The picture [left] shows me as I was a week ago. The article below was posted here on April 10th 2010. I have changed nothing in it. There's an asterisked (*) point with which I would now disagree with myself: the comment reflects my ignorance at the time of how and why "Climate Change" was based on modelled rubbish rather than empirical reality. Let's get real here - we all move on and grow. The post isn't about 'what a clever boy was he'. Rather, it is an answer to all the Smuggies who will tell you one day soon, "It was impossible to see what was coming".
It cannot be common sense….
To give the security services a carte blanche £12 billion to eavesdrop on all our personal electronic communications, when the problem lies with a minute and easily identifiable minority
Ditto for airport security
To have ‘Drink Aware’ warnings in small print on retail booze, but huge bannered offers of two cases of lager for the price of one – and Happy Hours in pubs
To develop spam-blocking software so crude and yet anally Victorian it limits freedom of email expression without in any way blocking its target
To allow television advertising for compensation-claim legal work. This is simply cementing the litigious ‘I’m entitled’ mentality, and pushes up the cost of both commerce and government
To carry on with the myth that globalist, deregulated neo-liberal economics are the future
That there is no alternative to the Bourse system as a means of capitalising business
To make asking questions about employee plans and status illegal
To sell heavily discounted retailer booze in a binge culture
To have lax 24/7 licensing laws in a late-evening drunkenness culture
To persevere with a correction system which clearly doesn’t work. (And even dafter to build more prisons)
That crime is going down but prison inmate numbers are going up
That everything’s just the same as it always was, but getting better
That educational standards and breadth are as good as forty years ago
To close hospital wards in order to meet budget targets
To have life-survival products in private hands
To spend millions on obesity education, but leave food manufacturers to offer discounts, two-for-one, and giant-size versions of junk food
To allow largely uncontrolled immigration when the country is already overburdened by social service costs, housing problems and acutely high population density
To have a globally linked banking system, when the probability of domino-effect was always so obvious
To extol the virtues of globalism when the planet faces such serious ecological problems*
To solve a social problem of splintered families today (more housing) by storing up another one for tomorrow (no countryside left)
To spend 232 hours of Parliamentary time debating how to kill vermin
For politicians to continue with their obsessively media-trained, evasive approach to issues when it is clear the voters despise them for it
To have remote, all-powerful central government deciding on local and community issues. (And even dafter to make county, police and hospital districts bigger still.)
To continue giving planning permissions to multiple food retailers, when communities are already under pressure to survive
To persevere with an outmoded and undemocratic voting system, when the one we have merely furthers the aims of a cosy, deaf Establishment
To allow a tiny minority to get richer and richer, and a sizeable minority to get poorer and poorer
To leave the welfare dependancy culture largely untouched
To allow electronically/telephonically based businesses not to have such methods of communication open to customers with a service complaint to make
To make billions of cheap, shoddy items we have to soon throw away when the Earth is already in need of more landfill space
The Slog 