In sacking General Stan. last week Obama confirmed all the criticisms suggesting personality flaws are correct and also in the eyes of many Americans revealed he is quite prepared, as Commander In Chief of the military services to put the lives of soldiers serving in foreign wars at risk by prioritizing the inflation of his his own ego.
In recalling McChrystal back to Washington and humiliating him in such a theatrical way Obama displayed his weakness and lack of leadership ability. The White House also ducked the real problem - a dismal lack of strategy for tackling the Taliban and getting out of Afghanistan without suffering a defeat as humiliating as Viet - Nam. Obama's dysfunctional civilian team in the State Department and in Kabul are responsible for this rather than Gen. McChrystal
.
No one would suggest the profane banter of McChrystal and his aides was a smart way to behave, never mind in the presence of an iconoclastic Rolling Stone reporter, but it would not take a very big man to acknowledge these are soldiers serving in a real shooting war. As such they are always likely to let off steam when an opportunity arises. The general is a soldier's who has stood alongside his men in fire fights and is admired by both American and British troops for that. In Iraq while in his 50s, he fought alongside SAS troopers. A man like that forges a bond with the men serving under him that somebody like Obama who has never known military service cannot understand. McChrystal deserved to be disciplined for his immoderate outburst but not humiliated
.
Thought the comments of the General and his aides were immoderate and rash they also reflected a deep frustration within the US military in Afghanistan and contained some unwelcome truths about Obama's civilian officials that angered the famously thin-skinned President decidedly uncomfortable. Even so the opinions voiced are hardly controversial. Even the mainstream media in the USA, widely derided for the sycophancy it has always displayed towards the President, has recognized the war is in trouble. Team America, as the General called his inner circle, was a bit dismissive of Obama himself and that cannot have gone down well with the self-obsessed self-regarding Commander In Chief. Even more irritating for Obama must have been the warm words the soldiers had for Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, who large numbers of Democrats and even many Republicans now wish had prevailed in 2008.
In appointing General Petraeus to succeed Stanley McChrystal Obama has replaced a man of action, a leader, with a bureaucrat. The sheer weight of numbers deployed in Petraeus' troop surge in Iraq subdued the opposition but at an unsustainable cost to the US Treasury. Now as the occupation force in Iraq is scaled down the tribal and sectarian violence is increasing again.
The situation is rich in irony. Obama won the Democratic nomination on the back of his anti-war rhetoric, now he is prosecuting a war being run by George W Bush's Pentagon chief, Robert Gates, and Bush's Iraq commander, Petraeus. That is not lost on opponents and skeptics. Many said Obama's only qualification for the job was his not being George W Bush. When people find they got a man with most of Bush's faults but without Bush's Americanism they may abandon the ship of hope and change very quickly.
There is something slightly disturbing about the word "science," all sibilants and soft vowels is out to be sensual, saying it should produce a feeling akin to fondling the well rounded buttocks of a beautiful woman who is wearing=ring very expensive silk panties. Beneath that however is something sinister and disturbing, something snake like, something that resembles the Dr. Evil scientist Craig Venter who recently tried to patent the human genome and when it was pointed out that he had only decoded part of it tried to patent the part he was responsible for.
What's wrong with that? you might well ask. Well had Venter been successful (the international courts told him to fuck off) it would have meant and gene therapies involving the genes on which he held patents would have earned him massive royalties, One Trillion Dollars he claimed.. And of course, in many parts of the world put those treatments beyond the reach of all but the very rich. Venter is now trying to claim he has created artificial life (he hasn't) and is trying to patent a technique which has been in use for years and will be necessary in delivering the gene therapies now being developed.
Resistance is growing to attempts to patent the human genome by this mad scientist and other world domination freaks and greedy fuckers who involuntarily raise their hand palm outwards and put their pinkie to their mouth as they say One Trillion Dollars...
Vince is right, at the Daily Stirrer we only get about 2000 readers a day but we have been warning since we started to publish of the dire state the economy was really in. Labour leaning media organisations are still trying to sell the idea that Gordon Browns bust and bust, borrow and spend economics left the economy in great shape. Even the Conservastive sector of mainstream media has soft peddalled on the true state of the economy. Raising tax and curbing spending was the only available option, Labour commentators who still insist we should have carried on borrown and increasing spending are insane.
The truth is, to be brutally honest, we are up shit creek and the boat is leaking. George Osborne's public spending cuts were necessary and urgent. Somehow public sector spending must be brought under control before Britain's international credit rating is downgraded which will mean the Bank Of England having to pay a higher rate of interest to the organisations that take up the bonds it sells to finance our monthly overspend.
I am not a George Osborne fan but at least he had the guts to face up to the reality Labour could never stomach. At some point the government has to stop spending more than it can earn. It's a no brainer.
Leaving the sentimental stuff aside I was shocked by Polly Toynbee’s maligning of the budget because the VAT rise will “push the country back into recession”
Now if Georgie Osborne had slapped an extra 20% on goods that might make me think twice before spending but an extra £2.50 on a hundred quid item will not even register on the radar. And it is still my choice whether I pay it or not.
The real danger lies in your suggestion Anna that if people can no longer afford to buy a sandwich from Pret a manger they could buy a loaf, a tin of spam and make their own. If people learn to do thinks for themselves again it will expose how few real jobs there are in the economy.
None of the "sustainable power" technologies available or in development so far are capable of producing the amount of power a modern society in a developed nation needs twenty four hours a day, thre hundred and sixty five days a year. The current fad among scientists and politicians is solar power. They seem to overlok the fact that the sun does not shine for half the year (at night) and across most of the world rainy days make another hole in potential power generation time.
Wind is not only useless when the wind does not blow strongly enough to turn the turbines (less than about 10mph) it also does not work when the wind is too strong and when the wind is gusty. There is a very narrow band of wind speeds at which the turbines work at optimum efficiency, most of the time they run well below what is economically viable.
As for biomass, don't even go there.
Which leaves waves, tides and marine currents as we have always argued at The Daily Stirrer. And though the technologies in that area are more promising nobody is putting adequate funds into research and the weirdie beardies are already yelling "Save the two toed shrimp."
On the same day we learned of that we also learn that Angela Merkel's coalition government in Germany is on the brink of collapse as German taxpayers rebel against constantly having to carry the Eurozone basket case economies on their Teutonic shoulders. And Geert Wilders, the right wing Dutch politicians who was banned from entering Britain by Gordon Browns populist authoritarian regime is poised to sweep to power or at least a big share of it because the Dutch voters are also sick of the Euro shenaneghins. Meanwhile Belgium is about to split into two nations, the divisions of this synthesized nation having been exacerbated by economic problems associated with Euro membership.
Only little Luxembourg still meets the economic criteria that were applied to nations wanting to join the Eurozone when the single curency was launched.
it was always obvious to anybosy with the least amount of economic nous the Eurozone had to fail. Unfortunately the European superstate gan, the world government suporters had the upper hand at the time. And look what happened...
RELATED POSTS:
Interesting Times
The folly of lending money in the bond m,arkets at 0.5% interest only to borrow it back from banks at 3.5% interest. This is what our governments have been doing in effect. Are you surprised we're up shit creek?
Piigs Might Crash And Burn
A recent warning of the current financial meltdown in the Eurozone posted in The Daily Stirrer as the G20 leaders were claiming their timely action had averted such a crisis. The words of politicians re cheap because there are no principles, only expedients in politics. The words of The Daily Stirrer however contain jewels of wisdom crystalised by experience. They are as valuable as any commodity you could possibly own because they could help you hold onto what you own
.
Next Financial Crisis
We had already told you what would happen in finance, here we tell you why it had to happen.
Magic Money
How conjuring money out of thin air led the world into economic meltdown. When money can be produced out nothing then no value can be attached to anything.
17 June 2010
The Absolute Necessity Of Curbing State Spending
by John De Roe
The left, already laughable styling themselves "the opposition" even as Labour splits into tiny factions including the "old left" the traditional party of the working class, the people with traditional Labour values who recognise there are no magical solution, the "progressive left", the kind of people my colleague Ian Thorpe refers to as The Politically Correct Thought Police, who are currently working themselves into a frenzy about the coalition's proposed cuts to public spending that will at least go some way towards bringing the public sector deficits under control and the "power at any price spinmeisters of New Labour, the people who have no idea how to solve the problems but believe during their thirteen years in power they infantilise Labour's core vote sufficiently for them to be able to spin their way out of the abyss by talking of abolishing child poverty and making internet access a human right.
The traditional left can be ignored, they will always be there, sustained by that sector of the Labour constituency covered by the phrase "they'd vote for a dog turn if you pinned a Labour rosette on it.
New Labour can be ignored. They are the dead parrot of politics, a party within a party, political operators completely unencumbered by anything resembling a principle.
This leaves us with the progressive left. Theirs is a siren song that can turn the heads of the feckless who hear meaningless talk of abolishing poverty and imagine a socialist utopia where cash handouts are available on demand, can delude the identity politics players who all too easily convince themselves that racism, homophobia, islamophobia and other completely irrelevant issues are the biggest problems our society faces.
It is the progressive left, the thought police, who are trying to spread fear and panic about the very necessary and urgent spending cuts. Article after article in The Guardian and on left leaning blogs (not that anybody reads those) warns that public spending cuts now will endanger the "recovery."
What recovery? When will these economic illiterates understand that public spending does not grow the economy, it merely grows the deficit. Printing money, which is what Labour were doing for most of their thirteen years in power and what in the guise of quantitative easing they did over the past two years that have exacerbated the damage done by the financial meltdown that followed the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007, is accomplished by selling debt. Running up debts does not grow the economy as this idiot is suggesting (National Debt Is The Money Government Owes Us) and another idiot is arging here (an excuse to shrink the state)
In support of their economically suicidal argument that the state has a bottomless pit of money from which it can keep funding pointless projects and financing futile policies the left likes to cite how Franklyn D Roosvelt's government tacked the great depression by funding huge infrastructure projects in the 1930s. There are a few small, barely significant differences. The first of these is that prior to World War 2 world demand for oil was booming and America at that time was the principal, indeed the only bulk supplier. Second was that vast tracts of the American mid west were undeveloped, still a horse and cart economy. Third was that America had the grain and cattle states of mid west, the great plantations of the south and the farms of the north east and the west coast, a vast agricultural base. America had stuff to sell that the world wanted to buy. We have financial services. America in the 1930s lacked infrastructure. Britain in the second decade of the 21st century does not lack infrastructure. So perhaps Roosvelt's solution is not quite appropriate for our situation.
Basically the advice given by Wilkins Micawber in Dickens' novel David Copperfield is more appropriate to our current situation. Annual income £20, annual expenditure £19.95p; result happiness. Annual income £20, annual expenditure £20.05p; result misery (for pedants I put it in current money terms for our younger readers).
To put it even more simply so that even members of the progressive left can understand, if you keep spending more than you earn sooner or later your creditors call in the debt and then you're in big trouble.
RELATED POSTS:
Ed Balls talks bollocks about VAT
15 June 2010
Is It Time To Ban Maths From Schools?
by Ian R Thorpe
Academics and politicians are always banging on about how school pulpils have no interest in maths and science. They blame everybody but themselves of course. When you get down to it, maybe the way Maths and Science are taught in schools is to blame. Or maybe it is the nerds who teach it and try to infect pupils with their own irrational enthusiasm for the uttrly pointless that has made these subjects so uncool.
Read full article Is It Time To Ban Maths From Schools?
14 June 2010
America's New N Word
recommended by Ed Butt
Othrodox wisdom held that with the election of a black President, Barack Obama, America would enter a new post racial phase in its development. Unfortunately the much anticipated and hyped Obama effect has been the opposite of what the President's fans predicted. Halfway through Obama's second year in office there is more racial tension, more mistrust and more animosity than there has been at any time in the past 40 years. And it is not just the whites that are feeling it.
In Negrophilia
a new book by black America writer Erik Rush with this title will be published later in the week. Rush argues that the greatest social force working against black Americans is the excessive affinity to opportunistic and self serving black leders by guilt tripped white liberals. I couldn't possibly comment except to say that Mr. Rush demonstrates yet again how seriously fucked American society is.
13 june 2010
Will Wind Power Be A Way Of Farming Money For Operators.
by Xavier Connolly
The Daily Stirrer has never doubted that climate change is happening and that is poses some serious problems for humanity. Whenever you hear the climate scientists ranting about climate change deeniers remember that our position is similar to that of most sceptics. Where we diverse from the science is God squad is that we are not convinced of the infallibility of "scientists" and their mathematical models or the abilities of their favoured technologies to do anything but make the problems worse.
In Does Money Grow On Windmills Andrew Gilligan takes a close look at the reality of the wind power industry against the hypoerbolic claims of its supporters.
Despite the wailing of the Green lobby and the Climate Change evangelists and Science worshippers wind power is a bloody stupid thing to invest money and effort in if we want to create a sustainable, non - polluting energy source to power the nation. If we are simply looking for ways to channel taxpayers money into the pockets of immensely rich and powerful energy corporations and landowners however it is hard to think of a better way to do it.
12 June 2010
Pentagon Hunts Wiki Leaks Founder
recommended by Ian R Thorpe
Pentagon hunts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in bid to gag the website. Soldier Bradley Manning said to have leaked diplomatic cables to whistleblower, . Plus video of US troops killing Iraqis; fear and panic in Washington DC is a story in todays Guardian
American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer unfiltered assessments of Middle East governments and leaders.
US news reporting and opinion website The Daily Beast reported Assange is a wanted manearlier this week after Wiki Leaks revealed plans to post security related documents stolen by US Army intelligence worker Bradley Manning, a serving soldier. Some of the 260,000 documents contained information that could make United States military installations vulnerable to terrorist attacks or expose the identities of intelligence workers and technical specialists.
Now we may call this blog The Daily Stirrer and we like to stir things up a bit even if than means sometimes giving publicity to some fairly whacky conspiracy theories. It is not our job to tell you what to believe but to make you think about what those in authority want you to believe. Having said that, we deplore the actions of both Bradley Manning and Wiki Leaks in this instance.
Governments, no matter how much we hate the idea, must from time to time get involved in some unpleasant activities. There are many people and organisations in the world only too eager to make life unpleasant for the citizens of rival nation, followers of rival religions or simply for the reason of furthering a political or financial agenda. We cannot expect to be protected from such organisations and then come over all Jane Fonda and start bristling with self righteousness when things get a bit messy.
Wikileaks have been irresponsible before in revealing sensitive information and surely aren't so far up themselves as to think they could keep getting away with it forever. Bradley Manning is a stupid little prick who for the sake of his own ego was prepared to put the lives of colleagues at risk. Those colleagues have parents, wives and children maybe, brothers and sisters, friends. A little twat like Manning, supported by Assange an even bigger twat and a supporter of the self styled "progressive left" who are neither progressive nor liberal but a bunch of evil little Nazi syphilis sores, think their Nazi liberalism (Ve haff vays of making you politically correct) think they can play God.
The Daily Stirrer knows there are a lot of shits employed by the government to do shitty things. Fortunately they usually only do shitty things to equally shitty people working for the other side. Wikileaks and Bradley Manning have not made the task of those people any easier however by spreading fear and panic on behalf of those who seek to disrupt our ways of life by spreading fear abd panic.
When you threatened the human rights of others you forfeit your own human rights. What's difficult to understand about that.
Pentagon Hunts Wiki Leaks Founder
RELATED POSTS:
Fear and Panic
Beards Of Terror
Cab Driver Of Mass Destruction
Liberate Your Civil Liberties
11 June 2010
Third Climategate Report imminent - Whitewash manufacturers report sales boom.
recommended by Ed Butt
If you were planning to do a spot of DIY over the weekend you may encounter a problem – an acute shortage of whitewash in your local store, as it may have been appropriated for more urgent purposes. The estimable Bishop Hill is reporting he has heard on the grapevine that the publication of the third report from the investigation of the scientific fraud known as climategate will be as big a whitewash as the first two.
The previous reports have cleared the suspect scientists of any wrongdoing while admitting their data was wildly inaccurate and the conclusions drawn from the results of their exercises in mathematical modelling bore little relation to the evidence compiled by real scientists who based their research on observations of things that were happening (or not happening) in the real world.
The sad thing about this is the idiots who have tried to make science into a religion, who have relied on mathematical modelling as "evidence" for their theoretical guesswork and assumptions, have destroyed faith in the process of scientific research and development as a tool for solving real problems in the sphere of reality.
Third Climategate Report imminent - Whitewash manufacturers report sales boom.
RELATED POSTS:
Climate Science Scam
Climate Change Corruption
An Inconvenient Truth About Climate Change
Menu of all our Climate Change posts
10 June 2010
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill - The Tide Turns
by Ian R Thorpe
It seems that after managing to pass off several weeks of dithering indecision about how to react to the catastrophic oil spill that has resulted from the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, Barack Obama in asking whose arse should he kick has provoked the same reaction from the oil industry and the American voters, "Your own, Mr President."
In the end, forced to at least be seen to be doing something Obama announced he was shutting down all offshore drilling activities. With the global appetite for oil and the American economy's appetite for the back stuff increasing at an accelerating rate Obama has decided to take the very worst course of action he could both economically and socially. The economic consequences for America will be dire, Obama might just as well have handed the Arab nations a gun and invited them to point it at America's head. The social consequences for the millions of people living and working in the populous states that have a Gulf shoreline will be even worse with thousands of jobs lost and millions of dollars removed from the local economies.
Obama was already the least popular President ever at this stage in his Presidency. Could this finish him and will the Democratic Party allow him to serve out his four year term and be defeated honourably or will they force him to stand down in order to prevent him dragging the party into the abyss with him? We could not say, but it may be no coincidence that the elegibility issue, always simmering on the back burner, has come to the boil again in the past two weeks.
US Bloodlust and the BP Oil Spill
Has Obama's anti Britain rabble rousing against BP over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill gone too far? It is beginning to lok as if a bsaklash against Obama himself is gathering momntum following his knee jerk reaction to shut down offshore drilling.
Mirror Mirror On The Wall
Rick Saunders examines Obama's question "Whose arse should I kick" and finds the fingers of accusation all point to one man, Barack Hussein Obama.
9 June 2010
The Gulf Oil Spill - Whose Arse To Kick
by Xavier Connolly
President Obama described the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico as America's worst environmental disaster ever. That is not true, the oil spillng from the fractured well has a long way to go before overtaking a similar blowout in the Gulf in 1979. What do we expect from the rock star President other than posing, posturing and crude attempt to make political capital out of catastrophe...
Read full artile Obama's Deepwater Horizon
RELATED POSTS:
Aircraft Grounded By Volcanic Dust
Hyping Coal Pollution
Copenhagen Climate Change Corruption
An Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming
Obama's Climate Change Bill
8 June 2010
A Quiet Day
Ed Butt
Ian, who does all our posting for the Daily Stirrer as well as his own Greenteeth Labyrinth and writing several blogs asked us to give him a free day today so that he could make some much needed changes to our archive system. This will make it easier to find related posts on the Daily Stirrer.
If you are wondering why we post manually, Ian says it is easier to create threads with true contextual links that way. A database, while wuick, can only match binary strings thus posts titles The Ancient God Of Boffing and Boozing and We Must All Trust In God To Save Us From Climate Change would appear to a search engine to have a contextual link.
You just can't beat the human touch.
7 June 2010
Free Gary McKinnon, Jail The Real Criminals
by Ed Butt
Charlotte Gore blogs "Free Gary McKinnon, I'm Not So Sure An article questioning the veracity of presenting the Aspergers Syndrome affected hacker who broke into U.S. Military computers as nothing worse than a geeky teenager who got a bit carried away.
While I agree with Charlotte's assesment that there is more to McKinnon than we are being told, for example what he did required a higher level of skill than the average "script kiddie" hacker, I still think the response of the U.S. Government is driven more by a ned to lash out at somebody who embarrassed them by exposing the weakness of their much hyped computer security than by a desire to see justice done.
There is a world of difference between Gary McKinnon hacking the Pentagon computers and making US Military Security look like a bunch of clowns (military security a bunch of clowns? Who'd have thought it) and a bunch of shifty, swathy complexioned guys walking into an airport and TWOCing 4 planes.
There is little difference in the criminal incompetence on the part of government employees it took to make both crimes possible.
RELATED POSTS:
Cab Driver Of Mass Destruction
Don't Be Evil - That's Googles' Job
Is The Internet Making Us Stupid
Luddites
You Just Can't Be Too Paranoid
There's A Chink (oops, pardon) In Our Armour
6 June 2010
Now It's No Longer Racist To Bash Barack
by Ed Butt
This is another of those irritating "We told you so" posts from the writers of The Daily Stirrer. We find ourselves saying "we told you so" quite a lot having predicted how events would unfold. This is not because we are psychic or unusually prescient, it is because we all have a wealth of life experience in roles that involve managing people so we can spot the phoney, identify the skiver and recognize the bullshitter at long range.
In this articleCool To Bash BarackToby Harnden reports the American left is deserting Obama in droves. It seems only the kool aid drinkers of the Obamessiah cult and silly celebrities like Paul McCartney are still taken in by Obama's 'Hey, you can't call me incompetent, I'm black' routine. People have seen through Obie's Healthcare Bill which will make healthcare more expensive for mid income Americans, put decent care further beyond the reach of poor Americans and channel vast amounts of taxpayers money into the pockets of health insurance providers. His cap and trade initiative to curb carbon emissions is a dead duck. The "scientific" case for carbon based AGW has been exposed as a fraud, built on the pursuit of corporate profits rather than concern for the planet.
The proposed amnesty for illegal immigrants has gone down like a lead zeppelin, so well in fact that while some fear any attempt to drive it through congress using the kind of pork barrel politics that pushed healthcare through will result in civil unrest while other point to the fact that several states have considered secession from the Union if Obama even puts his amnesty to a vote.
All in all then this is one of the most successful Presidencies ever - for America's enemies.
Bilderberg Blog
Latest From The Bilberberg Conference In Stitges
recommended by Ed Butt Don't let the complacency of mainstream media fool you, don't be put off by the sheeple who style themselves "the progressive left" calling you a tin foil hat wearer or a right wing nut job. When the financial and political leaders of the free world meet in secrecy, exclude the media, deny there is a meeting going on, declare an exclusion zone around the hotel complex with heavily armed guards patrolling constantly to ensure no independent reporters, protesters or members of the public get near. When a no fly zone is declared around that same hotel complex and helicopters of the security services hover overhead constantly, when the event is barely reported in newspapers and on TV and there are never any press releases or reports of the discussions you can bet what is being discussed is not their nations chances in the upcoming world cup and also is not in the best interests of Joe Public.
But if you really want to know what the Bilderberg Group is all about the secrecy and security paranoia is no obstacle. They are not shape changing lizards or 8,000 year old members of an Ancient Egyptian priestly sect. All you have to do is read George Orwell's novel 1984.
British Bilderberg Attendees
Why the protestors are your best friends
The security lockdown begins
4 June 2010
With No Common Culture A Common History Is Impossible
recoomended by Xavier Connolly
"There are two overriding objections to modern culture's eagerness to put labels on people. The first is that, often intentionally and sometimes merely carelessly, a label diminishes the complexity, nuance and uncertainty of the person on whom it is stuck. The second is that the label provides a lazy excuse to stop thinking about what the neatly labelled person is actually saying."
In With No Common Culture A Common History Is ImpossibleMartin Kettle make a argument for teaching an English history curriculum instead of framing our children's historical knowledge withing the distorted and totally untruthful narrative of Martin Luther King and the U. S. civil rights movement which has little to do with Britain.
Meanwhile it becomes more apparent every day that the educational establishment is determined to push a curriculum biased towards "science" down pupils throats and eradicate humanities and anything to do with British or North European culture altogether. Perhaps we should campaign for George Orwell's 1984 to be made required reading for all pupils before they leave school.
RELATED POSTS:
Killing History
Generation of Losers
Education
The truth about education, the ecomony and crime
Education Menu
3 June 2010
The Great, The Gullible and the Apple iPad
by Ian R Thorpe
One of the reasons we established this page was to fire broadsides at marketing and public relations hype. Apple is a company that built is success on highly manipulative hype by persuading people to buy expensive gadgets that perform less well than much cheaper versions. The launch of Apple's most pointless gadget yet, the iPad was a natural target.
Read full post The Great, The Gullible and the Apple iPad
RELATED POSTS:
Jobs New Gadget - The Apple Of His Liver
The Great Internet Scam
Don't Be Evil
Is The Internet Making Us All Stupid.
A-level pass? Computer Says No
Internet Access As A Human Right?
2 June 2010
Politically Correct Thought Police Create An Alien Species
by Ian R Thorpe
Us old boys all remember being teenagers, the spontaneous embarrassing bulges in trousers, the very real risk of breaking your pyjama trousers walking downstairs, the prurience, the wanking, the porno mags hidden behind the wardrobe, obessive fascination with girlks underwear even though you had not seen what was lurking behind it. The fear that you were some kind of sex maniac that made you so reluctant to talk to anyoby about you worries or ask the questions everybody you knew was bursting to ask an older, more experienced person too.
It was all part of the pain and joy of growing up.
Needless to say the Policitally Correct Thought Police are aware of the vulnerability of young males at this stage of life. And when at their most vulnerable young minds can be manipulated most easily. It is no surprise to learn then that adolesence is under attack.
Teenage Boys Becoming An Alien Species
Anna Raccoon posts a truly frightening story of the power of the Politically Correct Thought Police and their brainwashing techniques.
1 June 2010
The Poor Get Richer
recommended by John De Roe
Burning our Money blog shows how in real income terms the botton 25% income wise are now twice as well off as they were in 1961. It does not always seem so as expectations are so much higher but as Wat Tyler says in his post, povery is a very subjective thing. Back in 1961 a decent, warm home, plenty of food in the larder and a few luxuries were enough for most people.
Far from a majority of homes had a telephone, clothes, furniture and househoild goods were all made to last longer. My family were by no means poor, we had a car and a phone, a fridge and washing machine adorned my parents kitchen (again things we consider necessary now that were far from universal 50 years ago) yet I remember my mother "end to middling bedsheets, that is cutting a threadbare sheet down the middle, hemming it and sewing the former outer edges into a new centre seam.
This was not tight fistedness, it was how most people lived. Extravagance was frowned on. Now of course we live in a throwaway society and so although the inflation adjusted income of the lower quartile has more than doubled relatively people do not see themselves as much better off than their parents.
How The Poor Got Richer
31 May 2010
Why Laws, Why Now
by Xavier Connolly
Why did the Daily Telegraph choose to bring down David Laws now. Surely the Conservative paper knows if the coalition fails quickly we will be saddled with another Labour government led by a Milliband or even worse Mr. Bollocks.
So are they just flexing muscle in order to force Cameron to quite the EU or something similarly foolish but passionately supported by the right wing of the Consrervative Party? Snowolf blog has an interesting theory linked below.
What Else have They Got On The Coalition
30 May 2010
Silly Secularist Makes Year's Most Stupid Statement
by Ian R Thorpe
The arrogance of scientists gets more gobsmacking as time goes on. Terry Sanderson, President Of The National Secular Society says: “I look at it this way. If science disappeared from human memory, we would soon be living in caves again. If theology disappeared from human memory, no one would notice. Theology is a completely and utterly useless pursuit. It is self-indulgence of the first order. It grieves me that public money is spent on theological colleges while real education struggles to gain the funds it needs to maintain itself.”
OK, it's an opinion but look at it another way and science, we see, is responsible for all the world's ills. Just think, without science there would be no global warming, no overpopulation, no oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. If Newcomen had not invented the first steam driven pump deep seam coal mining would not have been possible and we would not have coal fired power stations belching out pollutants. We would also have very limited amounts of electricity but
Read full post Silly Secularist Makes Year's Most Stupid Statement
More on Tewrry Sanderson: Silly Secularist Of The Year
RELATED POSTS:
My Problem With God
Climate Science Is To Blame
Scientists In Denial
Man Or Mouse
IgNobel Science
Baby Bible Basher
Barack Obama Museum Of Creation
True Tale Of The Easter Bunny
29 May 2010
David Laws And The Lib Dem Closet
by Ian R Thorpe
Strange that the party responsible for pushing through the law that decriminalised homosexuality should have had three senior MPs in the past decade who preferred to stay in the closet. Or is it? The gay Mafia is so active in politics a desire to stay out of the limelight they generate is understandable. Mark Oaten, Simon Hughes and now the highly promising Chief Treasury Secretary David Laws have all damaged their political careers by trying to keep their sexuality secret
So why are Liberal Democrats quite so coy about coming out of the closet?
Could it be perhaps that as Liberals they are simply exercising their right to treat their sexuality as a private matter? Why should people feel pressure to come out? Is there the same pressure on people who like to indulge in a bit of mild to moderate S & M, some casual cross dressing or a little fetishism to share the details of their private life with the world.
If Laws is forced to resign we will lose a man who was starting to look like a very competent Minister at a time when the new government needs all the competence it can get. What he did may or may not have been wrong, it was certainly unwise. But consider, after outing himself as gay he would be forever a gay Member of Parliament, a gay finance minister. David Laws has, has he not, a right to be judged on his ability not his sexuality.
And for the record we have already had a gay Prime Minister although he stayed in the closet until his death. Not that it did him any good, he was still a crap Prime Minister.
RELATED POSTS:
Gay Minister and The Lib Dem Closet - Daily Telegraph
Apprentce Prime Minister
Beauty And The Beastly Homo
Cameron Seduces Clegg
Hate Crime Law
Politically Correct Military
29 May 2010
Reason, Order and Logic Are Not Always The Answer
by Ed Butt
The old science vs spirit argument is raging again at Comment Is Free ( Is reason always right ). The author of the article makes a good argument and in pile The CIF Scientific Thought Police to shout down anything that questions their God, Science.
I liked one of the comments though as it sort of slaps all down those who believe this vague, ill defined thing called science is always right:
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with REASON and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
Gautama Siddartha (Buddha)
Science, which means formal and universally accepted knowledge, is a fine tool for many aspects of business, commerce and industry but the arrogance of modern scientists in deluding themselves that nature can be controlled and subjugated poses a bigger threat to human civilisation than any in nature.
28 May 2010
Health Fascism With Teeth
by Ian R Thorpe
Ian with his satire hat on as he lays into another of those stupid health scare stories Open In A New Window
28 May 2010
How Long Do You Work For The Taxman?
by Ed Butt
The Adam Smith Institute publishes an annual report showing how far into the year we must be before we stop working for the taxman and make some dosh for ourselves and our families. A more interesting perspective from the Taxpayers' Alliance shown in this post at Devils Kitchen show how much of each working day we spend making money for the state.
Either of these should be enought to shut up those idiots of The Progressive Left who are screaming against public spending cuts.
If the fuckers are so ken on paying tax why don't they just give all their dosh to the government and live on jobseekers allowance while holding down a full time job?
27 May 2010
Orthodoxy Imposed By Stealth: Big Brother And Your Shopping Habits
by Xavier Connolly
Just because the perniciously authoritarian Labour government has been kicked out don't think the march to authoritarianism has been halted or even slowed down. We are still being pushed towards "orthodoxy" every day in every way. Look around your town, where do people get their main shopping. Now if you are lucky enough to live in a semi rural area as all of us do here in the Ribble Valley you will be able to go to an ancient market town like Clitheroe where there are still old fashioned butchers, craft bakeries, greengrocers with a colourful display of fruit and veg in the window and outside the shop. There is an independent bookshop, a wine merchant, an old fashioned tea and coffee merchants from which the most delicious scents of freshly roasted coffee emit, the world's foremost designer sausage shop and a thriving open market.
Highly individualistic, idiosyncratic (pricey) furniture is on sale in two local shops, there are many delights. The town has a small Sainsbury's and a branch of E. H. Booth, a regional supermarket chain that keeps Waitrose out of the area. Those who can afford to shop in Clitheroe are fortunate.
Contrast that with the larger towns of East Lancashire, Blackburn, Burnley and Accrington. Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, Aldi, Lidl, Netto. The bookshops, independent butchers and craft bakers are long gone, replaced by multitudinous pound shops and charity outlets. The big naional chains are represented but small local businesses have been squeezed out by what could be seen as a conspiracy between the local authority and central government. The traditional town centres have been usurped by out of town retail parks where cheap, utilitarian and shoddily samey are the norm. The problem with these retail parks is they are not well served by public transport so the argument that the low prices offered by the chains benefit the poor is proved false because anyone who cannot afford a car or taxi fare cannot get there.
Meanwhile certain people, mentioning no names, continue to drive their two litre car twenty five miles each way to a favourite clothes shop and spend more on a tie than a suit would cost from Matalan or George. The poor are not raised by this cult of cheap nor are the affluent constrained.
The Government has recently changed direction and has been promoting "the digital economy" and helping online businesses to attract our custom. Do people not see the attack on liberty here. With nothing to buy in shops only cheap, unserviceable crap we are isolated, pushed into shopping online, solitary consumers hunched over our computers instead of going out and associating freely with other human beings. And so it goes on. Keep a gooid grip on the real world or you may find you have lost touch with reality as so many almost did in the debt fuelled consumer boom of the past decade.
Swedish Revolutionary Proletarian Retail Outlet">Swedish Revolutionary Proletarian Retail Outlet
Charlotte Gore on how "orthodoxy" the only state of mind tolerated by The Thought Police in Orwell's 1984, is being imposed on us by stealth.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Out of order Xav, I did noy spend more on a tie than a suit can be bought for in a cheap outlet. It was a shirt, the tie only cost £30. And my car is more fuel efficient than many 1200cc models. You're an effing engineer you should know about power to weight ratios.)
RELATED POSTS:
Before The Pubs Close
Bread And Circuses
Change We Can't Believe In
Christmas Tyranny
A Future Of Medieval Serfdom
Populist Authoritarianism
Alcohol Shock
Imposing Orthodoxy By Stealth: Big Brother And Your Shopping Habits
26 May 2010
The War On Booze Has Just Begun.
by Ian R Thorpe
We have said for a long time that once smoking had been made a social crime the Thought Police would start on alcohol. And we were right. Follow these links to see how the war on booze is being stepped up.
Turning The CorkscrewDick Puddlecoat attacks the latest Politically Correct Thought Police Scheme to plaster big health warnings over the lables of wine, beer and spirit bottles. We really are marhing towards a 1984 style regime and it will not matter which party is in power. It is always the same self righteous, superior, patronizing people who run the country.
Worse, we read an item at Nanny Knows Best that told us one of those charity/quango hings, Drinkaware commissioned a survey of 1,000 people about drink problems and their booze consumption habits.
The results show 520,000 people go to work each day with a hangover.
Every day? Fuck me! That's over half a million people who are having more fun than us.
The purpose of all this of course is to stop people costing the NHS money by getting sick and dying, money that is urgently needed in the war for Malawian shirtlifters' rights.
The true folly of all this poltically correct bullshit is that while the anti - sex- drugs - booze and watching Mock The Week On Dave League of purity might save a little in the short term by preventing a few boozers needing hospital treatment in the long run, when nobody is allowed to die of anything, the pensions bill will be so huge all the developed nations will go broke and the sub turd burglars of tropical Africa will have to do without our help.
In The Future You Will Not Be Allowed To Die
25 May 2010
Blair's New Job
by Ian R Thorpe
Tony Blair has a new job (hint to coalition leaders: pass a law restricting ex Prime Ministers called Blair to one job and you will solve the unemployment problem.)
Mr. Blair's new job is as a consultant to a Silicon Valley company Khosla Ventures that is involved in stealing taxpayers money developing environmentally friendly technologies. Their recruit will be helping to persuade government's to pour vast amounts of taxpayers money into these whacky and unpoven ideas, or as the job description says, "to develop mutually beneficial global relationships."
Blair said of his new job: Solving the climate crisis by reducing carbon emissions is more than just an item on a political agenda, it requires imagination, creativity and vision.
That should be right up our Tone's street then, he is one of the most creative liars in recent history.
We must ask however how will our former Prime Minister find time to do his new job when he already has so many and is still occupied 24/7 insisting there are Weapons Of Mass Destruction stashed somewhere in Iraq. When asked about the remuneration for his latest role all Mr Blair would say is: "It's not a pro bono role."
Mind you neither was being Prime Minister. As he already commands a seen figure salary for his consultancy job with Wall Street bankers J. P. Morgan - Chase, receives an undisclosed sum for his function as Middle East Peace Maker and earns £400, 000 per speaking gig we can bet after paying the new recruit Khosla Ventures will not have much change from the $1billion they recently raised for research and development. Still Khosla are going to be rolling in it. CEO Vinod Khosla says instead of simply trying to reduce emissions his company will be looking for "clean alternatives for oil, coal, steel and cement.
Right so. They are obviously planning to put a giant pie in orbit abound the Earth and have a squadron of flying pigs running a shuttle service to it. Sounds about right for something Tony Blair is involved in.
RELATED POSTS:
Climate Science To Blame
Climate Change Kills Guardian Reader
Copenhagen Climate Change Corruption
Green Scaremongering
24 May 2010
Pain in Spain, Damage To Denmark as Green Fraud Exposed
by Xavier Connolly
Green Economy Crisis Spreads To Denmark
A few days ago we linked you to an article about the crisis brought about by the mandatory greening of Spain's economy. Now the other "green beacon" nation, Denmark has revealed its committment to clean, green, sustainable power far from boosting the national economy and creating jobs has exacerbated the effects of the global financial crisis in Denmark.
Spain's Much Praised Green Economy Model Discredited Spain's Green Economy model that had "progressive" world leaders and opinion makers creaming their pants has been exposed as unviable, built on unrealistic mathematical modelling as as having contributed to Spain's debt and unemployment models. So why do idiots like Cameron and Obama still want to copy it?
So long as we are restrivted to curently available technologies green power does not work. We told you so.
RELATED POSTS:
Climate Change Deniers Deny Nothing
Climate Change Science Scam
Copenhagen Climate Science Corrruption
An Inconvenient Truth About Climate Science
23 May 2010
Not Listening Cicero, La la la la la la la
by Ian R Thorpe
“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”
- Cicero, 55 BC
Wonder if he knows we're still not listening?
22 May 2010
It's Life Craig, But Not As We Know It.
by Ian R Thorpe
American Biologist Dr. Craig Venter(stein) claims he has created artificial life in a test tube. Venter and his team have built an artificial genome and implanted it into a bacteria. Naturally the team, because they are Americans remember and Americans are addicted to four things; hyperbole, the internet, recreational drugs, fast food and.... American are addicted to five things.... Among the many things Americans are addicted to as well as hyperbole are fame, success and money. Therefore we should reduce everything they say by a factor of 1000.
OK, what is a realists assessment of what Venter has done?
Well he has not created life for a start. He has merely taken a living organism and meddled with its genome. Geneticists have been doing this for many years in their research into preventing hereditary diseases. Next, can his creation truly be described as "life." Just as computer scientists in their eagerness to convince the world of the possibility of true artificial intelligence have tried to redefine intelligence, to equate thought to an ability to parse and filter vast amounts of data very quickly, so Venter's team have adopted a very restricted definition of what life is. They have created a self replicating organism but laboratories have been creating self replicating polymers for some time so again nothing new.
To put Venter's modus operandi in perspective this is the greedy, money grubbing twat who tried to patent the human genome after claiming (falsely - but he's fucking Yank, all mouth and no trousers) to have been the first to decode it. For the record the multinational team that were actually the first to decode the human genome decided not to try to patent it because it belongs to the world and indeed understanding of how our genes work could benefit all human kind greatly. Venter was only interested in how much money he could make from his "invention" so we think that proves he's a total piece of shit and we should all sue the greedy fucker for a billion dollars each for trying to steal the blueprint to our genes.
In the case of this new "breakthrough" which as we said is no different to things other less vain, less egomaniacal biologists have been doing for a while Venter hopes by fooling politicians and bureaucrats into believing that by reinventing the wheel he has made a scientific breakthrough that will transform the future of humanity for which he hopes to net a cool $1 trillion. One Trillion Dollars - do you see any similarities with Dr. Evil here?
We should dismiss this fraud now, ridicule his false claims and belittle his bogus science. He's just a wannabe celebrity in a white coat. Or a practicioner of scientific onanism maybe
RELATED POSTS:
Man Or Mouse
Spunky Internet Entrepreneurs
Synthetic Cells: It's Life But Not As We Know It
Artificial DNA is scary but not in the way you think
21 May 2009
The Perfect Economic Storm - We Told You So
by Ian R Thorpe
John De Roe is not about today, it being a beautiful late spring day here in the north of England. It's only fair though to make sure he gets the credit he deserves as the sticking plasters of quanitative easing, stimuli and bailours can no longer cover the festering wounds in the global economy.
John, a former bank manager in a local bank back in the days when banking was a respectable professon, has been warning of the true state of the global ecoomy ever since we started The Daily Stirrer. We would have liked to help more people but only about 2000 a day look at our humble publication and the mainstream media have ben sticking to the orthodoxy demanded by the "inner party" and enforced by the Politically Correct Thought Police and talking up the non existent recovery. Consequently many people who pinned their hopes and their savings on recovery are now kissing their future goodbye.
Forward this DailyStirrer article you all you friends by emailing our link (right click link & copy shortcut to paste into your email) The Perfect Economic Storm so they can see how accurate we have been, as is demonstrated in all the posts below and many more...
Interesting Times
The folly of lending money in the bond m,arkets at 0.5% interest only to borrow it back from banks at 3.5% interest. This is what our governments have been doing in effect. Are you surprised we're up shit creek?
Piigs Might Crash And Burn
A recent warning of the current financial meltdown in the Eurozone posted in The Daily Stirrer as the G20 leaders were claiming their timely action had averted such a crisis. The words of politicians re cheap because there are no principles, only expedients in politics. The words of The Daily Stirrer however contain jewels of wisdom crystalised by experience. They are as valuable as any commodity you could possibly own because they could help you hold onto what you own
.
Next Financial Crisis
We had already told you what would happen in finance, here we tell you why it had to happen.
Magic Money
How conjuring money out of thin air led the world into economic meltdown. When money can be produced out nothing then no value can be attached to anything.
Bond Villain Targets Britain
Some insights from the biggest trader in the global bond markets on how bond trading works and how the economy of Britain, over reliant on domestic consumption, the housing maket and financial services is particularly vulnerable to international speculators.
Debt Crisis Menu
A roundup of our posts on the debt crisis, stock market meltdown and the plunge into global depression.
Jobs Crisis Menu
Creasting jobs in public service, keeping people in full time education longer and forcing earlier retirement was only ever going to temporarily mask the real unemployment rate. This is a roundup of posts on the employment crisis that has run parallel to the economic crisis.
Economy Returns To Growth Sort Of
Public Debt Nightmare
Burgeoning public spending deficits is driving smaller nations to a situation where the income of government is not adequate to service its debt.
Unbalancing The Economy
How to skew the economy in order to create the illusion of growth through out of control public spending and placing artificial values on assets.<
>
Real Unemployment Rate
How to gague the real unemployment rate and expose the official statistics as complete fabrication.
Where do we go from here. Read The Daily Stirrer and we will show you the way out of this swamp.
RELATED POSTS:
Read more about the perfect economic storm at :
Daily Telegraph - Perfect Storm
Guardian - FTSE hits seven month low
Independent: FTSE dips below 5000
Independent: Government Borrowing Hits £10billion for month
Euro Fears Destabilize World Markets
20 May 2010
A Conversation With The Council
Dizzy Thinks - recommended by ~Ian R Thorpe
Politicians may promise change and governments may come and go buit bureaucracy stays the same forever. Read Dixxy Thinks' account of a converation his wife had with the council refuse that proves yet again to the bureaucratic mindset procedure always trumps common sense. Yet still the dark forces of the "progressive left" tell us we need more government, not less.
True Colours Start To Shine Through
Trixie - recommended by John De Roe
This excellent, shoe loving blogger provides as good a critique as any on the new coalition government's plan to massively increase capital gains tax and how it will depress the economy while driving more money offshore to tax havens. Bloggers get it, you'd think a conservative Chancelloor like George Osborne would too. People don't like handing over half the money they make to government.
19 May 2010
When The Cutting Starts
by John De Roe
The election party has wound down, the last revellers have staggered off into the cold light of dawn and the hangovers are beginning. While Nick Clegg speaks optimistically of the dawn of a new political era and the biggest shakeup in Britain's democratic process since the Great Reform Act of 1832 the Conservative and Liberal Democrat ministers moving into jobs in the Treasury are holding ice packs to their heads and reaching for the Alka - Seltzer.
Chancellor George Osborne has already launched an audit of the departed Labour government's spending commitments to try to rescue more that the already identified £12billion "efficiency savings" from the hungry maw of out monstrous deficit. It will be a difficult task to reduce spending in non essential areas sufficiently to make a hole in the £163billion (and growing) annual deficit without starting to cut the kind of high profile and electorally sensitive areas of health, education, policing, pensions and care. In normal circumstances to attack such a deficit would be a daunting task but the British economy having been under attack for three decades by governments determined to undermine the nations great providers of real jobs, industry and agriculture, really has no solid base on which to build a recovery.
Labour's answers were typical of the folly of socialism. In the final years they borrowed money by issuing bonds to fund public sector jobs keep young people and many older ones in full time education and thus off the unemployment statistics and while publicly making noises about getting many people off disability benefits and back into work really created a labyrinthine benefit system that made it virtually impossible for the disabled to make that leap from dependency on the state into employment, earning at least a portion of their income.
But what benefit is there to public finances if the people being pushed into work are being paid from public funds?
The Conservatives too must shoulder their share of the blame. The years of Margaret Thatcher's Premiership saw a wholesale destruction of the industrial base particularly in the traditional heavy industries that drove local economies in the industrial areas of the North West, North East, Yorkshire, The Midlands, South Wales and Central Scotland. Much as the South Eastern bourgeoisie hate to admit it, until the 1980s it was those areas that supported the British economy, the millions of mid income range skilled jobs in factories, mills, mines and workshops gave The Treasury a much bigger and more reliable source of income than the money jugglers of the financial sector would ever provide.
That part of the economy was sacrificed however to Mrs Thatcher's desire to wage war on a few powerful trade unions, the Miners, Engineers, Printers and Transport Union.
The problem leaders of our "new politics" now face is how do we get people back into real work, work that is funded from profits rather than tax revenues raised by the government. Labour pumped money into the economy but it only went to those companies that contracted to provide public services at vastly inflated prices. There was no industry to pump money into. Traditionally an upturn in the construction industry signalled the start of a recovery. Many years of using inflated house prices to underwrite personal debt which funded consumer spending thus masking a decline in earning in real terms has left us with an overpriced housing stock. First time buyers, the young employed, are priced out of the housing market and so construction is depressed. Small tinkering with property taxes aimed at boosting house sales are insufficient to make a significant difference.
Naturally the banking and finance sector scream for a return to the status quo, yet more of the wild, irresponsible speculation that led to the crash of 2008 in the first place. But how would the banks, unable to unravel the tangled web of dodgy trading and work out who owes what to whom, ever finance another round of speculation? By borrowing from governments of course. And how would governments raise the money to lend to the banks. By borrowing it.
That road can only lead to an inflationary spiral with commodity prices for essentials going through the roof.
The hangover from the years of madness is a real bitch. It is going to take more than a couple of Alka - Seltzers to cure it.
RELATED POSTS:
A Coalition For Cuts
Jobless Economy
Jobs Crisis
Interesting Times
Magic Money
Bread and Circuses
Economy Of The Living Dead
The Future Is Cancelled
Minimum Wage Folly
No Real Jobs In The New Economy
Stating The Obvious Will Not Rebuild Our Economy
Holy City
Chasing Bubbles
18 May 2010
Anti English Vendetta
recommended by Xavier Connolly
Anna Raccoon wonders why the Politically Correct Thought Police are always on hand when an English person utters the slightest criticism of the non English but are quite happy to tolerate the overt anti - English bias shouwn by people of other nations against the English.
Vendetta by Anna Raccoon
18 May 2010
There's No Money Left
recommended by Ed Butt
Burning Our Money Blog explains why the country is even more broke than we thought we were. Far be it from us humble bloggers at The Daily Stirrer to blow our own trumpet but we have been telling you this since our blog started to publish
RELATED POSTS:
Interesting Times
Bond Villain Targets Britain
Magic Money
Debt Crisis
17 May 2010
Legacy Of Labour's Rogernomics
by Ian R Thorpe
I read today of the first signs that government by the Conservative - Liberal Democrat "coalition for change" will change nothing except the names at the top of the news.
Coalition finance ministers are warning that "crazy spending commitments" made by Labour during their final months in power have left the British economy in a worse state than anybody could have guessed. Your Daily Stirrer writers of course and other Libertarian freethinkers in the blogosphere were reporting throughout that period exactly how bad the situation was but what do we know? We're not politicians. Now that Conservative and Liberal Democrat economic experts have been able to look at the books they are saying public expenditure will have to be cut much more deeply than was predicted and the cutting will have to start from yesterday. It's that bad (but the blogosphere told you that). Anyway wen the cuts bite it will all be Labour's fault.
So that's the new politics for you:
"We're fucked Nick, the punters will not accept the cuts, what shall we do?"
"Blame it all on Labour Dave, always blame the other lot who were in power before us."
It brought to mind something my daughter told me of on her return from a year in New Zealand, Rogernomics.
The Roger in question was Roger Douglas, finance secretary in the New Zealand Labour Government in the 1980s. Douglas implemented Thatcherite economics so draconian he thoroughly rogered the nation and his party. New Zealand Labour was made so unpopular by Rogernomics they did not return to power until the introduction of Proportional Representation enabled them to become part of a coalition government.
There we see the way forward for the new leader of the UK's Labour Party after Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have so comprehensively rogered the nation. Embrace proportional representation and learn to work in a coalition rather than claiming to have inherited the divine right to rule from the monarch, abandon the use of working class tribalism to frighten people off voting for the party they actually support be it Lib Dems, Greens, UKIP or The Monster Raving Loony Party and learn to collaborate with coalition partners rather than stabbing them in the back.
RELATED POSTS:
Change You Cant Believe In
Change: Politicians Don't Get It
Change Can Be Unfair To Everyone
Interesting Times
Magic Money
Jobless Economy
Labour Epitaph
Populist Authoritarianism
Holy City
Chasing Bubbles
Rebellion Of The DHWFs
by Wat Tyler (Burning Our Money) - recommended by John De Roe
Wat Tyler at Burning Our Money blog has been giving it rice with his calculator and worked out how much it is going to cost the ConDem-ned coalition to clear up Labour's economic mess. And he reckons the burden will be too much to bear for the DHWFs (Decent Hard Working Families) who pay the bulk of direct and indirect taxes. Wat predicts a middle class tax rebellion. But then Wat has a track record for that kind of thing (
Wat Tyler - Peasants Revolt). I hope to see the masses on Middle Class voters advancing along Whitehall towards Parliament weilding their pitchforks and cudgels menacingly.
Seriously though, few people including those running the new governing coalition have really understood the depth of the financial mire the Labour government of 1997 - 2010 have left the nation in. In the good years early in their first term they balanced the books by selling of national assets as the Thatcher government had, thus leaving the British economy denuded of its manufacturing base.
Then to create a feelgood factor they relaxed financial controls to make it easy for people who were not earning great money to enjoy lavish lifestyles by running up unsupportable personal debts and also raised welfare benefits beyond what the Treausry could afford from its tax revenues. And so the deficit economy was begun.
Finally when the "spend and spend" economic model went pear shaped the Labour government embarked on a programme of such gobsmacking irresponsibility no intelligent person can comprehend how they ever thought the nation could avoid going into an inflationary spiral on a par with Zimbabwe.
What form will the middle class rebellion take? Wat Tyler thinks something like the American Tea Party movement might arise. I feel the bigger danger is Britain will slide into self destructive apathy and nihilism.
RELATED POSTS:
Interesting Times
Magic Money
Money Grows On Trees
Debt Crisis
15 May 2010
The Scottish Question
by John De Roe
SNP leaders Alex (Rab C.) Salmond wants £700 million from British taxpayers as a way of showing that we respect Scotland's separate national identity. Cameron should respectfully tell him to fuck off and here's why.
Ever since the Labour party became the second party on British politics Scotland has done very well out of the English taxpayer. I am not being anti Scottish although if we allowed comments here I'm sure I would be attacked by thousands of aggrieved Scots citing the atrocities of King Edward 1, the Highland Clearances and random references to chilly jocko land and deep fried Mars Bars as evidence that England's innate racism is directed mostly against the Scots.
The fact is the over - representation of Scotland and particularly the solidly Labour voting central industrial belt distorts British democracy. If we agreed to the next demand for full independence for Scotland not only would Mr. Salmond and his nationalist friends crap themselves at the thought of how their country might fare economically with the intravenous drip of English money withdrawn, the Labour leadership would crap themselves too.
Without that Scottish block vote Labour would have little chance of ever winning another election for the Westminster parliament. Even the "Vote Liberal Democrat and get The Conservatives" would not work. The English by and large are slightly left of centre but have little taste for Labour's brand of populist authoritarianism. Indeed it is only the tribalism of the working class vote in English industrial conurbations plus the outrageously gerrymandered constituency boundary changes enacted by the Labour government that ruled from 1997 to 2010 that would maintain Labour as a political force of any significance.
Although English voters lean slightly to the left we should not write off the Conservatives as a bunch of right wing, free market nutters. The Thatcher era was an aberration. Apart from that, since the Great Reform Act of 1832 more social reforms, more acts to emancipate the lower classes have been enacted by Conservative Governments that any other. And I say that as a Liberal.
This attachment to Conservatism might seem perverse if as a nation we are the fairness loving social libertarians we like to think. It is however not a contradiction at all. As liberals we do not like to see the poor or minority groups being discriminated against but as libertarians we do not like governments telling us what to do, how to live. And we certainly do not like Labour's paternalistic attitude that causes the party's governments to treat the electorate like dull witted children who must be constantly protected from the consequences of their folly.
English people do not have much time for the politically correct do - goodery of Labour activists.
So long as Scotland remains a disproportionate force in\Westminster however, the voters of England will not get the kind of liberalism they want. While Labour can rely on Scottish tribalism they can ride rough shod over English libertarian feelings to impose their will on the nation.
RELATED POSTS:
Authoritarian Box Ticking
Change You Can't Believe In
Change: Politicians Don't Get It
Labour Out Of The Closet
Epitaph For New Labour
14 May 2010
The Death Of Nanny State
Anna Raccoon recommended by Ed Butt
The excellent libertarian blogger predicts and celebrates the imminient death of Nanny State as the Con Lib coalition shape up to start snipping away at all those politically correct stupidities Labour politicians traditionally love to lavish taxpayers money on...
13 May 2010
That Little Matter Of The Oil Spill
by Xavier Connolly
While the other guys have been having fun sounding off about the duplicity and hypocrisy of politicians, your truly has been watching the goings on in the Gulf of Mexico where there has been an oil spill after a bubble of methane gas blew the lid off a deep sea oil well.
This spill being off the American coast than the White House incumbent being a "progressive liberal" not only would you think this spill heralds the end of the world but from looking at some comment threads you on news blogs of the "progressive left" one might think that President Obama's politics are a bigger factor in stopping the leaking oil than the skills of the oil well engineers, geologists and technicians.
First let's deal with the "end of the world scenario. There have been bigger oil spills in locations that made them more difficult to operate on. Discount the propensity of that benighted nation for hysterical and what we have is a very run of the mill disaster. These things happen, we deal with them and unless America is involved everybody keeps calm and carries on.
What about the ecological effects. Will this wipe out marine life in the Gulf Of Mexico as the "progressive left" proclaims? Probably not. Oil is a natural substance and is rapidly broken down by nature. Paradoxically it is full of the ideal nutrients for the micro organisms that break it down so the oil spill will in the medium term help marine life.
There will be heart rending scenes on television of sea birds and marine mammals but those species have survived much worse ecological disasters.
Finally will it be possible to stop it? Yes but due to the depth of the well head, about 18000 feet under water I believe it is not going to be easy. Not easy is nothing new to engineers especially those whose job is to fix problems. If fixing problems was easy they wouldn't be problems.
Is this spill then a reason for shutting down the oil industry as the greens and the progressive left are claiming? Hmm, look where those claims are coming from, look who funds the scientists supporting such idiotic claims, follow the money and you will find it leads back to people peddling some very dubious alternative energy technologies. Given how much modern society depends on fossil fuels it is simply not feasible to shout down the oil industry or even curtail oil exploration. Green Technologies are a good twenty years away from being able to supply the needs of modern societies and even at that range the success of green power depends as much on a radical change of lifestyle as new technologies coming on stream.
12 May 2010
I'd Get A Lawyer To Look At That If I Were You
Anna Raccoon recommended by John De Roe
Give a Labour politician a sniff of our cash and they have this overwhelming urge to splash it all on a 3 legged nag, usually as the result of a dare. Even when he’s halfway out the door he couldn’t resist the temptation to blow a cool 25 billion because his mates in Europe said it’d be great.
Trusting soul that he was he went straight over there popped 25 billion in the slot, while his Euromates sniggered behind their hands, pressed the button and all he got out was a single piece of paper on which the word ‘Thanks!” was written in Read more: Get A Lawyer To Look At That
11 May 2010
Unempoyment Rises In US Despite Confusing Statistics
recommended by James Dahlberg
Unemployment Facts in the USA
The Daily Stirrer has reported on the weird and contradictory unemployment statistics issued by the UK government. In this article Citizen Wells finds the same kind of confusion concealing a picture far worse than anyone imagined in the USA. It appears the situation is much the same in the UK but I'll let the British guys comment on that.
The situation is much worse than statistics suggest. When will politicians realize they can't fool all the people all of the time?
10 May 2010
Will Cameron Seduce Clegg With PR Offer?
by Ian R Thorpe
Electoral Reform and the introduction of a voting system in which every vote counts has long been the goal of the Liberal and later the Liberal Democrat parties. Although most people have believed a Lib Dem alliance that could deliver electoral reform could only be made with Labour because Labour are traditionally the party that makes fairness a major plank of its election manifesto.
What political pundits and social commentators forget however is that Labour has traditionally benefited much more from the discredited first - past - the - post system than the Conservatives. Even in this latest election campaign Labour were looking set for a crushing defeat until in the last week they invested heavily in fear and panic tactics to scare potential Lib Dem voters back to the shelter of the red umbrella. The irony is Gordon Brown probably swung as many seats for the Conservatives with his anti - Liberal drive as he did for his own party, thus denying himself any chance of forming a stable coalition government.
Apart from the closely packed safe Labour seats in the industrial clusters on the north west, midlands, Tyne Tees region and inner London and the distortion of the electoral map caused by Scotland being vastly over -represented at Westminster, areas where Labour has exploited working class tribalism to retain huge majorities, the colour of the electoral map is overwhelmingly blue. Labour knows this of course and has exploited what one independent candidate in 2005 described as the "they'd vote for a dog turd if it wore a Labour rosette tendency" to its advantage. They have also show almost criminal self interest in adjusting constituency boundaries, pushing traditionally Conservative wards from seats winnable by the Conservatives into neighbouring safe Labour seats and moving solid Labour wards into seats vulnerable to the conservatives.
In other nations such behaviour would be decried as electoral fraud. Under a Conservative government it would be decried by Labour as electoral fraud. But it is OK for Labour to do it because in the Labour Power - At - Any - Price mindset the end always justifies the means.
We hope for a Lib - Con coalition, as I write it could be announced within minutes (but that would need another article) Those who are relieved we will not have another elected dictatorship such as the nature endured under Thatcher and then under Blair and Brown (John Major's government with a wafer thin majority and a faction of Thatcherite "bastards" in the Conservative ranks always had to show restraint.) We must also hope the Liberal Democrats will use their influence wisely and and bring about a permanent end to the Labour Conservative duopoly that has served the nation so badly over the past half century.
If David Cameron does seduce Nick Clegg and his colleagues with an offer of Proportional Representation the Liberal Democrats must be tough enough to make sure the Conservatives do not wriggle out of the deal. And they must be prepared to brink down Cameron and his Conservatives should they not honour their promises.
RELATED POSTS:
Populist Authoritarianism
The Gordon Truman Show
How Will We Be Governed Next Week
9 May 2010
Populist Authoritarianism, Fear And Panic
by Ian R Thorpe
The Labour Party may talk of socialism but their Nanny State tyle of ovrbearing governmental control freakery rather than protecting the weak according to the political philosophy of John Locke seeks to suppress individualism and impose uniformity by spreading fear and panic. This approach achieves equality by making all weak and dependent. Unfortunately it debilitates the nation
Read allPopulist Authoritarianism.
RELATED POSTS:
Nanny State Has Her Cake And Eats It
Ding Dong PTA Calling
Fear And Panic And HP Sauce
How To Be A Bigot
If Only The World Were Fair
8 May 2010
Clegg Could Redeem Himself The Liberal Democrats must consider their election campaign a failure, although the loss of momentum was more due to the main party's scare and smear tactics than Lib Dem mistakes. As a partner in government however the Lib Dems can show they are fit to rule.
Labour Loved The Lib Dems Yesterday Did Gordon Brown & Cool really think the Lib Dems were tamely going to keep them in power? They just did not know who the Lib Dems were, which shows why they were always unfit to govern.
All the Daily Stirrer writers have been labelled bigots during the course of the election campaign for daring to suggest New Labour's failure in education, immigration, the economy, jobs and health and their cynical use of obviously rigged statistics to try to mask their failures and incompetence and manipulate public opinion clearly demonstrated they are unfit to govern.
It is an opinion of course, an opinion shared by the electorate as it turns out. The Daily Stirrer has never questioned anybody's right to disagree with us or to express their point of view in their own online publications. Our not allowing comments on articles is a policy based on technical grounds, it is not denying people the right to free speech as has been blogged about us elsewhere. We deny nobody the right to express their opinion, all we are doing is choosing not to provide the public a platform on our pages. It is in fact the New Labour supporters who tell us we have no right to disagree with them who are bigots, as they would understand were they intelligent enough to look up the word's meaning in a dictionary.
In view of that attitude which is widespread among New Labour supporters their shock and outrage at the Liberal Democrats failure to prop up their dysfunctional party and its failed leader are hardly surprising. People with minds of their own, who have their own point of view and insist on thinking for themselves? Such bigots should not be allowed to enter politics.
7 May 2010
New Financial Crisis Will Lead To Autumn Election
by John De Roe
We're all being a bit lazy today after the all - nighter of election night. If you. like most people, are glad it is all over don't relax too much. The unfolding financial crisis in the Eurozone following the collapse of the Greek economy means we are almost certain be to back to election land in October or November to rerun the whole process.
In reality another election will solve nothing, the sovereign debt crisis is much bigger than the sub - prome meltdown or the failure of investment banks. The only way we will get out of it is by abandoning political point scoring, appointing government's of national unity, rejecting the idiotict notions of globalism and multiculturalism and getting back to nations running their own affairs.
From the decline of the Roman Empire to the present all attempts to unite many clutures, economic systems and tribal lifestyles under a single political entity have always failed. Why did anybody ever think now was going to be different?
So even while Conservative and Liberal Democrat Leaders are haggling over the terms of their coalition the new sovereign debt financial crisis that started in Greece and is spreading throughout the Eurozone and further afield is scripting the failure of their government.
Read more
Financial Crisis Guarantees Early Election
7 May 2010
Need A Degree In English To Write Your Name?
by Ian R. Thorpe
An article in today's Guardian suggests free degree courses in English should be offered.
The study of our language and literature is so fundamental to society that everyone ought to have access to it, argues Alex Hay.
For English degrees, the future does not look good, Mr Hay tells us. The cost of a degree will skyrocket if the top-up cap is removed, while the money an arts graduate earns is all too often pitiful, with some undergraduates never breaking even after their hefty debts are repaid. Worse is to come. Academics are warning that the present "age of austerity" will lead to big cuts in university budgets, and so English and other less "economically viable" departments may well get the axe.
Take philosophy, for example. Middlesex University announced last week that it was going to shut down its well-regarded department in that subject. The official reason was, you guessed it, financial.
Why degrees in English?
I'm pretty ancient at 61 I know, but even when my kids were t school in the 1980s and 90s a GCSE O level was a good standard of basic English while A level in language taught them to handle gerunds, subjunctives, participles etc. and to comment on stylistic aspects of writing and in Literature introduced concepts of literary criticism.
Degree level English was a specialise area of study.
Has education really dumbed down so much that people now need a degree level education in order to be able to construct a simple sentence?
Or is this just another example of Academic empire building?
6 May 2010
Is Carbon Dioxide The New Oil?
by Xavier Connolly
Imagine a green fuel that could power our cars, keep the wheels of industry turning, and wean us off our addiction to oil - a fuel called CO2", says the lead paragraph of an article I read today.
Some scientists have come up with a scheme to convert CO2 into energy. The atmospheric gas is cheap, plentiful and...
Hang on, CO2? Isn't that they stuff they have been telling us is fucking up the climate. Hmmm, typical scientists, spreading fear and panic they when they have us all running round like headless chickens they change their tune. Could it be the sniff some research grants, Nobel prizes and guest spots on TV shows nobody watches might be the payoff for coming up with the most unlikely sustainable fuel imaginable?
Poor scientists though, they're getting hysterical prematurely as usual. You see to convert CO2 to useable hydrocarbons requires such an energy intensive process it will consume twice as much fuel as it will produce. Not long ago the science army made the same mistake when they became over excited about biofuel. Great idea but we would have had to stop growing food in order to release land to grown the fuel needed to fuel the machines that turn biomass into energy.
So its all a lot of hot air about nothing as is usually the case with science. Why will they not learn just to leave the clever stuff to engineers and technologists.
.
Could Carbon Dioxide be the fuel of the future
5 May 2010
The Power of Povs
by Ed Butt
As journalists in papers controlled by the Politically Correct Thought Police fell over themselves to praise Cordon Brown for a "barnstorming speech" full of platitudes and banalities borrowed from the scarcely literate Barack Obama we are busy turning our attention back to the real issues.
Brown's speech, far from being praised should have ben damned as one of the most schmaltzy, schlocky, bogus exercises in the politics of fear as you are ever likely to see outside the USA. What's more he was preceded on stage by an all female family of three povs who talked tearfully of how they could not get by on the mother and grandmother's combined earnings of over £500 a week (tell that to a pensioner on £59 a week) and how they had to eat lentils for a week in order to buy the girl's school uniform. As grants are available to the truly hard up (see this page from Tameside Borough Council we must assume that:
a) Brown's povs were three actresses hired in for the job
b) They are illegal immigrants who could not apply for a grant
c) There are spending all their wages on booze, ciggys and drugs
d) The kid is going to a private school and thus is not eligible for a grant
The secondary message however, in view of the message in Brown's speech being that only he can keep the economy on track, is that Labour have created a society in which a family of three people cannot get by on a household income of over £500.
Labour have overplayed the fear card, sending potential Lib Dem voters scurrying back to the Conservatives, now they are trying to guilt trip us into giving their useless, morally bankrupt government another five years in which their grred, incompetence and lust for absolute power can further damage this country for future generations. The have gerrymandered consituency boundaries, politicised the civil service and the academic community, introduce the teaching of a political agenda in primaryschools and abused power in the service of their pymasters in the international banking community. Could there possibly be a worse government than these arrogant duplicitous, despicable, self righteous scumbags? Even the odious BNP would be preferrabe to anybosy with a sense of decency.
Enough of that however, we shall have a frivolous weekend whatever happens in the election then your freethinking commentators will be back to writing on the problems that are not going to disappear just because their has been a change of government; jobs, the economy, the climate change crisis and the three even bigger crises the politicians and mainstream media are hiding from view.
Meanwhile lest you forget that The Politically Correct Thought Police are not going to go away in a hurry either, here's Dick Puddlecoat on Pushing The Green Agenda In Schools
RELATED POSTS:
Private School Povs
Election 2010 roundup
How To Be A Bigot
4 May 2010
How Will We Be Governed Next Week?
by Ian R Thorpe
With the Labour vote in key marginals having entered its meltdown phase and Labour journalists and politicians already being enthusiastically engaged in the sniping, backstabbing and betrayal games that traditionally follow a Labour defeat the election looks to be all over bar the horse trading that will decide how many cabinet positions Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats hold in the governing coalition under Prime Minister Cameron.
So how will we be governed next week? A progressive government looks undesirable since "progressive" like "liberal" is a word that has been hijacked by Stalinist advocates of the all powerful central government. One wonders how these people who call themselves "progressive" can be so enthusiastic about authoritarianism. The traditional labels of left and right indicating respectively individualism, self determination and devolution of power and authority, suppression of dissent and hierarchically structured society and progressives should remember that both Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany ere based on the idea of an all powerful central authority controlling every aspect of individuals' lives.
We should be very wary of those who call themselves "progressive" then. All too often the only progression they are interested in is the progression of the Politically Correct Thought Police in their effort to control our minds.
Fortunately by this time next week, barring disasters, they will be gone, the unspeakably odious "New Labour" regime of the traitor and war criminal Tony Blair and the coward and bully Gordon Brown will be gone. The first improvement we hope to see is a lightening of the oppressive atmosphere that has weighed down the nation, no longer will we have to tolerate being described as bigots every time we question the official line of the Politically Correct Thought Police on Climate Change, Immigration, Mass vaccine against minor infections, Binge drinking, Obesity, Foreign aid, Minority rights or bogus statistics on crime, education and unemployment.
The next change we can hope for if a Conservative government is moderated by a strong Liberal Democrat influence is that fair will once more mean fair and imply that all people are treated equally rather than the interests of minorities being placed above those of the mass of people.
And thirdly we an hope for a return to sanity on jobs and the economy. Just as Margaret Thatcher failed to learn that we could not all make a living by selling financial services to each other so the New Labour Corporate State Stalinists have failed to learn we cannot exists as an economically powerful nation if everybody works in the public sector.
We can all hope for these things. Trouble is those who get carried away by promises of change can be Let Down By Hope.
What you may rely on however is that The Daily Stirrer will be right on the case of whoever emerges triumphant on Friday morning, questioning, challenging and ridiculing. No wool will ever be pulled over our eyes, we will never fall for the deception of statistics or the diversionary tactics advocated by King Henry IV in Shakepeare's play as he prepares his son to assume the throne:
Therefore be it thy course my Harry
to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels
that actions thus borne out may erase
the memory of former times
The minds at The Daily Stirrer will not be giddy and will not be busied with deceptions. We will focus like lasers on the actions of politics, business, religious leaders, bureaucrats and who ever seeks to serve their own interests while claiming to serve the public interest.
RELATED POSTS:
How To Be A Bigot
Immigration - The Elephant In The Election Room.
The Fiscal Nightmare
Election Round Up 2010
A New Daily Stirrer Archive Online
Nu Lab writers fall out with each other
3 May 2010
Politics Of Fear
by John De Roe
Other people must have noticed how the three main parties, having had their weakness on policy exposed and their failure to understand the true depth and nature of the economic and social problems that are dragging Britain towards the abyss are now resorting to the politics of fear.
With the Liberal Democrat vote confounding predictions that it would collapse both Labour and Conservatives are resorting to the fear factor. "A vote for the Lib Dems will mean five more years of Brown, and Labour tax - and - spend financial irresponsibility" wails David Cameron. Gordoin Brown responds by saying a Lib Dem vote will help usher in a Conservative that will cut public services and benefits while introducing tax cuts that will only benefit the rich."
Nick Clegg and Vince Cable rely on the "time for change mantra, pointing to the failures of the other parties over the past half century.
In truth we have, to quote Franklin D. Roosvelt, nothing to fear but fear itself. Voters should not be intimidated by this scaremongering. A Liberal Democrat Government could certainly do no worse than Labour from 1997 or the Conservatives between 1979 and 1997 but there is not going to be a Liberal Democrat government. In the event of a hung Parliament a coalition of either main party with the Liberal Democrats would have to be better that having either rule alone and the Liberal Democrats price for participating in a coalition, Proportional Representation would end forever the elected dictatorships whose governments have served the people of this country so poorly.
Do not be browbeaten by the politics of fear, it is the Labour and Conservative Parties and their leaders who have to fear a hung Parliament, not the voters. On Thursday May 6 use your vote wisely, vote for the party your conscience, common sense or gut feeling tell you will serve you, your community and your country the best. They will just have to put aside their hubris and find a way to work together.
When we observe the British Constitution instead of letting vested interests use scaremongering tactics to hijack it, there are few places in the world with a healthier democracy or national community than Britain.
2 May 2010
Epitaph For New Labour
recommended by Ian R Thorpe
I am not a Conservative but a Liberal through and through ad by that I do not mean a pinko Lib Dem. I destest Labour's authoritarianism as much as I detest the cynicism of The Conservatives. So I'm not a great fan of the Daily Telegraph. Having said that, the paper today carries a superb epitaph for the New Labour project which is surely dead with the Tory poll lead increasing while the Lib Dems score is holding up.
What has made New Labour so despised is their elitism, their sense of moral superiority and the way they have treated the people of Britain like children.
New Labour's Corrosive Legacy
Meanwhile former Labour MP Jackie Ashley writing in The Guardian says Power Has Rotted Labour But It Does Not Deserve To Die
The way The Daily Stirrer sees things, The Labour Party died after the 1992 general election, blown so spectacularly by Neil Kinnock with and ill advised triumphalist speech a week before election day.
New Labour, the love child of Old Labour's self righteous lust for power and the personal ambition and fascination with wealth and power of a new political class that progressed straight from University to a career in politics without gaining any experience of the real world was born rotten. John Smith had valiantly tried to kick some life back into the corpse of Old Labour after the 1992 defeat but his premature death opened the way for the solipsists and self aggrandizers to make their backroom deals that would take the party further and further away from its core vote.
The last man who could have saved Old Labour by challenging the cosy progression of leadership from Blair to Gordon Brown, the result of a deal hatched in an expensive restaurant long before the 1997 election victory, Robin Cook also died young. And so the "project" ruled, unchallenged except by its own arrogance.
New Labour was not rotten, it was corrupt, preferring to do its business in private, away from democratic scrutiny, preferring to rely on appointed "special advisers" rather than elected representatives. Eventually it became depraved as the leaders came to believe they were above the law. It is not a question of Labour not deserving to die, it has become a tumor that must be cut out and destroyed so the host body may live.
The corrosive legacy its successors must avoid is that authoritarianism, the addiction to power, that made Labour's rule so toxic.
RELATED POSTS:
Immigration - The Elephant In The Election Room.
The Fiscal Nightmare
No Real Jobs In The New Economy
The Politics Of Fear And Panic
1 May 2010
Which way is the election going?
by Xavier Connolly
Greetings on this May Day or Beltane if you are of a pagan disposition. Apart from those who are preparing to dance naked under the moon tonight and the many people who will be obsessing over the outcome of a few football matches, the question sure to be on everybody's lips today is "Which way will the election go?"
The party leaders' debates are over now, overall the Liberal Democrats probably benefited from pretty strong performances by Nick Clegg although he was not the winner of the final round. David Cameron was solid but not convincing enough to give the Conservatives the breakthrough they were hoping for. As the unpopular leaders of an even more unpopular government Gordon Brown always had a mountain to climb. The fact that he is not by any stretch of anybody's imagination a "people person" did not make things easier for him.
Overall then, though the Lib Dems saw a massive boost in their polling scores the television debates did not produce and decisive change in the nation's mood.
What is happening then? The Daily Stirrer predicted that the Presidential format of the debates would focus mainstream media attention on party leaders when most voters concerns are more local. We have lost sight of the fact that in the UK we hold general elections to elect a Parliament of 650ish members whose job is to represent the interests of their constituents. It is not their job to represent the interests of the political parties that sponsor them or the wealthy donor that fund those parties.
Electors are far more aware of that than politicians like to think. Thus while the Liberal Democrats are picking up votes from Conservative and Labour, the Labour core vote in inner city constituencies and industrial areas appear to be haemorrhaging away to UKIP and the BNP.
The excellent UK Polling Report provides detailed analysis of recent polls. In the explainer to this ICM poll of Lib Dem target seats some interesting trends are revealed. Polls conducted in Conservative target seats have showed similar trends but the latest of these is rather out of date now.
RELATED POSTS:
Change Can Be Unfair To Everyone
Immigration: The Elephant In The Election Room
Its Magic: Unemployment Rises And Falls
The Debt Nightmare
30 April 2010
Climate Science Crook Goes To Court
by Ed Butt
Perhaps the most culpable of the climate scientists caught up in the "Climategate scandal" Prof. Mike Mann has been advised not to sue his critics for fear of what will come to light. He still faces court action from the US State of Virginia however.
We now seem to be heading towards all out war between the devotees of "science" and people who favour objectivity and realism. Obviously this can only be counter productive. In climate change, health, food production, energy, population and new media very bad things are happening, things that are presented as liberating for humankind but can only lead towards authoritarianism, loss of individual rights, legally enforced conformity and a controlled society. It is no good raising these issues, the "science" lobby and the corrupt politicians who support them are convinced anybody who disagrees is a bigot.
Mann Made Global Warming: Mann goes to court
RELATED POSTS:
How To Be A Bigot
Climate Change Deniers
Climate Change Science Scam
Copenhagen Climate Science Corruption
29 April 2010
On The Matter Of Substance
Mr Eugenides blog - recommended by Ed Butt
Gordon Brown says he he the only one of the party leaders with "substance. Mr. Eugenides takes the Prime Minister to task on this alleged substance and shows Gordon is every bit as shallow as Tony Blair before him.
On The Matter Of Substance
28 April 2010
Piigs Might Crash And Burn
by Ian R Thorpe
Yesterday it was finally acknowledged Greece, the nation is bankrupt. The Greek government is not earning enough in tax revenues and duties to pay its bills and service its debts.
That is hardly news, the state of the Greek economy has made the downgrading of its debt from dodgy to junk bond status inevitable for almost a year, a question of when rather than if. More worrying however is the number of nations following Greece down that road.
The Daily Stirrer was warning last year that Piigs might crash and burn. The economies of Eurozone nations Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain were so overburdened with debt because all had been borrowing heavily each month in order to feed the insatiable hunger for money of their burgeoning welfare and healthcare budgets and to pay the monthly interest on existing debts. By early 2009, after the financial meltdowns of 2008, all those economies along with Britain and a number of non European nations were in the position of having to borrow to pay the interest on what they had already borrowed.
Politicians of G20 nations including the USA, EU and other industrialized areas have been frantically trying to talk up a recovery on the basis of their policies and actions having halted or slowed the decline. They have achieved their small gains however by pumping money into failed banks, vanity projects, pork barrel spending and creating thousands of jobs in the public sector in order to give the impression unemployment had stopped rising. All of these things increase the shortfall in government income against outgoings (public sector borrowing requirement). All in all everything done so far has been cosmetic, conjuring tricks to create the impression that things are not really as bad as they are.
If the current Greek crisis does damage the confidence of the markets so much that the credit rating of the other Piigs nations and those elsewhere is downgraded the ensuing financial crisis will dwarf anything that has ever happened before.
Piigs Might Crash And Burn
Ahead of the news as ever The Daily Stirrer reported last week that the next phase of the west's economic collapse was about to begin and this one could be worse than the crash of 2008.
RELATED POSTS:
Interesting Times
Jobless Economy
Jobs Crisis
Bond Villain Targets Britain
28 April 2010
Climate Scientist Threatens To Sue Over Satire
by Ed Butt Climate Scientist Mike Mann who has endured so much flak over his Hockey Stick Graph which he claimed proved the case for global warming but which in reality showed that: (a) Mann knows fuck all about the growth patterns of trees and (b) that scientists are not as smart as they think they are. Mann has fought tooth and nail to avoid allowing iundependent scrutiny of his "scientific" data but a law suit would allow the defendents to require full disclosure.
Needless to say the people who made the video ridiculing Mann on hearning of the lawsuit said "Bring it on."
We await developments with great interest.
27 April 2010
Change Can Be Unfair To Everybody
by Ian R. Thorpe
It cannot only be me and my colleagues here at The Daily Stirrer who are fed up of hearing about change and fairness in this election. Campaigning has been more Presidential in style than ever before with attention focused on the party leaders and in particular on the televised debates. This is bad for democracy of course because The British Constitution (and we do have on American visitors though it is not contained in single document) requires that we elect Members of Parliament per Constituency to represent all the people of the constituency and not that we vote according to which of the party leaders is the prettiest, has the most vacuous catchphrases or parades the prettiest wife on his...
Read full post Change Can Be Unfair To Everybody
RELATED POSTS:
Let Down By Hope
Change You Can't Believe In
Change: Politicians Don't Get It
The Conservative Contender
26 April 2010
Vapid Science More Dangerous Than Volcanic Dust
by Xavier Connolly.
The cloud of volcanic dust belched out by an icelandic volcano grounded most European and trnsatlantic flights. But was there a real danger to airline passenger from the volcano or was it another case of Politiical control freaks and their science poodles using fear and panic in a desperate attempt to revover a little of the credibility they lost through the climate change science scandal and the swine flu pandemic that never was?
Read full post Vapid Science More Dangerous Than Volcano Dust
RELATED POSTS:
Volcanic Dust And Divinity
We're All Going To Die WTF?
Gaia And The Volcanic Dust
Luddites
The End Of The World As We Know It
Scientists Blame The Volcano Goddess
Peccavimus
Whatever Happened To Swine Flu
25 April 2010
When Green Naivete Meets Nature's Ruthlessness
by
Xavier Connelly
OK I know I have a warped sense of humour but this post from Wolf Howling on the expeditions to walk (or canoe in one case) to the north pole wearing T shirt and shorts (slight exaggeration for comic effect there) to show how advanced global warming is made me laugh. Global warming or no global warming, the North Pole is still effing cold even at the height of summer and you would expect people so besotted with "science" to know that.
Now I have always believed, as have the other writers here, that climate change is a very real problem. We see the function of The Daily Stirrer however being to question the orthodox view and challenge the "science" which is often arrived at by people whose concern for their own career interests outweighs their commitment to objectivity. Similarly we challenge the economic orthodoxy of the loonytoons school of economics that says nations can just keep spending and increasing their budget deficits, underwriting their loans by inflating the value of assets.
Well loonytoons economics has ben thoroughly exposed and climate science, though fighting a rearguard action against its critics is proving less than reliable for anything other than suggesting ways in which the sponsoring corporations may make a fast buck by milking taxpayers.
Unfortunately climate science has taken on the mantle of a religion, faced with the doubts of the intelligent climate scientists have resorted to the kind of tactics used by Old Testament prophets to spread fear and panic among the gullible. Such fanaticism it bound to push some believers over the edge and like those medieval Saints who succeeded in bringing about their own demise in order to show how much they loved their god, climate science zealots are now embarking upon irrational adventures in order to demonstrate that the gods of climate change will protect them from the ice monsters that lurk in polar latitudes.
So far only a few fingers and toes have been lost but we must ask how long it will be before the first climate change martyr is acclaimed?
Read all When Green Naivete Meets Nature's Ruthlessness
at Wolf Howling blog.
RELATED POSTS:
Scientists Blame Ancient Goddess For Volcanic Dust Disruption
Climate Change, Pollution and Coal Fired Power Stations.
The Evil Green Bastards Who Want To Save The Panet
Greenteeth Climate Change Menu
23 April 2010
Economy Returns To Growth - Sort Of.
by John De Roe
After the modest return to growth in the last quarter of 2009 that after being revised upwards twice eventually showed a 0.4% growth in GDP and the figure released today for the first quarter of 2010 which shows an as yet unrevised figure of 0.2% growth on GDP the Labour and Conservative finance teams slugging out the election argument differ on what the figures mean. Labour naturally claim these figures of superficially modest growth show the recovery is steaming ahead into recovery as a result of Gordon Brown's and Alistair Darling's expert management of the nation's finances.
The Conservatives on the other hand say the figures show the economy is still in the doldrums and recovery will not begin until there is a change of government.
What the figures really mean when considered in the light of how much money the government is pumping into the economy through bond sales (at excruciatingly high interest rates) and how prices are rising both in the commodities markets which affect manufacturing and in the shops where price increases affect everything is that far from growing the economy is contracting at an alarming rate. A gallon of petrol costs 20% more than it did a year ago, food prices continue to rise at over 10% per year (a 1.2% official increase was recorded in March compared to 1.7% in February) while the stated overall inflation rate continues to be distorted by idiotically low interest rates.
Many commentators are coming round to the view that the government know how bad a state the economy is truly in. I have moved on from there, we now believe even the government does not understand how bad things are. The Conservatives do which is why they are trying to avoid overall victory in the election. We truly do live in interesting times.
BBC News: Parties Disagree Over Economic Performance
RELATED POSTS:
Interesting Times
Jobless Economy
No Real Jobs In New Economy
Zombie Economy
22 April 2010
Messing About
by Ed Butt
If you were hoping for a post on the election today, apologies. It has been a beautiful week and two of the old gits who write for us have been busyt in their gardens. Ian, who is our webmaster and Tekkie is busy playing with some new toys and a site redesign on our mothership Greenteeth Multi Media and had little time to write anything. He has put some of our archive stuff online however.
Daily Stirrer Archives ... Recommended Reading Archives
These archives are not really worth linking to, a better way to seach the site is by typing your search word in the dialogue box at the top of our navigation panel on the left. So if you are interested in politics, the economy, education, science and technology, comedy and humour or if you want to be more specific and see posts on climate change, the debt crisis, election 2010 etc. you can call up a quick listing from your favourite search engine .
21 April 2010
Unemployment Falls, Number Not Working Rises, It's Magic
by John De Roe
How can it be that there are less people in work than last month but also less people claiming jobseekers allowance. Well preparing statistics has always been an occultish activity and government statistics is definitely among the dark arts. The deception on this conjuring trick by the desperate and discredited Labour government is achieved by simply paying people to be out of work so they do not have to sign on as unemployed.
We have highlighted this anomaly before in The Daily Stirrer of course and in terms of governmental mendacity it is no worse that the Thatcher government's pressuring family doctors into declaring people disabled to keep them off the unemployment register. Quite simply the economic mess that is driving us towards a jobless economy is the result of dismantling the industrial base, letting overseas investors take full control of key industrial firms and encouraging the export of jobs to low labour cost countries.
Such lunacy, in which both Labour and Conservatives governments have participated, and the creation of the debt driven economy that masked the true state of affairs, could only ever have one result. Britain is effectively bankrupt.
It is dishonest of this Labour government or the Conservatives to blame the bankers when both parties have been enthusiastic deregulators and good friends of unconstrained irresponsible speculation because what went on throughout the 1980s, 90s, and the last decade was pure gambling in the guise of free market activity. There is no market activity in buying and selling bundles of debt. There is neither a product nor service of any substance to be traded. The so called free market economy of the past three decades was a poker game in which all the player's were bluffing. Players were betting recklessly though they had nothing to bet on constantly raising the ante in the hope others would fold first. In the end they all folded just as soon as the first IOU was called in
Now Gordon Brown, displaying the addiction to power from which all failing Prime Ministers suffer is simply trying to buy votes. Do not forget those votes he buys only swell the public sector deficit which means the taxpayers will be saddled with more debt. If the deficit continues at its current level, and it cannot possibly fall but is almost certain to rise as the currency devalues further, by 2015 the government, whether Labour, Conservative or a coalition of either with Liberal Democrats or minor parties, will have to borrow £2000 per year for every living person in the nation just to pay the interest on our debts.
Read news report on the latest unemployment figures in The Daily Telegraph
Unemployment falls, number in work hits a new low.
RELATED POSTS:
The Jobless Economy
Jobs Crisis
No Real Jobs In The New Economy
Real Unemployment
20 April 2010
Is The Next Financial Implosion Starting.
by Ian R Thorpe
World Net Daily is a rather nutty right wing online Newspaper with nit's target audience the more paranoid wing of the American religious right. It is always worth looking at because its readers seem to have an insdatiable appetite for far our cnspiracy theories. Not of that should be taken as proof that WND could not ever break a really good important story on occasion.
I bwlieve they have one in The Next Bubble To Burst Will Cost $600 Trillion
The reason I think this story has substance it it ties in with what John De Roe, finance expert of The Daily Stirrer has been telling us since we started posting about a year ago.
RELATED POSTS:
Greek Bonds Downgarded
The Fiscal Nightmare
Interesting Times
18 April 2010
A book for climate change sceptics:
Myths Of The Green Economy
recommended by Xavier Connolly
Unusually we recommend you look at a book (hey, it's Sunday) and worse a non fiction book but if you are concerned about where the industrial nations are headed and you can stomach the writer's belief that the USA is the only nation with problems this expose of how the obsession of Government's and their academic poodles with windmills, carbon taxes and crackpot schemes to pay us all for putting solar panels on our rooves and becoming mini power station operators are simply divorced from reality is an essential read.
At this stage in the climate science debate I'm sure everybody knows the plan to cover the beautiful English landscape with ugly, 400 foot tall windmills is a lunatics fantasy. The winter of 2009 / 10 has been the hardest for many decades. Most of our readers will have noticed that during the coldest period when the temperature hardly rose above zero Celsius in two weeks, as the frost lay on the ground there was hardly a breath of wind. It is a well known weather pattern and there are well understood reasons why it occurs. Do the scientists who advise the government, those arrogant fools who think their scientific research can conquer and control nature really believe their gigantic, ugly windmills can generate electricity when there is no wind?
Apparently they do.
And solar panels? On rooves in Britain? Even on a sunny day these would need all the daylight hours to generate enough electricity to boil a kettle. Yet the government and their scientist poodles have cooked up a scheme to pay householders handsomely for the surplus electricity they will feed into the national grid after providing for their own domestic needs.
Who will benefit from this government / science academe drive to promote domestic solar panels? The solar panel manufacturers of course. Companies that are known for their generosity in supporting political parties sympathetic to their business goals and funding University research projects that are rigged to provide the results they want.
The climate change Nazis will of course say I'm a climate change denier. That kind of orchestrated campaign to discredit anybody who questions their "settled science" or point out how unsettled and shaky their arguments are is the sole reason we do not accept comments on The Daily Stirrer. There are in reality very few climate change deniers, anybody with eyes in their head can see the problems mounting. One of the biggest problems we face however is that rather than looking for ways in which we can deal with the problem the Government and the scientists and academics who serve them are totally committed to not dealing with the social consequences of climate chaos but to finding ways in which their friends can profit from it.
The "Climate Science" supporters are the ones truly in denial.
RELATED POSTS:
Climate Science Scam
Climate Change Deniers Deny Nothing
Green Power and Coal Pollution
An Inconvenient Truth About Climate Change
Copenhagen Climate Change Corruption
Ten 4 Ten
17 April 2010
Washington Post Patronizes Britain
by Ed Butt.
Ever eager to remind us British of their collective delusional state in which they imagine their country to be the older nation and Britain to be the backward former colony, America's "liberals" have been falling over themselves to comment on our party leaders' debate and compare it to their televised Presidential Candidates debates.
Perhaps in replying we should remind them of the last four people (Bush mk1, Slick Willie Clinton, Bush mk2 and Obama/Soetoro/Dunham, whatever his name is). And then we should remind them that in Britain we elect MPs to serve the interests of the constituency in which we live, we do not elect a Prime Minister as they elect a President. And then we should tell them that while we welcome the interest of ordinary Americans in our election, their mainstream media, organizations like The Washington Post, New York Times, Fox News etc with their partisanship, abandonment of journalistic standards in favour of Corporate fascism and New World Order consensus opinions can fuck right off.
16 April 2010
Cameron Faces Pit Bull Bureaucracy
by Ian R. Thorpe
A Conservative win in the election was never a foregone conclusion but after last night's first of three leader's debates a hung Parliament looks more likely than ever as the Prime Miserableist Gordon Brown confirmed the impression that he is a dab hand at chanting statistics and very competent at answering the question he wanted to be asked rather than the one he was asked, David Cameron was revealed as less confident and sure footed than we might expect from an Old Etonian while Liberal Democrat contender Nick Clegg, revelling in his equal billing made a positive impression on most people who watched the debate.
Even if he does win CAmeron showed he hasn't much idea what he will face as Prime Minister when he glibly promised to cut red tape as part of his effort to reduce the Public Sector Deficit.
Cut red tape, just like that.
Does the boy Dave really think that the Civil Service Bureaucrats will ever willingly give up a square millimeter of their Empires or relinquish one iota of their ability to meddle in the lives and affairs of private citizens? They cling to such stuff like a Pit Bull Terrier with its jaws clamped on a juicy steak.
If he does he is far too naive to ever hope to be a competent Prime Minister.
15 April 2010
The Fiscal Nightmare
by John De Roe
Political conservatives and libertarians in the USA are aware of the problem but here in the UK with less than three weeks to go until the General Election that will decide who governs the country for the next four or five years only the Liberal Democrats and representatives of small libertarian parties seem aware of the real issue that should decide the outcome. To echo President Bill Clinton it's the economy, stupid.
Public sector spending is not just killing hopes of recovery, the government is mortgaging the future in its desperate bid to hold onto power. At the moment, with the public sector deficit (money the government has to borrow to cover the difference between what it spends and what it receives) running at £6 billion a month you can safely assume any talk of recovery is electioneering bullshit. The deficit last February (2009) was £2.5 billion if the money laid out on financial interventions to save failing banks is excluded. Figures from the National Statistics Office
Bank bailouts were a one off item so it is fair to exclude them so we are comparing like with like.
A few days ago I was gobsmacked to read that we as a nation are now paying around 3.5% interest on bonds the government sells when raising cash fund its defecits. I have written before for The Daily Stirrer and both Ian and Xavier have touched on the topic of Gordon Browns Loonytoons economics. What kind of an idiot would sell bonds (effectively borrow money) at 3.5% in order to lend that same money out at 0.5% interest? That applies to the part of public debt accruing from contracts to support struggling industries. We get no return at all on the burgeoning costs of social security.
We must wonder what is going on however, when even Saint Vince of Cable, the only man who understands the economy he tells us, is spouting the same mealy mouthed platitudes as the Labour and Conservative finance supremos. Here is a message for them all:P>
PRINTING MONEY DOES NOT EQUATE TO ECONOMIC GROWTH
The fact is none of the political parties dare bring up the issue of how bad a state the economy is really in because none has a clue what to do about it.
Things are no better over the pond
The Fiscal Nightmare
State spending is drowning our civilisation. Several European states are heading towards a situation where debt interest payments exceed tax revenue.
RELATED POSTS:
Interesting Times
Magic Money
Future Is Cancelled
The Fiscal Nightmare
Holy City (a poem for the debt crisis)
Public Debt Nightmare
We know this government is obsessed with sureveillance, phone tapping, internet scanning and invading privacy in evry available way. They have been forced to shelve a plan that would force us all to carry ID card loaded with GPS chips that would inform the authorities of our whereabuts at any time.
Their plans for DNA databases and NHS patient information databases have been frustrated by their own incompetence. And still the control freak policies keep rolling of their authoritarian production line. They are now abusing personal information heald on NHS databases in order to target cancer patients with personlised leaflets warning that conservative budget cuts would lead to treatment being delayed.
In the past few days I have been intrigued by a news story emerging from a district attorney’s office in Texas. A memo sent by an assistant DA to a prosecutor congratulated him on overcoming “a subversive defence that had some "Canadians" on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant. Canadians it seems was a new euphemism for a certain ethnic minority group
In Britain we are fairly tolerant, no society of mixed ethic groups will ever be free of racial, tribal or cultural tensions but most of us British cope quite well. Why then do our politicians insist on trying to pretend we are all Nazis under the sking when anybody tries to raise immigration as an election issue?
