Modern myths

Christmas is for many people a time when they can eat and drink to excess.

But what constitutes excess? And how is it measured?

Let's look at the "Safe" limits for drinking. Where did they originate? What scientific research was carried out that led researchers to their conclusion?
According to this blog
http://timworstall.com/2007/10/20/those-safe-drinking-limits/

" Guidelines on safe alcohol consumption limits that have shaped health policy in Britain for 20 years were “plucked out of the air” as an “intelligent guess”.
The Times reveals today that the recommended weekly drinking limits of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women, first introduced in 1987 and still in use today, had no firm scientific basis whatsoever."

A best guess. That's all it could be. Surely a five foot tall adult male weighing seven stone will have a different tolerance to alcohol than a six foot six male weighing eighteen stone? So how can one standard be applied? More nonsense and scaremongering.

What about the Five-a-Day healthy eating campaign? You know we're all supposed to eat five portions of fruit and/or veg in order to stay healthy. Where did they find the scientific proof of that?

The answer is - they didn't. According to this article
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1349960/5-day-fruit-vegetables-myth-claims-nutrition-expert.html

"It started as a marketing campaign dreamt up by around 20 fruit and veg ­companies and the U.S. National Cancer Institute at a meeting in California in 1991"

That's right- an advertising campaign by fruit and veg companies. No bias or vested interest there then.

So- whatever you're doing this Christmas- enjoy yourself. My advice (which is worthless) is to drink moderately and only eat what you normally eat. It's up to you to decide what is moderate. We're all different. And don't you forget it.

What must we do to be rid of Mad Gordon?

Rasputin was repudedly stabbed in the abdomen. He recovered from that. He was then poisoned with cyanide in cakes, then shot in the back. This didn't kill him so they shot him three more times and beat him up,castrated him wrapped his body in a carpet and dumped him in the river. The stabbing, poisoning, gun shots and castration didn't kill him. He drowned in the frozen river.

Why do I think of Rasputin whenever Gordon Brown's name is mentioned?

Hung

I

It's Sunday night and the horse trading goes on. This will end in tears for all of us. The electorate voted on Thursday and they have spoken. The politicians are sticking their fingers in their ears and going "Lalala can't hear you".

Just over 60% of the electorate voted and just over a quarter of them chose Labour. Whichever way you read it, that's hardly a vote of confidence.
In Brown's own constituency the turnout was among the lowest. True, he increased his majority, but that was because the majority of his constituents either voted against him or stayed at home. How clear a message does he need to be sent?

The Tories got some of the "Anyone but Brown" vote, as did the LibDems. Unfortunately neither party offers a real alternative to Labour.
It's the same old policies, the same old politicians, only they've got different coloured rosettes on.

The political system is in a mess. The three main parties all appeal to the centre ground. It's like daytime TV or commercial radio. They've studied the demographic and have tailored their programme to a mythical typical viewer/listener/voter.
Anyone who has the misfortune to watch daytime TV will soon notice that every channel offers the same programme mix at the same time.
A few years ago I used to record a one-minute "thought for the day" for our local radio station. I chatted to the staff about who they thought was listening and they said there were two "typical listeners".
One was a twenty something female who listened to the radio while getting ready for work. She typically listened for fifteen to twenty minutes. The other was also female, middle aged, at home during the day, etc etc. Every element of their programming was aimed at these mythical creatures.**
Daytime TV also seems to aim at a particular demographic. After the Breakfast news programmes, which basically repeat every fifteen minutes because that's how long their typical viewer is alleged to watch; you get makeover programmes, antiques programmes, house buying programmes. Or car crash TV like Jeremy Kyle.
If you switch TV channels to find something different you soon find that each channel is aimed at the same mythical demographic.
Choice? There's no choice. The people who make the programmes have chosen according to what they believe the viewing public wants.

So it is with the current political landscape. Somewhere deep in the bunkers the strategists have identified the person they are appealing to. The floating voter. They have tried to second guess what he believes and what he wants.
Every five years the electorate get a chance to choose between the different varieties of political window dressing that they have selected for us.
It's like the TV Soap of the Year poll. The organisers select six programmes and you choose which one you like. If you don't like what's been chosen for you but would rather choose your own, tough. That's not how it works.
The electorate is given three very similar choices which are then advertised to death and various spin and polish added to make each one look more attractive than it is.
That's how it is supposed to work. Those who rule us have decreed it.
Only this time the electorate have in essence rejected all three.
Gordon Brown is so unpopular even his own MPs hate him.
Cameron is all style and no substance and is in thrall to his advisors. He is too scared to be a Conservative in case he alienates the mythical floating voter.
Clegg is good on TV. Full stop.

By failing to elect any party by a clear majority the electorate said that they are disattisfied. They're being ignored by virtue of living in a safe constituency, are ignored because their concerns about immigration, debt, corruption and the economy are not being adressed, and are fed up by being pandered to by tailor's dummies fronting huge spin operations. The electorate wanted honesty and transparency, leadership and openness.

So, three days on and what have they got?
The same old horse trading behind closed doors. The prospect of the parties that came second and third forming a government. The reality that their view have once again been dismissed.It will end in tears.

**(There were only a handful of staff at the radio station, mostly sellers of advertising space, with a couple of "presenters" recording links on to a computer. They could record a two hour show in about 20 minutes and the computer would play the tracks and the adverts and the links in the correct order. It sounded real, but was all an illusion. Btw, our local radio station is now broadcast from Peterborough. The studios are shut down. The signal is sent down the telephone line to a transmitter. That's the only local element)

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.

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?

Spin spin and more spin

I'm a bit late responding to this, as the original article was published in the Daily Mail yesterday
You can read it here
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1261290/HEATHER-BROOKE-The-great-razzle-dazzle-rip-off.html

The government is the biggest advertiser on tv. I've stopped watching them because they are almost all factually incorrect or biased or downright lies. Global warming, passive smoking, obesity, all designed to keep the population fearful and/or guilty.
The police, the NHS and local government spent countless millions every year on spin. Nobody in any of these organisations is allowed to speak to the media without the permission of the relevant press office.
This is from the Mail yesterday

"The TaxPayers' Alliance, the campaign group for lower taxes, trawled through 445 annual reports just for 2008 and then all those for previous years to compare spending.
The 2008 report revealed the average local authority spent £971,985 on publicity, with the total local authority publicity bill being £430million. Six local authorities each spend more than £5million annually on publicity, including Birmingham City Council, which spent more than £9million. Tower Hamlets, my old council and one of Britain's most deprived boroughs, spent £2,354,000 in 2007-08 on Press and PR - an increase of 82.6 per cent from ten years before."

Inspector Gadget reports that Northumbria Police nominated themselves and won a public relations award "for the way they handled the media after the tragedy of a schoolgirl knocked down and killed by a speeding patrol car."

I encourage you to visit his blogsite and read the article. You'll be astonished and appalled

 

http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/hayley-adamson-is-dead-but-nprthumbria-win-gold/

All this money being spent on press officers and media advisors instead of front line services. Thousands upon thousands of Comical Alis defending the indefensible.

Now you'll know where all those media studies and political science graduates got jobs. Very cosy.

Combatting scepticism by shouting loudly

Biased-BBC pointed me to an interesting article on this site
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/03/combating-the-growing-influence-of-climate-sceptics/




Now I'm an AGW sceptic. As far as I can see, global warming or climate change is all about money. There's money to be had by trading on people's fears and taxing them as punishment.
When the "climategate" story broke, it revealed to the world that the figures quoted by all the "authorities" were in fact made up. The antics of the warmists and their refusal to countenance any deviation from the party line, followed by calling us "denialists" only made me more convinced of the shakiness of their argument. The science is not settled, and when one party in a debate has to resort to name calling, then he has lost the debate, full stop.


The BBC and the Met Office are central to their cause. This was highlighted in a recent report commissioned by fake charity and political lobby group Oxfam . My eye was drawn to this line on the Leftfootforward site, which sums them up -
"Oh, and remember to check out James Delingpole’s column at the Telegraph. If any of it makes you angry, you might like to let him know. Did I say be polite? Scratch that."

So, more encouragement to be rude towards sceptics. You don't win arguments by shouting louder than everyone else.
Here's a handy little diagram that accompanies the article.

Click on it to enlarge it.

Get rid of the non jobs

The public sector Unison has recently launched a video that claims that cuts to public spending will hit front line services. This is called the Washington Monument Syndrome. Defined on Wiki as
"Washington Monument Syndrome, also called the "Mount Rushmore Syndrome", is the name of a political tactic used by bureaucrats when faced with reductions in the rate of projected increases in budget or actual budget cuts. The most visible and most appreciated service that is provided by that entity is the first to be put on the chopping block. The name derives from the National Park Service's habit of saying that any cuts to its projected increases would lead to an immediate closure of the wildly popular (and not very expensive to maintain) Washington Monument.

The Taxpayers Alliance have issued their version of Unison's video. It shows that public expenditure can be reduced without harming front line services
Check it out here

The lessons from history

A friend sent me a email with this message. The sad lesson we learn from history is that we never learn the lessons from history. I'm printing it in full and I hope you will read it and if your agree, let others know.


A German's View on Islam
A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II,
owned a number of large industries and estates.
When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. 'Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care.
I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools.
So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen.
Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'

We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace.
Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectre of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide.
It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave.
It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honour-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque.
It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.

The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.

China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And who can forget Rwanda , which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:

Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up,
because like my friend from Germany , they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun. 
 
 Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts--the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world-wide, read this and think about it, and send it on - before it's too late.

Stop spending our money promoting mythology!!!!

The Register and the Grauniad are both running stories about the government's "drowning dog" tv advert that was broadcast in December and January.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/24/ofcom_drowning_dog_probe/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/feb/24/ofcom-climate-change-bedtime-stories

I saw it and almost threw something at the TV. Here's the offending advert. (Caution- liable to induce stress related vomiting)



It seems that Ofcom are to investigate claims that the advert is blatant political advertisng, while the Advertising Standards Association (ASA) have received about 1000 complaints that it breached advertising standards. Too right it did.

The truth is out on AGW. It's a money making scam involving carbon trading credits.
Read this story for the full sick making extent
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/protecting-big-carbon.html

The advert cost £6m of our money and the news comes hard on the heels of the announcement that the department that produced this rubbish spent £600k of our money on Google adwords last year.

As a postscript to the Carbon Trading scam. On the day that the BBC made Tiger Wood's fake confession its no1 news item, Corus closed its Redcar steelworks.
Corus is owned by Tata.
This article may help explain why they closed it.
http://www.matador94.nl/global-climate-related/u-n-climate-chief-pachauri-cashes-in-on-tata-owned-corus-carbon-credits

" Mumbai-based Indian multinational conglomerate with business ties to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman since 2002 of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, stands to make several hundred million dollars in European Union carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain with the loss of 1,700 jobs.
The Tata Group headquartered in Mumbai anticipates receiving windfall profits of up to nearly $2 billion from closing the Corus Redcar steelmaking plant in Britain, with about half of the savings expected to result from cashing in on carbon credits granted the steelmaker by the European Union under the EU’s emissions trading scheme, or ETS."

Here's the link between Tata and Pachauri
"In 1974, the TATA Group provided the financial resources to found the Tata Energy Research Institute, or TERI, a policy organization headquartered in New Dehli, India, of which Pachauri has been chairman since the group was formed."

No wonder they chose to bury the news.

FFS!

Just when you think it couldn't get any crazier the Register is reporting this

"The government department responsible for climate change policy has admitted bidding against one of its own quangos for advertising on Google, forcing up the cost to taxpayers.
Ed Miliband's Department of the Environment and Climate Change (DECC) said it sometimes battles the Energy Saving Trust to sponsor links on the dominant web search engine.
DECC has spent £361,700 in the last 12 months on search keywords such as "climate change" and "global warming" to target Google users with government publicity urging them to cut their carbon emissions.
The Energy Saving Trust has meanwhile spent more than £270,000 on similar advertising in the last 12 months."

Quite apart from the fact that the whole AGW scam is discredited and is only about fleecing the paying public, we have the government spending our money on advertising on Google- more than half a million in the last year alone.

Give me a machette. I'll cut goverment spending at a stroke.

HM Goverment advertising

 HM Government is the biggest advertiser on UK TV and radio. They spend our money lecturing us on how we shoudl conduct our lives. They spend an absolute fortune on it.
My blog's been a bit heavy on Youtube videos lately, but this is worth 90 seconds of your time.
The video is produced by The Taxpayers Alliance.