You Can Always Rely On The Daily Mash...

...to put the entire Geert Wilders affair into perspective:

EXTREMISTS STOP 
EXTREMIST FROM 
SPREADING EXTREMISM
ABOUT EXTREMISTS
"We simply cannot have people coming to this country and saying things," warns Home Office maniac
Jacqui Smith: Home Office Loon.

When all the bloggers, dissidents, homosexuals, liberals, badgers are finally rounded up, and put in a NuLabour gulag, lets hope there'll still be satire...

Fitna'd Up

This is considered incitement to racial hatred.

This isn't.

Nor are these.

And neither are any of these.

And if they are (clearly) incitement the police are unwilling to do anything about them for public order fears. What the hell is wrong with this country? Since when was it ok to let mob rule dictate who deserves justice and who doesn't? This law is most certainly a bad one; you cannot claim to have freedom of speech in a country which closes down all debate in such a ridiculously one sided manner; those who use the "screaming fire in the cinema" arguement know this doesn't apply here- the only reason it is dangerous in this metaphor is because you know the occupants of said "cinema" will likely burn it down in retaliation.

Jacqui Smith, having already shown how little she thinks of the electorate by stealing from it so brazenly (and if you are innocent and feel you have done nothing wrong, you odious trollop, then why so focused on hiding them?), has also shown less regard to the spirit of this once great country; yes Geert Wilders looks like he should be attending a flock-of-seagulls reunion tour, yes he may some rather unpleasant opinions on matters, but any less so than what must go on in your crazy lunatic mind? Or what is pasted on the placards of half a dozen angry young asian men when some uppity Dane starts drawing Mohammed with a bomb for a hat?

You are the problem Jacqui, you and your festering kind who have sold out our democracy, made our parliament a joke, sold of our birthright and that of all free living peoples with cowardice. I wont advocate your hanging in parliament square though; I want you to see just what you have created, I want to see you lose your job because you were caught with your hand in the till, I want to see pay back the tens of thousands you have stolen and then I want to see you, broken and lost, wander into one of the council estate hell holes you have filled to the rafters with single parents, immigrants denied dignity and feral children and ask yourself am I happy with the world I help create?

You and your ilk have a lot to answer for.

UPDATE: Old Holborn, despite our differences in the past on subjects best left alone, hits the nail on the head with this post, albeit in his usual visceral manner.

The Icy Road to Serfdom

Now more relevant than ever. 

If you want to see which way this country is going read this - all it will cost you is a sock full of air.

I would add one thing to this entire episode; the credit crunch was not caused by capitalism as so many on the left have claimed over the past 6 months - capitalism would first have to exist. The "one-eyed Scottish idiot" and his predecessor Messiah Blair gave the keys and cashbox over to the corporations, the quangos, the EU and faux-charities to promote the conditions that have caused all of this; it is not so much Laissez-faire capitalism as but carte blanche corporatism.

Brown rode the debt bubble to pay for every grandiose crazy NuLabour scheme they could put through on their massive majority; we are all reaping the whirlwind for it now. Be very wary for calls to regulate markets and discussions of the "failures" of capitalism; other groups have mentioned this in the past and we all remember what happened there (third paragraph).

Stop Brown now (NOTE: write your own letter to her, and dont mention the EU)

UPDATE: The IEA blog tells it like it is. Be very wary of people with vested interests telling you it is all "capitalism's" fault like it was some sort of living entity.

Daddy Cool

Mine.

And in 6 short months everyone elses.

But what kind of world am I, or the cretin Gordo, leaving to it? What type of parent will I become? What type of child could they become? Or worse yet, will judicial and social activism, with no democratic oversight, remove my say in how I raise my child altogether?

I'm not going to go all daily hate on you, stating what I think what is right and what is wrong with homosexual adoption but there is something profoundly wrong with this picture; putting the blame on the couple wanting to care for the children, and then trying to explain why it wrong based on anecdotal evidence and moralistic proseltysing, just puts the blame in the wrong place.

I have several problems with this:

1. Like JuliaM, I think there is something profoundly wrong with the fact that the main reason they dropped the case was that it was bankrupting them; whilst most of us would say we would fight to the ends of the earth for our children and grandchildren, how many of us have actually had to prove it? Especially when it is against a loaded deck of professional social workers with a larger warchest to bring to the table and a loaded ideology.
2. At no point do you hear the judge awarding legal aid in this case (to be fair neither do you hear anything to the contrary, but thats just sloppy journalism on the part of the Daily Hate).
3. The social workers, as has become much more prevalent in left-leaning NuBritain, have resorted to emotional extortion - "do as we say or you never see your grandchildren again" is a pretty big piece of leverage; this is a clear abuse of power.

This is the world Blair and Brown have wrought; a world where blood relatives can be supplanted by the flavour-of-the-month minority group and the childrens happiness and development take a back seat to the statist's new social engineering wunderplan.

I'm all for adoption agencies allowing gay couples to adopt children; Lord knows I've seen enough bad heterosexual couples in my time to want to start compulsory sterilisation in the landed underclass in this country:

But I am dead against forcing them to make choices against conscience, whether it is inspired from religious views or otherwise. Why cant it be a choice made by the parent at registration of birth?

Any why oh why are social workers bellyaching over strong-arming grandparents into giving up their grandchildren to strangers when they cant even protect children from genuine threats from their "family"?

There is something hideously wrong with society when it perpetuates conditions that lead to this so readily; the only way we can deal with this is by taking responsibility for it, which means localising and democratising controls for social, police, health and welfare services; not in some meaningless fake "consultation" process, where NuLabour put forward their agenda, we bitch and moan about how it wont be effective and then they go ahead and do it, but one where there are consequences for the actions of those in public service:

You can lose your job if you are proven to be negligent in your duty.

You can lose your freedom if you are corrupt and have this proven.

You can be run out of town if you perpetuate injustice, whilst guilty men walk free.

Now is the time for localism. I just wish someone had a plan for this...and a vision for something different for Britain...

A Simple Request

My Queen,

Your country, that you have so diligently served for 56 years, is in terrible danger.

Since coming to power Prime Minister Tony Blair has taken us into 2 wars, corroded civil liberties with acts of parliament such as the anti-terror laws and ignored your parliaments due process by enacting European Union via the vastly undemocratic system of "statutory instrument".

His successor, Gordon Brown, who has never attained a mandate to govern your people, has undermined the economic standing of your currency - Sterling, that was once the watchword for safety and security on a turbulent world stage, has been brought to near death. Billions have been wasted on so called "public spending" which has only succeeded in increasing a criminal underclass, reliant on handouts, whilst dehumanising what should be acts of kindness and grace; the welfare of the weakest in our society. Under his watch it is increasingly likely that his inaction on tough decisions such as power generation and infrastructure will lead to the lights going out by 2012, and your people left at the mercy of criminals, illness and lawlessness, all for the want of a few extra police, doctors and entrepreneurs.

Additionally much of what remains of your parliament's decision making power has been spirited away to Brussels with little or no consultation to either yourself or your people; more than 70% or all laws in Britain are now made by the EU "Colleagues", sanctioned by a compliant group of EU parliamentarians and paid for by taxpayers who have not seen true account of this money or whether it has been spent wisely (or honestly) for over a decade.

Yes, your country is in danger, and I ask you to do something.

I am a simple person with simple goals in life; I wish to live free and with as little imposition from the state as is possible, that my labours remain my own save for a modest part to be used in defence of your realm, the welfare of the weak (and not the work-shy) and to ensure that justice is not only blind, but available to all.

I believe you are capable of doing this by doing the following:

When a Prime Minister wishes to dissolve Parliament and call a general election, he or she is obliged to seek the permission of the Sovereign to do so. For this purpose, the Prime Minister usually travels to Buckingham Palace before announcing a general election. This role is widely seen as ceremonial. 

My request is simple; that you dissolve parliament under your own volition - I do not believe this role is ceremonial, only taken as so by men who see you as obsolete; I see you as the last defence against tyranny. 

I beseech you, my queen in all urgency to rid us of this rouge government before it thrusts us further into the abyss.

May the Lord our God bless you and keep you. Amen.

Your loyal subject,

Tomrat

Anyone with me? If so go to this website, copy this message to it and hope she will listen to reason.

UPDATE: IPJ, has commented that any message sent to the Queen will be redirected if it contains any referrence to the EU; to avoid this happening write your own letter and send it to her, sans EU-references.

Pensions

Having started a new job that has consumed my soul and time over the last 6 weeks I have a new years resolution to fill in the pension details and get myself a healthy pension plan going (as healthy as can be achieved in the current scheme of things anyway, what with the fire, brimstone, moon-as-blood scenarios playing out). 

Mike over at the BOM(b, for it is)  is posting (yet again) on the pension crisis-in-the-making that will engulf the "public sector" (read "your wallet and your childrens wallets, and maybe your grandchildrens...").

Now, my general stance on this is to think of all those hole-digging-consultants, the crevace-filling consultants and the general navel-gazing experts and think "bah, why should I be paying for their sorry ass pension anyway?".

It is at this point spitting over my evening reading that I realised that in addition to these people there are also doctors, nurses, police officers, soldiers and social workers (yes, there are some good ones, they must be in the majority otherwise the BBC and Daily Mail wouldn't get so worked up over the bad ones) who have done their job, grinned and born the incessant insane ramblings of every social engineering project that MP's have sprung upon them (let leave the messy question of those who actively encourage the insanity to another post) and have paid dutifully into their pension pot and expect a return.

The problem is, as the good Dr. Crippen points out, is that the bastards in Whitehall (all of them, since time immemorium) have been raiding this fund like a personal kitty for whatever insane scheme they want to push that week.

Now "investing" someones pension fund is what is supposed to happen; you hand over money to some clever dick, they put it towards something, train lines in Africa, etc. you recieve a return. This, for the slow-witted amongst you, is not what is happening here; they are spending the money on toys then expecting the taxpayer of tomorrow to pick up the tab; it is deferred taxation at its most insidious - forgot Browns billions he is "investing" in our banking industry and "public services"; there are entire multiples of this countries GDP that need paying in the next few years that is only increasing, unlike our relative GDP, which is rapidly decreasing.

Dr. Crippen rightly points out that the problem, in both private & public sectors, is a lack of respect for the individual money you are spending; he links to the following on private pension fund management:

"One of the most senior figures in the fund management industry has broken ranks and admitted that up to 40 per cent of private-sector pension pots are swallowed up in fees."

The Doc points out that the public sector fund (fat) controllers are much worse:

"This is worse than the city spivs. They only steal 40% of private sector pension contributions. The government has stolen 100% of the money contributed by doctors and nurses."

This negates one obvious and shocking addition; the money is just taken from tax payers in the form of either:

1. Higher taxation (very unpopular)

2. Turning the printing pressed on (less well understood, but arguably much more dangerous, i.e. fall of society dangerous).

Often (indeed today) we are seeing a combination of both; a devaluation of what you have in your wallet, matched only by the speed at which Gordo and the wonder-badger can take money out of it.

I have a simple solution to the private sector problem and it works around the following synthesis:

Pension fund managers are paid fees and bonuses on the basis of investing the money in some venture, which are paid up front with no link to the long term health of a pension fund.

In Short: Dude doesn't have to think long and hard with where or how to invest money, only that he invests it so he can get the fee for it.

The Answer: write into law that pension fund manager can only be rewarded for the long term health of a pension fund, i.e. My pension pot gains 5% of its value this year- you get 0.5% of it, my pot loses 20% of its value, the effective -2% loss is mitigated across the fund managers complete commission for all pension funds, i.e. the reward pot has both negative and positive feeds on it, and depending on how they invest changes their fee.

There's more; a percentage of the annuity is paid to the fund manager once it starts to be paid out; they get a defined % of the pot (something very small obviously).

Should be quite an incentive; you earn money when the fund earns money, not when you invest your clients money. You also earn money once a percentage of the annuity once it is realised so you are incentivised to get the best return possible in the safest manner.

As for the question of the public sector...it always comes down to one thing...

BB is Txting U

Reality has most certainly left the building; the creep towards totalitarianism seems to have stopped outright; but only to put on its running shoes for a much more rapid journey down the road to serfdom.

Plans are underway to protect us even more from the Eevil teworwists & dwug dealers by creating a compulsory national register for all unregistered Pay'n'Go phones:

"A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say."

I'm not with Vodafone and if this goes ahead I will most certainly not consider them in the future; if the push in the future is to incorporate more mobile phone networksI will continually move away from that network; if all British networks are "incorporated" I will move to these guys.

Its been a few years since I had to change my sim card; as I recall I had to provide my details to my mobile service operator in order to get some of the better offers and other stuff; fine, I said - it was to both our benefits - they sell me more stuff which I want. If I were a terrorist the security services could, with some necessary difficulty, get a wiretap in order for them to monitor a potential criminal: You do not need this for any legitimate reason.

I am not a terrorist and I am not a thug. I am a normal guy who does normal things; I go to church, have a loving family and I help run a youth group (filled to the rafters with kids who's homelives have been given the once over with NuLabour's decade of social engineering) . I drink fancy beer in expensive irish themed bars, have the odd cigar over a poker game with friends and play way too much Wii; I will not be made to feel a criminal because the chimps in power feel a little insecure.

That said I offer a suggestion; this is the head of GCHQ, David Pepper:

He will be the one in charge of putting this database together. May I suggest you make his job a tiny bit harder by visiting a site like this, registering for as many free sim cards as is humanly possible then registering every last one. If every person in the UK did this with the 12+ sim cards they would pretty soon get the message that we dont like being unnecessarily monitored.

And in case anyone is curious I got the idea from a TV show...

For even greater emphasis why not take part in the following activity? Mines heading to this happy camper, John Battle, my local MP. You may not know him but like George Forman he puts his name to some interesting stuff...

Old Holborn's Walk

Master Holborn is going for a light constitutional. Its a good thing to stay healthy these days, what with a credit crunch looming, distracting us from the thinly veiled spectre of blogging censorship, amongst other, more outrageous things. (Ed note: If Turgid Bore knew about US squaddies torturing Iraqi's surely his erstwhile chancellor also knew? something to ponder at the next election).

Regrettably (especially having bought my ticket down to London) I am no longer able to join him on his route; that week will feature major upheavals on the employment front for me and I will have to focus on that.

I did a rough calculation based on the route OH is taking, the average UK BMI, walking speed and calories expended and have concluded he will burn a little less than 60cals for the duration of the walk - his attire may cause him to burn more though; looks a little stuffy. This is hardly likely to burn off the calories imbibed in the average UK pint (approx. 300-500 calories depending on type; drink one of these for me will you OH?). Being that may be the case I will most certainly be attending the next such episode. Until then I will exercising in my own unique way...*

Disclaimer: I am nowhere near the level of training these guys are - but give me a year...

The Daily Mash: Putting A Smile On The Credit Crunch

Always a source of joy; rudely taken away by my workplaces restrictive tintoweb filter software now :-(

Promise to do a proper post soon; mega busy with all kinds of stuff.

Peace.

T

Tom's Economically Illiterate Guide to Poverty 1.0

Spurred on from this recent find whilst reading this LPUK article I feel I should try this tag also. I am married and the general plan each month is to drain one account and then the other; mine tends to empty fastest which is humbling to have to go to your wife for lunch money (but thank you so much sweety! X)


Here is the breakdown of my finances (as with Mutley this is all in English pounds, or lack of them):


My take home pay this month was (after tax) 1172.90


Loan (to pay for our bathroom which literally fell apart) 400.12


Gym £95 (a luxury I cannot stop till March. grrr)


Car insurance 56.23


Telephone/broadband 50 (variable)


Contact Lenses 18.00


Council tax 83.00


Bus/train pass 79.50 (and rising monthly, but it is still twice as cheap to get to work via bus/train than to fill my petrol tank)


Petrol 30 (for small journeys when buses cant be relied upon)


Which gives me on average £360 a month to buy food, drink and entertainment; my wife pays for the mortgage and utilities so between us we have approximately £600 a month. Once you get past the food bills and other outgoings it leaves sparingly little, but we are comfortable, and, more importantly, happy.


Like Mutley I too have to pay credit card bills monthly; these are mainly a result of unforeseen bills creeping up in addition to those that I pay (an example is our bathroom, which was refitted but the tiling materials weren't covered and I had to fit the flooring myself so we weren't walking on floor boards). I also live predominantly in my overdraft which I have never managed to claw my way out of.


I have paid 208.60 in income tax, 114.76 (which is effectively doubled by my employer) in NI contributions and, of course, I'm paying as our many others via many hidden stealth, dual and bastard taxes and VAT as is Mutley.


When I was a considerably younger man (in the interests of personal honesty I'll remove the "er" suffix to "younger" for now) I used to tell myself "I wouldn't mind pay MORE taxes if services covered the essentials". However, it was then that I discovered blogs like this and this that I realised that this was pure. wishful. thinking. (to Wat and Chris I owe a great debt on this matter. Kudos to you two).


Even though I have little money to spare I don't feel unhappy about this particularly, because I have this promised to live by:

For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?
And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life?
And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin,
yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!
Do not worry then, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear for clothing?'
For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 6:25-34

These are comforting words for Christians the world over, undergoing persecution or not. So I try, and fail frequently, not to worry about money.

However, I am not the primary casualty of NuLabour; I have a fairly decent degree and an ok job and some decent experience in many different field.

It is people like this who are its primary casualties, and their children who are collateral. In my spare time I volunteer for my church youth group that deals with children with exactly the same story as this poor girl and exactly the same parents; you pay for people to behave like scum, act subserviently and keep voting red, and you get precisely that.

NuLabour has single-handedly managed to accelerate this rot which is why we see scams like this, why we see feral gangs knifing each other and innocents and why we see no one batting an eyelid at politicians and MEPs fleecing hundreds of thousands in taxpayers money without batting an eyelid.

And I would give every penny I have to change this.