What makes you happy ?

Rudy Giuliani, the 9/11 candidate who beat Ron Paul thanks to the aid of a 3% swing on Diebold voting machines, received 9.11% of the vote in three different towns. Coincidence or somebody’s idea of a sick joke? src: Prisonplanet

Only it’s not a game, is it?

We used to pay little attention to the utility bills. If they said they wanted 35 quid a month (or any amount) then they got it. We took it for granted that what we saved in the summer would even out with what extra we used in the winter. Oh how wrong we were….
After going bankrupt we naturally examined where each penny was being spent. And once we got the ability to pay bills again by getting the utility back (water are okay, electric/gas aren’t too bad, phone? they make you sweat blood. No, I am not joking) we looked really hard at these budgeting schemes. Initially we left it to them and it slowly but surely slid in their favour. I don’t mean that they had our money – I mean that our debt increased. Their grip got tighter. This matters because we wanted to change suppliers.

You ring your gas supplier and say “I want to switch to someone else”. They reply “No problem, but fully settle your bill first”. And all of a sudden you can see that part of their ploy is to put that financial obstacle in your way. After all, if you are moving suppliers to save money chances are you don’t have the money around to pay that bill off. So you are more likely to stay with that costly company – who then say you can save money by having your electric / phone / broadband / satellite with them. And you can pay monthly there too…. bargain….

With the costs of energy going up (and we can only hope the Govt immediately start telling the elderly that they will help more than they do) then I’m sure many people will head over to USwitch, find the deal and only then discover just how bad their debt is. So when the Govt and journos say that so many people have yet to switch it must include not just the inertia effect but also this financial hostage taking that the energy companies deal in.

Are we switching? Hell yes. But only when Martin Lewis says so. (The only thing I will not change is my ISP. At £35 a month it’s costly but when I ring Zen I get someone who really does know all the technical stuff. I don’t ring often but when I do the last thing I want is someone reading from a screen. I also – obviously – need an excellent service which I get).

New Year starts and so does the propaganda. We now have a government funded website called “Act on CO2“. It offers tips for motorists to help them ‘reduce their carbon footprint’. Things like “have less junk in the car so it is lighter” and “keep the tyre air pressures right”, “Petrol or diesel” and using a smaller car. They even have a Brand Partnerships page which if you look really carefully at you’ll realise that every brand there is absolutely reliant on the car. No car, no brand. This then explains why the biggest clue for car users is not anywhere on that website. So here it it:
Get out of the damn car and walk or use public transport.

Fact is there are school mums taking the 4×4 to drop off little Timmy when they live only yards away, people driving to shops they could easily walk to, perfectly good public transport that car drivers will ignore because it is beneath them. That website – which we as taxpayers have also funded – is car propaganda, nothing else. If the govt were serious they could do so much better. I’m surprised they haven’t followed that ridiculous Honda ad from last year which seemed to preach that the internal combustion engine was in fact a gift to nature.

This is why the Road Tax is a nonsense. It’s a one-off pain that is shrugged off. Abolish it. Get rid. Instead, impose a car insurance tariff and double the tax on petrol. The person who has the best clue about this? Ken Livingstone. The congestion charge in London isn’t just right, it should be extended to all cities. (The arguments against are in the main crap because the govt actually wants to see this fail. No way can the govt lose the support of the Roads lobby). Until the motorist is actually hurting daily they won’t consider using their head and will not consider what they are actually doing. But then it’s always the other guy isn’t it?

I can’t be the only brit to keep seeing loads on blog posts about some guy in the USA called Ron Paul. According to some he’s great but then so is Bush / Guiliani etc. Mr Paul also believes in creationism. Whatever. There’s so much noise about him changing US politics. And yet in this article about the US election, there is no mention of Ron Paul at all. He’s not even hinted at. So either a respected and knowledgeable BBC corespondent has no clue, or the blogs are doing nothing but inflating the impossible. I go with the latter. But hey, I’m a brit, what do I know about it :)

Brazil’s government has expressed its “unhappiness” that no senior police officers involved in Jean Charles de Menezes’s shooting will be disciplined. … the government would continue to support Mr de Menezes’s family, and to offer them every conceivable assistance. BBC

… so the Brazilians are unhappy. Big deal……

Brazil’s Police officers are frequently accused of murdering destitute minors http://pangaea.org/street_children

While the Committee notes that the right to life, survival and development is integrated into domestic legislation, it remains extremely concerned at the number of children murdered, as reported by the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions in Brazil in her 2004 report, which stated that the perpetrators of those crimes are mainly military policemen or former policemen

The Committee expresses its grave concern at the significant number of street children and the vulnerability of these children to extrajudicial killings, various forms of violence, including torture, sexual abuse and exploitation, and at the lack of a systematic and comprehensive strategy to address the situation and protect these children, and the very poor registration of missing children by the police.
UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Brazil 2004

police officers are paid to eliminate innocent children without responsible and effective actions by the federal government to prevent these atrocities. Link

With the above – and none are offered “every conceivable assistance” – plus lots of other abuse and violence then I think our Govt has every right to not give a flying one for whatever those Brazilian murder-abetting politicians think.

“Very rarely do mere words on a message board startle me. I’ve seen many descriptions of waterboarding, but that one made me sit up straight. Wow.” Straightdope src: Reddit

Terry Pratchett won’t be so well.. An Embuggerance.

Millionaires will be created under a revolutionary scheme to hand out fortunes as a reward for the simple task of casting a vote. Guardian

Dame Jane Roberts …told The Observer she believes it is time for some radical thinking to revive interest in voting. ‘We want to incentivise voting and we are keen on the carrot rather than the stick.

‘Incentivise’ .. what a stupid word. You know who’d win? Some idiot who the rest of society would judge to be just that – an idiot – and it would actually dis-incentivise everyone.
What they do need to change is the act of voting. Right now it is optional. It needs to be compulsory. Failure to vote incurs a guaranteed fine of £250. No excuses, no being let off. No vote, pay. The arguments that people can’t get time off, or can’t be in the right place at the right time are crap, they don’t wash. They are excuses. The argument that it is your democratic right to not vote has some weight but not enough – fact is if it were law your democratic right to not vote just went the same way as your democratic right to drive at 100mph on the roads.
I think it was a Conservative election that was won where by the number of votes cast they had less than half of that vote. So we had a government where less than half of the people voted and less than half of those actually voted for the winner. That is nonsense, but it happened. Politicians trade on the fact that people will not vote. Come the next election Labour will be praying for storms, the others for a sunny day. Our government will again be chosen by the weather. This is plainly stupid.

Right now the politicians can very safely ignore over half the registered voters. They really don’t care and because of all their reports and research they know just where not to care too. Why waste time travelling where people will not vote? So they appeal to a few, hope for nice/bad weather and just hope their personal gravy train does not get rocked. (Except for Dennis Skinner). This lottery crap is another way of the Establishment patting the lower classes on the head (even though you just know it would be someone connected to a silver spoon that would be given the money. I wonder if there are people in the country who do actually believe that their vote is a secret….). And yet the Members of Parliament would have us believe that they serve us. That they look after our interests, that they answer to us. If you believe this you either are an MP or you sleep with one.

Making the vote compulsory means they have to pay attention (unless like GWB you get your vote machine buddies to screw the vote and the people for you).
Imagine voting was compulsory at the next election. Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems get 20%, 15% and 10% respectively. That would mean that 55% of the voters went into that booth and ruined their paper (you would never convince the govt to have a ‘none of the above’ choice.) But by having that 55% available to any of the parties the next time around they would all have to work harder. We are all – every one of us – a vote which is more than we are right now. We all must know that parliamentary boundaries are redrawn to favour the incumbent but by making everyone vote that starts to matter less. Those figures of 20/15/10 may not be that far off but no-one in power cares because that represents everyone who would turn out anyway. It’s a short-term view that it’s bad, that fines would be terrible and that it would be undemocratic.
The carrot has it’s place but with something as important as this? Use a stick. And hey, it’s once every couple of years if we include local elections so the hardship factor isn’t so high…

(Please not that I did not add into this comparisons to emerging democracies where people will queue for days to exercise their democratic right, nor did I mention any wars and I didn’t point at any of the gentler sex and say “Emily died for you!”. Someone else can use all that – I think it’s far better we focus on making politicians actually work and keep working.)

Scans have shown that paedophilia may be the result of faulty connections in the brain. BBC

So just open those brains up and do some rewiring. That is obviously the best solution.

Of those who could vote, a majority at the Oxford Union decided to give a platform to the leader of the BNP Nick Griggin and the Holocaust denier David Irving.
Dr Julian Lewis disagreed and resigned.

Of those who could vote, a majority in the New Forest East constituency decided to give a platform to the person from the Conservative Party.
Dr Julian Lewis MP was delighted to accept.

Two democratic votes and he disagrees with one. Which is fine, he can do that, but the principle that gave those two men the vote gave him his far loftier platform.

If Nick Griffin was speaking in Leicester I would go to see him. I would do so partly because he is not in the political gravy-train so he can actually say what he really does think – unlike Dr Lewis – but also because I think it’s really important that we do give people like him their time on the political soapbox.
You cannot know what you disagree with until you see / hear / touch it. You cannot know what you disagree with until you know what you believe in and why you believe that. There will have been people who voted Dr Lewis into the position simply because he was a Tory. Their parents voted Tory so they will too. Zero active thought. They do it in just the same way that someone else voted for anyone else because they hate the tories. Arguably the people giving the platform at the OU have given far more thought than many of his constituents.
It’s important too that whatever Nick Griffin (I’m concentrating on him because his political agenda is prominent) has to say that we actually do hear it. What he actually says is not what is printed in the newspapers. They have their own political stances and none include British Nationalism. We don’t really know what he says, what he thinks about x or y or z. And we should. We can only argue against what we know. And we only know by giving time and a platform to someone whose views are different.

We make a big deal of being democratic. Maybe we are, maybe we are not. But if we are not, we will get further not by not allowing others to speak.

Stephen Altmann-Richer, co-president of the Oxford University Jewish Society, told the BBC News website that while freedom of speech was important “it is overshadowed in this instance”.
“I don’t think these people should be invited to the Oxford Union, by having them speak, it legitimises their views,” he said.

No it doesn’t. It simply means he gets listened to, and he hears others arguing back. Nothing legitimises a view. It is simply heard. Some will disagree, some will agree and some will go away and think. What they think is almost unimportant but at the end they will be closer and firmer in whatever beliefs they have – and that is a good thing, even if that position is further away than you might be.

Sabby Dhalu, secretary of campaign group Unite Against Fascism also objected. So how far left would I have to go before she objected to me? “Well we hate facism but not that much”. So what she too means is that she supports some of the people who want to unite against facism, but not all. A bit like Dr Lewis with his “I support votes but not this one”.

Not talking to people with other views narrows your own views and hardens your attitude to change.