Posts Tagged ‘talking bollocks

25
Apr
13

Here we go again – Syrian WMD

WMD or a new Tesco?

WMD or a new Tesco?

Stupid people run our lives. This was made obvious back in February 2013 when the footballer Paul Elliott resigned his posts at the Football Association as well as trusteeship of the anti-racism campaign group Kick It Out because he used the word “nigger” in a text message argument with another black football player.

Elliott has received the CBE for services to equality and diversity in football and is quite obviously not a racist yet he was forced to resign by the witch hunt mentality that prevails in British public life.

The reason that we oppose racism is that it causes harm to people. We’re not against racism when an American is deemed friendly, a German efficient or an Englishman polite. We’re against it when certain groups are discriminated against. When they lose out to other groups when applying for work or are unjustly hassled by the police. Of course we should avoid using racially derogative terms when referring to people but the single use of such a word should not be a litmus test of racism.

Public life is dominated by people so lacking in judgment that they rely on idiotic rules and this is the way with much of 21st Century life. This same knee jerk mentality seems now to be pushing the United States into another war. President Obama has previously said that the use of chemical weapons by Syria would be a “red line” that could trigger U.S. reaction. Today, the United States Secretary of Defence, Chuck Hagel, put out a statement saying that “that the U.S. intelligence community assesses with some degree of varying confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.” -  the talk now is of whether Syria has crossed that red line.

HANG ON A MINUTE! - Statements put out by government departments are always very very carefully worded and this statement reeks of indecision – “WITH SOME DEGREE OF VARYING CONFIDENCE”???!!!!!…..They’re TALKING BOLLOCKS!

Obviously the statement has been constructed under pressure and the authors have made damn sure they express themselves in terms which commit themselves to precisely nothing. It’s interesting to speculate on how the story originated. A brief perusal of the web reveals that a vague article in the London Times on 13th April 2013 stated “Forensic evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria has been found for the first time in a soil sample smuggled out of the country in a secret British operation. Defence sources, who declined to be named, said yesterday that conclusive proof that “some kind of chemical weapon” had been fired in Syria had been established by scientists at the Ministry of Defence’s chemical and biological research establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire.”

So we have a story from an unnamed source that some soil in Syria may be contaminated by some unspecified chemical weapon. The Times is a News International rag and, for Rupert Murdoch, this constitutes hard news.

First we should question whether this story and the subsequent statement by Mr. Hagel have any merit at all. If the British government do have contaminated soil from Syria then let them say so; it’s worth investigating. But rather than setting trip wires that commit Americans to combat and potentially death let’s think this through.

Why do we abhor Weapons of Mass Destruction? It’s not because they kill people, many weapons do that. It’s because they kill masses of people. Hydrogen bombs are an obvious example but gas attacks are another. So if we are looking for evidence of the use of WMD we should be looking for far far more than traces of some bloody substance in a plastic tub of questionable providence. We should be looking for masses of dead people. If Assad is using Sarin to run his lawn mower we should not give a toss. If he’s exterminating thousands with pick axe handles we should sit up and take notice. We should consider the crime not the mechanism used to commit the crime.

Like the absurdity of discerning racism by a single casual word the existence of a few grams of chemical is not a defining piece of evidence. The West has a history of intervening in the Middle East and all interventions are couched in altruistic arguments designed to placate the electorate but fundamentality all interventions have been for the benefit of Western countries.

The decision of whether to intervene in Syria is a difficult one but the United States should resist being bounced into another war by idiots and war mongers.

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23
Aug
12

waking up with a pencil in your ear wont get you pregnant

It was me. I was Talking Bollocks!

It was me. I was Talking Bollocks!

It’s been a bumper week for those in the public eye TALKING BOLLOCKS!

First I heard that Respect MP George Galloway had blundered around like a bull in a china shop on the subject of rape and said that having sex with a sleeping woman was “not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it“.

Hmmmmm………I’m not sure I’d considered this question before but it’s pretty insensitive. Rape, like race and illegal drug use, is a taboo subject which politicians mention at their peril.

The liberal intelligentsia were quick to jump on Mr. Galloway. On BBC Radio 4′s PM program a criminal barrister named  Felicity Gerry was interviewed. She was very clear in her opinion which I have been unable to find on the web and so must quote from memory. When pressed for a definition of rape she said something along the lines that it was “anyone putting anything where someone else didn’t want it” and gave the obvious examples of a penis in a vagina as well as a pencil in someone’s ear!

I kid you not! I heard this almost verbatim on the wireless. The really strange thing is that no other pocket bureaucrat thought it necessary to come on the radio and condemn such idiotic remarks. Imagine if Mr. Galloway had said this?

The interviewer suggested that the law could have different levels of rape and that not all were identically serious and gave the example of murder and manslaughter but Ms. Gerry was adamant: “Rape is rape”. The idea that “rape is rape” is, of course, bollocks as it puts a 16 year old boy who has sex with his 15 year old girlfriend in the same category as a psychopath who has raped multiple women at knifepoint. “Rape is rape” she kept repeating unaware that she was talking as much bollocks as George Galloway.

Then we had a barmy American politician wade into the argument. In an interview with a TV station Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Missouri, was expressing his opposition to the right to abortion for women who had been raped and, in an attempt at justification, said: “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare……If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Woah!!!! This is strange stuff. First he implies that some rapes are not “legitimate” then throws in some weird science he must have read on some Christian Alien blog.

Remember that TV show Kids Say the Funniest Things? How about a new show where the we round up a lot of politicians and ask them questions. They could call it Politicians Talk The Most Bollocks – No, wait, they do it already only it’s called Prime Ministers Questions.

Trees In Silhouette

Trees In Silhouette

24
Oct
11

Occupy London – Hypocrisy & detachment of the establishment

“You can't wash your hands of the consequence of your actions” - What a hypocrite!

You can’t wash your hands of the consequence of your actions - Mathew Hancock, MP

“You can’t wash your hands of the consequence of your actions” said Mathew Hancock MP this afternoon on Radio 4′s PM program. The topic was the financial crisis but Mr. Hancock was not talking about the bankers, he was talking about the protesters!

Mathew Hancock, Conservative MP for West Suffolk, was interviewed by Eddie Mair along with Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK. Mr. Murphy was sympathetic to the protesters, talked about changing the financial system and got in a plug for his book The Courageous State.

Mr. Hancock was not sympathetic and went on to say some very stupid things. He said that it was fair to ask the protesters what they’re campaigning for and how it should be achieved. He said that it was reasonable that they’ve made their point but that now it is time to look forward to the detail of achieving the world that they want to create.

Mathew Hancock was TALKING BOLLOCKS.

Firstly, the idea that the protesters have made their point and should leave him and his buddies to address the situation is self satisfied tosh! If the protesters just pack up and go home then the bankers and the politicians will merely carry on as usual. The current Conservative pre-occupation with getting out of the EU is evidence that the unfairness of the bailout has slipped right off the governments agenda.

Secondly, the idea that it is not possible to protest unless you have a solution is utter rubbish! It is like the triage nurse at a hospital telling a sick man to go away until he had developed a cure for his ailment.

It is an indication of how out of touch our politicians are that Mr. Hanock expects ordinary men and women to do a better job of running banks than those paid millions for their supposed expertise. It was not the job of ordinary tax payers to keep an eye on the banking industry and we should not expect them to set policy but it is their right to protest and make themselves heard so that those who do have the knowledge and the power can recognise their concerns and adjust policy.

However, it was another of Mr. Hancok’s statements that really angered me but first let me tell you about another Radio 4 program over the weekend. In BBC Radio 4′s, The Bottom Line on Saturday Evan Davis interviewed the chairman of a boutique merchant bank, the chief executive of a financial advisory firm and the chief executive of a savings and investment group. When these men tried to dismiss the accusations that the bankers were to blame for the financial crisis Mr. Davis got fairly miffed and stated that just prior to the credit crunch, after a boom which had run on for ten years (and was therefore due to bust), a major bank had lent £40 for every £1 it had in deposits. This meant that if the value of its investments were to fall by just 2% the bank would be insolvent. This is incompetence and complacency on a massive scale. Further, at the same time, while the economy was booming, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, was running a deficit. (If you can’t repay debt in the good times then when can you?)

This evening on PM, Mr. Hancock said that the protesters outside St. Paul’s had caused the cathedral to close, losing the church around £20,000 a day, that actions have consequences and “You can’t wash your hands of the consequence of your actions”!

According to Wikipedia, before becoming an MP, Mr. Hanock was an economist at the Bank of England, specialising in the housing market. It is further testament to his utter hypocrisy that he can utter such statements without a hint of irony. This out of touch pillock is quite content to let the politicians and bankers destroy a whole industry then walk away with fat bonuses yet has the gall to accuse others of not taking responsibility for their actions.

Even now, the bankers do not understand that they only have jobs because they were bailed out by ordinary citizens, such as those spending their nights outside St. Paul’s.

Something’s gotta change.

16
Jun
11

When Labour call for tax cuts you have to be suspicious

Cut taxes? Labour? With their reputation?

Cut taxes? Me? With my reputation?

I just watched Ed Balls on Channel 4 News calling for VAT cuts. Labour’s argument is that they agree that they need to bring the deficit down but not so fast. Recently I heard Labour talking about the National Health service. Once again they agree that change is needed but not the change that the government are pursuing.

It’s easy being in opposition. All you have to do is disagree with the government. I don’t think many of us have enough understanding to know whether the governments fast track to deficit reduction is better than Labour’s ideas for going more slowly.

We do know that the opposition are bound to disagree with the government. The truth is that Labour have no alternative and so they are forced to criticise the speed of the process rather than the process itself. This is not surprising since the Labour leadership are a bunch of nobodies.

Both Millibands and Balls have never had proper jobs. They all worked as media monkeys for New Labour before being shoe horned into safe seats. They perform so lamely in opposition because they have no policy ideas of their own. They only know is how to present ideas, know how to play the media. Remember that idiotic attack on Ken Clark a few weeks ago? Any sensible person who listened to Clark’s arguments could not have believed that he meant to make light of rape yet Ed Milliband picked it up and was banging on about it during PMQs the very same day. This was nothing but spin.

I have heard several times in the news that Ed Balls is a “considerable intellect” and that he is generally well clued up on the economy. Last week The Telegraph released transcripts of some of Mr. Balls documents from when he was working for Gordon Brown. I read the document entitled Project Volvo where Mr. Balls lays out his ideas for getting Gordon Brown elected.

Not much evidence of a great intellect there.

In fact, project Volvo was no more than an off the shelf marketing campaign which could have been put together by any marketing graduate. The same approach could have been used to sell magazines or margarine.

I realise that this marketing stuff works and therefore political parties are forced to hire marketing staff. I guess this took off in the UK when Margaret Thatcher hired Saatchi and Saatchi but Thatcher was never so stupid as to confuse marketing staff with politicians. Labour’s mistake was to allow the marketing men to run the party.

You have to be suspicious when you hear that Labour want to cut taxes. So when I heard, this evening, that Ed Balls wanted to cut VAT I did not think that this was part of  a well thought out economic strategy. I thought that he was TALKING BOLLOCKS! Balls knows that reputable bodies such as the IMF and the EU do not agree with him and he knows that the government will ignore his calls. But that is not the point.

Mr. Balls does not expect the government to follow his advise. His call for a VAT cut is merely headline grabbing fluff to cast the Tories in a bad light. More spin. More marketing.

Under Tony Blair the marketing men worked too closely with the leadership. In today’s Labour party the marketing men ARE the leadership. I am even starting to hear of yet another rebranding attempt, this time to be entitled “Blue Labour”.

In marketing terms Labour is now a tainted brand and repairing a brand is a very big job requiring going back to honesty and principles. The product itself must have intrinsic value.

While Labour remain a party led by nobodies like Ed Balls even Saatchi and Saatchi couldn’t repair it.

15
Apr
11

Why Alternative Vote system is a good idea

A better way to choose your rabble

A better way to choose our rabble

On May the 5th the British people have a chance to fundamentally change part of our democracy yet for some reason the media has been practically silent about this. There has not been nearly enough coverage and it’s likely that many people will not think that voting is worthwhile.

I think we should get out in large numbers and vote AV and I’ll tell you why.

The current voting system is known as First Past The Post (FPTP). It’s supporters claim that it is simple and straightforward. We all get a single vote to cast for a candidate to represent our constituency in Parliament. After voting closes all the votes are counted and the candidate who has the most votes wins.

This system has the advantage that each constituency gets a representative who has been voted for by local people. It has the disadvantage that, when there is no clear overall favourite, a candidate will be elected who has the support of only a minority of the electorate.

The Liberals have long advocated Proportional Representation (PR). This is a system where all the votes for all the parties in the UK are added up and a number of elected Members of Parliament (MPs) allocated proportional the the number of votes cast for their party. This overcomes the shortcomings of FPTP as smaller parties or parties with support widely scattered through the country are allocated MPs which they would not otherwise have got. It has the disadvantage of breaking the MPs link with his constituency.

But the system which is being put to the British people on May the 6th is not PR. The system which is being proposed is known as the Alternative Vote (AV).

With AV the voters get to rank the candidates in order of their preference. So the voter puts a ’1′ by their first-preference candidate, a ’2′ by their second-preference and so on. They can rank as many or as few as they wish.
When all the votes are counted, if a candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes then they are elected. If no candidate gains a majority on first preferences, then the second-preference votes of the candidate who finished last on the first count are redistributed. This process is repeated until someone gets over 50 per cent.

Initially I was skeptical about this and I may have been swayed by the Tories pushing their propaganda that this is a “complicated” and odd system. However, after mulling it over for some time I have decided that, if one is trying to elect a representative, then this is not only a superior system to FPTP or PR but that FPTP can be absolutely undemocratic.

My reasoning is as follows. Suppose you and 59 other people survived a ship sinking and you were marooned on an island. 60 people in all. You decided that someone should be the leader (I leave aside why we think we need leaders for the moment). You decide to elect the leader. You decide that you will all vote and the person who gets the most votes wins.

Suppose 3 people are candidates and one guy gets 50 votes. You’d be fairly satisfied that most people wanted this guy as leader. Both FPTP and AV would deliver this result.

However, now suppose that one candidate received 8 votes, one candidate received 25 votes and one candidate received 27 votes. FPTP would dictate that the candidate with 27 votes would be the leader even though the majority of people would not want him as their leader. In fact the majority of people might think the guy was completely unsuitable but they would be overruled by the minority.

I believe that in this situation everyone would start yelling and people would decide, that, OK, it was obvious that the guy with only 8 votes was not a contender and he should not be a candidate. A second round of voting would be held with only the two main candidates.

Now the people who had voted for the least popular candidate would cast their votes for one or other of the two mains candidates. The outcome of this would be a majority.

In a national election with numerous candidates it is not practical to keep rerunning elections but whoever invented AV has obviously thought of this. AV gives us a chance to rank our first preference and then asks us: if your first preference were to come last then who would you vote for. This is a much fairer system because, as in the shipwreck scenario, it ends up with everyone voting on two candidates and one necessarily end up receiving a majority vote.

The Tories argue that AV is too complicated and strange and that FPTP is more like a sprint race. The Tories are TALKING BOLLOCKS!

FPTP does not always produce a clear winner. If it were a sprint race then, in many situations, all the runners would collapse, never finish the race and be carted off on stretchers. The winner would be declared the guy who got closest to the finish line. It is an absurd system as there are situations where nobody wins yet one guy gets to become an MP.

To continue the analogy, AV is more like a series of heats where the loser of each race is knocked out and the races rerun until, in the semi final, only two runners remain and first across the line is the winner.

I believe that AV is fair and logical because it produces a clear winner voted for by a majority.

So get out and vote on May 5th.

07
Mar
11

Janet knows bollocks

Writing Bollocks

Writing Bollocks

Janet Street Porter had a go at Talking Bollocks in yesterday’s Independent. She termed it “Official Bollocks”and correctly identified the New Labour charlatans as a primary cause of this phenomena. Lately it seems to me that the one tangible thing that New Labour left behind is an ocean of bullshit. Talking Bollocks is one manifestation of this but lately I have started to realise it goes further. The weird consultancy led bollocks speak has led to miles of official documentation which achieves nothing. Targets, standards, policies, procedures – you name it, under New Labour business was taught that it was vital if they were to become “World Class’ (another bit of bullshit). Vision statements, frameworks and roadmaps were duly created. But all this bollocks requires people who are  extraordinarily boring and unimaginative to write it and tart it up to look smart. Who could we possibly get to do it? Of course, Tony’s old friends the business consultants. So in they came, charged everyone an arm and a leg to create this mind numbing garbage and off they went with a bag full of cash. The written bollocks was then stored on a file server somewhere never to be accessed again.

24
Feb
11

ex-pat wife misunderstands “abroad”

Send in the SAS says ex-pat wife

Send in the SAS says ex-pat wife

I just caught a bit of Channel 4 news covering the situation in Libya. An British woman with a large pearl necklace bemoaning the fact that she had not been telephoned by the British government and that her husband had not been magically plucked from the Libyan desert by the SAS.

The woman was TALKING BOLLOCKS!

It seems that someone in the UK did not perform perfectly and several aircraft due to pick up British citizens arrived in Tripoli later than would have been ideal. However, said woman was talking of the her husband and other miscellaneous British workers on remote oil and gas installations far from Tripoli scattered around the very large Libyan desert. A quick look at Libya on Google Earth confirms what I had thought. Libya is a large desert country stretching around 1500 miles east to west and about a 1000 miles north south. I doubt that the be-pearled woman herself knew where her husband was so expecting the British government to know where he was, know who she was and then give her a quick call to make sure she was alright seems a bit optimistic.

Workers in locations like this get paid over he odds specifically because the location is weird and potentially dangerous. The responsibility for their safety lies with the companies who employee these people. She and her husband were presumably happy to collect the dosh but failed to realise that they are not in Britain any more and cannot expect the same level of service as when they’re back home in Cardiff. One statement really took the biscuit. She said “Britain has one of the best armed services in the world” – Well, perhaps, but that doesn’t mean that we want to get involved militarily all over the world just because some expats have run out of milk.

Then we had the invidious Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander condemning the government for it’s handling of the situation. Mr. Alexander put  forward no suggestions or policy but merely tried to profit from people’s misfortune with a knee jerk condemnation of government action. The Tories cutting? – Too fast he cries! – Brits being rescued from Libya? – Too slow he squeaks.

Of course Mr. Cameron has been on TV apologising. It’s interesting that, these days we expect the Prime Minister, of all people, to be responsible for operational activities during an evacuation such as this. The PM has no special understanding or knowledge and there is no reason why he should get involved. A senior foreign office official would be more appropriate but I guess this reflects the way politics has been forced to adjust to the media.

“I’m a very private person” said the woman – yeh, right. Not so private that you don’t go straight on telly to make ludicrous demands.

I suggest that she and her husband stay in England and get a nice local job.

06
Feb
11

More Labour Promises

Labour Promises

More Labour Promises

I hear that Ed Miliband has warned that the young generation have been betrayed by spending cuts. Mr. Miliband is TALKING BOLLOCKS! It is right to be concerned that cuts to education could damage the potential of the next generation but it is absolute hypocrisy for Mr. Miliband to pretend that Labour policies are more friendly to the next generation than those of the coalition government.

It was on Labour’s watch that the UK ran up massive debt and Labour are now opposing every effort to bring the deficit down and repay the debt. The real betrayal of our children would be for us to escape cuts now by borrowing more money to service the debt and just pass the burden on to the next generation.

I also take issue with Mr. Miliband’s idea of a “British promise” that every generation will do better than the last. There has never been such a promise and we should not believe any politician stupid and arrogant enough to make such a promise. Indeed the driving hyper-industrialisation which lays behind this sort of thinking is unsustainable and deceitful. It is deceitful because while it pushes pointless trinkets into our hands it erodes our quality of life by depriving us of space, by driving us to work ever harder and by standardising and commercialisation our environment.




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