Then they’re not charities, are they? Not for profit organisations, certainly. Quangos, probably. But charities, no.
A quarter of all charities receive funding from the state and for some groups – such as employment and training organisations – it can make up the bulk of their income.
*thud* *thud* *thud* *thud* *thud*
That’s the sound of me hitting my head off the desk. Look, a charity is an organisation that an individual donates money or time to voluntarily. An organisation which takes money purloined from me under the threat of prison, without my having any say so is not a charity. It just isn’t. We already have employment and training organisations, they are called schools and colleges. Throwing money at organisations to right their wrongs is not the answer. Address the problems in the education system. This is a system that is little more than a stat generating organisation so politicians can throw brickbats at each other. Come on, why not really think about the children, instead of the next election or management ‘teaching’ post? As for organisations who get the bulk of their income from public funds, well, where’s the accountability? Where’s the democracy? If I’m not happy with the way the Home Office or FCO is being run, I at least get the chance to vote for someone else to have a go, with these ‘charities’, where is my say? It’s my bloody money.
Research for the False Economy website [. . .] found it was charities related to children and young people that were most affected, with more than 200 receiving cuts in funding.
Look, the party is over. I’m sure you’ve been doing very important work and I’m sure it’s made you feel very important. But the fact is that our national debt is running at £900 billion, we simply do not have the money. You may as well shriek that the sun isn’t green and that our rivers don’t run with ginger beer.
Voluntary Action South Leicestershire (VASL) has lost £20,939 state funding for its befriending service, which supports those those who are isolated and lonely.
And that is a scandal, not that the funding has been cut, but that people are isolated and lonely and relying on ‘support’, whatever form that takes, from perfect strangers. I find myself wondering how much support a group can provide. How often are these people visited or taken out? Once, twice a week?
The problem is not a lack of public funds. The problem is a system which squeezes so much out of people financially that they have to work and work and work to keep their heads above water. A system which has spent the last twenty years telling people there is no problem that cannot be solved by state funding and intervention, when the truth is that there isn’t a problem which cannot be made worse by state funding and intervention.
Successive governments have launched shocking and devastating attacks on the old bastions of family, friends, neighbours and community, and reduced them to rubble. They’ve told us for over a generation that only the state can provide your needs, desperate to make us reliant on them, and they simply cannot deliver the goods. Dave’s Big Society is a con, he wants people to provide the services for free, but I get the impression he’s wanting to make sure it is all carefully overseen and controlled. Governments don’t like people doing things for themselves.
These people aren’t isolated and lonely because of some nebulous ‘social decay’, they’re isolated and lonely because of a social vandalism that is nothing short of criminal.
Well, now they’ve run out of our money. Again. Giving people our cash to do stuff that has always been done by friends and family was never going to work, will never work and can never work.
The problem is, the system is so comprehensively destroyed, I don’t know if it can ever be repaired; looking after the people is now the job of the state and the state is incapable of love, tenderness or humanity – it will always be reduced to numbers on a sheet of paper.
How? How can you quantify compassion? It certainly can’t be expressed in pounds and pence and checklists.
I was going to write about the whole reporting anarchists thing, but I'm so late to that particular party that all that is left is a warm bottle of supermarket brand hock and the funny yellow dip that nobody trusts. Angry Exile, Muffled Vociferation, Captain Ranty and Uncle Marvo have it covered in spades, so head on over there.
I'm going to talk about something else. Something a little more esoteric.
When I got back from work at just after lunchtime (don't worry, I started waaaaay before breakfast time) there was a knock at the door and stood in front of me was a man, wearing civvies, holding one of those little electronic pad things where you sign for parcels. I was not surprised to see him, even though I was not expecting anything, because my next door neighbour, who is very pleasant woman, has been embroiled in a little bit of a battle with an on-line retailer about a self assembly garden shedette she'd bought, but which had arrived missing a few of the components. She's currently down at her late parents' house sorting it out prior to sale, and she asked if I wouldn't mind taking custody of the missing items in her absence.
It wasn't the shed bits she was expecting. It was a package for a house, eight doors down and over the other side of the street. I have never set eyes on the people that live there and it transpires that, shockingly, at about half two in the afternoon, they're out, probably at work.
Would I mind taking the package for them?
Well, yes. I would actually.
Firstly, I have better things to do with my time than continually traipsing half way down the street to see if these people were in. That's the delivery man's job.
Secondly, if I'd ordered something and then some total stranger turns up on the doorstep saying 'this was left with me for you' I'd be a little miffed. Not as miffed as I'd have been had it been dropped off with a perfect stranger and they didn't turn up on my doorstep with it.
Thirdly, I don't know what is in the parcel. It could be that the old bill have been keeping tabs on the parcel of crack that Mr Big has sent out. I don't fancy having my front door kicked in.
Finally, and re-visiting point one, it is the delivery man's job. He was most put out by the fact that I wouldn't take it. In fact, he got a little bit cross. He got even crosser when I asked if he wanted me to take the rest of his parcels and see if they were in whilst he sit on my sofa, put his feet up and watch the cricket. I apologised for not doing his job for him, gratis, and making him complete the task which he's fucking paid to do.
The supermarkets manage it when you buy online from them. You don't get the bloke from Tesco ringing your doorbell asking if you wouldn't mind taking in the weekly shop for old Mrs. Miggins' down at number 37 do you? Is it so difficult for online retailers to stick a bit on about date and time of delivery? OK, granted it may take a day or two to get the order together, but here's the clever bit, you'll normally send the customer an email to tell them their order has been despatched, perhaps you could send them a link to your site where they can nominate a date and time. Then the person can receive their goods at a time convenient for them, because they have after all paid for the delivery as well the goods.
Why the hell is it so difficult to provide or receive a decent service these days?
And don't even get me started on the Royal Mail 'We've got a parcel, but we couldn't even be arsed to bring it to your door, you can come to us where you'll have to provide seven forms of ID and a DNA sample before the surly bloke behind the 6" thick safety glass will even think about giving a despairing sigh and stomping off to find your parcel with as little grace as can be mustered' card through the door.
Top Gear got me thinking this evening. For those of you who didn’t see it, Clarkson and May conducted an uncharacteristic sober and objective review of the two 100% electric offerings from Nissan and Peugeot. Nicely made cars, on the expensive side (the Peugeot especially which was monumentally ugly and prohibitively expensive for what you get at £30k) but the consensus was positive. Except for the electro-motors Achilles heels – range and charge rate.
The distances that electrical cars are capable of covering are just too limited to be of practical use for anyone looking to cover much more than 30 miles a day, and the charge times (around 12 hours from flat to full charge) are just too long for most users.
With the best will in the world we have to accept that reserves of oil are very definitely finite, bugger the ecological aspect, just for logistics and economics we need to develop alternatives and develop them now.
I’m far from convinced that electrically powered cars are the answer. Not just for reasons of practicality, but also the cost of the unit, the cost of charging (they have to be charged from the mains and electricity bills are soaring almost as much as the charges we see for petrol and diesel) and the fact that the electricity has to come from somewhere. The juice flowing from the wall to the car does not magically appear from nowhere, there is a power station at the end of the line, either burning coal or gas – themselves using limited fossil reserves, or nuclear. Nuke stations I have no problem with, but plenty of the people who will gladly shell out the extra for a leccy car will have a very real problem with it, and sorry, wind and solar just ain’t gonna provide the power.
James May reasonably made the point that Honda have the answer in hydrogen powered cars. Yes, getting the hydrogen into a tank and powering a motor isn’t an easy task, but is it really much more difficult than the extraction, refining and distribution process for crude oil?
In the short term, if we do need to wean ourselves off petrol electric cars then electric is the only answer, if only we could get around the range and charging issues. Well, that and the decidedly ecologically unfriendly way the cars have to be made.
The Top Gear guys came up with the tongue-in-cheek idea of running a dodgem style wire grid over the top of the road. Obviously and intentionally ridiculous. But there is a solution to the problem, and it is a very old solution as well.
Back in the days before cars and trains there was a network of horse drawn stagecoaches around the country, in order to keep to some semblance of a timetable, once you factored in the bloody awful roads, cracked wheels axles and people holding you up for your lupins, at points on the route, the tired horses would be changed for fresh ones with the old horses being stabled, given some oats and some kip before being hitched to another stagecoach when they were ready.
How difficult would it be for the car producers to use a battery of uniform dimension and connection? How much of a cushion against the oil running out would it be for the petrol stations and oil companies to offer a service where you pull up onto the forecourt, remove your expiring battery, place it into the charging rack, take a fully charged one, insert it into the car, pay up and drive off?
Yes, there would be logistical issues, but surely it couldn’t be that difficult, could it? The USB has done the same for computing, why not a similar interface for cars?
I am naturally uncomfortable about the moderation of comments here (the new .com site). I’m perfectly happy for people to disagree with me, I don’t mind if you want to call me an idiot – although I’d prefer it if you qualified the accusation.
Been having a few problems with spammy comments on here, you can stick your hair straighteners, webcams and sleeping aids where the sun shineth not. As a result, I’m engaging the least worst option on here. That being your first comment on here will be held for moderation – unless you do something completely overstepping the mark, it will be passed for publication. Once your first comment has been approved, your subsequent comments will be posted without the rigmarole. I don’t like it, but I’m already getting narked off with removing comments from spammers. If you want to advertise on here, feel free to drop me an email, I’m sure we can come to some mutually beneficial arrangement.
As for the old blogspot site which is acting purely as a mirror to guard against any unforseen tech issues – the comment capacity will now be disabled. Traffic for the two sites has now reached parity, and I’m expecting the .com site to get more traffic from here in. So if you’ve something to say please come and say it over at thesnowolf.com, more people will read it, the comments over at the old house will not be imported, and it will make me feel special.
At first it sounds like an attention grabbing policy, that a petition delivered to Parliament containing 100,000 signatures will have to be considered for debate. But there are far too many weasel words in it for my liking.
I’ll hand you over to the loving embrace of the BBC (emphasis mine):
It allows popular petitions to be discussed by the backbench business committee of MPs, which has the power to propose debates on non-government matters.
So, if you get enough people together, there is the chance that your petition might be discussed by a backbench committee who might propose a debate which will be subject to the usual whippings and even if they did make it through a vote would then besubject to committee hearings, secondary debates and the Lords where if it survives it will probably be changed beyond all recognition.
To be honest this sounds more galling to me than just being told to sit down and shut up. They ask for our opinion, will make the flimsiest attempt to consider it and then punt it out of play while turning to us and sneering ‘well, we considered it, prole. What more do you want?’
Labour has said the petitions could lead to debates on “crazy ideas”.
Which I take to mean any idea they’ve not come up with.
It is lip service at democracy when not actually providing any at all. I’d be happier to see a policy of bit of legislation that means the submission of a petition of, oooh, let’s say, 1.5 million people forced the holding of a referendum.
The Daily Express, slightly smarter than The Sun, has a petition calling for an EU membership referendum. This is a referendum I will sign. Assuming the debate is successful and we pull out of the EU, no doubt the Express would then start another one for the return of hanging.
However I really think it makes no odds. If you want out of the EU, I’d urge you to sign the Express’ petition anyway, just to send a message if one really were needed. But be under no illusions, the answer will be ‘nah, we don’t fancy it.’
The bunch of bastards sat in Westminster couldn’t give a damn about our opinion, and asWitterings from Witney points out, are starting to get spooked by us. Our best hope for getting out of the EU is to vote UKIP en-masse (unlikely) or wait for Cyprus, Italy and Spain to bring the whole house of cards down (much more likely). The problem with the latter is that it will cause us significant pain.
No laughing matter, although I suspect someone has done something a little foolish having had a one or two drinks too many. No, this isn't denormalising drinking, it is an illustration of making a choice, or series of choices, and dealing with the consequences. Doesn't make the events any less tragic for those concerned, but if my suspicion is correct, then the individual in question has but one person to blame - themselves.
Anyhow, what am I blithering on about? This story from the Kent office of the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation. I've taken a screenshot, as I suspect there maybe some hasty editing before long:
'After being hit by up to several vehicles'? Well how many is that then? I'm assuming the progression is thus: one - a few - several - lots - shitloads.
A commenter in the article below has asked if the link to thesnowolf.com at the top of the page, under the header is genuine.
It is indeed genuine.
There was an issue with Google/Blogger the other day which lead to this blog being taken down for a while, and I'm not confident that it won't happen again and happen permanently, so at great expense (well, about £20) I bought the address thesnowolf.com and have moved in over there.
At present I'm mirroring that site over here (except this post), and I'll keep updating over here for the next month. After that I'll be dumping some code over here which will automatically re-direct to the new site when you come here, and this site will survive in a state of stasis.
All the articles that are archived over here have been imported along with links, images, videos and comments. However, any comments you leave here now will not be recorded over at the new place.
I love having all you guys and girls coming over to read my ramblings, and whilst I'm not even close to being in the Premier League of blogs regarding traffic, I'm proud of the readership I do have and would very much like you to come over to the new house for a look around.
I'll repeat the appeal for my dear readers to bookmark the new site and for you lovely bloggers to update your blogrolls to reflect the changes.
No, it isn't a scam, no it is isn't a virus. Be not afraid.
Now, he’s a very naughty boy. I may occasionally talk about lamposts and piano wire, but I don’t for one moment counsel such a course of action. You can’t go round inciting people to murder and expect to be given a free pass. And even accounting for:
Bilal Zaheer Ahmad, 23, from Wolverhampton, was also sentenced for other terrorism offences.
We have to assume that as these ‘other terrorism offences’ aren’t disclosed in the article that they aren’t sufficiently sexy or, dare I say it, explosive to bother about.
12 years does seem a little steep, mind. Trying to get someone to off an MP is one thing, actually making them do it is another. Given that no-one is in the dock on a charge of conspiracy to do so, or on a charge of actually doing it suggests he wasn’t that effective.
It turns out he’s got a young girl to undress and sit on his lap, he also seems to have, somehow, managed to get himself into a situation where he’s been able to grope a woman under her clothing, and also whilst she was in bed. I’m assuming he wasn’t in the bed at the time. Then there’s the 11 charges of indecent images, including sado-masochism being visited upon one poor child that he’s also been convicted of.
Fisher [. . .] was jailed for a total of 15 months and banned him from working with children for 10 years.
Really? 15 months?
I’m not going to blame the judge as she has a framework she has to work from, but it doesn’t seem right to me that writing about killing MPs is in the eyes of the courts almost ten times as worse as actually engaging in a physical act of sexual abuse against a child.
Silvio Berlusconi as he realises he’ll not be able to afford those high class whores any more.
Herman Van Rumpoy as he figures out what this means to him.
And as the penny drops for the Italian premier’s new austerity squeeze, she asks, ‘why me?’
'After being hit by up to several vehicles'? Well how many is that then? I'm assuming the progression is thus: one - a few - several - lots - shitloads.
