The One That Is Comparing And Contrasting. . .

Perhaps I’m easily confused, but these two stories on Al-Jabeeba’s website this morning have me scratching my head.

Exhibit A:

A review from the UK Met Office says it is becoming clearer that human activities are causing climate change.

It says the evidence is stronger now than when the Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change carried out its last assessment in 2007.

The analysis, published in the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change Journal, has assessed 110 research papers on the subject.

It says the earth is changing rapidly, probably because of greenhouse gases.

Blimey, that’s a bugger. What the hell are we going to do?

I will console myself by continuing to consume my morning news. Oh… hullo, what’s this?

Exhibit B:

Four ships break free from Baltic Sea ice.

Four ships have broken free after being stuck in the ice in the Baltic Sea, but around 50 remain stuck, officials say.

Some ships are stranded in the waters between Stockholm and the Aaland Islands, while others are stuck in the Bay of Bothnia to the north.

Many of the vessels are not likely to be freed for hours, the Swedish maritime authorities say.

They say no-one is hurt and there are currently no evacuation plans. However, the level of alert has been increased.

So, on one hand we’ve got polar bears breaking out the factor 40 and people in the centre of Australia building arks in anticipation of the biblical flood we’re expecting, and yet on the other hand we’ve got ships stuck in ice off the coast of Stockholm. I know that Sweden is hardly St. Lucia in winter, but Stockholm is a long, long way from the Arctic Circle, and it is bloody March.

Even the IPCC has declared a ‘pause’.

Anyone have any ideas? ‘Cause I’m stumped.

The One That Is Struggling To Understand. . .

Confused, confused, confused.

I’m finding it hard to get a handle on the Sunday political posturing this week. There are two explanations for this. Either, I am too dim and would be better off watching the Sunday omnibus edition of Hollyoaks, or the reason I’m getting confused is that the three main parties have no clue about what it is they actually want, beyond the keys to Number 10.

Where to start?

OK, I’ll start with the LimpDems. My old mate Mac the Knife, who in a previous life had some dealings with the party, is of the opinion that so desperate for power are they that they would sodomise each other in a high-street shop window if they thought it would give them access to the levers of power. Cleggy, obviously keen to be seen as a man of substance on the eve of his party’s conference, has come out with all guns blazing.

Firstly announcing a policy that includes the following cuts:

Cutting the number of government departments to 14 (saving £314.2m per
year)
Halving the number of departmental spin doctors (£7.44m)
Culling or
merging 90 quangos and capping all senior salaries at the Prime Minister’s wage
(£1.182bn)
Cutting the number of ministers to 73 and freezing their salaries
(£1.88m)
Abolishing taxpayer-funded salaries for the leader of the Opposition
and party whips (£0.96m)

Great, go Cleggy! All you need to do now is drop your slavish devotion to the EU, HRA, warmist religious inclination and about two dozen other issues so that you really ARE liberal and democratic and perhaps we can do business.

Ah, you didn’t actually say those cuts would be passed on to us though, did you? I see, so as far as you’re concerned, my money is still actually yours. But then in a separate article from a similar source he states that he will:

‘fight the next general election with a pledge to cut income tax bills by £700 for people on low and middle incomes.’

Some headway then, although there is still this policy of spite that you have more than me, so I’m going to get my friends together and we’re going to take it. The maths is so simple, rich people earn more money. Rich people get hit with high tax. Rich people then either pay an accountant to hide their money in a ridiculously complicated tax system or take it abroad. Charge everyone a sensible and smaller amount of tax, everyone will pay it. You get more money from rich people. 10% of £1m is more than 50% of £100,000. People have more money to spend, so they spend it. This creates jobs, which means you have more people paying the tax.

Anyhow, Clegg is also being tough to those nasty Tories. He’s called Cameroid a ‘con-man’. He

‘accused the Tory leader of saying anything to win the next general election,
saying: "He's put the con back into the Conservatives."

Hmmm, saying anything? What like giving people £700 a year in tax cuts? Wiping out billions of pounds of government spending? Things like that?

For some reason, Cameroid thinks that his Tories and the LimpDems share a lot of common ground.

Mr Cameron urged the Lib Dems to join the Tories in a new "national movement"
claiming there was "barely a cigarette paper" between them on many issues.

Bloody hell! Really? Go and ask your party members about that. Ask them especially about Europe and tighter financial regulation. And you mentioned cigarettes and didn't denounce them as Satan's pencils, you'll probably pay for that, as well.

In an article for The Observer, Mr Cameron said the two parties shared the same views in areas like civil liberties (squash ‘em), education (keep ‘em dim) and climate change (scare ‘em to death whilst emptying their wallets).

Yes, not too much difference there. But why the overture? Does Call me Dave think that the Tories might need some friends? Does he think it will be that close?

Either way, Cleggy isn’t about to act like some school-prom slut, he’s keeping his legs firmly shut. He’s not committing to either side, he obviously wants to inspect the love tackle before jumping into the sack.

But why would he want to join up with a Labour party who only underline that after 12 years in power, they haven’t managed to accomplish anything that one would consider close to their traditional goals. Cue Alan Milburn and Pat McFadden (who?).

The report says those who come from middle and working class families are still at a disadvantage when they enter the jobs market, and that access to professions like law and medicine is becoming increasingly socially exclusive.

Ah, and why is that, then?

The panel found more than half of top professional jobs are still taken by candidates who were independently schooled, even though they account for just 7% of all school children.

It’s the rich! Those bastards, spending their money on making their lives better, that’s why it all has to be taken from them! Or is it because whilst generations of inbreeding has produced offspring who are as thick as bottled shit and have faces which are twelve eighths teeth, they get a proper education rather than the socially engineered politicised rubbish spewed out in the publicly funded education system to those with access to a decent gene pool?

Kids in schools where they are actually taught useful things, actually learn useful things. They probably can’t decorate a Ramadan cushion, or bake a Yom Kippur cake, but then Corpus Christi probably don’t want that in an entrance exam, they want answers to questions that show the prospective student sort of, y’know, knows useful stuff.

You’ve had twelve bloody years, an entire school career. I wouldn’t say the time has been wasted though, as they’ve certainly got richer. Oh look! Here comes Baroness Scotland again!

Now, the beleaguered lawyer is facing claims she had wrongly been paid £170,000 in Parliamentary allowances.

There’s a bloody surprise. The worst of it is, the bastards are claiming this cash and then not even paying their bar bills.

I don’t ask for much in life, but next May, I’d like to see about 400 seats overturned in Parliament and some real people put in.

The message to those who are pissed off with the established liggers: Don’t bloody vote for them!

Lend your vote to the minority party or the Indy. You’ll be amazed how less craven they are, and how things will be no worse than they are now.

The One That Wishes It Were True. . .

I've not said much on the continuing economic situation, this is for a number of reasons. Mainly because I am not an economist, to be honest the theory behind all this makes my brain hurt, I just do not understand the details.

Sometimes the fog clears and I have a moment of something approaching clarity, this afternoon I have had one of those moments. I've just been watching Sky News and apparently McBroon has said that the UK 'can and should be a beacon of light' in these troubled times.

Well, I'm sorry, I don't get it. You can stand there and point at a pile of shite saying it is a pile of golden coins sat on a silver platter until you are blue in the face, it does not alter the fact that it is a pile of shite.

From my simplistic point of view, we have this week seen Woolworth and MFI go to the wall. What the fuck? Are there two bigger names in the UK retail sector? Gone, winked out of existence. I know that MFI have a rep for producing furniture made out of cardboard that falls apart when you look at it, and Woolies is the place where you can get anything you want, unless you need to get something specific, but this is a serious indicator of something.

HBOS were on the brink, Northern Rock saved at the very last minute, a run on a bank, in what we are told is the 4th biggest economy in the world or somesuch.

We have Richard Branson, telling us that 'the economy is fucked.' I've never travelled on his trains, but I've been on his planes and shopped in his music shops, as far as I'm concerned, this guy has some idea what he's talking about.

We now have a government which as of the end of last month, borrowed £16bn. Does that amount of money even exist? If we added up all the coins and banknotes that the Bank of England issued would it add up to that? I don't think so, and if I understand it correctly, we are due to print more cash. Well what is that based on? Didn't Gordon sell a shit-load of our gold at the bottom of the market? What connects these banknotes to something tangible? I was told as a kid that if I took a fiver along to Threadneedle St, then a man in a pinstripe suit and bowler hat would have to give me £5 worth of gold if I demanded it. I've just looked at a £10 note it says 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of Ten Pounds' it's signed by some bloke called Andrew Bailey, the chief cashier.

Well, £10 of what? Fresh air? Printing more money? Isn't this what happened in inter-war Germany and just recently in Zimbabwe? Fucking Hellski, as DK would put it, I don't even own a wheelbarrow, should I buy one to move my valueless banknotes around in?

How the hell do we pay off £16bn? That's very nearly €350. And this is the problem, as the £ plummets against the €, we're told it is good for export? What are we exporting beyond stag parties to Riga who now faint at the cost of a Latvian pint? What do we make that people want? As far as I can make out, we have one chap selling imaginary money to another bloke, who pays the first chap with more imaginary money he got from a different imaginary source. How the hell that does work? What happens when (like now) no-one wants to buy our imaginary money any more?

And now we look towards those who are taking the piss, Tata, the Indian firm who are the owners of Jaguar want a £1bn bail out, but then fork out Lord knows how much to stick their name on the side of the Ferrari F1 car for next season (H/T to OH). I've been in a Tata truck, believe me, it is hard to imagine anything further removed from a Ferrari.

I understand that everyone across the globe has it tough, although I don't understand what event has brought this situation to a head, but as far as I can see we are not well placed to deal with it, we are well placed for a longer, harder time than most people anywhere else. I also understand that for the last ten years our prosperity has all been down to Gordon's prudent stewardship, except for the last year when it has been a global problem.

In prosperity we were in glorious isolation under the guidance of an economic genuis, in poverty it's nothing to do with him. When do we start blaming the Jews or the Romans as our former colonial masters? It was good enough for Hitler and Mugabe.

Me? I've got a €5 note in my wallet, I'm going to buy some land, some sheep and hire some Kiwi farmers and some Dutch weavers. It worked in the 16th Century and people will always need clothes and food. If no-one buys it, at least I won't be cold and hungry. . .