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Guest blogger James does not have his own blog but like Ian T. was recently thrown off a big, pretentious U.S. newsblog after posting a long comment challenging claims made for a dodgy health product. It seems the blog owners do not agree with James and Ian that product placement has no place in what is presented as factual reporting James is on another topic here however. For his first contribution to The Daily Stirrer he looks at how the popularity of Barack Obama, the Yes We Can" man has collapsed from the record levels seen right after his inauguration as President to the latest polls that make him the most unpopular president ever after a year in office. The economy, unemployment, the disatrous health reform bill and weakness on foreign polcy have played a big part but how much is due to the failings of man himself... read all Change You Can't Believe In by James Dahlberg

My own view is that I have never tried homeopathic remedies and do not intend to. What pisses me off about the homeophobics is that one cannot simply say "know bugger all about it, if people think it works for them well, it's their life." A homeophobic cannot leave it at that, they will not let you be neutrally uninterested, of no. They have to try to bully you into agreeing with them.

"But the stuff is diluted so much blah blah," they scream. Yeah, am I bovvered, I don't use it.

"But its unscientific." Yeah, so what. The flight of bees is unscientific but I'm not going to stop eating honey.

Many people believe homeopathic remedies have cured long standing complaints in the way I believe a couple of glasses of red wine protects me against swine flu, cancer, Alzheimer's disease and The Dreaded Lurgi in a way that no vaccine or drug ever could. The science-is-god faction cannot just accept these are opinions, they are determined to allow anybody to think anything that is not scientific. They have to start ranting about how there is no scientific evidence to support claims that homeopathy works (which apparently proves it does not work) and that an excess of alcohol can result in many serious health problems later in life.

Their favourite tactic when faced with demonstrations that somebody has suddenly showed a gobsmacking lack of symptoms shortly after taking a homeopathic remedy is pure coincidence.

Like all fringe religious cults the science is religion cult attracts a lot of nutters who would probably make great homeopaths if they could overcome their prejudices.

There are probably many such nutters in the Merseyside Sceptics Society (which should be named the Merseyside Selective Sceptics Society) who today will be indulging their OCD - like need to go on about how unscientific homeopathy is by getting together outside Boots Chemist in Liverpool and staging a mass overdose protest against the chain store selling homeopathic remedies. Protesters claim they will eat who bottles of homeopathic pills to show the medications are not effective. Similar protests are taking place around the world.

Do you spot the failure of logic here. There are many conventional treatments a small does of which will cure but which can be eaten in larger quantities without harm resulting. So isn't the protest as unscientific as the protesters say homeopathy is? Oh well religious cults, even the science-is-god cult have never been big on that common sense kind of logic.

What would really be a wonderful coincidence is if one or two of the protesters dies of strokes or heart attacks after eating their massive protest overdose of pills.

Apologies to any regular readers, if we have any that is, for our continued erratic performance. Ian Thorpe is the only one of us old geezers who write the stirrer who really knows how to use the internet. As he has needed to spend a lot of time on family matters there has been nobody to post. Today Ian left me logged in to the Stirrer's source file (he's a very brave man) so I can get some posts online.

Our first returns to a theme we reported on a few days ago, the prospect of a jobless economy. We noted how government claims to have defated rising unemplyment are based not on less people actually being unemployed but on fewer new claimants being added to the register than in the previous period. There are no signs of recovery in the economy, just statistical jiggery pokery. Do not be tricked into believing the government have succeeded in anything, they have merely changed the way they present failure.

There used to be a sayng; The devil is in the detail. Perhaps in view of the government's love of quoting skewed figures we should say Satan is in the statistics.

Sorry for the absence regular readers, we have been experiencing server problems.

Bit late with this I know, but it is worth a mention. Photographers were planning to gather in Trafalgar Squsare today to take pictures of public buildings, coppers, traffic wardens, buses and all the other stupid stuff the anti terror laws now forbid us to take pictures of.

I could not make it to Trafalgar Square but I staged my own protest. I stood on the local railway station and took photis of passing trains which is illegal, took more photos of the bus station (also illegal), a photo of coppers haging around looking bored near the football ground (very very illegal, a photo of the tax office (quite illegal) and the local magistraes court (more than illegal - a blatant act of terror). We know the Labour government is totally paranoid but is there not something more sinister going on here? While they are forbidding us to take photos of everything they have covered the nation in CCTV cameras to take photographs and video us us and are now talking of using military drones of the type used in Afghanistan and Pakistan to motinor towns and countryside. "It is to help security foorces protect the public," those responsible for the idea say. We say it sounds like another step on the road to authoritarianism. If they are worried we might be attacked why not just let us buy and keep guns. When it comes to shooting the evil bastard and protecting my family rather than vice versa, I'd back my judgement over that of some panic stricken, paranoid - schizoid copper any day.

Taking Protest Photos News of an unusual protest when people will gather to take photographs in public. This one is worth supporting.

Don't you think these New Labour apparachiks who write for the Guardian should be shipped off to a special rehab centre for people who have totally lost touch with reality? Yesterday we had an article claiming the 7000 fall in the unemployed (out of 2.5 million claimants) is not being recognised as a success for the government in their fight to turn the economy round and lead us out of recession. Of course it isn't, apart from the fact 7000 out of 2.5million (0.35%) is trvial we all know it was achieved by statistical jiggery pokery rather that growth in real jobs.Jobless Fall Does Not Benefit Labour.
No wonder The Guardian, now the house magazine of the Politically Correct Thought Police is going down the pan faster than a dollop of Domestos. Do these pretentious fuckers really delude themselves into believing we are all so stupid we can be taken in by this government of crooks and liars?

One of the reasons people give for buying The Guardian was always its unbiased reporting and the seperation of reportage and opinion / comment. Now all you get is a long line of patronising, rich, guilt tripped middle class bastards telling you how great Labour are and what a great job they have done on the economy, education, health and public services. All of which Labour have failed so comprehensively on the nation is now teetering on the edge of the abyss.

The one area where Labour have succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams, the one area they have outdone all other modern governments at is war. Not only have Labour got us into more wars than any other modern administration, they have managed to keep two of those wars going, thus feeding biŁŁions of punds to greedy American armaments manufacturers and creating a few job vacancies by getting young able bodied men and women killed or mained.

The Guardian is not only losing money, its charge to the left has made it a laughing stock among its target audience. The editors may think making people laugh is a way to recover lost sales. We think if people want to pay good money for a laugh they will buy Viz.

Shockwaves are still reverbrating through the American political system after the shock defeat of Democratic Candidate Martha Croakley by unknown Republican Scott Brown, a former Cosmopolitan centreold. The Democrats expected to coast home in the most strongly Democratic state of the USA. Now political pundits are suggesting voters are turning their backs on Obama as, after all the grandiose rhetoric he has failed to get to grips with domestic problems, embarrassed his country abroad and showed a total lack of leadership on all issues.

To the sceptical the Obama Agenda always semed to be based on nothing more substantual than a belief that if everybody would join hands and sing Kumbaya the world would be perfect for evermore.

The Obama Agenda? From my side of the Atlantic, which is a long way off the action I know, it always looked as if the only agenda was to promote the Obama celebrity brand. This has never been more apparent than in the healthcare debate where the important thing was not to benefit Americans, not even those Americans who put Obama in The White House, but to get a bill, any bill, passed in order to be the President who reformed the health system. Really Barry and Michelle are little different to David and Victoria Beckham ... except Dave's six pack and Victoria's snake hips are no the result of airbrushing. Read what Roger Kimball of Pajamas Media has to ay about The Obama Agenda in the wake of a defeat in the safest of all Democrat Senate seats, that formerly held by Teddy Kennedy

Tory Radio, commenting on the objections to the takeover of chocolate company Cadbury by American cheese into plastic food processor Kraft complained at the nationalistic nature of the criticism. The Daily Stirrer begs to differ.

Objections are not nationalistic but business based. If Cadbury had been trying to take over hershey or Kraft they would have faced all sorts of legal and protectionist obstacles.

Whatever President, be it Obama, Bush, Clinton or Reagan, has spoken of globalisation they do not include America in the "opening of domestic markets to foreign competition" bit.

So why should we always be willing to wave goodby to British jobs and see British profits expatriated. I though this was Tory radio, your comments sound like socialist internationalism.

On a less serious note, we at Boggart Blog are not looking forward to Willie Wonka - Kraft treating us to Fruit and Nut Dairylea.

20 January 2010
Americans Give Up Looking For Jobs
Xavier Connolly

New figures out today underline what the Daily Stirrer has been saying since we came online almost a year ago about the true and truly dire state of the American economy. The report shows that millions of well educated, well qualified people with good experience and a solid career record are simply giving up looking for jobs.

America's economic downturn, like that of Britain started a long time ago. In the 1980s there was an abandonment of industry and agriculture in favour of candy floss industries like financial services, people becoming self employed by setting up service businesses specialising in ironing shirts, the digital economy in which candy floss businesses traded with candy floss money and a host of other ventures that had little or no substance.

In the 1980s real unemployment went off the scale of course. Older workers who would have expected to work to age 65 were effectively put out to grass at 55 as the Thatcher government, mistakenly believed by many still to have changed Britain for the better but in reality the most centralising and financially profligate government ever, encouraged doctors to diagnose perfectly able people are long term incapacitated by minor illness and put them on disability benefits.

It was a stupendously expensive way to massage the unemployment figures and also took a vast pool of skills backed by experience out of the labour market. Thatcher's insane obsession with destroying the working class not only dismantled the industrial base but the skills pool too. Now we have to import skilled workers from Eastern Europe and the east while British workers man banks of phones, cold calling unreceptive members of the public and trying to sell them insurance or double glazing.

And even the non - jobs in call centers are being exported buy a Labour government that is more Thatcherite than Thatcher.

At the same time unemployment statistics are being massaged at the other end by driving more and more school leavers into higher education with the promise that a University Degree will lead to a better job. Young people have no option but to believe this because there are so few openings for them. How many degree holders does a society need though. Ten per cent? Fifteen percent? We do not need fifty percent of people entering the job market to hold degrees, there is simply not enough work available at that level.

Dishonest politicians like Blair and Brown can talk of "the knowledge economy" but in reality when knowledge is so easily available as it has become it has little commercial value. One does not need a University degree to work as a mechanic, cook, building tradesman or a nurse. These are hands on jobs where experience and practical training are more important than academic learning. The only point of pushing school leavers through higher and further education is to keep them off the employment statistics for up to five years.

In the end of course throughout the English speaking world, because this problem does seem to be concentrated in nations with a predominantly Anglo - Saxon culture all our leaders are doing is putting off the problems for another day and another government. They are financing this procrastination with borrowed money however. That is another problem being stored up for the future that we have warned of time and again in the pages of The Daily Stirrer.

Jobs Crisis A roundup of all our posts on the jobs crisis, the effect of the digital economy on employment and the insane economics of the "progressive left."
Debt Crisis Posts on the debt crisis, the financial meltdown, its causes and effects on jobs, welfare, social order and the future...
Politics & EconomyAll our posts on politics and economy related matters, jobs, industry, business, housing, education and war listed here for quick reference...
Weekly Shop At Amazon - No ThanksAmazon’s argument seems to be that it is selling food simply because it can. The internet has no walls, so why not sell everything? From a business point of view there is a strong rationale for this line of argument. If you sell DVDs, why not sell sliced chorizo too? After all, the value of the online grocery retailing market will almost double over the next five years from Ł3.7bn to Ł7.2bn Chasing BubblesAs recession slips into depression deficit spending threatens to drag us into and the business models governments says will start the recovery are actually destroying jobs.... Interesting Times
Let Down By Hope
1 million Americand Give Up Searching For Work

As the Labour party tries to get itsef back together after the putative coup organised by Geoff Hoon and Jaqui Smith with the aim of replacing Gordon Brown as leader before the Generl Election which is only weeks away, many people from all wings of the party are stepping forward to offer the Prime Minister advice on how he may rise above the expenses debacle, the financial crisis and the failing Afghan operation to turn aroud Labour's seemingly dire prospects.

One theme is common to all this advice. Labour must offer the voters "Change". The Conservatives are talking about change too in spite of their organisation having a name that suggests change is low on their agenda. So when will politicians get it? People are sick of change, they want stability and a.....

Liberal Democrate Culture, Media and Sport spokesman Tim Clement Jones says Live Music Must Not Be Silenced Mr. Clement Jones is introducing a bill into Parliament that, in the unlikely event of its succeeding in becoming law would reverse some of the draconian measures in previous government licencing law reform that places prohibitive restrictions on small venues whihing to offer live entertainment. These laws, he claims, are preventing new performers and musicians from gaining the experience on which they can build a career.

For all Labour's hypocritical posturing on the binge drinking culture we should remember it was they who changed licensing laws in favour of 24 hour drinking which only made the lives of pub landlords harder but did a big favour for the profits of the Coporate Interests that owned pub chgains and drinks manufacturers.

At the same time the Labour regime tightened up regulations on live music and entertainment venues. Well their corporate paymasters did not want anything to distract the binge drinkers from spending money on booze did they?

Once again we are too busy to bring you a Daily Stirrer report today. All of us are old gits but able in different ways to offer help to those less fortunate. After another heavy snowfall overnight Xav has been buzzing aroud in his Suzuki Jeep helping social services, John has been on foot delivering essential supplies to old and diabled people who can't get out in the snow and Ian has been at the CAB advising people on how to get help with the enormous heating bills that are landing behind their front doors.

Weather forecasers predict more snow and freezing temperatures are on the way in the next two weeks. Given the recent track record of weather forecasting though, this means we will probably get sub tropical temperatues and blazing sunshine. Remember last year's BBQ summer or the "warmest winter ever" that was promised us back in the autumn.

Does anyone out there still believe in climate change science. If you do, can we remind you The Daily Stirrer has always said it was a scam

As the nation waits for the next blast of arctic weather and the next bombshell of economic bad news (likely to be about unemployments rising again or inflation starting to set in as it must now the government can no longer afford to buy in its own bonds in order to maintain the value of the pound) we find that not only do we have a gang of loony scientists bending our ear about how this will end up being the warmest winter on record, but the other profession for which being completely and utterly stark raving bonkers in the head, the Economists, are starting to work themselves about the rebound of the economy.

What has kicked off this line of academic fantasising is that the figures for the final quarter of 2009 will probably show a very marginal increase over the third quarter. Don't you just love their arrogant assumption that we are all stupid and these self styled experts can pull the wool over our eyes whenever they please? After falling for nine consecutive quarters the economy will show a slight rise above its low point thanks to the Łbillions the government has created and pumped into the economy. A rational person might be forgiven for thinking that we do not resume economic growth until things have returned to where we were before everything started to fall apart.

The economy is not rebounding. It cannot rebound because we have so little industry left to lead us back into growth. Printing money and creating jobs in public services then encouraging people to take on bigger mortgages and run up more debt in an attempt to kickstart the housing market and reinflate the consumer spending bubble is economic suicide. What will happen to those people now being tempted back into the housing market because with mortgage rates so low they are fooled into thinking they can afford to buy properties that will ruin them once mortgage interest returns to a more normal rate.

What will happen to those people already hamstrung by debt once a rise in mortgage repayments ends the brief respite they have had from the soul destroying cycle of long working hours (often in more than one job) and budgeting worries?

Not so, according to a member of the Monetary Policy Committee we are so well placed to bounce back that soon The Bank of England will have to think about raising interest rates from the current near zero to something more sensible to check runaway growth. This is the loonytoons economics version of telling us the policy of printing money has failed and the government can no longer afford to hand out interest free loans and then borrow back the money at commercial interest rates to fund its monthly public spending deficit.

Gordon Brown's hapless government claimed to have put an end to boom and bust economics. In a way they did, replacing it with roller coaster economics in which the economy soared, crashed, soared and crashed again within a decade. The normal boom and bust cycle had been fifteen years. Now, alas, the roller coaster has run out of track and you see the truth of our lonytoons economics analogy. Like Wile E. Coyote when he runs over a cliff, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the rest of the Labour gang have not realised there is no longer anything solid beneath them and are still running furiously. At any moment they will begin to plunge into a deep, deep hole.

11 January 2010
This Will Be The Warmest Winter Ever Say Climate Scientists With the winter half over and shaping up to be the coldest for seventy years at least climate scientists, with typical near-autistic detachment from reality are still insisting it will be the warmest winter ever. You have to admire one thing about them, they never give up...

So how does a nation pay its way when it makes nothing to export, has no services to sell that other nations cannot provide more efficiently for themselves and must import much of its food and most of its fuel?

That is the sorry state Britain is in, and though it should not be a comfort to anybody America is not much better placed to cope as recession turns into slump. Where Margaret Thatcher who contrary to legend was the most centralising, most financially profligate Prime Minister we have ever had in Britain declared war on the working class by declaring war on the working class by deliberately destroying the industries of our economic base that provided the well paid, skilled and semi skilled work that sustained communities and ... read all A Jobless Economy

The Daily Stirrer and before The Stirrer, Little Nicky Machiavelli have alwats said to get to the truth all anyone needs to do is follow the money. Well we followed the money on climate change and were among the first to expose the links between the senior climate scientists pushing for carbon trading policies and carbon capture technologies and the corporations that stood to make the greatest profits were such things to become reality.

So what about Vitamin D deficiency? Vitamin D is essential for health and wellbeing but is produced naturally in the body when skin is exposed to sunlight. In recent years the healthcare branch of the fear and panic industry had hyped the link between sunlight and skin cancer so much people are afraid to go out without slathering themselves in Factor five million sunscreen even on cloudy days.

Now as the "scientific" case that exposure to relatively low levels of sunlght causes skin cancer starts to unravel with new independent surveys showing dangerous Vitamin D deficiencies in a majority of Americans and many Europeans once again we we quote Cicero and say "Cui Bono?" Who stood to benefit. Who stood to gain so much from sales of sun protection products they were prepared to pump lavish funding into research projects that unanimously proved very little sun on a person's skin would turn that unfortunate person into a walking tumor. Follow the money all the way home and odds on you will land at the doors of corporations that manufactoure vaccines or create GM seedcrops or sell overpriced drugs that have monstrous side effects.

In the wake of three reports that state the "scientific" evidence for climate change has been overstated (as against one that says the scientists have been too cautious in making up the numbers they fed into their mathematical models) the government has gone into fear and panic hyperdrive to try to save what is left of its reputation and any chance of the Copenhagen summit not being dismissed by ordinary punters as another excuse for the flying pigs of global politics to get their snouts in another trough (these pigs only fly on account of their having a 747 each to haul their bloated bodies into the sky you undertand) one of the UK's "leading climate change science experts" LOL has announced that if the Copenhagen summit fails to produce a deal to ~~impose a global governance system~~ produce a deal to control carbon emissions by ~~taxing the arses of us ordinary punters~~ agreeing a binding treaty to commit nations to their pledges to cut emissions, 95% of the world's population may die.

How big a "may" is that? Let's put it this way, I'd rather bet my life on Portsmouth winning the Premier League this season.

But as the "climate change science" (the bit they don't like to talk about) shows the arctic permafrost is melting which means the millenia old warming cycle is irreversible who is this clever scientists going to do? Spread factor 50 over the earth's surface so it cannot absorb any sunlght?

And finally Lord Monckton, a climate change scientist who has always questioned the mainstream view and who revealed that a proposal to impose global governance was on the agenda at Copenhagen here defends himself against accusations that he is a right wing conspiracy theorist. He demonstrates that the words global governance appear several times in the agenda for the climate summit by reproducing the relevant paragraphs.
After Copenhagen

One of the reasons I cancelled my order for the Guardian was the constant insistence that "the science is settled" on global warming. Now the science has been unsettled by allegations of corruption and a decade of cooling the Guardian;s tame scientists are wriggling like worms on a hook...
AGW Scienece Is Behind The Cold Weather

3 January 2010
Interesting Times: The Economic Crisis In 2010?
by Ian R Thorpe
KEYWORDS: Economic, global, finance, financial, euro, EU, Europe, European, Greece, Eurozone, Single Currency, Britain, USA, Obama, dollar, China, American

Which way will the economic crisis go in 2010? Cracks are apearing in the Europen Single Currency scheme and China which has massive holdings of US treasury bonds is making unhappy noises about the dececits being run up by the Obama administration as they pursue loonytoons economic policies. Read full article

Argentina accuses Britain of using the Falklands as a distraction from economic woes

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Argentina accuses Britain of using the Falklands as a distraction from economic woes