okay Sunny, you're not an oik but you're still a sociopath

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Correction 08-02-12: Corrected "pedagogy" to "demagogy" in 1st para. Idiot. 

When I read this reply from Sunny to my earlier crowing I had a moment of genuine contrition because he's done some really good work at Liberal Conspiracy building a forum for thinking people and there's some really great stuff posted there. Then I re-read Martin Robbins' original tweet and I thought, "No, fuck it. Martin's about as right as anyone can be." You see, Sunny is happy to purse the truth and to share it with the world as long as it furthers his agenda to put the Labour party back in power. Sunny's a Labour fanboi. He sucks on the teat of social democrat demagogy like a parched camel after two months in the desert. Its his oxygen. And that's why he, like all partisan hacks, is a part of the problem. He's fundamentally disinterested in the entirety of the gritty truth behind any issue. 

Lets dig a little deeper into the issue. Martin's tweet was responding to this one of Sunny's:

@sunny_hundal: First NHS hospital gets privatised - article avoids mentioning company's links to Tories bit.ly/w3OLuL

And yes, the article avoids mentioning the link to Tories' pockets, which have been well established and are broadly appreciated by anyone who has the time and wants to take an interest. That isn't news. We all know the Tories are the Nasty Party, in bed with big business and happy to use their positions of enormous responsibility to throw the interests of the UK population on the bonfire in order to profit personally. I'm happy to read about this sort of thing, despite being already too familiar with it because every time I read something like this it fuels the fire inside me. It drives me to seek justice and to challenge the pricks responsible wherever I find them. The thing is, I'm equally happy to crow about Martin's post because Labour did a hell of a lot to advance NHS privatisation before the Tory's picked up the baton and ran with it. I can't be arsed to research links to it now, my name's not Google. Start with PFI and George Monbiot's book 'Captive State'.

For a Labour slut like Sunny to point and shout at the Tories for doing the same is rank, steaming hypocrisy. That is the opposite of evidence-based politics and it should be scorned for the malignant sociopathy it enables and propagates. Worse still, its the sort of shameless, history-denying points-scoring crap that keeps the endless two-party system in the UK going. Coalition government? What coalition government? All I see are a pack of Tory cunts and neoliberal, populist slags. Split these scum however you want because I don't see a choice between the lesser of two evils as any choice at all. A plague on BOTH your houses.  

And an especially rich, florid 'Fuck You' to you, Sunny.

Simon Jenkins rules, "eco-towns" are an ecological catastrophe

What an awesome article! I think its time to write to Alison again.

"Britain has plenty of potential eco-towns. They are called London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle, to name a few. They conform to every one of Flint's declared objectives. They have an infrastructure of utilities, schools, clinics, libraries, welfare services and public transport already built. People have shown themselves ready to live, work and play in them without using cars. They are settled communities able to absorb immigration and high-density living, without tearing the bonds of local leadership.

If Flint wants to see land available for development in these eco-towns, she need only get in a helicopter and fly over them. They have the lowest residential densities in Europe, the most road-space and, incidentally, the greatest problem in generating communal cohesion. They can and do handle more people each year, even if it does mean more flats and fewer gardens."

"Any fool can build in what remains of the countryside and call it eco-something. It will not save life on Earth, but merely drive ever more people into hypermobility.

The way to preserve the green of the countryside and maximise the carbon-efficiency of human habitation is to make today's cities work better. They are full of useable land. They have suffered enough insults from politicians for the past century. Cities are the new green."

"[Caroline] Flint wants between 30% and 40% of houses in her eco-towns to be for the poor. Her boss, Hazel Blears, wants "half the households" not to be allowed cars, presumably also the poor. She does not say who will live in these ghettos. The idea that they can be made both privately financed and "affordable", whatever that means nowadays, for locally employed families is laughable. A 6,000-house eco-town cannot begin to sustain a full range of services, nor would any developer touch an estate where nobody can have a car.

To be poor without a car in a British new town is hell. That is why the last census showed only 14% of residents in Bracknell and 19% in Milton Keynes as car-less, against a national average of 27%. People have to get out of these planners' dream towns. Anyway, it is only big cities that do without cars: 37% of Londoners and 48% of Mancunians. Wild horses would not get Flint or Blears to live in their new towns, yet like city builders down the ages, they inflict them on the poor."

Q - Why isn't the government pushing this technology?

"Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University, one of Britain's leading marine energy experts, estimates that the Pentland Firth alone could generate up to a quarter of Britain's electricity – more than is now being provided by all the country's nuclear power stations – making the channel between Orkney and the north Scottish mainland "the Saudi Arabia of marine energy.""

A - Because they're incompetent sociopathic wankers so wrapped up in their post-Imperialist ideological clusterfuck and in trying to convince themselves that the UK is still a world power that they are emotionally incapable of doing anything other than royally fucking other people's countries up at the expense of our own.

Word.

Labour's stupidity with our tax money

I've never heard of Jenni Russell before but she's pretty well acquainted with the absurdities of PFI and Labour's insane payouts to management consultants. Anyone who damns the Trident replacement is ok in my books.

freedom of information - just as long as you don't want it any time soon

The delaying tactics of Whitehall threaten to return us to the days of Lack of Freedom of Information.

Britons' disposable income plummets

"We are working harder, but we are not getting any wealthier. We are just running to stand still." is how one commentator put it. That analogy of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland has been used for so many different things that I relish each and every new application of it. So apt, the image of running at full pelt on a treadmill carrying you backwards just to remain stationary upon a spot on the ground.

Anyway, enough of my pretentious twoddle. The point is that, although economics remains a well-researched field with ample past records to guide those in charge of our current economy, they still can't get it right.

UK rail regulator damns government's blessing of fare increases

Newsflash! - The government wants to reduce its investment in our rail network and passengers to foot more of the bill!

Excessive pricing is what we have already- fuck knows what I'd call the new pricing policy . . . . . . . grossly excessive? Morbidly excessive? "It-would-be-funny-if-it-wasn't-for-the-fact-that-I-now-have-to-pay-twice-as-much-as-a-French-person-would excessive" ???

Eg:
Prices for midday, midweek tickets 2 1/2 months ahead:

Paris-Bordeaux (~400km): £16.93 (25 euros)
Bristol - Newcastle (~400km): £15

Prices for next day tickets:

Paris-Bordeaux (~400km): £51.94 (73e70)
Bristol - Newcastle (~400km): £89

Yes, that's nearly twice as much as the French for a next-day ticket. Time to start eating garlic and growing onions methinks!

plutocracy . . . yada yada yada . . . cock-weasel . . . . . British public transport is shit . . . etc . . .etc

These two themes seem to be prevalent throughout the press these days with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's latest report and the ongoing debacle of Metronet. The third string to this bow is, of course, the government's climate policy which is as full of holes spewing carbon and pollution as , well, as a cheap, Chinese-made plastic collander.

So why, dear listener (I'm listening to the radio and it appeals to me to address you so), why is it that we tolerate being treated as serfs? I must take a bus to work today at a cost of £1.45 per trip. An interesting observation is that that £2.90 would allow me to travel an impressive 25 miles (ok, so that's shit fuel economy but I drive a 1.6 Nissan Bluebird- you try and get a decent car for under £500). I can assure you that the trip to town is barely 2.5 miles, so why the extreme expense?

Today's Independent cover story suggests an answer, this story inside has more.