The government will continue to make you hated or ridiculed in the rest of the world (and expose your warriors to danger) by conducting itself as if a small island nation of no particular current consequence was morally superior to all others.
5. Political games will be played at Westminster, while the laws are made by unelected men and women in Brussels.
6. Most of our children will be tragically denied a decent education while one side of the House of Commons rails but does nothing and the other side stokes envy of the few who do what all decent parents would if they could only afford it
7. Serious criminals will be glamourised, coddled and protected, while decent people will be criminalised to make them docile (and give the police some cheap wins).
8. The government will get larger.
9. The economy will rise and fall periodically, while the underlying trend in terms of the lifestyle an ordinary person's wage can buy continues downwards.
10. Our leaders will try to bask in the reflected glory of our daughter civilisation in America, while the worst (and I fear the most) of us continue secretly to envy it and wish it ill.

Now aint that the truth.

Ash & dust

Heres the map showing extent of the ash/dust cloud from the Icelandic volcano as of yesterday. The area marked in red is the no-fly zone.

Spot the difference? Last week they shut down the European airspace based upon a computer model, without any testing or sampling of the atmosphere.

So the actual risk area is revealed to be tiny, and once again weve been dumped on by numpties who spend all day looking at computers instead of measuring the real world.When they actually sent planes up there to measure how much dust and ash there is, the risk was downgraded and the world was allowed to get back to normal.

Im puzzled by all this. One, planes fly through dust and sand every day without harm. So why was this dust cloud considered so dangerous?
Two, it seems that those who rule us take great delight in keeping us guilty and scared. They manipulate data to try and scare us into believing that the world is going to end in a fireball, or that polar bears are going to swim down my street because the ice caps have melted. Next they scare us into panic over a flu virus that ended up killing fewer people that the ordinary kind.

There is a motive behind it. The only weapons they have to control us are guilt and fear. Its always been this way. For centuries we were ruled by kings who had armies and the church to administer the fear and guilt.
Now we are ruled by......
Whoever they are, their weapons are still the same.

Google censors parodies

Wattsupwiththat are reporting that Google are censoring a video that parodies Michael Mann and his "hide the decline" stance.

Apparently Google are taking down all the Hitler parodies as well. This is what Adolf had to say when he found out.

Fuss about nothing?

The airlines have revolted and are flying planes into UK airspace, forcing the airports to open.
Millions have had their travel plans disrupted and the MotoGP race due to take place this weekend has been cancelled.
So what is actually going on?

The Register is reporting this-

"So the UK Met Office closed European civilian airspace on the basis of one computer model, which it didn't check against reality. We already knew that the great volcano shut-down was based on a model, but we didn't know how little atmospheric sampling was performed to test the simulation against the atmosphere. It turns out only four test flights have been made to sample the composition of the cloud.
Matthias Ruete, the European Commission's transport chief, accused the Mystic Met of preferring virtual reality to evidence. "We have a model that runs on mathematical projections. It is probability rather than things happening," he said.
As a result the Met Office continued to issue projections of where it thought the ash cloud should be, but was unable to report its density and composition with confidence. These are critical vital factors an airline needs to know. European airlines sounded the alarm on Sunday, when they noticed that the satellite pictures didn't tally with the centre's output."

You can read the rest of the article here-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/20/mystic_met_volcano_model/

So what is going on? I assume that the insurers hold the key. Everybody fears being sued and nobody is willing to put their jobs on the line.

Im a big fan of Ayn Rands "Atlas Shrugged". In her book the action revolves around a transcontinental railway as airlines hadn't taken hold in the US when she wrote it.
However, the parallels are uncanny.

Then there is the governments response. What response I hear  you say? Exactly.

A TV presenter named Dan Snow took three inflatable boats to Calais to collect some friends. The French authorities wouldnt let him take them for hours. In the end he was able to bring some Brits home, but not his friends.
The media picked up on this and the government was stung into action.

I can imagine the conversation-
PM- We must do something!
Flunky- That bloke off the TV has taken some boats to Calais in a rerun of Dunkirk. He s getting all the media attention.
PM- Media attention? We must do something about that. Theres an election going on.
Flunky- Why not a rerun of Dunkirk? You know, send a warship or two over to collect our people?
PM- We must do something. Were losing in the polls!
Flunky- This is something.
PM- Let's do it! Erm, do we have any ships left?

Its a fiasco of the worst kind. Knee jerk politics. Media hype and scaremongering.

Ayn Rand was right all along.

Visiting Time

Seen on Aulde Holborne's Facebook page. Genius!!

The Browns at Broadmoor Hospital.

You couldn't make this up.

The Times is reporting that the Pope has called for Christians to “do penance” in the face of “world attacks” on the Church over the clerical abuse scandals.
At a Mass in the Pauline Chapel of the Vatican for members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission the Pope, who turns 83 tomorrow and is to make a two-day visit to Malta at the weekend, said: “I have to say that we Christians, including in recent times, have often avoided the word penance, which seemed to us too harsh.”
He added: “Now, under attack from the world, which talks to us of our sins, we can see that being able to do penance is a grace and we see how necessary it is to do penance and thus recognise what is wrong in our lives”.
You can read it here
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7098470.ece

Well excuse me Mr Ratzinger. I didn't molest the kids and cover it up. Your priests did. And they did it when you were in charge and could do something about it.

Your statement sums up what is wrong with your church.
You presume a moral authority over other Christians.
You rule your clergy by denying them the right to a normal married life.
You rule your church through guilt and fear.
You claim infallibility for yourselves.

And now you want Christians everywhere to do penance for your sins?
Jesus died for your sins. You don't need to do penance. No-one does.
And the idea of making me do it in your place reveals what a den of thieves the church has become.
The Bible says quite clearly that judgement will begin with the church.
It is beginning.

Saturday night pool party

We have a pool table in our back garden. Every home should have one. On Saturday night Chris and Heather invited Jamie & Rachel around for an evening of pool. Of course, being mid April, it gets dark before nine o'clock, so the ever resourceful Chris rigged a couple of Par64 lighting cans so that they could carry on playing.

A few minutes later he came inside to say that they could see the volcanic ash that had grounded all the flights across the UK and Europe. I went out and yes, you could clearly see that the air was full of tiny specks that glistened under the lights, although they were invisible to the naked eye.
Could this stuff really down an aeroplane? The experts say yes, if there was enough of it.
Take a look at this short video. If it was mid summer you could argue that it was insects, but this is England in April. It's too early by at least a month. And there were no barbies last night.

grounded by dust

Here's a picture of the volcanic ash cloud, as seen from space. Although it can be seen from space, the BBC have said that you can't see it when you look up in the sky. It seems a bit far north to have affected the whole of the UK, but many people are enjoying the peace that comes from not having an airplane flying overheard every few minutes.
I live in Northamptonshire and we're on the flightpath for every transatlantic flight that uses the polar route, along with all the domestic flights and the military traffic from the US into Mildenhall.
I've lived here for twenty years and when we first moved in we were regularly buzzed by US A-10 tankbusters flying overhead at zero feet. Apparently they weren't fitted with radar and the pilots had to navigate with an A-Z atlas on their knees. A friend saw two A-10s take evasive action when a Tornado almost hit them head on, just to the west of Daventry. No they didn't see him coming. We used to see all manner of aircraft flying overhead, from modern military jets to vintage warbirds. We don't see so many nowadays.
The most unusual aircraft that I saw flying overhead was a Tupolev TU95 Bear, on its way back to Russia after appearing at an airshow at Fairford. The noise was deafening.
I've seen the Battle of Britain flight overhead countless times, plus the odd Spitfire and Hurricane. When my friends Nicki Gillis and Tracy Dann came to tea last year, I was able to treat them to the sight of a lone Spitfire doing an aerobatic display over a village a mile or two away. There's nothing quite like the sound of a Merlin engine, except two or four of them.
Then there's the B-17 Sally B, once a regular sight overhead, along with Mitchell B-25s, Mustangs, C-47 Dakotas and many more.
The most recent and most stirring sight was the spectacle of the Vulcan bomber accompanied by six stunt planes as they repeatedly overflew the town.
We don't see them anymore.
And the reason why is the same reason why there are no planes flying today.
Insurance.
No Insurance company will insure a passenger plane taking off into a sky that might be full of volcanic ash, a powder that is so fine that you can hardly see it, yet it will scour aircraft windscreens and remove paint from wing edges. It will heat up and turn to glass if it's sucked into jet engines. Only one aircraft has survived flying into a cloud of volcanic ash. That was almost thirty years ago and insurers won't take the risk.
And sad to say but it's becoming harder and harder to buy insurance for classic planes. And that's a pity because there's nothing like the sound of a Dakota from Coventry Bagington flying overhead, except a Merlin powered Spitfire, Lancaster or Mustang of course.


PS- The global warming alarmists must be going spare. All that CO2 being discharged into the atmosphere and nobody to blame. All that dust will affect the weather for some time as well. You can't blame that on us.
Some wag on another site wondered if the cloud was Iceland's response to the UK government's demand to repay their bank debts.

Windfarms sinking into the sea

"Hundreds of Britain's offshore wind turbines could be sinking into the sea because of a design flaw.
It is believed the concrete used to fix some turbines to their steel foundation can wear away, causing the power generators to drop a few inches. "

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1265886/Sinking-turbines-cost-British-wind-farms-50million.html
Ok, where to start?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sorry, got a bit carried away there.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

It reminds me of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "One day all this will be yours. They told I was mad to build a castle in the middle of a swamp but I went ahead and built it anyway......."

Lies, damn lies and statistics

Here are a couple of graphics from the excellent Wattsupwiththat site
They both use exactly the same data. Exactly the same.

And this

One graphic has been designed to give the impression that we're all doomed. can you tell which one it is?
Read more here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/13/lies-damned-lies-statistics-and-graphs/#more-18419

UKIP won't field a candidate in Kettering

Lord Pearson named the Conservative candidates Ukip would not run against as Philip Davies (Shipley), Douglas Carswell (Clacton), Janice Small (Batley and Spen), Alex Story (Wakefield), and Philip Hollobone (Kettering).

It will also not run against Labour's David Drew in Stroud and independent Bob Spink in Castle Point.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1265680/General-Election-2010-UKIP-wont-stand-key-marginals-Tory-candidate-anti-Europe.html#ixzz0l0eGRXhr

That's actually made choosing who to vote for easier.

Why comments will not be moderated

This was posted on The Register today. You can read it in full here-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/08/user_comments_ruling/

"A blog owner can avoid liability for user-generated content that appears on his site without being checked or moderated, the High Court has ruled. But fixing the spelling or grammar in users' posts could lose him that protection, it said.

The Court ruled that the operator of blogging site Labourhome.org could not have a libel case struck out. The site operator, Alex Hilton, had said that his argument that he deserved exemption as a service provider was so strong that a trial was not necessary. The Court disagreed."

Hmmm. Any wishing to comment on my posts had better check their spelling or I might get into trouble...

RIP Malcolm Maclaren

ell, he kept that quiet didn't he? MM dies of cancer aged 64. And no-one knew he was fighting it.


MM was the best publicist in the 70s and the 80s. He gave the music business a good kick up the arse just when it needed it. I don't know your views on punk music, but it came along at just the right time.

Music works in ten year cycles. The post war 40s period started in 1945/6. It was a time of austerity but also of change. Sinatra and Crosby were still at the top, but things were happening. Crosby's guitar player was Les Paul. He was an innovator and was determined to be different from the others around him. He was on tour with the Andrews Sisters when he rang his mother who said that she'd heard him on the radio the evening before. It wasn't him, but an imitator. He immediately came off tour and retired to his garage where he set about devising a new sound, a new way of recording. Within a year or so or so he'd invented multi-track  and multi speed recording. He also designed what is arguably the most successful guitar ever built- the Gibson Les Paul. The Forties belong to him.

The Fifties began in 1955/6 with the skiffle boom. As a reaction to the over-arranged technically excellent big band music which was great to play but beyond the scope of the average teenager, skiffle gave anyone the opportunity to make music. Simple songs, three chords, perfect.
Every pop star of the early sixties started out playing skiffle in the fifties. When Rock 'n Roll hit the UK, there were thousands of guitar playing youth who latched on to the rhythm. The fifties belonged to Rock & Roll.

The Sixties began in 1965/6 when the Beatles, who began as a skiffle group, progressed through country rock, rock and roll and early Tamla and became the biggest band of the day. As they pushed the musical boundaries, aided and abetted by their producer George Martin, it opened a way for players to stretch themselves musically. The Sixties spawned the Guitar Hero. Clapton, Beck and Paige all began their careers playing the the Yardbirds. As the sixties progressed, the music got more complicated, as bands became more interested in releasing albums than releasing singles. The Sixties was also the era of Prog-Rock, long hair and greatcoats. In parallel with this the music became more flamboyant, with complex stage shows and artists wearing make up. The Sixties was the time when mainstream entertainment embraced rock music. We had Glam Rock.  It was a long way from music on the street.


The Seventies began in 1975/6, exactly on time. I was playing in a rock group then. We played pubs and small venues in Northamptonshire, with the occasional foray into London. We played the Marquee, the Greyhound in Fulham Palace Road, and other pubs in and around the capital. We were playing mostly original material, a sort of poor man's Thin Lizzy but without the talent. As we got changed in the "dressing room" (a toilet or cleaning cupboard) we'd look at the graffitti and I noticed that the Stranglers, Sex Pistols and 101ers were also playing the same venues. The 101ers became the Clash. The writing was on the wall for us. Our music was out of date and  there was nothing we could do but to pack it in and try something different. Punk was in.

MM was brilliant at manipulating the media. At its heyday, there were never more than 1000 or so punk fans in the country, but they were loud, fervent and loyal and they worked together to create a phenomenon, orchestrated by MM.


MM was a little like John Peel, who promoted music that was out of the ordinary. Where MM differed was that he did it for the notoriety and for the money. When the Sex Pistols imploded he looked for something different to promote. We had Bow Wow Wow, a band that had everything- except for a decent song. I'd moved out of music by the early-mid eighties and lost touch with what he was doing.

The Eighties began in 1985/6 with the beginnings of sampled music and the birth of hip-hop. Once again the music of the previous decade had become more and more complicated and remote from the average boy/girl in the street. The thing about hip-hop and its sub genres was that anyone could rap, anyone could make this music. I understand the MM had a hand in making this music known.

The Nineties began in 1995/6 with the birth of Britpop, a reaction to the manufactured pap of the boybands and Stock Aitken and Waterman. Britpop had its own bad boys in the shape of the Gallaghers, so MM wasn't needed.

The Noughties began- when? The Noughties were the decade of the celebrity, when people were famous for being famous. The Noughties were the decade of the TV Talent Show, when karaoke singers vied to be the label on the latest tin of beans from the pop factory. The Noughties were the decade when the youth ignored the music business altogether and did their own thing.
The Noughties were also the decade when music became an arm of government, when music was used as a tool to keep the mob in line, subdued.

Which was why subversives like MM had no part of it. MM couldn't play, sing or act. He just was. And the world needs more like him.

Ian Dale on Chris Grayling

Ian Dale jumped into the Chris Grayling "row" on Saturday.
In his post he makes this rather stupid and uninformed comment-

"I fundamentally disagree with him on the main issue. This is not about property rights. If you open your house to paying guests, it is no longer just your house. You are running a business, just the same as anyone else, and you should be subject to the same laws as anyone else. If you do not wish gay people, black people, Jews or anyone else in your house, don't open it to the public. Simple as that. No one would accept a shopowner refusing to serve a particular type of person, would they?"

And that's where he is wrong. I worked in retail for over twenty years. Shops are private property. So are shopping centres and retail parks. There is no public right of way. The public are invited onto the premises. If I wanted to ask someone to leave, that was within my rights as the company's representative.
Retailers are under no legal obligation to sell. All items are offered at a particular price and can be withdrawn at any time. The customer has no legal right to demand an item at a certain price. If an item is mis-priced it is quite legitimate for the manager to withdraw that item from sale. That is the law. The manager can, at his discretion and in order to foster goodwill, sell a product at a cheaper price if it is damaged. He is under no legal obligation to do so.
So, if a bunch of louts with nothing better to do came into my shop to use it as a playground I could and did ask them to leave.
I could and did eject someone I suspected of trying to steal from my shop. They had no legal recourse. We invite people in. I withdrew the invitation.
If I caught someone stealing from my shop I always called the police, and that person was permanently banned from entering the store. I said this in the presence of the police, and confirmed that if they tried to enter the shop again they would be arrested for tresspass.
Now which part of that don't you understand Iain?

Greenpeace is neither green nor peaceful

I was encouraged to have a look at this post on the greenpeace website. It's here-
http://weblog.greenpeace.org/climate/2010/04/will_the_real_climategate_plea_1.html

Greenpeace? Aren't they the vandals who commit piracy on the high seas? Aren't they the political lobbyists who want to return the world to pre-industrial times?
Yes on both counts. Here's some passages from their website. I encourage you to read it for yourself.

"What do you do when patient petitioning, protest marches and court orders fail? What do you do when all the protocols and cheat codes of democracy fail? This is what you do: you reclaim the language of democracy from the twisted bunch that have hijacked, cannibalized and subverted it."

Ok, so how do you intend to do this?


"We need to hit them where it hurts most, by any means necessary: through the power of our votes, our taxes, our wallets, and more.
We need to be inclusive. We need to join forces with those within the climate movement that are taking direct action to disrupt the CO2 supply chain. We need to embrace the conservatives too, the ones that choose scientific rigour and court injunctions as their weapons."

So what do you mean by direct action?
If you hit the link to Beyondtalk you will read

"But time is far too short to shut down one site at a time. Massive action is needed today, in order to: 

ensure climate justice for the affected communities around the world that contribute the least to the problem, but are already feeling the effects 

Implement a real deal that does not rely on carbon trading, offsets, or other false solutions 

Keep all fossil fuels in the ground, and drastically reduce emissions 

End subsidies to climate polluters including oil and gas, coal, industrial bio-fuels, nuclear power, etc. 

End mountaintop removal and industrial logging of primary forests immediately 

Invest in local union jobs driven by purpose, not profit, and protect our community health"

Lunacy. utter lunacy. And it goes on-

"The politicians have failed. Now it's up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It's not working. We need an army of climate outlaws."

And to reinforce their stance- 

"If you're one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:
We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work."

All my dealings with warmists and greenists have shown one consistency in their attitude.They're always rude and intolerant of anything other than the party line. They're mad, bad and dangerous.  Their foot soldiers have been brainwashed into pushing for a pre-industrial world where life expectancy will plummet and only the very rich and their bosses will be able to travel anywhere. At the very heart they're not green, and they're not peaceful.



H/T to Devil's Kitchen

UPDATE- Greenpeace have removed the offending post, but you can still read it here-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/06/damage-control-greenpeace-removes-threats/

Good Friday

I'm a Christian who no longer goes to church. My faith in Jesus remains the same, but I no longer have any faith in organised religion. You've seen the papers and you don't need a sermon from me.

Isaac Watts was one of the first hymn writers. The established church at the time pilloried him for daring to write hymns. The only words that could be used in church were those written in the Bible, and any other words were sacrilege.
It's reassuring to know that nothing changes.

This is, in my opinion, the finest hymn in the English language

When I survey the wondrous cross
on which the Prince of Glory died;
my richest gain I count but loss,
and pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
save in the death of Christ, my God;
all the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to his blood.

See, from his head, his hands, his feet,
sorrow and love flow mingled down.
Did e'er such love and sorrow meet,
or thorns compose so rich a crown.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
that were an offering far too small;
love so amazing, so divine,
demands my soul, my life, my all.

Isaac Watts 1674-1748

Happy Easter!

Car scrappage scheme ends

The government car scrappage scheme has now ended. It cost £400,000 and the government claims that it helped save 4000 jobs.
Full story here
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/research/2010/03/expensive-scrappage.html


Do the maths. It works out that the government spent £100,000 of taxpayers money to safeguard a job that probably pays £25,000 pa. Someone on £25k probably pays 8k in taxes and NI, so they spend £100k and get 8k back.


Sound economics eh?


http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/research/2010/03/expensive-scrappage.html

UPDATE. All the cars are stored on the runway at Thurleigh. Sensible eh? The government paid to empty acres of new cars stored on runways, and left thousands of older cars in their place.

The first soviet style show trial

We all know about baby P. We know how disfunctional the Social Services were. We all know that it cost Sharon Shoesmith her job. We all know that.


The Daily Mail's article here
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1262812/Baby-P-report-Sharon-Shoesmith-beefed-justify-sacking.html
reports that Ed Balls ordered that the report into the scandal be "beefed up" in order to intensify pressure on Ms Shoesmith, and in time she was dismissed, with the full approval of mad Hatty Harperson's "court of public opinion".


I'm not disputing that Ms Shoesmith should have been sacked. She should never have been appointed in the first place. Overpromoted individuals are commonplace in most organisations, but the current obsession with quotas and political correctness has enables incompetents to get into positions of influence based solely on their ability to spout jargon and knowing the right people. Ms Shoesmith is one such person.


However, Ed Balls insistence that they rewrite the report in order to get Shoesmith sacked, if proven, has set a dangerous precedent. We have now returned to Stalinist style purges and show trials.


So who will be next?

Local Government Rich List

The Taxpayer's Alliance have been doing some heavyweight research to find out exactly how much the local government fat cats are troughing.
The results can be found here
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/thrl2010.pdf
It's almost 200 pages long but it's worth checking up how much the top dogs and bitches at your local council are trousering.
There are at least 1250 of them earning more than £100,000 a year, and in this time of economic uncertainty, where many in the private sector have either lost their jobs, had below inflation pay rises or indeed, pay freezes or cuts, isn't it heartening to know that this figure has grown by 14% since 2007-8?
Well no actually.
These people are public servants. They serve us. Remember that.

I checked the list and found that Corby Borough Council don't have anyone earning more than £100k, but Kettering Borough Council's Town Clerk (or as he prefers to be addressed, Chief Executive) David Cook earns a whopping £145,000.
My council tax goes to pay his salary, then his pension, then the other salaries, then their pensions... oh and if there's anything left, they might empty my bin every couple of weeks.
I worked as a binman as an agency temp a few years ago. It was hard work and I was paid the national minimum wage, which as everyone knows, is actually the national maximum wage.
If the Chief Executive's pay were cut back to £100k (still four times the national average) they could afford to employ a couple more bin men. They'd be a lot more useful.

Northants County Council have seven people earning more than £100k. I'm not sure what any of them actually do, as their titles are in government doublespeak. I mean, what exactly is a "Director for Community Leadership"? We pay him/her over £117k. Nice little earner that.
And the Chief Executive gets almost £180k!

East Northants Town Clerk (sorry, chief executive) earned about £105k


South Northants failed to respond to the TPA's Freedom of Information requests.
Remember that. "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear"?

Northampton Borough Council also refused to give the information, despite being asked under the Freedom of Information Act. "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear", eh?




Wellingborough council's chief executive "only" earned £110k. Compared to Kettering, that's good value. Both Corby and Wellingborough have free car parking for their shoppers and their chief executives earn far less than Kettering's.
Does this mean that parking charges in my town are there to help pay the Chief Executive's salary? We need to be told.


I encourage you all to have a look at the TPA report, and ask yourself if our local councils are serving us, or are we serving them?


http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/thrl2010.pdf

April 1st

It's April 1st, April Fools Day, traditionally the day when the media publish spoof stories. I bought a copy of the Daily Mail and scanned the pages to see if I could find the spoof stories among the genuine ones.


One of these stories is a spoof. But which one?
Is it this one?


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1262584/First-wives-swept-aside-whim-rich-powerful-Top-barristers-wife-wins-215-000-payout-husband-divorced-25-years-ago.html

Apparently a barrister's ex-wife has successfully won another £215k payout 25 years after they divorced. My first marriage ended almost 30 years ago. Does this verdict open the door to my ex-wife sueing me for money to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed half a lifetime ago? You couldn't make that up, could you?


What about this one?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1262533/The-Hubble-Bubble-tower-welcome-visitors-London-2012-Olympics.html


A huge twisted pile of rusty looking steel will be the lasting monument to the London Olympics. Ironic eh? They allowed the Stratford area of East London to become run down so that it resembled a bomb site, with ruined factories and warehouses everywhere, then clear away all the wreckage and leave in its place a huge pile of twisted steel, designed and funded by foreigners. They are having a laugh at our expense aren't they? This is the April fool story, isn't it?




Ok, is it this one?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1262708/Goldfish-seller-Joan-Higgins-gets-used-life-tagged-criminal.html


Pet shop owner gets caught in a sting mounted by trading standards for selling a goldfish to a 14 year old (a crime that didn't exist 4 years ago) and is fined £1000, is placed under curfew and has to wear a tag. That has to be a spoof doesn't it?


This one?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1262697/Auctioneer-Jim-Railton-fined-1-000-selling-oak-cabinet-bird-eggs-inside.html

An auctioneer with 20 years experience has been fined £1000 for attempting to sell a 100 year old wooden cabinet complete with 100 year old eggs, most of which were broken. He was arrested, fingerprinted, a DNA swab taken before being bailed.
He turned up in court expecting a wrist slapping, but no he was fined £1000 and had to pay costs.

"A spokesman for the RSPB said: 'We are very happy with the result. The fine imposed by the magistrates shows the importance of these cases.'

Dear RSPB, you will never receive a penny from me again.
Oh, and all the stories are genuine. It's too depressing for words.