Well, at least it’s not about Obama

Just saw this on the Facebook. By and large the comments are NOT supportive. Maybe there is some hope for this country after all.

Get The State OUT Of Marriage

Look at the trouble it’s causing. The gay “community” ( I always put ” community” in scare quotes nowadays ) want to call their partnerships marriages, and of course some people are all for it, and some are against it, but what they are all calling for without exception is for the all powerful state to change it’s mind about what a marriage is.

Well I’m sorry, but that’s bollocks.

A marriage is a contract between consenting adults. It is a promise to share lives and wealth until death, said in front of witnesses and associated paperwork signed and witnessed. The state has no business in dictating the terms of such a contract, dictating where it may be agreed to or dictating who may sign it. Full stop. (A libertarian may here interject that the State may have some role in enforcing contracts but I’m an anarchist, so they can bugger off).

This whole debate amounts to one side saying “please sir, please sir, those people want to say they’re married but I don’t WANT them to” and the other side saying “Oh, but SIR, you simply MUST agree that we can call it marriage too or it’s just so UNFAIR!” Grow the fuck up. You love each other so why do you care what sir thinks? Or the other crowd? Get the state OUT of marriage altogether and the whole debate simply fades away. Sign a contract, find somewhere to hire out to celebrate it (and somewhere else for a proper party afterwards ) and have done with it.

And don’t get me started on religious freedom. What about Muslims and Mormons and anyone else who fancies a bit of polygamy? I hear a lot about one man and one woman, two men or two women but what if you fancy two wives or three husbands? Or a wife, two bisexuals and a tranny? If they all agree then why shouldn’t they be able to enter into contract?  And call it marriage or whatever else they want?

And “advertising standards” can kiss my arse as well. It’s a contradiction in terms anyway. Next time you see “x% of y women agreed” do the maths, see if it comes out to a real number of women. That’s just more corporatism, right there.

Odd One Out

Reason: Why We’re Losing http://goo.gl/mag/tm6ki

They’re right, alas.
I’ve often characterised people as ‘anti -bees ,’ in that bees are individually quite useless but as a collective are amazing, but people are wonderful as individuals but as collectives (or mobs ) are stupid.
The trouble is, as humans are a pack animal they have a propensity to collectivise, and, as a pack animal they also have a large beta contingent which is always compelled to defer to “the boss. ” In a democracy, you can see how this works. It is a perpetual duking -it -out between two or three bosses but the idea of 60,000,000 bosses never arises. And I fear it never will.
You may have noticed I started referring to humans in the third person there, that was deliberate. I don’t really play well with authority, I’m not a joiner or a beta male but I’m not an alpha male either. I usually end up in de facto leadership roles, deferred to by others, but I’m not comfortable with it. I just want to be left alone.

I’m a “don’t tread on me ” anarchist. Not a ‘big anarchist movement ‘ one. So I don’t really fit the primate social model. I don’t actually count myself as “human” anymore. Humans like order, they like hierarchies, they like to know who’s in charge and that they deserve to be in charge because they are “doing something.” They like this because they are a pack animal, like the wolf.
Are YOU human? 

Good

I saw on the news this evening that Birmingham City Council have had their proposed cuts declared Unlawful in the High Court.

Good. (Waits for hushed gasps to settle)

Yes, I said it, this is good news. Bear with me here.

Remember that the Poll Tax Council Tax is capped by central government and cannot be increased (beyond 3.5% anyway, still too high IMO). Now that the judiciary have decided that councils cutting "front line services" like "providing care packages for about 4,000 adults whose needs are assessed as being substantial," especially in a judgement that is going to have "implications for local councils across the country" a lot of councils are going to suddenly find themselves in very dire financial straits. These are the agents that actually apply most of the freedom-busting ideas that float out of Brussels, via Westminster. The Smoking Inspectors, Recycling Coordinators and Five-A-Day-Cessation-Social advisors and the rest of it is all enforced by the local councils. Imposing "Cold Calling" zones and "No Drinking" zones and harrassing law-abiding people in the street. While centralisation is no good thing, that does not mean that local government is the friend of liberty.

The delicious bit is that the ever-expanding nanny state’s own centrepiece legislation, the Equality Act, is the basis for this ruling. Fantastic! Irony is even better than goldy or silvery, sometimes. So some people who could probably do with a bit of cash (possibly even the pensioners who actually paid already for the services the council wanted to cut that I saw on Five news) are going to benefit, and the local councils may actually have to cut some of the more excessively intrusive things they do instead of cutting where it shows and saving the bean-flickers counters. What’s not to like?

Is it possible the beast will eventually tie itself up in so much red tape that we can all be free?

This is why I hardly post anymore

In today’s news, teaching union takes ignorance of new government plans to establish so-called “free schools” and place a modicum of competition in the school system as “parents don’t want these schools.”

In other news, the VAT increase is set to help bring down the spending deficit, but is it good for the economy? No plans to actually reduce government spending though, which would help a lot more.

Yawn.

Square Pegs

Sorry there hasn’t been much out of me lately, a brief sojourn in Brighton (eye-opener, and not for the obvious reasons) followed by a mysterious illness have put paid to posting for a while.

Anyway.

One of Leg-Iron’s recurring themes recently has been the Official Standard Human and the woes lying in wait for those who do not conform, and I think a story that hit the news yesterday morning demonstrates that nicely: Children labelled with special needs may simply have been poorly taught.

Brilliant. Education is so regulated today, so full of targets and key stages and whathaveyou that there is no option but to be poorly taught, unless your child fits into the Official Standard Human model, which pretty much states that each child must be able to do x in week y of key stage z with no regard to the blindingly obvious fact that all children are unique.
One of the examples given on the BBC Breakfast programme yesterday was a child that was labelled special needs because they had difficulty with long division at the alloted hour of the alloted week of their school career: a definition that would have captured your host for I too had trouble with long division (I still can’t do it) and yet went on to pass the 11+ and later had no difficulty at all with calculus, complex number and Fourier Analysis.
Attempts to fit all children into one standard model are doomed to failure, and fail the kids at the top of the ability tree as well as those at the bottom. The obvious tendancy to label those that can’t (and probably those that can, easily, and act up through boredom) as special needs is probably more to do with teachers covering their arses than it is to do with eugenic social engineering but the effect is the same, saddling humans with a label that will stay with them for years (possibly their whole lives should they come to believe it themselves) simply because they don’t fit.

And don’t even get me started on the whole ‘we’ve been saying this for years but now a government agency says it it’s news’ thing.                      

S.O-S.O

Mid-Wife Crisis on the new housing benefit-council house system, illustrating

that while politicians may be moving in the right direction they are still congenitally incapable of thinking anything through…
God, all these changes with regard to Housing Benefit and council housing are stressing people out. It’s the uncertainty that’s getting to constituents more than anything else, although some are pointing out how many of the proposals are contradictory, at least in what their effects are likely to be. Mrs Jennings rings up to say that she has been thinking of trying to exchange her council house for a smaller one, now her children are grown up. She wants to know whether, if she goes ahead with an exchange, her tenancy agreement on the new house will be time-limited. I can’t give her a definitive answer, as no-one seems to have addressed this particular issue at all, though it does seem likely to me”They must think people are bloody stupid if they think anyone will move to a smaller house if that’s going to be what happens to their security,” she says”People will just cling on to their houses ’til they die.”"It does seem rather ill thought-out,” I say. “But we will have to wait and see.” I don’t say that what we don’t know is what the exact nature of the carrots and sticks will be.

Do read the whole thing.

Again

Only a few weeks after Derek Bird, and there’s another crazed gunman on the loose. This time, however, the talking heads are strangely silent on the subject of the gun laws, presumably because -unlike Bird- Raoul Moat is a convicted criminal and therefore forbidden from owning a firearm altogether. That’s alright then…

Oh no, wait a minute! HE’S A DANGEROUS CRIMINAL AND COULDN’T GIVE A STUFF WHETHER HE’S ALLOWED A GUN OR NOT! In fact, the law didn’t stop him so much that he aquired weaponry in a very short time after being released from prison!

Oops. The people who didn’t have guns -who were also forbidden from having them- his ex-girlfriend, her new fella, a couple of coppers: remind me what happened to them again? Not to mention the poor, disarmed folk of Rothbury, quaking under their beds completely at the mercy of the homicidal maniac on the loose in their vicinity.

The gun laws need repealing now. When guns are outlawed… well, you know the rest.

P.E.T.A. (Polar-bear Extinction Team Associated)

Remember Knut? The ‘kute’ baby polar bear and superstar of the Berlin Zoo? Well, PETA, the international guild of dog-murderers are claiming that he is ‘disturbed,’ and that this shows quite plainly that ‘polar bears do not belong in captivity.’

Apparently, he sways to and fro, which is abnormal although PETA do not mention how long they spent in the company of polar bears in the wild to discover that they don’t do this. Also -and I would guess that this is what really upsets PETA- the most popular polar bear in the world has started to imitate the people photographing him by standing up and mimicking the action with his paws. Oh heavens! This animal has obviously been tainted by human contact… the end times are upon us, horses are going to start eating each other etc. etc. etc. Given PETA’s record with traditional human-companion symbiotes I suppose the idea that such a majestic wild animal like the polar bear starting to show signs of domestication (imagine if, after several generations in captivity and successful breeding programmes polar bears became as docile as dogs! Oh, the horror) is one step too far. PETA have had problems with Knut before, don’t forget, even when he was a kute liddle bay-bee.

Another thought that occurs to me is that if the breeding population of polar bears in captivity were removed, then that adds more ammunition to the ‘think-of-the-poor-polar-bears-with-no-ice-to-sit-on’ wing of the Climate Change Church. Despite the fact that polar bears are actually doing all right in the wild, thankyouverymuch.

Ignorant Cu ts

I despair sometimes, I really do.
I think yesterday’s Sun had something in it about ‘painful cuts’ to public spending and how awful it was going to have to be. I was (very uncharacteristically) waving the paper around at work remarking how it wasn’t going to be painful at all for me, and I wasn’t sure what the big deal was.

“Cuts to wages!” they said. “Not our wages,” I said. “Civil Servants, Public Sector workers. We work in the private sector,” I said. “Our wages have already been cut.”

“Cuts in pensions!” They cried. “Not OUR pensions,” I said. “Public Sector Workers Pensions. Besides which, the Brown Gorgon already fleeced OUR pensions.”

It just wasn’t sinking in. People -and these are otherwise intelligent people, some very so- just do not seem to grasp the concept that the money the government spends is their money that’s been taken away from them. They fully believe that it’s magic money that will be taken out of the economy by cuts in government spending. Even when I said that sacking all the civil servants and putting them on the dole would still be cheaper because you’re giving them less money for doing the same job (boom boom!) all I got was blank faces. Crazy.

What high-falutin’ libertarian types like the Samizdatistas would call the ‘meta-context’ is well and truly sewn up by the Keynesian left. Regular, credulous people the country up and down (and I know that this isn’t a scientific survey, but I bet you’d find the same story in tearooms everywhere) are totally bought into the notion that government spending is essential to the economy and the idea that the government and civil service are actually parasitic on the economy is totally alien to them.

What doesn’t help of course is supposedly highbrow programmes like BBC Breakfast (yes, I know) constantly pushing this line. Whether this is by design or just a symptom of the organisation being run by people who are also totally bought into the same idea I’ll leave for another time. This very morning they were discussing Cleggerton’s idea of following the Canadian model and both ‘sides’ of the ‘debate’ were worried that instead of a few hundred thousand people possibly being out of work (like in Canadia) we had several million public sector employees (the figure I think they quoted was 20% of the workforce) and cutting all their wages and/or jobs would be bad for the economy. Nobody saw fit to mention that 20% is an absurdly high figure to start with, nobody saw fit to mention that most of those employees are doing jobs that don’t really need doing (or are in fact completely undesirable for anybody to be doing full stop) and yet again nobody saw fit to mention that paying them JSA instead of £40,000 p.a. would be a hell of a lot cheaper anyway and most importantly nobody saw fit to mention that if they were not doing non-jobs at the other 80% of the populations expense they would be more likely to find work doing actual useful jobs, making products or providing services that other people were willing to pay for. And this from a programme that supposedly ‘well-informed’ people watch. Sheesh.

I feel completely despondent.