Merry Christmas To All

Yes, even you.

What’s the longest you’d want to live without internet access?

WordPress wants me to do a post with this title.

I’m going to say infinity years…

Jeremy Kyle as a Justification for Anarcho-Capitalism

Lots of people deride the Jeremy Kyle show -often with some justification- as one of the very worst examples of car-crash television, parading the weak and the feckless for the viewing public’s titilation, and I suppose it does. What it also does, however, is provide a very real and current demonstration of how voluntary associations and trade can be harnessed to aid people absent the state’s involvement.

The Jeremy Kyle show does help people. They have comprehensive aftercare and counselling as well as providing the mediation, polygraph, DNA analysis or whatever else is required to help the participants turn whatever corner in their lives they have appeared on the show to turn. Nobody is forced to appear -except by their consciences or desire for the truth- and most importantly of all, the services provided by the show are free at the point of use.

This is not to say that the producers, researchers, counselling teams or even Mr. Kyle himself are volunteers, donating their time and energy for purely altruistic reasons (not that there is anything wrong with that), they expect to profit from it. They put on a show that people watch, sell advertising and turn a profit from helping people, all without court orders or state-certified mediation services or any of the other tendrils the big state loves to infect people’s private lives with. From this we can show that absent a state, the profit motive would indeed lead enterprising people to plug the gaps in the market left by the state’s dissolution, and those enterprises would by no means be out of the reach of the poor.

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.

Oh Noes!

They really are reaching now, aren’t they?

The Beeb was awash this morning with news that you can now buy a glass that will contain a -wait for it- a a whole bottle of wine! Arggh! Somebody alert the authorities!
Because of course, if someone usually drinks three or four glasses of wine then obviously if they use this type of glass then their consumption will skyrocket to three or four bottles! Ooman natcha, innit. People are greedy and furthermore too dim to appreciate the difference between a glass holding 25ml and a glass holding 70cl. Something Must Be Done! And just WHAT about the drain on the NHS, that’s what I’d like to know!! 

Which all pre supposes that it’s actually anybody’s damn business how many bottles of wine an individual may or may not choose to drink, which of course it isn’t. Oh, and to cap it all off, this isn’t even news (it’s olds). Here’s a picture of my sister-in-law drinking vodka and coke out of just such a glass two christmases ago:

I Despair

Print it out! It’ll look more professional…

Child In Learning At School Shocker

Boy sees fox.
Boy touches fox.
Fox sees boy.
Fox bites boy.

That’ll learn him.
The Wail’s reporting that he ‘stroked’ the fox, while the Bun reckon he pulled it’s tail. Either way, instead of unleashing another fox scare story, shouldn’t we be asking where the parents were?

Bloody Hell

Am I hearing right?

I could have sworn that I just saw -amongst the usual nonsense- the BBC announcing that Dick Cleggerton is asking the public what we should really be spending the money on, given that there really isn’t that much money left.
Allegedly he’s even gone to the Treasury and asked them to work the sensible way around, ie to start afresh and see what the State actually needs to provide rather than finding ways to justify what they already spend.

If they are sincere (and this really could be a clever gamble, if the public really are that used to being nannyed and hectored that they will ask for more anyway) then this is a very promising development, as this is what many of us have been calling for for ages (DK did just the other day, echoing the words of Norman Tebbit (a voice from within his own party that Dick would do well to listen to).

We could all compile lists of what we should get rid of all day long, I’m sure but starting from zero and asking what we really need seems so eminently sensible that I still can’t quite believe my ears. Here’s my list: Nukes
Soldiers
Sailors (and boats)
Courts (Criminal)
Policemen
Firemen
Ambulances
A&E wards

And that’s it! Coupled with a massive reduction in the tax burden of course, so we can afford to buy everything else from the private sector.

Quote Of The Yesterday

Note the uses of the singular and plural:

On Friday I was pleased to be back in the constituency and the day started early on with a meeting in West Malling with our local PC and PCSOs.

Still, hopefully as one of our new LiberoCon overlords, you’ll be doing something about that, Tracey, right?

Inappropriate App Shock!

Today’s Sun is working up a fury about an iPhone app that allows you to simulate glassing someone using the phone’s motion sensors. So far, so Sun. The line that caught my eye though was the one tucked away at the end mentioning that it had not been censored by Apple, the implication being that it should have been.

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about Apple’s command structure and their insistence on telling you what you can do with your machine once you’ve bought it from them. I don’t really have an opinion on that (if you don’t want that don’t buy a bloody phone from them) but it strikes me, especially with once-evil but now a busted flush Microsoft moving in the same direction with their new mobile OS that app store business models are very easy for the Righteous to lobby for even more ‘choice editing’ than currently goes on.

I don’t want to get all alarmist or conspiracist but I can easily see a sanitised, Righteous future where the irreverent and unconventional things we can download for our computers will not exist and we will be confined to downloading ‘approved’ software, especially if devices like the IPad become the norm (as I’m guessing they will, eventually, simply for their convenience) for people to access the internet, play games and so on. A future where it will be just as easy for the Righteous to get a computer program banned as it is now for them to get a tv show or an advert pulled.