They're Joking. Aren't They?

I don't believe it

2013-05-19T09:42:00.000+01:00

It's difficult to imagine words to more perfectly illustrate the total moral and intellectual bakruptcy of the 'anti-racist' Left than these:

The Ukip leader was left stranded in the middle of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, surrounded by around 50 nationalists and socialists calling him a racist, but demanding that he: “Go home to England”. Police officers attempted to persuade two taxi drivers to take Mr Farage away from the trouble but both refused as the protesters continued to barrack the MEP with chants of “racist Nazi scum”.
...and later:
A spokesman for Radical Independence Edinburgh said: “Farage came up to Scotland to spread his racism and bigotry here – we showed he's not welcome. His party Ukip have always achieved a derisory vote in Scotland but Farage thought that could change after their recent local elections successes in England. In 2014 we finally have the chance to get rid of the political system at Westminster that pours fuel onto the bigoted fire of Farage and Ukip. Scotland wants to be a country that welcomes immigrants – but we need independence to make that desire a reality."

To be fair, the problem here isn't so much the utter lack of self-awareness involved in the witchunters when the shiny new, totally cool and awesome slogan of anti-racism amounts to 'foreigners go home.'
After all, scientists have been warning that inside the intestine of the typical liberal lurk up to seven and a half pounds of undigested bullshit, and conservatives have long known that the anti-racism industry's Average Uncle Joe's public pronouncements are to truth as A History of Banking in Manchester is to the Game of Thrones novels.
No, it's the type arguement that they're using to justify saying Englishman go home that's so spectacularly wrong from their own point of view: namely that it's his belief system, not his race, they're objecting to. He's a Nazi.

Can we use this argument so it would work in the context of actual immigration to the UK today?
Nazizm is wrong, presumably, because it encourages and indeed mandates its followers to use violence and subterfuge up to and including conquest of the entire world with the consequent subjugation of all outsiders into permanent submissive or slave status and the execution of all Jews and other undesirables. Nazism also took the stance that women were less valuable than men and ought to stick to domestic work, motherhood and religion. Oh, Nazism in practise slandered opponents, violently suppressed and eventually criminalized all political expression contrary to the will of the ruling party - there was to be no artistic, intellectual or political activity that was not condoned or compelled by the rulers, creating an intellectual police state as total as the physical tyranny on the streets and its substitution of laws equal to all for 'laws' existing solely to enforce the will of the leadership . Coincidentally, Nazi censorship started in the form of 'angry' street protests intended to intimidate and drown out the speeches of anti-Nazis.

So I'm guessing if the anti-racist, anti-Nazi Left were sincere in disliking ideologies and practises like that their next slogan would in the real world have to be; "Muslims go home. Because your beliefs and actions are wrong - not your race, which is just fine."

As a bonus, the Zen-like calm of someone who proclaims that somehow Westminster politics makes British people unwelcoming to immigrants, (as if the UK government had much to do with who comes to live here and how immigrants should be treated and how natives might feel about the situation), gives us a glimpse into the surreal landscape of contemporary liberalism's alternative reality mindset.

Jokes about spices, gold and precious gems

2013-04-17T17:32:00.000+01:00

…that I bring to Jerusalem to test the wisdom of Solomon with hard questions.

David Cameron insisted “we are all Thatcherites now.”

Which means I must be…

Picture from here.

Eh-oh!

2013-04-08T16:57:00.000+01:00

Everything’s always lovely here in Tellytubbyland.

Everyone’s always happy and nice to each other and no-one is ever Mean or Grumpy, unless we’ve made some silly mistake – Oh-oh! - that the Wise And Kindly Voices (who tell us what to do and when to go to bed or when a Story’s going to happen) can Make All Better by showing us all how silly we’ve been. In fact, no matter what goes wrong it never really lasts and there isn’t anything that can’t be Made All Better by a Big Hug or a Story.

It never, ever rains or makes any nasty weather in Tellytubbyland – unless rain or nasty weather can give the Wise And Kindly Voices (who tell us what to do and when to go to bed) a reason for telling us a Story about rain or nasty weather and when they do that it’s always a lovely story and we’re all so very happy and grateful to listen to the Wise And Kindly Voices who tell us what to do and when to go to bed and when a Story’s going to happen. And the giant windmills really, really work.

There’s always tubby toast and tubby custard from the machines to eat that never, ever run out because there’s always more from wherever tubby toast and tubby custard come from (unless we’ve made some silly mistake – Oh-oh! – that the Wise And Kindly Voices who tell us what to do and when to go to bed or when a Story’s going to happen can Make All Better by showing us all how silly we’ve been), and then usually it’s time for another Story so we never, ever have to go and find any tubby toast and tubby custard for ourselves, so we can go and play with our magical toys that come from Magicland and that never break or go wrong and that we never have to fetch for ourselves.

And when the sun always shines and the bunny rabbits hop around, the Wise And Kindly Voices (who tell us what to do and when to go to bed) show us a Story about all the little children of the world who are nice and lovely and who are (almost) exactly like us and who only need a Big Hug and tubby toast and tubby custard and magical toys that come from Magicland and that never break or go wrong just like us - which is why everything always ends up All Better.

And if we are ever extra silly and make a mess – Oh-oh! - then the Noo-Noo comes along to clean up the mess and it looks a little bit cross but we don’t mind and we never have to be upset or scared because we’ve made a mess because the Noo-Noo is never really Grumpy and Mean to us. It just cleans up our mess and we can play with our magical toys that come from Magicland and that never break or go wrong and that we never have to fetch for ourselves.

In fact, there really isn’t anyone in the whole wide world who’s Grumpy and Mean, because being really and truly Grumpy and Mean is IM-POSSIBLE – except for the Grumpy and Mean people who pretend that there are in fact Grumpy and Mean people, but they’re just silly.

So if we never, ever listen to the Grumpy and Mean people who say that there are in fact Grumpy and Mean people somewhere, everything will be All Better and we can go on listening to lovely stories and eating tubby toast and tubby custard from the machines to eat that never, ever run out and go and play with our magical toys that come from Magicland and that never break or go wrong and that we never have to fetch for ourselves and we’re all so happy and grateful to listen to the Wise And Kindly Voices who tell us what to do and when to go to bed and when a Story’s going to happen.

And if we believe it really, really hard, then nothing bad will ever, ever happen and it will always all be lovely and all the little children will always be loved and safe and happy here in Tellytubbyland because there are in fact no Grumpy and Mean people in the whole wide world at all.

In fact, we think that the last Grumpy and Mean person (who does not exist) has just gone away and no-one will ever, ever tell us that it isn’t going to be All Better ever again.

Big Hug.

By-Bye.

28. Days later

2013-04-02T08:14:00.002+01:00

Yesterday was supposed to be benefits Armageddon according to Polly Toynbee of the Guardian and the BBC: in which the mindless recipients of thousands of pounds in benefits and who simply can’t think or act for themselves, and the homeless would stalk our land, dying in silence and resorting to cannibalism in order to survive…

Thursday 28 March 2013

Benefit cuts: Monday will be the day that defines this government

Those on low incomes, after all the vicious talk dismissing them as cheats and idlers, will be hit by an avalanche of cuts… and so on and so forth…

I’ve worked in benefits for nearly ten years. So sue me.

I read about 100 case files a week. I’ve interviewed or been quizzed in person at our offices by hundreds of claimants and spoken to many hundreds more (thousands, in fact) on the phone – many of them receiving Disability Living Allowance.

In all that time I’ve seen one guide dog, one set of crutches and one stump where a severed thumb used to be.

I continue to read files and talk with customers who’ve borne children while they’ve been receiving Disability Living Allowance and /or Incapacity Benefit – and not just once but multiple times. Or big, healthy people who have ‘anger issues’ that consist of trying to intimidate benefits staff into sympathizing with them and paying up despite whatever lack of evidence they are in the office for. And then there are the ‘depressives’ who manage to survive for months after they stop claiming main benefits for subsistence without work or savings or income of any sort but who somehow don’t starve and freeze but who still need to have their rent and Council Tax paid. How do the most vulnerable in society do that if they aren’t very thrifty and resourceful? If they are thrifty and resourceful, how can they be vulnerable?

Then there are the alcoholics and other addicts who till recently got more pay than the unemployed in order to, presumably, avoid the requirement to look for work but about 30 quid a week extra can buy a few bottles or maybe some drugs. That was Incapacity Benefit before it was more or less replaced by Employment Support Allowance.

Some people receive DLA because they have ‘panic attacks’ – which when you interview them turns out to mean they hate it when someone sends them on work experience or asks them to attend work training… or any kind of appointment.

There are also genuinely sad cases out there for whom proper psychiatry might help (but not necessarily enable them to work soon or indeed ever), and of course some people do get injured or otherwise sick so Incapacity Benefit/DLA/ESA are temporarily needed and I’d not like the disabled element of Universal Credit to disappear. And it won’t. That would be and is a safety net. I don’t resent a penny of tax that goes to keep them alive, fed and housed.

But so many uninjured people have ‘issues’ it seems obvious that doctors have been handing out disability assessments more or less wholesale, and that has helped to create a permanently non-working ‘disabled’ welfare caste who do not even have to seek work.

They aren’t imaginary. They aren’t a tiny minority – they are a hard core on the scrounge and they are taking scarce and shrinking resources away from people who actually need medical or welfare payment help and the taxpayers who might otherwise get to keep and spend their own hard-earned money on themselves and their families. Some are hoarding bedrooms built and financed by local government to house people instead of ‘a lifetime’s memories.’ It’s not ‘demonizing’ them; it’s called actually meeting them.

One third of Northern Ireland’s working age Incapacity Benefit recipients were ‘incapacitated’ until Incapacity Benefit was phased out? I didn’t know the IRA was that effective. Or that the Coalition could do wholesale biblical miracles.

There’s a welfare aristocracy out there that needs to be abolished, and it’s a pity that (as seems likely in this bureaucratic day and age) ATOS is going the tick-box route, but ‘disability’ is a way of life for those shameless enough to claim it.

It’s being stopped, and though I won’t be voting for the Conservatives (probably ever) and haven’t done so for years, at least they are doing something.

Picture from here.

Sorted

2013-03-13T19:58:00.000Z

Words of wisdom and hope from The Independent.

“It’s OK if you are one of the 13,000 millionaires in this country.”

Let’s take him at his word and do what the trade unionists and respected charity spokespeople in this report might suggest as good ideas.

The

national debt that has to be paid back to someone or other is £1,347,000,000,000.

That “someone or other” is the banks who would otherwise be lending to employers and people who make useful stuff and who want to keep on employing people and making useful stuff and paying taxes for our existing welfare state….and the taxpayers and their children who would otherwise be spending their taxes on themselves and their children.

Just on servicing the debt.

“As of Q4 2012 the national debt amounted to £1,347.4 billion, or 88.7% of total GDP. The annual cost of servicing the public debt amounts to around £43bn, or roughly 3% of GDP

This is roughly the same size as the British defence budget.

Due to the Government's significant budget deficit, which must be financed by borrowing, the national debt is increasing by approximately £121 billion per annum, or around £2.3 billion each week.”

Just on servicing the debt.

Let’s tax the rich!

Assume there might be as many as 100 billionaires [wild guess] in the

Let’s call them ‘the obscenely rich.’

That’s £100,000,000,000 they own.

Call it £100 billion.

Let's assume that the middling millionaires’ total personal assets (including those of lucky footballers and scrap merchants and car dealers and factory owners and farming combines) amount to say an average of £50 million each.

Let’s call them ‘the filthy rich.’

That’s 1,200x 50,000,000 = £60,000,000,000 they own.

Call it £60 billion.

In total let’s assume the obscenely and filthy rich between them own £160,000,000,000.

Call it £160 billion.

Let’s think small here.

Let’s increase capital gains tax on the combined rich [a tax on how much more their assets are worth each year from investing them in businesses that produce trivia like jobs, food, medicines and medical supplies, and essentials and basic human rights such as holidays, reality TV and beer], because how much would you get if you taxed that lot at, say 100% of growth.

So the combined filthy and obscenely rich never get richer.

Even assuming an [unrealistically high] 10% per year capital growth rate that’s 100% of £160,000,000,000 per year to help with the deficit.

Which equals £16,000,000,000. Call it £16 billion.

That’s five weeks’ increase in the interest the government pays on existing debt.

Which is increasing.

Bother.

Let’s think big here

and confiscate all those assets and sell them to Gulf oil billionaires and the Chinese industrialists and Russian mafia because nobody’s left in

Britain

who can afford them after we’ve impoverished all our most rich.

That’s our [The People’s] £160 billion now.

That will pay off the annual increase in the deficit [the increase of the difference between the government’s annual spend and its revenues – not the debt itself,] for 1 year and 4 months.

So we nick everything the combined rich own right now, sell it abroad, and what the government owes does not increase from April 2013 to August 2014.

The rich have stopped paying their existing taxes because they’re all on Jobseeker’s Allowance and Council Tax Benefit/Support and Housing Benefit now, because they're renting...

Which just leaves the little guy to pick up the bill for £43billion each year in existing interest charges on what the previous government officially left us.

Yey, the little guy!

We could abolish the armed forces and take a year’s holiday from debt interest repayments for a whole year.

Just on servicing the debt.

I wonder who’d be running our national defence by the end of that year?

Only asking.

What the government now owes does not increase from April 2013 to August 2015.

Except it’s increasing.

Bother.

Now that the rich and all the squaddies and jolly jack tars and the RAF and the Marines are claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, New Labour’s annual interest repayments amount to (assuming 60 million folk here in Albion’s sceptered isle) is 43 billion divided by 60 million, which equals £716.66 per year that each human being has to find each year just to pay interest on New Labour’s debt to stop it increasing.

New Labour’s (and the Coalition’s!) debt is increasing by approximately £121 billion per annum, however, so it won’t stay that low for long.

That’s us little guys paying government debt interest via:

public charges, tax, VAT, reduced government expenditure on benefits, education/NHS/ transport spending; not those people spending on food or fuel or luxuries or Christmas or travelling to school/relatives/hospital/the shops.

Just on servicing the debt.

Except debt is increasing. Bother.

It doesn’t buy us anything good.

And of course the UK national debt that has to be paid back to someone or other is £1,347,000,000,000.That “someone or other” is the banks who would otherwise be lending to employers and people who make useful stuff and who want to keep on employing people and making useful stuff and paying taxes for our existing welfare state, and the taxpayers and their children who would otherwise be spending their taxes on themselves and their children.

Just on servicing the debt.

Of course, quite a lot of those folk are children or sick or old or retired, so if you don’t take it from them, assume that you take it from working stiffs: including taxi drivers and farm labourers and nurses and trade union officials and teachers comprise about 50% of that.

That’s a tax bill of £1,400 per working stiff per year just to pay the interest on the previous government’s laptop for skoolkids giveaway scheme.

Just on servicing the debt.

It won’t buy them a sonnet’s worth of English tuition or a single ‘free’ school meal, or pay a penny’s worth of rent or Council Tax, or for an hour of a copper-on-the-beat’s valuable time.

Would this perhaps be a good time to ask the trade unions to refund the £20 million per year New Labour gave them to improve their IT systems?

Guess we're gonna need a bigger millionaire class.
Let's conjure some up, shall we, from nowhere? Like New Labour's 'fragile recovery...'

Let’s tax the other rich!

Let’s sell the property of everyone who owns £49,999,999 and less (including their houses and pension plans and two cars and their children’s education funds) in

Britain

’s increasingly quiet cities, towns and villages.

Let’s call these ‘the moderately rich.’
These include: some doctors, shop owners, independent pharmacists, people who set up and run pension schemes, some academics, dentists, TV producers, most celebrities, film stars, Ray Winstone (if he’s still in Britain by then) lesser Premiership footy players, best selling novelists and rap stars, web designers and IT executives, road haulage company proprietors, gym owners, travel agents, clothing shop owners, etc.

Rif raff like that. How many of THEM are there, I wonder?

Assume 10,000 of them? – that’s £499,999,990,000 to expropriate –

if we can find buyers for their property.

Hmmm.

Which leaves a national debt of only £847,000,000,000 for the little guy to pay the interest on.

Yey, the little guy!

Because there’s no-one else left.
And remember, the deficit is actually going up…

Britain

will be increasingly quiet because the combined rich; moderate, filthy and obscene alike will all be doing…what exactly?

Picture from here.

Pease pudding and saveloys

2013-02-13T22:58:00.002Z

Can’t fault the latest intel about Charlie’s activities up the Mewrong Delta over at House of Dumb.

It seems that the Coalition’s school food advisers are worried about too much fat at lunchtime for the nation’s tots.

Contrariwise, the DC is quite happy to raise the poor kids’ potential gristle consumption at bedtime.

Now that the Coalition has recently increased the statistical probability of, um, innovative adoption , what are the chances that listening to ‘The Adventures of Little Nutbrown Hare: Guess How Much I Love You’ will be a longer-lasting experience for Little Orphan Andy when it’s read to him by one or both of his dads?

Mind you, if just one child can be saved from the horrors of full-fat Coke served with a white bap full of Laughing Cow and a side order of Walkers then oceans more government coercion and billions of pounds that we just don’t need for anything else would be a small price to pay… And at least the innocent, stylish Bruce and Wayne will be sending their new ward Robin to Gotham Academy with sustainable food storage containers packed full of salt baked sea bass with pesto and crispy pancetta pasta - which should prevent all kind of digestion problems as he heads off to the school counsellor’s office for that Little Talk about what not to wear.

And just look at The Telegraph’s commenters; they’re in a conservative newspaper?

It looks as though the inter-species genetic experiments have been successful as Comment is Free ratchet-jaws have been fused with the ‘graph’s NuTory bedwetters.

There does seem to be an enchanting troll or two adding much-needed irony into the mixture. I especially like the thread about giant pencils ;but then trolls have reason to be sensitive to such matters.

Say, is there some kind of theme developing here?

Picture from here.

Judgment Day

2013-02-06T17:08:00.000Z

It is with great personal joy and no little excitement - in which I’m sure my readers will join me - that I can announce that I’m engaged to be married to the Internet.

I know what some of you are going to say and I have to agree that; yes, it is not currently legal in the UK for men to get married to the Internet, nor indeed to any non-biologicals. However, there have recently been hopeful signs that the ancient taboos and clannish prohibitions against man-machine unions may be next on the list of outworn, oppressive obstacles to the satisfaction of any and every imaginable individual desire.

My family and friends are more worried for me now that a lifelong connection is potentially in the offing; more so even than that spectacular family gathering when I first announced that I had ‘gone online.’ They had hoped that for all my flamboyant browsing (often in public places and using hand-held devices where it’s commonly called ‘surfing’) that being an Internet user was for me just a phase; that I’d post my wild oats, grow out of it and settle down with a nice girl, etc, etc.

They just didn’t get that for many men of my age-group and later generations, love could truly, madly, deeply be found in the beautiful and exotic world of the Web. But how can any man-machine relationship, no matter how pleasurable, be regarded as even remotely equivalent to the genetically-determined and 3 billion-year history of sexual reproduction and hence of sex within species between male and female? How absurd such arguments seem now in our enlightened, sophisticated days? As if evolution is somehow true; as if species really thrive by successfully adapting to mutations and producing similarly-mutated offspring and then somehow enabling their survival. I mean, what kind of Neanderthal crackpot fundamentalist actually believes in Evolution, for gossake?

And as for the Internet not providing the companionship, social cohesion, comfort, sense of belonging and material security that marriage to a woman… well, fyi: Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Google, Wikipedia, MSN.. say no more, right? We’re happy together; isn’t that enough?

But what I and I really want to do is to adopt.

Again, I know what many of you are going to say: that a man and Internet can’t possibly be good enough substitutes for the father and a mother who produced them. As if smelly, grunting biologicals had any kind of imperative to help their spawn to survive. Some; many even, ‘traditional’ marriages fail or are imperfect, and still children suffer discomfort and injury at the hands of one or more biological or adoptive parent or guardian, so what’s the point in preserving such and inadequate definition of marriage and family at all?

Soon a man and the Internet will be able to adopt, cherish and raise, say , a little boy of six and seven years largely or entirely unsupervised by a suspicious and authoritarian State. It’s not as if children living in homes with their biological parents means they aren't going to encounter violence or pornography or nasty belief systems; ‘marriage’ already allows such things to happen in some cases, so it is only logical and just that homo-digital partnerships are likely to be just as good for kids as their meat-breeder ‘parents.’ Human-cyborg relations are every bit as likely to produce well cared-for and socialized children as the randomly joined, unscientific, undesigned pairings of tree-refugee primates who just happened to have indulged in mouse-free sex together. Internet will be a perfect co-parent for me as I try to bring up some orphaned or abandoned waif in the privacy of my own home; away from prying eyes, apart from Skype and other places where pictures can be exchanged.

I mean, it’s not as if men are some kind of monsters predisposed to having as much sex with as many bedmates as possible and that are consequently less willing than mothers to sacrifice themselves or their time or resources to enable the survival and health of their own (much less other men’s) children. You’d have to be some kind of man-hating feminist to argue such a thing and what nutcases they are, yeah?

It’s all so clear why I would be so good helping me raise a son: it would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there.

And just say for an instant, to all of those repressive paperbook-readers and traditionalists that all this is all very well but there’s no background or tradition of man-digital partnerships being truly willing and able to protect children, then I’m sure that kids in such exciting new family structures can be protected at the stroke of a legislator’s pen.

I’m certain, for example, that that successful gay marriage advocate (and coincidentally equivocal opponent of paedophila ) Peter Tatchell has insisted that safeguards be put in place to protect little boys who are now to be adopted by couples of married men and that such safeguards can also be applied to the wards of homo-digital marriages too.

I’m sure they’ll be every bit as effective (as if they were truly-needed!) as the wise and well-funded professional State apparatus that protected Baby P and the fatherless children raped by Muslim paedophile gangs in Lancashire.

It’s going to be awesome.

Picture from here.

Asking for it

2013-02-02T09:10:00.001Z

I see that the jokers are trying to push a new ‘disco’ website up the Google and Facebook ratings so those horrible proletarian oiks of the English Defence League can no longer expect their unacceptable expressions of free speech to be found on the first page or otherwise high on the listings when the search term ‘EDL’ is used.

At least when those views are no longer so easy to find, some of our feminist sisters will be safe in suburban dance halls or taxi-served nightclubs boogying the night away to ‘My Boy Lollipop’ by Millie while sex-education Koran-style is taught unchallenged in Nottingham and the streets of Tower Hamlets are kept safe from the Gay Terror., etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Or maybe they’ll open with ‘Silence is Golden,’ by the Four Seasons?

Muslim abuser who 'didn't know' that sex with a girl of 13 was illegal.

Muslim vigilante gang attacks.

Muslim forced prostitution gang found guilty.

Outrage as Muslim cleric likens women to 'uncovered meat.'

SHARIA LAW: RAPE VICTIM RECEIVES 100 LASHES.

Why, oh why, can’t we just all get along?

Only asking…

Picture from here.

Danish Gold

2013-01-16T07:50:00.000Z

Probably still the funniest post in the world.

It’s true: bacon is just that much fun.

Also, it’s a thing; an important cultural institution throughout Britain. Countless peoples’ lives are improved; their days lifted just a little bit by a bacon sandwich. For the busy husband and father rushing off early for the long drive to work a bacon butty (as we say up North) from some trailer on a bypass is that little pick-me-up that boosts the day; that gets the blood sugar going and the brain working as he travels the weary distance from the home and family he loves to the workplace where, ultimately, the mortgage will be paid. For the rushing teacher on her way to a ten, twelve hour day followed by marking and preparation for the next, a couple of grilled slices with ketchup in a margarined bun ( or ‘bap’) is her first line of defence against a hard, rewarding, frustrating day.

And what office building of a Friday morning isn’t lifted just a bit by the delivery (sometimes by several vigorously-competing sandwich companies) of those little bags of warm, revitalising, productivity-boosting and weekend daydream-deferring streaky goodness?

It’s a better world for having bacon in it, and no mistake.

I don’t eat bacon any more for moral reasons (the morality being that Mrs. Northwester is an ethical vegetarian and joining her is no price at all to pay for her smiles,) but I can’t deny that my colleagues are perked up immeasurably by that Friday morning buzz when the delivery arrives and the day’s volunteer distributes those neat little foil-wrapped parcels from desk to desk. Everybody wins: the taxpayers because they’re getting just that little bit more concentration and brain power when the public sector spending its money instead of neck straining towards the clock from eleven onwards, to the customers who find cheerier and more attentive helpers than otherwise, to the management knowing we’re busting some targets better than with rumbling stomachs or the brief, dreary carb high of toast.

So here’s an idea: why not spread the love? Let’s share it out throughout the public sector.

No: let’s share it throughout the private sector and put a Smoky and the Band-aid on the country’s wounded economy. Let’s make it a law, possibly even a legal right, to have bacon sandwiches delivered to every workplace in the land on Friday mornings - barring bank holidays, of course. And maybe Ramadan. It wouldn’t be very expensive, all things considered, to kick Britain into productivity overdrive as the streaky hits the palates of the nation and raises morale coast to coast. Oh, it might put a bit more on the tax bill, but it’d surely pay for itself in the long run as the economy booms not only from the fillip that the workers receive when the pink and crispy ambrosia goes down and their attentiveness and enthusiasm for the day’s work goes up, but also from the employment created for workers preparing and delivering their salty cornucopia. Accident rates, accounting and date input errors and apathy will all plummet on the most tiring day of the week.

Now, absurd as it seems, I can imagine some folk having qualms about this. For example, they’ll say that this will be offensive to certain groups, for example vegetarians and vegans, and I’m sympathetic, I truly am: being one of the former myself. But nobody’s forcing such people to take part. They can scoff their soya sausages or Quorn slices alongside their porcovore colleagues, or breakfast before they get home, or simply ignore what their pig-munching workmates are up to altogether. Live and let live, I say. And besides, not all vegetarians are necessarily good people, if you know what I’m saying? You have to wonder just a little bit what else is on the agenda for the kind of people who don’t eat meat and who maybe have a less than sympathetic attitude for those who indulge in Kosher slaughter and who won’t eat pig meat at all, yeah?

Which brings us to the Jews. I mean, I accept that in desert tents and closely-packed hilltop villages of the ancient Middle East the proximity to pigs might demonstrably have been a health hazard akin to the Far East’s tendency to originate pig-human crossover viruses, but really my friends! The Israelis have air conditioning and excellent sewage systems and medical services today; possibly having removed it all from the rest of the Arabic world apart from Riyadh, various tourist hotels and most presidential palaces. All the Jews have to do is to not take part, tolerate the pleasures (and necessitates) of their neighbours, carry on freely practising their quaint traditions in their own authorised and exempt designated enclosed spaces as the Sabbath approaches and just leave the rest of us alone. Now I think of it, synagogues are workplaces of a sort, aren’t they? Should non-Jewish cleaning staff and even liberal Jews (clergy and congregation) be cut out of the fun? Perhaps they shouldn’t be excluded, huh? Why should some ancient law in a mouldy old book keep the joy of pork from decent, legally resident British subjects going about their otherwise identical religious services? I think not.

And what can I say about Muslims? Well, one thing I can say for sure is that I’m really, really glad I decided to blog under the nickname of North Northwester.

Friday prayers or Jumu'ah are an important aspect of a pious Islamic life and it is just possible, (if only barely), to imagine some Muslims being irked at the idea of bacon that they had to pay for in their taxes being served to their infidel colleagues just before such an important part of the week. Knowing that it goes on elsewhere at their expense should pose no serious problems for them, should it? I suppose they might even object - however politely - to the notion of their holy places, such as mosques and madrassas and the Pennines, being permitted by law to serve or receive doorstep deliveries of bacon. I don’t, however, see that a law merely permitting such a cornucopia of pork being allowed in principle, especially as there happen to be no specific plans to make it compulsory any time soon, could ever threaten honest, law-abiding, tolerant modern Muslims.

I don’t believe that such uptight people (minorities all) have anything to fear in the principle being allowed in law and thus spreading to their formerly ‘private’ places of public worship and into their economic lives, any more than they should be allowed to enforce their outdated notions on a more tolerant and laid-back majority and their political and moral leaders.

I mean, it’s not as if the powers that be in the Free World impose their universalizing largesse on large ethical or religious groups: even the conservative Powers That Be.

Picture from here.

In which I see the light

2013-01-05T12:09:00.001Z

Ever wondered how the majesty of England’s legal system became symbolized by sober, thoughtful, wise old men in wigs and robes?

Dumb Jon seems to be ungrateful once again for the enlightened regime of peace, freedom and human dignity which our new masters have wrought.

If an unemployed man who returns from a terrorist training camp with extra mobile phones, wads of cash and information so sensitive he needed to swallow it to prevent the police reading it can’t travel freely anywhere throughout the United Kingdom, then what does the very word ‘freedom’ mean?

Another example or two or three of all this is a small price to pay, surely, for a foreign-born father of five and associate of terrorists not to cool his heels skulking in some flat above a kebab shop in Gloucester or Polperro, surely?

I remember well the righteous anger with which left-wing and liberal human rights activists (and our own pals of the right-wing libertarian persuasion) opposed New Labour’s former plans to introduce 90 day court-granted detention periods for terrorist suspects, and it must delight us all to know that reason prevailed, with ‘control order lite’ such an effective measure and alternative to some harsher regime of, say, locking up or deporting known associates and enablers of terrorist groups?

Or, maybe not.

Or maybe it is, but the official Left wants the new lighter rules to be enforced in a tougher way? Why, some of them do. Nothing typifies the Left’s profound sanity and illuminated intelligence better than its forthright calls to make something work that can’t work by making it work by being really, really tough because it’s better than doing something that can work. Such as prison or deportation.

Proudly, my formerly bellowed Conservative Party opposed the 90-day regime and wanted less stringent measures instead. You can see how well that’s working out.

Less stringent measures, such as an internal equivalent of our nation’s delightful ‘open-door’ policy of immigration seem to be protecting the rest of us satisfactorily, as in “Here’s an open door, Mr. Terrorist Enabler, but please don’t slam it behind you.”

It’s a fine example of our humourous political class that they can argue our security downwards for months, the Labour government starting as more authoritarian (read ‘security-conscious’) than the traditional supporters of national security and law and order.

So, yes, Mr. Magag should be free to carry cash and several mobile phones and to come into what’s left of London where, at worst, he will speak approvingly of terrorists and maybe contact them and advise them and perhaps even to travel abroad again to join them and help them.

That’s only free speech and freedom of movement; fundamental human rights not to be curtailed lightly. I see the light at last.

On the other hand, the Political Class is not so doctrinaire that it won’t allow the long detention in harsh conditions of a man who had sought to travel abroad in order to be rude (and possibly quite truthful) about Islam and for an assault for which there seems to be no actual - what’s that word? evidence - and for ancient mortgage fraud charges that seemed not to have been considered by the authorities in the case of Peter Mandelson while allowing his livelihood to be destroyed and his associates intimidated, or the incarceration of someone who stayed right here in England to be (admittedly very) obnoxious to members of ethnic minorities in person.

You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. I feel safer already.

So the judge’s wigs as symbols of a just and sensible legal system? Now pretty much abolished outside some smaller courts and House of Lords big occasions.

But not all is lost.

Pictures from here and here.