I’m a Pundit

I have often commented on the insanity of the British legal system, murderers get put in jail for 2 years while people who are too poor to afford taxes get 10, people who beat people in drunken brawls in city centre, trash peoples cars or break into peoples houses get off scott free, while someone defending themselves gets a sentence.

Therefore it was refreshing to read a story regarding a man, who after splitting up with his wife five years ago became an alcoholic, spending around £500 a week.  He was recently convicted of his seventh driving offence, but spared jail on the offence that he did not touch or drinking alcohol for 12 months.

This isn’t however what made me laugh, as part of the judges verdict, he said,

‘(That is) poor judgement on two counts there — drinking that much and drinking Melbourne Bitter,”

This coming from a country where personal choice in beer is sometimes fought for as aggressively as their support for football teams I could not help but laugh at the judge bringing this rivalry into the courtroom, something that would see a judge suspended in the UK.

God bless Australia.

written by Oli \\ tags: Australia, Crime, Drinking, Driving, Funny, News

Equality minister Harriet Harman has today been laying down plans in England for a Law which I am heavily against.

Currently in the UK there are laws that say a persons ethnicity or religion should not affect a job application, for Harriet Harman however this does not seem enough.

Let me point out right here and now that I am 100% against ethnic and religious tolerance, I believe what the world needs is ethnic and religious indifference.

In Harmans speach she spends a lot of time segregating groups, even promoting discrimination, saying that if a company is short on blacks, men, women, muslims whatever they should try and balance things up.

In my view religion, race or cultre should have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on someones job unless it would physically affect their ability to perform the functions of the job.

If a black person got a job over me because he was more suited to the role I would not complain, if he got the job because he was black I would be annoyed.

This planned segregation is the pure fantasy afforded by those who do not have to deal on a day to day basis with the problems encountered in the working world.

How can an equality Minister hold her job when she is actually promoting the discriminiation of  people, isshe seriously that stupid?

I thought the worst part of her entire speach was when she noted

“Official figures show that the gender pay gap has been declining, but for every pound a man earns, a woman still earns just 87 pence. Female part-time workers also still earn as much as 40% less than their full-time male counterparts”

Ok, hold on one second Ms Harman, did you just compare FULL TIME male workers against PART TIME female workers?

Of course the women in that group are getting paid fucking less you stupid fucking bitch, they are part fucking time.  If you want equality, since you are the ‘equality’ minister why the fuck are you not comparing men and women who are both part timers ratehr than trying to swing the statistics your way.

I apologise for the language but she does, fucking, deserve it.

written by Oli \\ tags: Bigotry, Bitch, Equal Pay, Equality, Harriet Harman, Racism, Sexism

Green lifestyle has come back to the forefront of the public mind in recent years, headed by the train of global warming.  This isnt the first time environmental isues have hit the forefront of the publics attention, with both the 60’s and 70’s having several year periods of environmental attention which waned as quickly as they appeared.

As the new millennium arrived a new catch phrase was spawned by the environmentalists, the Carbon Footprint.  On this they showed how carbon had a direct collations with global warming, and that we made a hell of a lot of it.  They ignored things such as, the graph they used failed to show any of earths warm periods or mini ice ages, warmer temperatures cause carbon level rises from vegetation, this warm period was predicted 800 years ago as part of the earth solar cycle, the type of carbon that effects the earths temperature is around 0.25% of the worlds global carbon production and so on.

Despite the facts to the contrary the political figures began to latch onto the carbon footprint as a vote accumulator, suddenly Environmentalism was a hot topic again.  Government sponsored expeditions were sent to where the ice shelf was melting (While of course ignoring the places where the ice shelves were growing, after all that’s not where the action is happening and can be discounted).

The media jumped into this frenzy with gusto, after all if it buts votes it surely sells newspapers.  Nearly every major newspaper opened up a section on its website and brought in Environmentalist columnists for its papers.  By this point whenever anybody questioned the Carbon Footprint Validity they were shot down with phrases such as “But look how much proof there is!”  Despite all the proof being re-iterated statements from the 1980’s and graphs showing earths temperature and carbon levels rising, which just happens to be a natural phenomenon when the Earth gets closer to the Sun.

People who had spent the last 25 years sat in Indian villages smoking copious amounts of weed appeared yet again, brandishing the environmentalist flag, saying how they had lived at one with nature, ignoring the years they had smoked pesticide drenched ganja for the majority of their desireless lives.

The politicians pretty much all jumped on the Carbon Footprint boat as soon as it became popular in the majority of developed countries.  Nearly every government adopted it as it’s ’save the world’ policy, and it did turn out to be a bit of a vote winner.

Now however as more and more scientists are speaking out that not only is the carbon theory of global warming a load of bullock manure but if carbon WAS causing global warming we should not be investing in reducing it like we currently are.  Instead the government should be spending in long term research for carbon reduction.  Of course the problem with that is long term strategy does not get votes.

Despite the resurgence of environmental popularity however things seem to be dropping off.  Live Earth, designed to be a huge popularity stunt failed miserably when it attracted only 2.2 million American viewers, eclipsed by every other half decent TV program showing at the time.  Despite the campaigns the only real difference in recycling is from the companies that have been forced by law to adapt, and nearly everyone questioned says that despite the dire warnings given over the Earths future they will not change their ways.

The fact of the matter is that for the majority Environmentalism is a fad, Global Warming is an even shorter fad that takes off once every two decades (60’s 80’s 00’s). 

Not only that but some of the more serious environmental agencies (Those who at one point were boosted by the popularity of global warming but now actually want to try and make a difference) have stepped back and taken a look at what their work has achieved.

Due to the carbon footprint campaign

Funding has been lost for 17 new recycling centres

An environmental policy to provide funding for cleaner industry in China failed, meaning the Great Barrier Reef is dying at a faster rate each and every day.

The rain forest is being burnt down at an exceptional speed (Not being logged) to make room for ethanol fuel production. 

Ethanol cannot be transported by pipe so is actually being transported everywhere by Truck and Boat.

3^rd world poverty is increasing because food prices have nearly tripled, in part caused by 1/5^th of world farms turning to ethanol production and increased food transport costs caused by green party led increases in fuel tax (Ethanol is now a mandatory requirement for gasoline and petrol manufacturers to include in their produce creating massive demand)

Tens of thousands of businesses have gone under as peoples livelihoods are destroyed by increased transport costs.

And so on.

It is for this reason that some of these environmental agencies are now calling on politically free research on the topic while concentrating funding on areas that are more substantiated and resolvable.

This is a fantastic move in my opinion, allowing agencies with fantastic resource capability and experience to move into the fields they are most suited to, whether it be saving endangered animals, saving the coral reef or the rainforests. 

The best part is that now realisation has dawned that the publicity surrounding the ‘carbon footprint’ is having a hugely adverse effect on the environment it will hopefully move into the political community, freeing up resource for projects that really can make a difference, here and now.

As the political viewpoint changes, already occurring with the conservatives in the UK, it is becoming more and more apparent that the scientific community is turning more towards the rather apparent concern that there has been a huge mistake has occurred in government sponsored research by the European council.

The main mistake in my opinion is tasking scientists to prove that global warming exists and that it is man made Without putting together a group to prove that Global Warming is natural and if it is infact happening.

Scientific knowledge has progressed over the centuries due to debate and argument, by making a group with a specific goal (And removing over two thirds of the work because it did not agree with what they wanted) they are simply hindering the progress of environmental science for political gain.

written by Oli \\ tags: Carbon Footprint, Global Warming, Green

As an ongoing penchant of the EU to run with the Global Warming Debacle they have once more made another uninformed and politically ridden piece of legistlation to try and increase costs to car users who drive cars with poor fuel emission ratings.

This is a move which has severly handicapped disabled and older people, as well as the agriculture industry and people who live in rural areas.

Many older or people with slight physical difficulties require larger cars, and the agriculture industry is on the verge of being reduced back to the ‘horse and cart, ox and plough’ era as tractors are announced to be non environmentally friendly.

But its nice to know that a European Conference of some of the worlds greatest minds spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of EU taxpayers money to decide that since requiring fuel efficiency to be included in advertising was not having the desired effect it should infact take up a minimum of 20% of the advertising.

Now did it ever occur to these people that many people need larger cars, whether its because tey have a family to move about, friends to give lifts to, goods to transport, people need big cars and no matter how large your advertising is it will not change the fact that a person looking for a people carrier will still buy a people carrier and a single person living in the city will probably buy a smaller car.

Don’t get me wrong, fuel efficiency is important and useful information when buying a car, but automobile advertising accounts for a massive percentage of western advertising, outflanked only by credit cards and followed closely by mobile phones.

Now imagine if these car companies are suddenly forced to  increase their advertising space by 20%, thats 20% more paper used, 20% more trees cut down.

This is scarily close to another recent move on Ethanol, a fuel only transportable by vehicles, where it was decreed by those up on high that gasoline/petrol created for road use must contain at least 5% ethanol, the governmetns even subsidised ethanolproduction world wide.

The result?  The speed the rainforest is being cut down has increased dramatically, with rainforest being burned down (Not logged) at an alarming rate for Palm Oil crops. Transportation of this fuel has greatly increased pollution in these areas and since 20% of worldwide farms are now given to Ethanol production third world countries have seen food prices rocket.

My position in this fiasco is clear, global warming has been proven to be part of a natural cycle caused by the Earths relation to the Sun.  It’s a simple fact that the Earth is in fact leaving an ice age, so bound to be warming up, its also a simple fact that carbon released by the sea increases as it warms up (Creating a nice relational graph, you can do an experiment in a lab to prove this)  and its also true that the graphs and data used to support global warming were debunked well over 25 years ago.

The money spent so far on ‘reducing carbon footprints’ numbrs in the hundreds of millions, and the new EU fund proposed on tackling this looks set to massively increase that.  This is money that could be used to help Britian pull itself out of recession and bankruptcy, it could be used to build new recycling plants, finally researching ways to make them more effective.

It could even be used to feed all those starving families in thirld world countries who have been condemmed to death by western incompetancy.

It seems however that we will just see more insane laws and advertising teling us to be ‘green’ while more and more of us fail to pay mortgages and thirld world countries slide into oblivion as they cannot even afford to eat.

written by Oli \\ tags: Carbon Footprint, Debacle, Environment, Global Warming, Government, Politics, Recycling

Today all the papers were in uproar about the 2p increase in fuel taxes in England (Which several months ago they were thanking gordon brown for postponing till later in the year).  Gordon brown proceeded to say that taxes were not the problem but that the cost of Fuel Globally must be tackled.

Now, hang on a second Gordon. The average price of fuel in 2007 was 95.1p per litre, thats high yes, but not as high as the 63.7p Duty which is included in that cost.

Without Gordons tax, which at one point drove Fuel Duty to 81.5% of fuel cost, we would be paying a measly 31.4 pence per litre in fuel.

Now What Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling do not seem to want to take into account is that the myriad of taxes in this country has stifled our economy.  Fuel Costs especially have destroyed many businesses as their costs have rose above customer income.  Taxis, once a fairly good way of getting around have seen prices sky rocket, and transportation companies are failing nationwide.

But yet despite the current take government is getting from Fuel, well over two thirds of what you pay at the pump, high fuel prices are apparently not Gordons Fault.

Think of it like this,  if everything you took to the till tripled in cost when you paid for it would you be happy?

Hell No!

When you looked at the price on your goods and then asked the cashier why the cost was 3 times that of the actualy price what wouldyou think if she said it was the basic cost rising, even though she was the one who put the cost up by so much?

While I am not a vindictive person it is fairly obvious even to me that the people running the UK need to take a good long hard look at themselves and then jump off the nearest cliff.

written by Oli \\ tags: Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, Politics, Tax

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7421045.stm

I read this story on the BBC news site today, it raised one of those good ol’ moral dilemas.  This woman has HIV and will most likely die if returned to her home country.  She has already been treated here in the UK several times on our NHS at tax payers cost, despite being an illegal immigrant.

Now how do you weigh a persons life against your own cash?

The fact of the matter is that millions of pounds of tax payers money is spent treating people who have come to the UK for that sole reason, the NHS is a very large, complex and overall easily abused system.

The problem is if you treat one person, why not treat them all?

Every year we send back thousands of people who have come to this country to abuse our system, as nice as you make it sound they come here illegally simply to take what they want.

Others of course come here because they want to live in Britain, to contribute and to become part of our society.  There is a clear, if unmeasurable difference between the two.

How can we keep out those who are abusing the country and let in those who want to join England?

And how do you turn someone away who so desperately needs medical attention, whatever their skin colour, creed or religion?

While it would be nice to treat the world we simply cannot afford it, hell we can hardly afford to treat ourselves with the NHS’s drug boards regularly cutting important medication and treatments from what we get on the NHS.

I have to admit it is a subject matter I would not want to be the policy owner on.  Do you bankrupt the country or stand to be hit by claims of racism and hatred?

Maybe we should look more to other countries, ones that protect their own heritage?

Ones that are not afraid to stand and say, this is us, if you can contribute you can join but do not expect our country to bend to your will.

written by Oli \\ tags: Culture, Disease, England, Heritage, Immigration

Just incase anyone has been reading the BBC site recently they have reported on the current legal battle being spearheaded by the Greek people of Lesbos.  They claim that a gay rights group should not be allowed to use the word lesbian because it is infact the name used for the people of Lesbos.

Now first off let me say I have a lot of respect for lesbians, especially the fit ones.  If women want to cop off with each other I think that is a great thing.

The legal action against the gay group is most certainly going to fail, after all lesbian is a recognised term for a female attracted to the same sex, most people trying to name the people of lesbos may guess at lesbosian before lesbian.

The Islanders aversion to the use of the name  Lesbian has actually effected them so much that they are now considering renaming their island after their capital Mytilini (Actually a fantastic place to visit)

But this has of course left us with a quandary, The Lesbian people of Lesbos have undoubtedly held the name for much longer than the lesbian movement, should the lesbian movement therefore have the right to take it away from the people of Lesbos?

The Lesbian Movement named itself after the goddess Sappho who expressed her love for women in poetry during the 7th century BC. However Dimitris Lambrou standing for the people of Lesbos said that the the goddess committed suicide over the love of a man and that she mothered a family,  therefore making the connection to lesbianism irrelevant.

Jesus it’s complicated!

written by Oli \\ tags: Greece, Lesbianism, Sexuality

Vivid, the group responsible for realeasing the Tommy Lee Jones/Pamela Anderson Sex tape have today released the Jimi Hendrix sex tape, which shows the iconic rock and roll legend cavorting with two gorgeous brunettes. My first instinct is to say, so what?

I mean this guy was a massive rock star, I am not in any doubt that he bedded more than his fair share of young starstruck women in his time. But Jimi Hendrix’s current publishers who have held the rights to his material after his death are claiming the tape is nothing but a fake.

Personally i am not sure how they are so certain, but to give them their credit they are calling in Jim Hendrix’s past lovers to verify details about the mans.. less public attributes.

I don’t think it makes much difference in the long run though, the man after all was an entertainer, its nice to see that even after his death he is expanding from his main genre.

written by Oli \\ tags: Controversy, Jimi Hendrix, Music, Rock, Sex Tape

Net Nutrality is a very hot topic which is very conveniently looked over by the world media.

What is Net Nutrality?

Basically Net Nutrality  is the protection of the internet from ISPs who are looking to blackmail every single internet website.

International Giant Virgin for instance has already stated that it will reduce bandwidth to it’s customers on websites that do not pay a premium in the near future, many other ISPs have also stated this as well.  So why not th big debate?  Most ISPs are owned by media corporate giants, go figure!

What would this mean to us users?  Well the general degridation of the internet, starting up a new internet business would be harder due to the new lack of bandwidth and many businesses would go out of business because they could not aford to be held to ranom by a multitude of network providers.

Imagine for instance you lived in the midle of nowhere, isolated but in contact by regular bus services.   Now imagine that the bus decided to only go to places that paid a premium, limiting you to comercial giants who could suddenyl afford to rip you off because you had no choice of going anywhere else and they had the excuse of paying costs to increase prices.  Sure you could walk to another place, but it would take all day!

The only option left would be to move house to somewhere with a better ISP.

Of course net nutrality doesn’t just stop at drawing awarness to bandwidth reduction, you may also find that in ISP could cut a site off, cut you off from other ISPs (Whch has already been done in Europe, causing an Uproar in World of Warcraft gamers who can no longer access the game because their ISP failed to reach a deal with another ISP on its Internet strategy)

Now imagine your ISP cut you off from all the news sites but its own, all the shops but its own, and so forth and so on.  The internet would be in danger of becoming sectioned, with most people being forced to use one single provider.

Now you could say that one ISP could stick to net nutrality and keep open bandwidth to all sites connected to it.  Now, just playing a theory here, what would happen if all the other websites turned on it and blocked it completely?

I have to admit the thought scare me.

written by Oli \\ tags: Internet, ISPs, Net Nutrality

It seems that more and more cases are appearing of women who have been kept in captivity for long periods of time by some fairly weird people.

The most recent case is that of a man in Austria who imprisoned his ten year old daughter for 24 years.  During this time he fathered 7 kids with her, 6 of which survived, and three of which were sent to his grandparents with the claim they had been abandoned on his doorstep.

Even more worryingly his wife denies any knowledge of his crimes, despite the daughter and grand kids being kept in his basement. You would have though at least the issue of the food bill might have come up at some point, i mean keeping 7 people fed and watered is no cheap thing to do!

The good news however is that this man will be going to jail for a long time, with kidnapping, imprisonment, Incest and murder of the dead child on the cards.

I think the real question which needs to be asked is HOW did this man get away with imprisoning a girl for so long?

Surely someone in the town must have noticed the disappearance at some point.  I think some real work needs to be done from stopping this king of thing from happening.

written by Oli \\ tags: Abduction, Crime, Imprisonment, Incest, Kidnapping, News