Wednesday 27 January 2010

Plod suspect terrorists armed with "spangly blue hairdryers" as threat to public



Kids TV presenters Anna Williamson and Jamie Rickers from ITV1's hit show Toonattik, were filming a skit for the programme on London's South Bank wearing combat gear and armed with children's walkie-talkies and hairdryers.
"Jamie and I were kitted out in fake utility belts, we had the whole bulletproof flakjacket thing, we've got hairdryers in our belt, a kids' £1.99 walkie-talkie, hairbrushes and all that kind of stuff, and we were being followed by a camera crew and a boom mike and we get literally pulled over by four policemen and we were issued with a warning 'under the act of terrorism'."
Rickers, 32, added: "We were stopped, not arrested, but they had to say 'we are holding you under the Anti-Terrorism Act because you're running around in flak jackets and a utility belt', and I said 'and please put spangly blue hairdryer' and he was, like, 'all right'."

So that would be the South Bank that is in front of the large ITV studio complex then?  Nice to know the police have got a good sitrep on the area they are patrolling.



h/t Yahoo News

Saturday 23 January 2010

Photographers demo today



Just been reading the great LegIron and he brings up the point that Al Johnson has just increased the nation's security alert level to DEFCON 1 saying:
“I should stress that there is no intelligence to suggest than an attack is imminent"
Well, that'll be the photographers then.  Coincidence?  Possibly, but I never trust this government one inch after the catalogue of catastrophes they have created under their incompetent watch.

I'll leave it up to Sergeant Phil Esterhaus to say:
Hey, let's be careful out there

Thursday 21 January 2010

Make your own Conservative poster



h/t Leg-Iron

Wednesday 20 January 2010

Power Cuts like it's 1979

Fucking Labour - on the UPS, last bar of power and I have a deadline for the USA.

Cnuts.

Monday 18 January 2010

Pat Condell says "Thank god for Andy Choudary"

But with his usual twist on the situation.

Youtube

Saturday 16 January 2010

I've found the 30% who vote Labour!


A thick, deluded, partisan, ignorant, non-thinking idiot standing next to a Labour activist

Ever wondered why Labour still hold 30% of the voting slice?  I did.  And now I know why and where.

Some old crone on LBC this morning rabbled on and on and said the most ridiculous, partisan claptrap and refused to be corrected.  She said:

  • Tony Blair inherited a country that had a terrible debt in 1997
  • The Thatcher government was more corrupt than this Labour governement
  • We had 3 million unemployed in 1997
  • Gordon Brown had reduced this debt and had given more workers jobs
  • The hospitals are better and the schools are better
  • Interest rates were apparently 16% in 1997 when Tony Blair took over
  • We had three day weeks under Thatcher

The worse thing about the conversation, is that despite the evidence proffered by James Max, she refused to believe it, like an eco-scientist receiving a collection of Hadley CRU emails.

This, dear reader, is where your labour voting slice comes from.  Thick, ignorant, partisan individuals who refused to open their eyes and think for themselves.

We live in a country where people unquestionably believe what they are told.

Prescott Impersonators destroy house



A floor collapsed beneath a group of about 20 members of Weight Watchers as they gathered to compare how many pounds they had shed over Christmas.

Obviously they all suffer from "glandular" problems and absolutely nothing to do with the ingestion of 300 KFC bargain buckets and a wheelbarrow full of cakes a day.

Fat greedy fuckers.

Times Online

Thursday 14 January 2010

Andrew Neil feeling Brave




h/t Swiss Bob

Wednesday 13 January 2010

Norm's blogging, and he's quite good

Lord Tebbit is blogging on the Telegraph and now has written his second post.  It's is very well written and has some good humour in it.  My favourite line:
It seems to me that our masters these days are willing to use a carrot and stick approach, but they almost always use the stick on the poor old donkey’s nose and inflict a terrible indignity on the beast with the carrot at its other end.
Norman Tebbit's blog

Jabba Brown and Salacious Balls




Ed Balls is Gordon Brown's Salacious Crumb

Tuesday 12 January 2010

Songs from inside my helmet



h/t Keith Law

Friday 8 January 2010

In the cold, bleak winter, won't someone remember the windmills?



Remember those windmills that will protect us from the peak oil theory and help remove all those nasty CO2 emitting power stations that are killing our cheeeldren?

Well, what do you notice about winter weather when it's particularly cold?  Yes, that's right: there's no wind and a still breeze an unproductive windmill makes.

From A Problem With Wind, this particularly damning observation often overlooked by those blinded by simplistic green rhetoric is the final twist of the knife into the folly that is wind technology when managing a country's energy demand:

Denmark (population 5.3 million) has over 6,000 turbines that produced electricity equal to 19% of what the country used in 2002.

Yet no conventional power plant has been shut down.

Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants must be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity. Most cannot simply be turned on and off as the wind dies and rises, and the quick ramping up and down of those that can be would actually increase their output of pollution and carbon dioxide (the primary "greenhouse" gas).

So when the wind is blowing just right for the turbines, the power they generate is usually a surplus and sold to other countries at an extremely discounted price, or the turbines are simply shut off.

So, whenever any eco-nazi starts going on about how windmills will save the cheeeldren, remind them of the above.

If you have time, read the information at the link - there are summaries but for the more technically minded, there are some good pieces about energy management and the distruptions caused by windmill trials, especially in Germany for instance.

Thursday 7 January 2010

The BBC at its biased best



It looks like Nick Robinson's blog is going into overdrive as he once again desperately tries to make up for the slow start to the failed coup attempt on Gordon Brown.  Guido and Tory Bear were reporting the news after midday.

The BBC have been piling on the toadying to Not-quite-so-new Labour, completely removing all but the mere hint of a whisper of the Tories from the front pages.

It was rumours abound as Peter "will he, or won't he arrive at Newsnight" Mandelson finally buckled under pressure from Mr Dale to cast his spell over Gordon's inevitable descent into oblivion.

David Vance of Biased BBC fame has report the "sheer pro-Labour entertainment value" of James Naughtie's Today program, where once again the BBC are giving a platform for Labour MPs to get their daily message out unhindered and unchallenged, liberally sprinkled with the usual "nasty Tories" rhetoric.

And of course, best leave it up to the ineffable Pie Muncher Puncher to summarise the situation with his erudite demeanour delivered using a syntax that has upset many a Babelfish:


Tuesday 5 January 2010

Depressing rates by bringing in cheaper foreigners

From the Times Online:


Tens of thousands of foreign IT workers are being sent to work for their companies’ subsidiaries in Britain, sparking fears that British workers are being denied job opportunities.

Almost 30,000 non-EU technology workers entered the country under so-called intra-company transfers last year, with the overwhelming majority coming from India.

Most of those arriving came for low and mid-level IT jobs where there are not significant skills shortages among British-born workers, fuelling suspicion that British workers are losing out to foreign workers who are being paid lower wages.

This has been going on for years and is quite prevalent in the IT industry. It affects mainly the contract and temp staff whose value to a company is for a temporary resource to help with varying short term workloads or to provide expertise that the company does not have currently.

The reason why companies do not employ new permanent members of staff (perms) under these conditions is that often the costs of permanent employment is much more than the contract staff when you take into account of pensions, health, training, sickness cover, paid holidays and other hidden intangible costs.

Which is why sometimes perms look at the contractor’s hourly rate and think they contractors are overpaid. What perms fail to understand is that out of this hourly rate they have to pay employers NI, employees NI, business costs, often IR35 and S660 applies, indemnity insurances, executive pensions, training costs and membership fees and of course, make cover costs of being out of work and ill. The costs incurred by the perms are normally paid for by perm’s parent company and are part of its operating costs.

Funnily enough, as they are only paid for turning up to work, contractors aren’t often as sick as perms! :)

A rule of thumb to compare equivalent salaries and rates is to take the hourly rate (say £30/hour) and times it by £1,000 to get the equivalent permanent salary of £30,000.

So there is an attraction to keep contractors on for cost purposes and sometimes political: I know of one major company that prefers to employ contractors rather than perms because the headcount numbers are smaller.

Back to the main topic: it is impossible for morons like Phil Woolas to say that we’re protecting British jobs and we have checks in place to stop abusing this system, because companies have been abusing this system for years, importing cheap labour from abroad and depressing contractor rates.

One way companies do this is to advertise a job way, way below market value so no-one applies for it. They can then say “we advertised this job, no one took it, it must be a skill’s shortage” and then bring in Cap Gemini or someone who supply the cheap labour through the ICT system.

Another way I have had personal experience with is that a company finishes a project, sacks a load of perms saying times are tough, creates a subsidiary company in India, starts up another project, and brings over cheap labour internally.

As I said, no-one cared about the IT industry – it was full of boring geeks. However, now this practise occurs in many other industries, such as Finance, Oil & Gas, Medical and all of a sudden people are starting to wake up.

I left contracting behind many years ago and now work B2B with my own company, but government and EU are still destroying a very important part of our wealth producing economy and I hope to see this Labour government, who instigated most of the above, being completely wiped out in May.

Monday 4 January 2010

Wootton Basset - should Islam4UK be allowed to protest?


Photo h/t Marc Vallée

Because I believe in the concept of Freedom of Speech, however distasteful I find the raison d'être of Islam4UK, it should go ahead. The town Wootton Bassett where the bodies of fallen servicemen and women pass through has obviously been chosen for maximum inflammatory effect and is simply anathema to any person with a sense of honour.

If the police allow the protest to go ahead, I would imagine some trouble would inevitably occur and the MSM will be sensationalising what it can to sell as many papers as possible.

However, it prompted me to think about another scenario: what would the reaction of the country and the state be during the 1940’s if people marched in one of our cities protesting in support of National Socialism, the Occult replacing Christianity or telling the British government to get out of German occupied countries?

Would they accept large numbers of German countrymen into their homelands and allow them to march around and jeer pro-National Socialist views at our soldiers, or would they be arrested and in the case of British nationals, be tried for treason?

We are effectively at war with Iraq and Afghanistan. Are there sufficient differences today compared with the 1940s for us to turn a blind eye?  The caveat "we are at war against terrorism only" absolve the above actions?