Religion is stupid, and dangerous

When your invisible friend tells you to kill it is called madness, when somebody else's invisible friend tells them to tell you to kill that is call religion. More on the wonderful religion of peace. All of these things will of course be completely denied as really not part of Islam; even though they keep coming up again and again, are integral parts of every Islam dominated society, and are in the Islam 'holy' books. This is not some aberration this is Islam.

Sacrificed to Xocolatl

They where coming closer. He could hear them down the hall. The stamping, the bangs, crashes, and sounds of high priced office furniture being torn apart with bare hands. The occasional scream.

Suddenly he was plunged into darkness, one of them must have got down to the backup generators. Shivering in the darkness beneath his desk the Chairman thought back how it had started. Such a small thing. Just a few words. If only those words had not been written. It was not his fault, he told himself, it was not his keyboard that had typed them. He had never realised the price that would be paid for them. He was just trying to help people, to make them better people, why had it come to this? A certain amount of disquiet had been expected, people where often set in their ways and did not appreciate how much better they could be made. You cannot get people to eat omelette if you aren't willing to break a few eggs after all, but not this. Nobody had expected this. Surely nobody could have expected this.

There was movement outside again. They were searching. A ravenous feral pack, sniffing out its next meal. He shuddered at the thought as it brought back the images from the reports he had been shown. The things he had seen in them, the things they had done ... it was beyond madness. Nor was it isolated. His field officers where bringing back the same reports from where ever they where sent, those that came back at all, and now they where here at WHO headquarters.

He could hear them on the plush carpet outside now. It would be over soon. All the plans he had, all the things he still had to do all the good he could have done. It was all going to end in this corner office in Geneva. The door was thick and the locks solid but that did not stop them. With a sound of splintering hardwood the door was effortlessly torn from it hinges.

The creature filled the doorway. Its small beady eyes stared at him over big round cheeks. It seemed soft and harmless, this creature that had been a woman, but he knew better. He could see what was left of a mind still working behind those eyes. The last scraps of rationality were slowly weaving together a question as it approached. At last the fat lips parted and it spoke.
"Do you have Chocolate?"

I'm Sparticus (again)

Mr E has pointed out that it is time for another of those 'I'm Sparticus' moments. A few days ago Harry's Place posted this:

UCU and the David Duke fan
David T, August 22nd 2008, 5:58 pm

The University and College Union maintains an email list for its activists, which is administered and monitored by the union. As Harry's Place readers know, the email list traffic is dominated by political extremists and almost entirely given over to their obsessive and nasty campaign to boycott Israeli academics.

The extremists are countered by a small number of Jews and anti-racists, many of them supporters of Engage. They are routinely defamed as racists, imperialists, Apartheid supporters, liars and conspirators. Quite a few of the Jews and anti-racists have been chucked off the list by the UCU administrators, arbitrarily, and usually for making public their complaints about the racism on the list.

There have been complaints to UCU about racism on its activist list. UCU has dismissed them all as baseless.

One of the formal complaints was made in relation to a series of particularly poisonous and nasty emails written by a Sheffield-based UCU activist called Jenna Delich. That complaint was also dismissed.

Yesterday Jenna Delich wrote the following message on the activist list in order to support a boycott of Israeli academics:

John,

In support to your link this may be a long but also an interesting reading:

http://www.davidduke.com/general/humanitarian-disaster_595.html

No comment necessary. The facts are speaking for themselves.

Jenna

JENNA DELICH

The website which she links to is the website of David Duke, who is the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and perhaps the most notorious racist and anti-Semite in the world. The article itself was originally posted on an extremist conspiracy nut website, but appears only on David Duke's website. It is therefore reasonable to infer that Jenna Delich reads and takes her information on world events from neo Nazis.

Because of this their DNS provider has been forced to pull the plug on them because the bitch in question sent her lawyers after them for pointing out that she is a fascist witch. Harry's place may be down but the article can still be found in Google's cache here for the time being, hence how I was able to get it for the repost above. Everything to do with the case can be found here. As for Jenna Delich? Please, just call off the lawyers and go back to sucking your fellow anti-semitic neo-nazi David Duke's fungus encrusted love pole.

Yet more data lost

Yet another data security fiasco. This time the CPS records of "Operation Montrose, which saw 59 men jailed over drug dealing in 2005" turning up un-shreaded at a dump for anybody to pick up and peruse. This isn't the first time confidential data has been casually dumped[6] and it was only a week ago they lost the names and home addresses of every prisoner in in the UK. Given that they lose one laptop or phone every month, including several lost laptops containing data on potential recruits to the armed forces, these repeated breaches of security shouldn't really be a surprise. Everybody in the country must now know how bad the government is at dealing with their data. Particularly after last year when personal data on every child in the country and national insurance numbers and bank account details of parents and carers claiming child benefit went missing after the government sent two password-protected CDs through the post. What is surprising is that there could be anybody left out there that thinks that these giant centralised databases containing vast amounts of data are actually a good idea.

The Coast Guard has got it Invergordon

I'm just back form a little break further down the coast and it was packed, despite the weather. Lots of people and rather more London accents than I remember from last year. What these people might not have realised was that it was distinctly more risky than last year. The RNLI (which is a charity with no connection to the state what so ever) was out doing sterling work saving anybody that got into difficulties, but the coastguard where on strike. This isn't the first strike in the Coast Guard's history, it is the second. The first was earlier this year.

Labour and strikes go hand in hand, all the way back to the very first Prime Minister from the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald. During his brief term in office the entire Atlantic Fleet went on strike. The reason for the strike was that the government had run out of money and had cut their pay. For what seems manly to be bureaucratic simplicity everybody got their pay reduced by the same amount so then, as now, it was those on the lowest pay that to the biggest burden (in percentage terms) from the government not being able to balance its books.

rank		old pay per day	new pay per day
CPO		8s 6d	7s 6d
Leading Seaman		5s 3d	4s 3d
Able Seaman		4s 0d	3s 0d
Ordinary Seaman		2s 9d	2s 0d

The bureaucrats at the Admiralty sent a signal to the Captains of the fleet to read out to their men in order to explain exactly why the cut was taking place, and why it had been done in that manner by taking exactly one shilling from everybody's pay. Most did not read it out, the strike was not violent and they had no desire to change that. I'm going to now show you part of the signal that the men of the Atlantic fleet mostly where not shown because it gives such a good insight into the workings of the bureaucratic mind, such that it is.

The revised rates of pay introduced in 1925 for ratings and junior officers where the result of the report of the Commitee on the Pay of State Servants in 1923, which expressed the opinions -

(a) that none of the Fighting Services err on the side of paying officers of the highest rank too much;
(b) that the pay of officers of the middle rank is not excessive, subject to such adjustment on the costs of living grounds as is already provided for in the regulations;
(c) that the pay of junior officers is more than is necessary or even fair to the rest of the community, and
(d) that the pay of the men is too high and should be reduced in correspondence with the wares paid in civil employment.

Particularly good are parts a, where the people drawing up the report and their contemporaries claim that they are if anything underpaid, and parts c and d. where the most junior (and therefore most remote from the bureaucracy) are considered the most overpaid. At this time the ratings could barely keep themselves and their families solvent, and midshipmen got 5s per day in 1918 (less than the senior ratings) which won't have changed much between then and 1931. As trainee officers they where expected to be able to keep themselves presentable as officers and that generally meant an allowance from their family's until being promoted. Neither could really be seen as getting too much money, unless you where a bureaucrat needing to make savings by cutting somebody's pay and determined that that somebody would not be you.

Where are the Lib-Dems?

The Conservative lead is as big as the Labour share of the vote. If these results where replicated at a general election the Conservatives could get a 200 seat majority. It is particularly bad since Labour should be experiencing a bounce at the moment.

The reason that I think Labour should be getting a bounce are:
Parliament is not in session, which is always good for the governing party.
It is summer, which is good for the governing party.
The more affluent are on holiday, which is good for Labour.
Cameron isn't getting quite as much TV time as usual, which is bad for the Conservatives.
Nick Clegg seems to be wearing an invisibility cloak, which is bad for the Lib-Dems.
Gordon Brown isn't getting much TV either, which is good for Labour.
The Olympic success should be generating a feel good factor, which should be good for the governing party.

Yet all of this does not seem to have affected Labours terrible poll ratings, or perhaps it has. Maybe what we are seeing is the effect of a bounce caused by all of these positive factors. Maybe without them Labour would be doing even worse, and once the bounce fades away Labour will be doing even worse. The question is where are these votes going to go? I do not see the Conservatives getting much higher in the polls, they are already above Margaret Thatcher at the height of her powers, and the idea of any party getting above 50% of the polls seems just ridiculous. The obvious answer is the Liberal Democrats, but they are languishing down in the high teens.

Liberal Democrats certainly could pick up a lot of votes, but at the moment they aren't. I suspect that if he wants to get these votes Nick Clegg has to go into complete Media Whore mode. He has to get onto the panel games (like Charles Kennedy did), He has to get onto the chat shows (like Charles Kennedy did). He needs to be on Richard and Judy's sofa even f it means sewing himself into one of the cushions. When the Lib-Dems get on TV their poll share goes up and there are a lot of votes looking for a credible alternative to the Labour Party which isn't the Conservatives at the moment.


If Nick Clegg can remind them that the Liberal Democrats are a credible alternative to the Labour Party, or simply that they exist, then he is going to see his party's poll ratings go up a lot. He could even become the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition after the next election. If he does not it will not be that he is able to fit all of his parliamentary colleagues in the back of a taxi, as the Liberals could at their lowest ebb, but there will be major losses.

Another day, Another Database

Labour loves databases, they know nothing about them or their limitations but they love them all the same. They cannot get enough of them. Whenever there is problem the solution always seems to be another giant IT project to get farmed out to Crapita with an enormous budget, which they then squander. The latest in this long line of money pyres is to store and track every communication of almost any sort all in one place, so that the single to noise ratio can be brought to as near zero as is practically possible.

There is nothing really new in this. Labour have had a love of snooping and big databases since they first came to power. All ISPs are already obliged to install monitoring equipment (at their own cost) to allow the state to monitor their users, under the RIPA 2000. An act that is already being regularly abused in order for councils to spy on people.

Then there is the NHS Data Spine to collect all of your medical records into one place. So that it cannot be accessed when needed due to the system being constantly overloaded. Possibly a good thing, if they have the same level of security as the single giant database used to misdirect medical training and destroy the careers of young doctors. Not being able to access it could well be the only security measure there is.

Or the soon to be delayed National Identity register to collect all of your personal details into one place. So that they can be lost, stolen, left by a roundabout because they just couldn't be bothered to take it somewhere safe, or otherwise handed over to identity thieves.

Plus, of course, the congestion charge tracking system to monitor your movements throughout London, illegally, which has been proposed to be rolled out so that the state can track everybody's movements where ever they are.

To get around this latest invasion of privacy you could try encrypting everything, piping it all out to a server in a less hostile country (the Unites States for example) via a VPN and using that as a proxy. Except that encryption has been effectively illegal for eight years now since the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 came into force. You have to provide encryption keys to the plod on demand or face a two year prison sentence, and like so much Labour legislation you are guilty of deliberately withholding them until you prove yourself innocent.

Bansturbating furiously but not even shooting blanks

At the start of Labour's time in power they banned the law abiding from having guns. Criminals didn't pay any attention, gun crime rose. Now they plan to ban the law-abiding from having deactivated guns as well. The criminals won't pay any attention to this either, they prefer guns that can actually shoot.