Count your blessings

I've been humming this little number to myself over the last few days...

Adam Curtis was clearly otherwise engaged, so not the the highest quality accompanying visuals conceivably possible

On the plus side, Curtis didn't write the lyrics either

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The Feckless Unemployed

I've just spent ten minutes typing out a response to question someone asked me underneath an earlier post and, f*** it, that makes it long enough to be a post of its own...

Anon - 05 January 2009 13:00

Stef, what do you make of this statement? (something I hear quite a lot in certain social circles):

Although it is true, there was a whole program on BBC dedicated to it. I said that we don't do the jobs on average as well as they do. That's not opinion, that's fact. There are plenty of stats flying around about workforce productivity in the labour market comparative to earlier years. A trip to Google might suffice.

The jobs will likely be filled at one point or another, although I wouldn't expect it to be the kind of speed at which they were taken a year ago. The sad truth is that a British citizen can quite effortlessly gain 15k a year through benefits, so why earn 11k at subway and have to work for it? Unemployment has far too many benefits, no pun intended.

As for those who are employed, take builders for example... It's pretty common knowledge that if you want an excellent individual job done you don't employ British labour. It's par to say the least, where as the foreigners really earn their money and do a great job (talking averages here), and do it a lot cheaper.

The absence of the immigrants means that we're not going to be filling jobs as fast, we're going to lose out on productivity, and it's going to waste money for corporations. Be that on recruitment, productivity, employment (maternity rights, anyone?), and general service. And that affects our economy.

A lot of people slate the Polish for reasons they don't understand, but they were actually a great benefit to our nation - and they expect very little.

Stef - 05 January 2009 14:32

There's a lot of talk in the press about one group of benefit scroungers, the 'feckless' unemployed, and fuck all talk about another group of benefit scroungers, exploitative employers, who can get away with paying shit wages and benefits because the shortfall in what they give their staff is picked up by the welfare state

The DSS, that would be the rest of us, effectively subsidises lousy companies

So maybe, just maybe, a large part of the problem is not that the benefits are too high but that the wages are too low

Anxiety Culture

It's also worth remembering that the expression 'productivity improvement' is largely a euphemism for paying people less money to produce more output

Maybe you could argue that was a good thing if that money made was reinvested in productive infrastructure or paid out in dividends to the people who took the risks and created the jobs in the first place.

What usually happens in practice is that the financial benefits of 'productivity improvements' are trousered by senior management who have no problem with paying people more to do less; provided they are the people being paid more and doing less

By any measure, income inequalities in the UK have increased over the last 10-15 years off the back of this kind of mentality

And, as well as being inequitable, it's unsustainable because, sooner or later, once you've ripped off ordinary people past a certain level they can no longer afford to buy the goodies that make your system go round. They can start borrowing, of course, but that can only work for so long; as we're currently in the process of finding out

People forget now but about 10-15 years ago the press was full of talk of a 'leisure bonus', as new technologies promised to reduce the amount of time people would need to spend at work.

Fifteen years on and now we're being told that we won't be able to afford ever to retire

What happened?

Imagine for a moment you're a member of the Evil Overlord class. Can you imagine anything worse than the prospect of the plebs having more free time on their hands and becoming financially independent?

Fuck that

Think about the kind of useless jobs so many of us are engaged in. Jobs that offer no real benefit to society as a whole and absolutely no sense of satisfaction or self-worth to the people doing them.

Anxiety Culture

The Evil Overlord class would have us believe that any job, however pointless and soul destroying, is worth having just for its own sake

Bollocks to that

It's also worth pondering upon the fact that the vast majority of jobs people would identify as being intrinsically worthwhile and offering a sense of self-worth to the people doing them usually sit at the bottom of society's pay scales. And, speaking as someone who's held down a couple of highish paying jobs in his time, I can absolutely guarantee that higher pay is absolutely in no way intrinsically linked to high ability, high intelligence, high integrity or high commitment

Migrants play along with this shit because they're economically desperate and easily exploited. Neither of these qualities strike me as something we should be encouraging in our society; however profitable they may be for The Few

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Very serious charges at the Met

I haven't seen too much crowing in cyberspace about the demise of part-time Ridley Scott lookalike and full-time shit copper Ian Blair earlier this week

Sir Ian Blair

The problem is, I think, the fact that there's a very strong possibility that Blair is going to be replaced by someone even more reactionary than he is

Whilst undoubtedly perplexing for those of us who have issues with Blair because he repeated untruths about JCdM, blocked the investigation into JCdM's execution and was an enthusiastic and high-profile booster of the nonsense War on Terror fairytale, the biggest criticism of Blair promoted by the establishment media was that he was 'too PC' and too soft on potential evil doers

Not that I personally expect Blair's successor to be that different from Blair

Conspiratorial thinking aside, it's a plain fact of Life that the people who rise to the top of large institutions usually do so not because of any technical ability they might have but because they have mastered internal politics or have been mentored by masters of internal politics

If you're busy trying to do your job properly there's no way you've got the time to get stuck into the serious business of putting the shaft into your fellow team members

And the bigger the organisation the more scope there is for dead weight, non accountability and parasitism

The Metropolitan Police, and every other large, centralised organisation, all the way up to old favourites such as the EU, the UN and the big corporate cartels are and always will be Institutionally, and inherently, Corrupt

and you don't need to be a Conspiraloon to acknowledge this

and then, popping my Conspiraloon hat back on, you've got to admit that stuffing the special duties sections of our police forces with serial shaggers and the kind of dishonest fuckers who have no qualms about getting beered up on tens of thousands of public money does make for a very malleable security establishment doesn't it

and if that doesn't work it's nothing an ill-fated camping holiday or Sunday afternoon stroll in the woods can't solve

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Feeling Odd?

Legendary pie-aficionado and Flickr regular Thomas Hawk recently made a comment about a certain poster being used in the latest Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorism publicity campaign

I won’t reproduce the original poster here but the text reads…


Thousands of people take photos every day

What if one of them seems odd?

Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras

If you see someone doing that we need to know

Let experienced officers decide what action to take


Hmmm, given that I and most of my chums a) take pictures of stuff in public places and b) look a bit odd, it’s difficult not to take this latest heap of fear-mongering bollocks personally

It’s also worth remembering that here in the UK we have something like 25% of all the world’s CCTV cameras and that most of those cameras are privately controlled, by poorly-regulated c*nts. So it’s a bit rich, or rather a bit fascistic, when our publicly funded police force is essentially easing towards criminalising anyone who might take photographs of those wretched, corporately-operated, things

Anyway, Thomas’ post (itself picked up from another blog) was picked up by Boing Boing and people have started to post ‘remixes’ of the original poster







There is also a chirpy radio ad to accompany the poster campaign that can be accessed on the Met site here (transcript here)

When a time comes when it’s virtually impossible to distinguish between real anti-terror publicity and satirical anti-terror material that’s a time to start feeling really quite uncomfortable about where we are being led (if, perish the thought, you haven't already)




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Fans of dystopian sci-fi movies will, however, with all these Orwellian ‘public service’ announcements about generic terrorists and the accelerated blurring of state and corporate power and interests, be feeling right at home…

"Quaid, activate the reactor Quaid…"

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edit: and whilst on the subject of not being able to distinguish 'truth' from satire and dystopian sci-fi, cheers to anon for this little nugget...



Next Week on Fox News - Al Qaeda only 'months away' from completing a Death Star?...

edit#2:

Everyone's friend Henry the Hoover - unlike the Al Qaeda Dalek, a Weapon of Love not War

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Official Press Release from the Conspiraloon™ Alliance

The text of an official press release issued by the Conspiraloon™ Alliance earlier today...

"It is with a heavy heart that we at the Conspiraloon™ Alliance feel the need to issue a public announcement distancing ourselves from recent statements made by honorary Alliance member Mohamed Al-Fayed



Whilst giving evidence at London's Royal Courts of Justice at the inquest into the death of his son Dodi and Diana, Princess of Wales, Mr Al-Fayed made a series of allegations identifying a number of senior public figures; including Prince Philip and former Prime Minister Tony Blair, as being murdering Nazi scum involved in a gigantic Establishment conspiracy. Outside the court, Mr Al Fayed did not halt his invective. Asked by the BBC's royal correspondent Peter Hunt whether he was lying, the Harrods owner shot back: "You work for MI6, you idiot!”

Mr Al-Fayed, stricken by grief at the loss of his son, has clearly boarded the last train to Funkytown and is no longer able to distinguish between fact and fantasy

BBC royal correspondents work for MI5 NOT MI6

We wish Mr Al-Fayed a speedy recovery and the swift return of all his faculties"

Unlike Mr Al-Fayed I personally have every confidence in the objectivity and outcomes of Official British Inquiries and my only regret is that this all-too short inquest simply didn't have enough time to get to the bottom of the peculiar, and illegal, collapse of Paul Burrell's trial or end the rumours about an exceptionally dodgy (and missing) dossier Princess Diana had compiled on her beloved husband's hobbies which even my dear old mum, someone who has never connected to the Internet in her life, has heard about

Best Royal Portrait ever?

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What's a Creationist's Favourite Sandwich?

The mysterious origins of Life - as illustrated by a large banana smeared with warm, dripping peanut butter

As I've posted on this blog, once or twice, I'm not a big fan of Darwinism. For many reasons, which I'm not going to go into here, I'm about as sure that it doesn't stack up as I can be about anything

I am also equally sure that mainstream scientific orthodoxy on the closely-related, though not the same, subject of abiogenesis - the spontaneous generation of Life from inanimate matter is also pretty ropey

It's not a question about abiogenesis being hugely improbable. As things stand, within the restrictions of our current level of knowledge, abiogenesis is flat out impossibile. There is nothing like a viable theory to explain how something as simple as a single-celled organism (not simple at all) can spring into existence out of its constituents chemical parts. And as for actually replicating that process in a lab, forget it.

Put simply, the notion that life spontaneously sprang out of nothing is currently a faith based belief; anchored on two extremely sophisticated scientific principles which only someone with a brain as large as Richard Dawkins' can comprehend...

1. Life must have come from somewhere
   
   
2. There's no fucking way I'm bringing God or Space Aliens into it

And if anyone bumping into this post thinks they can pull me up on this; without reverting to Dawkins-style bullshit and deceit, I'd genuinely love to hear from them (False-choice, 'you're either with us or against us', proofs that people who believe in Jesus are wrong about the origins of Life and therefore Dawkins must be right definitely don't count)

Over the years I've seen several thoughtful, intelligent attempts to communicate the deficiencies in mainstream science's attempts to grapple with abiogenesis

This is not one of them...

Peanut Butter, The Atheist's Nightmare!

I originally posted a link to that video on the Conspiraloon Alliance blog and wasn't going to bother replicating the post here

However, someone posted a link to another Masterpiece of Food-based Creationist PR in a comment underneath...

The atheist's nightmare: the banana

Where this Creationist obsession with high-calorie sandwich fillings comes from God(?) only knows, though it does apparently have its limits. Follow-up searches for titles such as 'Why Secular Humanists Fear Spreadable Marshmallow' and 'Jam - The Agnostic's Nemesis' on Google/ Youtube have, so far, stubbornly refused to yield any positive results :(

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