The 'logic' of the ridiculous Gary McKinnon fan base

I really have to get this off my chest before I wind up in A&E or worse, because it is really starting to piss me off.

Over the last few months, I have read an ever increasing amount of bullshit in an ever increasing number of publications roaring in indignation at the Americans for their persistence in trying to get Gary McKinnon extradited to the States for hacking into military computers. You've got the right wing howling off in the Daily Mail , because it scores some good ol' nationalist Brownie points. The left wing have now taken up the baton, because of the whole 'aspergers' heart bleed not to mention the anti Bush, anti American angle and the fact 'liberals' detest the notion of a person going to jail for doing something wrong.

'Liberal' lefties really hate that one, which is why I will always simmer with rage at the very sight of a picture of Shami Chakrabarti, who seems to pass herself off as a lover of liberty, when in fact I know full well whose liberty she is more interested in protecting - the liberties of wankers and ne'er do wells.

My dear Mr Boatang summed the whole matter up perfectly in this recent piece - I can't possibly top this, and the article is well worth reading as dear old Boaty truly knows his stuff on the subject.

But what I need to nail home, further to the debate that generated on Mr B's recent piece, are a few points of logic. What I want to do is highlight all the areas that the pro-McKinnon/anti-extraditionists are using in their propaganda, and dismiss the logic that is being applied to each and every one of them.

So here goes.

Aspergers

My opponents in this field will argue that because McKinnon has 'aspergers', he should not be sent for trial in the US. The logic is that he could not have been fully cognisant of his actions and the gravity of his actions, and that because he was/is 'disabled' in some respect, it is unfair that he be made to stand trial in America for what he did.

This reason is also brought up whenever Mr McKinnon's current state of mind and stress levels are discussed.

My position on this is crystal clear - if his legal team wish to argue this, that's fine. But they should have to argue it in a court of law in the United States, because the current law dictates that he be sent to the country in which the crime took place. I.e. America.

If it were a burglary, it would have been no different. McKinnon essentially 'broke into', 'trespassed' and caused damage to property in that country. He may as well have been over there at the time.

What cannot be tolerated is the totally absurd notion that because a doctor says he has 'x' condition (a relatively recent diagnosis I would add) that means all is well and he should not be held to account at law.

Imagine if everyone started doing that? "Hello, my name is Pablo and I recently traveled to the UK from my home country of Portugal in order to rape a few university students. It's OK, though, I won't be standing trial in England for my crimes because my Doc back in Lisbon has a note to say I have a high libido and a bit of depression. Sorry about that. Send them my love, won't you?"

It's bollocks. This is what courts of law are for, you fucking imbeciles. You can't jostle your way out of justice, because you aren't well. It's the old 'sick note' getting out of gym class excuse, and I cannot believe serious minded people are using this ruse.

Have people forgotten what the Rule of Law is all about these days, or are people that emotionally driven and fucking stupid?

The 'aspergers' thing is something that must be tested in court. That court must be in the States. Why? Because the law fucking says so.

Get over it you simpering jerk offs.

Which leads me onto...

The Extradition Treaty is unfair

Some people, like Henry Porter of the Guardian (see the link above under 'the left wing'), think the law is unfair and inherently biased against the Brits. OK. This may well be so. But why was there no fuss about all this when the law came onto effect in January of 2004? Well, it's obvious. A case has arisen which throws it all into stark relief.

The trouble is, laws aren't there to be retrospectively applied, twisted and canceled at will, just because one party or another has decided it isn't much good after all.

The proper place to raise this is via the political and legislative process. In other words, there needs to be lobbying of ministers for a push in a change in the law. This is awkward, as it will undoubtedly involve the Americans who probably would not be overawed at the suggestion of a revision in the law.

Either way, you can argue the toss over the fairness of the law all day, the fact is, the Extradition Treaty is fucking law, and it's one that is engaged by the shenanigans of Mr McKinnon. It is very simple - a law exists. It must be applied. If people want it changed, that's something that the future, not the past, must accommodate.

It's a bit like taking an old jumper back to the shop without a receipt and asking for your money back. This one has more fucking holes in it than a block of Switzerland's finest. McKinnon (who I may shortly name 'McClownan for the sheer idiocy of his behaviour) did not play Tetris with the Pentagon Payroll for a few fucking hours.

He caused some serious fucked up shit over there, as explained by Mr Boatang on his recent genius comment.

The Americans have put a lot of thought into Gary McKinnon's prison cell wall design

Bloody Americans! Bloody politicians!

Yeah, yeah, fucking yeah. This is so bloody predictable it hurts. Just because politicians are selfish, short sighted shits and the Americans are a bit Gung Ho, does not mean that the Treaty is null and void and McKinnon should remain in Britain. Sorry about that.

To look at this point with more clarity, let us look closer at some of Henry Porter's words in his piece:

"(there is a) suspicion that the US authorities waited to apply for McKinnon's extradition under the new law, which came into operation in January 2004. The delay is held by many to have been a deliberate strategy followed by the Bush administration. To what degree the British connived in this delay is a matter of speculation but given the relationship between the Bush and Blair governments, now being revealed in the Chilcot inquiry, informal co-operation to make sure the Americans got their man cannot be ruled out"

I'm glad he used that word before I did. 'Speculation'. I am also glad he discredited his ludicrous position by linking the McKinnon case with Blair's alleged 'signing the Iraq war in blood with Bush in secret pact' matter. Because this makes it all clear, doesn't it. 'Politicians in dodgy horsetrading, 'real-politik' sneaky behind the scenes deal shocker! Therefore all actions of politicians must be inherently bent and corrupt.

But, even if we accept this assertion as fact, and that the British went along with American delaying tactics so that McKinnon was ensnared by the new law; it is still tough titty! Delaying tactics like this are not unusual in the legal arena. And linking an alleged delay with a determination to nab a particular person for whatever reason appears to me to be beyond proof.

Even if it could be proven, would that seriously mean that the Treaty is illegal, or void, or unenforceable? I seriously doubt it. You could have a thousand Johnnie Cochranes in your legal team, and I would lay odds of a million to one on the chances of getting the Treaty revoked on this basis.

You can yell about how unfair it all is, and how it all stinks, and it still does not detract for one moment from the fact that a law stands and it is there to be enforced.

McKinnon lost his appeal. The Home Secretary came out on the 27 November 2009 and said that the extradition must go ahead, because extradition is not incompatible with his human rights. McKinnon's team are putting in for a Judicial Review as I type, but I am convinced that the government would have stopped it all going ahead...if they were able. They are not able, because there is a Treaty in place and there is no way round it.

Hindsight is a marvelous thing, is it not?

Try him in Britain, not America!

Why? Extradition Treaties (and there are many of these things, look it up) are there for a fucking reason. I severely doubt that there would be so much uproar if it were a foreign person accused of committing a similar or even a very different crime from abroad against British property or interests.

The real reason people are upset is as I have described at the beginning of this piece. It's either because he is British (and therefore the argument lacks logic or merit and consistency) or it is because America is full of Americans and they are all right wing and nasty and have harsh jail terms. Again, illogical and ridiculous.

He didn't do that much 'arm, poor bugger and look at what the bankers have got away with!

This is fast becoming the modern day equivalent to Godwins Law. These lazy, inarticulate, dull, dim witted, left wing, sneering and childish moral equivalents are beyond boring. Who has said anything about holy, upstanding bankers? Just because some bankers have committed terrible misdeeds and have got away with lots of things, does not mean it is OK to let every other wrongdoer off the hook.

Henry Porter in the Guardian voices just such a view in his fatuous article:

"How much damage did McKinnon do in pursuit of evidence about UFOs? The Americans say it is equal to $500,000. It is perhaps worth comparing this amount with the harm done to the British and other economies by greedy and irresponsible American bankers. I don't see many of them being shipped out for prosecution."

This is text book Marxoid bullshit. I haven't heard anything this fucking inane since Tariq Ali last popped up on telly.

Just because you think and say it is about UFO's, does not mean that at law that is indisputable fact. That is why we have fucking laws, and trials, and judges, and juries and treaties you cock. To test evidence.

We are then sold the line that the damage done was small beer and of little consequence, again, as though the 'value' of the damage has much to do with it. Furthermore, the New Godwins Law is invoked, and we are asked to consider why bankers are not being shipped out for prosecution.

Firstly, I think the comment about the damage caused is insulting and embarrassing. The US will have their reasons for pursuing this case besides the money aspect. I should imagine there is a massive public interest factor involved in taking this case on - McKinnon is not the only fucking hacker out there, after all.

Secondly, bankers made bad decisions and poor investments because people, like you and me, freely banked our money with them. Securitisation went sour, but it was something that was happening years before the Sub Prime crisis hit. In other words, yes many bankers are bastards, but we let them get away with it and essentially, we all have a hand in how it all worked out.

Whether you are American or British, an American investing in Britain or a Briton investing in America, it's all part of the same picture in our globalised economy. Some American bankers were bad, and so were British ones. People had the choice before the credit crunch on who they banked with. Many claim ignorance of the workings of international banking and sub prime.

The trouble is, in law, whether in the case of McKinnon or the case of every day punters investing their loot with the bankers, ignorance is no defence.

Conclusion

All of the arguments posited by those against McKinnon's extradition are illogical and stupid. They are riven with non sequiturs and emotional bias. You can be against a law, but still understand its enforceability and legitimacy. You can want a law changed, but realise that any current law or treaty stands. You can wish a law never existed, but know that the clock cannot be turned back. You can try and get a law changed, but know that what has been committed is done and must be addressed by the appropriate law.

There is not a single valid argument against McKinnon's extradition. None that I have read or heard yet, at any rate.

Welfarism, it's consequences and an interim solution

Libertarianism is obviously the purpose of individual responsibility and contribution for the benefit of the individual and society as a whole, among other things, and that is why is it so opposed to the concept of the welfare state. Although I have stated that in the 21st century some form of safety net is a requirement, this does not include the vast majority of benefits that are currently on show.

This article focuses on employment and its consequences, in particular how unemployment benefit and its associated housing benefits have led to the current social breakdown and the ghettoisation of our country, and the wider western world to a great extent.

Unemployment is the great strain on many areas of our society, in many ways beyond many people's scope. Worklessness is not simply not having a job, it is the removal of individual freedom through the loss of income and therefore choice. The western, in this case British, solution to this is the welfare state.

The welfare state is no longer as it was meant to be. Originally it was the progressive liberal idea of a safety net largely based upon the parish taxes and other systems previously devised. As time went on it introduced the pension amongst other things. To clarify, I am not getting into the NHS here, although part of the system it should be approached separately.

Original intentions are important in other areas too. For instance, social housing, which has become inseparable from unemployment. This, however, was not always the case. Originally social housing rents were in fact higher than the private sector and you were given tenancy on your ability to pay the rent, not on you not having a job. That is, you had to have a job to pay the rent. Social housing was the better form, better facilities and was largely a solution to the slum dwellings that blighted much of this country.

It is important to note here that there was no security of tenure. If you broke the rules through crime or anti-social behaviour, you were out. The person who scrapped this and gave social housing security? Maggie Thatcher.

Unemployment is in the vast majority of cases the overwhelming economic factor of crime. The evidence is manifest. In turn, due to the changes of the 80s to switch the nature of social housing to the provision of tenure to those who were unable to pay or work, council estates became concentrations of poverty and in turn, crime.

A huge issue here is that unemployment benefit has become on a par with work. The cultural mistake of believing that work is a desirable human thing has become quite clearly wrong; the million or so who are euphemistically known as long-term unemployed but realistically permanently so, have no intention of working. They lower their standard of living to one that they find acceptable but many of us would not and therefore the incentive to improve it is simply not there.

On top of this they will readily supplement this income from the black economy - crime.

A key driver of their ability to live like this is simple: housing benefit. Housing benefit accounts for £12 billion per annum of taxpayers money, just to pay the rent of social housing for those that cannot afford it. 60% of housing benefit claimants live in social housing.

To go to work means losing your housing benefit, which means paying your rent from your wage, which means you might as well stay on benefits because you will now be worse off. This is a basic human calculation.

The libertarian solution is to scrap the welfare state, or depending on your position, some of it. However, I see an interim position as a way of ushering in a new era. I will mention others, but in the main...

The removal of social housing.

People on housing benefits would still receive money in order to pay their rent, but directly. No social housing requirement in new developments, no council or housing association as landlord. The money is paid directly into the person's account to be spent as they wish, in return they must provide a receipt for the housing provision they have used. In short, the rent is given to them to enter the private rental sector, which includes all previous social housing.

This makes them, forces them, to find somewhere to live, to enter into a rental agreement, to exercise free choice as opposed to allocation of resource. If they get a job, below a certain wage of course, they can top up their rental allowance and get a better place to live. If they choose to spend the money on drugs or drink and so do not get a roof over their heads, then they are homeless and their benefit is stopped. The consequences of their actions, or lack of it, are clear and absolute.

This gets people to start operating in the libertarian spirit. They must use money as a free choice, they must not just sit there and be spoon fed. If they choose to spend that money the wrong way, they go without. No back up, no help. They were given the chance, they blew it.

Many will obviously stay in their current homes, except now if they fail to pay the rent, they get evicted. The more they earn the less housing benefit they get until they are self-sufficient.

In turn, the black economy is removed. At the moment many turn to drugs and prostitution to earn and the only tax they may possibly contribute is VAT. My solution to this, in common with many people's, is decriminalisation.

Drugs are now taxed, prostitution is now taxed. They are regulated and licensed, they pay tax and they contribute to a person's income and help offset their benefits and also the deficit the state incurs.

Our country has become one of dependency. A huge number of people are utterly reliant on the state for their income, their housing, their food and water and clothing. On one side this is seen as a drain on the economy and an unacceptable use of an ever increasing tax burden on those that work. However, it is also the removal of freedom for those people. As Hayek argued, money is freedom. It is choice.

Before we remove the vast majority of the welfare state, we must first implement an interim system to get those affected back to exercising freedom of choice, the decisions that make them individuals and the consequences of their actions. Libertarianism's perspective on the welfare state is not just about the tax burden it creates, but also the freedom it removes from those that become reliant on it.

In turn the welfare state, and housing benefit in particular, have created no go areas, ghettos of poverty and state reliance, poor education, high crime. The approach above removes this, it gives people control over where they live and how they make those decisions, it removes the threat of crime and re-introduces the income produced from those activities back into the formal economy.

Before many of the things we want to see achieved can be implemented, a road map must be drawn up to show the stages that will be put in place to get to our primary objective: lower taxes, less state control, individual responsibility, freedom.

Roger Scruton's documentary 'Why Beauty Matters' is brilliant

I cannot recommend this documentary enough. I watched it last night, and it blew my socks off.

A fantastic look at the importance of beauty in art, architecture and our every day lives, from a straight talking conservative-minded philosopher and writer.

He, with devastating politeness and simplicity, destroys those responsible for bringing vulgarity and ugliness to our lives - something that began in earnest from the 1960s onwards.

You are left agog, only to make a series of logical connections to things and to wonder how more people do not realise what is going on in our society today.

Click the link and watch the broadcast on BBC iPlayer, for free. This is available for the next 6 days, so get in there if you haven't seen it already.

And if you wish, pen your thoughts on it here for further debate.

A 'YouGov' poll with some interesting clues

Yet another poll has been published on the forthcoming fortunes of the main political parties, this time a YouGov poll for the Daily Mailygraph.

You will be flabbergasted to learn that the Tories are doing quite well, and...the Tories intend to do well at the election by targeting target seats.

A little clue for the pollsters: they are called target seats for a reason. They are marginal, and hence target seats, and they are targeted, because of small majorities for the opposing party thus making them winnable.

It's kinda been an electoral strategy for, ooh, I don't know, the last couple of hundred years.

Bunch of pricks.

However, there are some interesting clues in the poll which reveal much about a) the state of the Tory Party, and b) the state of modern Britain.

You may have noticed lately that Cameron's Tories increasingly peg their chances of winning by triangulating traditional and new Labour policies and appearing more socially democratic than the party of the centre-left. The other day we heard about Cameron's wooing of the fatuous and despicable 'mumsnet' outfit (a collection of nasty, embittered gossiping wenches who spend their lives bemoaning the fact that they don't get enough 'entitlements'. I.e. other peoples' hard earned money).

Two days ago the Torygraph reported on some inane utterings by a major Cameron adviser called Philip Blond, nicknamed the 'Red Tory'. This adviser is telling Cameron to 'break up' the big supermarkets, impose anti market policies and interfere in the workings of big business. Apparently this qualifies as 'fresh thinking'. Even though this sort of thing started to become popular about 70 years ago, with a current revival in statist Keynesian ideas coming to the fore under our very own PM Gordon Brown.

But here's an extract from the Torygraph piece on the poll, which contains two noteworthy messages.

"Although the poll will please the Conservatives, it also points to some significant Tory vulnerabilities. Some 61 per cent of marginal voters say the Tory plan to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1million shows they “mainly want to help the rich, not ordinary people”.

The results also suggest that while marginal voters are increasingly disillusioned with Labour, they are not yet fully convinced by the Tories on many key issues: only 26 per cent think education would improve under a Conservative government. For the NHS the figure is 22 per cent, and only 19 per cent think that the Tories would cut crime."

So let us look at that first bit, shall we? 61% (that's quite a lot) of 'marginal voters' (so people who voted for New Labour but might be swayed this time) are unhappy about the Tory IHT proposal because it shows they want to 'help' the rich and not 'ordinary' people.

"Wa-hay! We're the Basildon Clowns and we want to help 'ordinary people', just like Maggie here! Guffaw Guffaw!"

This says pretty much everything you need to know about our brainwashed nation. Out there, there is a large number of people who think that the role of government is to take wealth away from people in order to 'help' those who are deemed worthy. To not take tax, according to these people, is tantamount to taking away from worthy folk.

To not take money by way of an inheritance tax from rich(er) people, means that 'ordinary' people are somehow hard done by.

The underlying assumptions inherent within these received norms and ideas are breathtakingly irksome and worrying. Firstly, who are 'ordinary' people, and what is it that they want exactly from a government that taxes the estates of dead people? Secondly, what moral or other claim do 'ordinary' people have in this case? And why is the Tory IHT plan any kind of statement about that party's intent regarding 'helping' people?

None of this makes any sense. It only begins to materially piece together as a narrative, if you pop the old social democratic specs on and go wading through the righteous jungles of quasi Marxist freedom, machete in hand, ready to catch anyone who looks like they have a bit of money in the old 'sky rocket'.

So long as people think in terms of what the government can do for them, rather than what they can do for themselves and their families, this country is screwed.

We will never, ever, get anywhere as a nation state, so long as people think in these terms. The reasons people do think in these terms are varied and many, though one major factor is the fact that people aren't generally that bright, are easily open to influence from above, and are all too willing to pass the buck when the going gets tough. I'd also add that most people aren't very political and therefore do not see the consequences of handing over vast amounts of power to the State.

A second clue in the piece lies in the final paragraph, which says that the Tories are failing to convince the floaters of their ability in the key areas of health, education and crime.

In this, they are quite right in their fears. The Tories will be utterly useless on these, and most other areas, and almost certainly no different or better than Labour. Why would they be better? Their ideas are tame, they are substantively the same as Labour and their solutions are authoritarian, not libertarian.

What the marginal voters do not realise, is that until they connect the first assumption (that they deserve 'help' from the state) to the second assumption (the opposition party won't improve anything) nothing will ever change.

Politics cannot be something other people do on your behalf - it is something that, if it is to work, must properly involve us all at all times.

A few comments about Russian spam and anonymous postings

I'll be brief with this one, readers. As I wish to move on to some very important topics over the course of the next couple of days and the subject matter here is unworthy of big word count.

Russian spam

First up, a few words about spam. Boaty & D (the dot com version) has been up and running for almost a year now, and we've had precious little trouble in terms of spam hitting our comments sections. Until now, that is.

This is quite an interesting development, because the spam is largely from a Russian source, and arrives in mostly Cyrillic script. Co-incidentally, all this started soon after a visitor from Moscow made a few hits on our site. I know he/she is from Moscow, because I keenly check the Boaty & D battleship computer most days and we get all the details on who checks in and out.

It's not often we get readers from Russia, and so call me paranoid and presumptuous, but I've kind of put two and two together.

If, as my suspicions would have it, we are under attack from a Russian based spam artist, I cannot say as I am very surprised or shocked. Our site has featured one or two articles in the past attacking that country's foreign policy, specifically how they handled the South Ossetia crisis.

From what I understand, Russia under Putin and his pals have adopted a peculiar and rather bizarre way of dealing with anyone who criticises that country or anything remotely Russian, even slightly: they attack them in any way they can.

I might be totally wrong here, but based on the trickle of news that comes over regarding Russian issues, I would not be amazed to learn that Moscow employs a little department somewhere dedicated to cyber-attacking and disrupting all internet based sources of anti-Russian sentiment.

Why else would a British based blog, that has nothing to do with Russia, and is written in English, come under sustained and vigorous attack from Russian spam?

The trouble with all this, is that while this may cause upset and a change in direction to most other sites, this will only have the direct opposite effect on me. Because I am a very odd sort of bloke who has a real stubborn, fucked up, nihilistic attitude to things. I do not always act rationally and cautiously, particularly when I feel under attack or treated adversely for no good reason.

In other words, I don't give a motherfuck. I really don't. Words are cheap, but these ones are the real deal. If these cunts seriously think that by slapping my site like a bitch, I'm going to pick up my handbag and makeup and tout my wares on the next street corner, they have another thing coming.

In fact, what I intend to do is actually the exact opposite of what they want (which is probably to take down the comments section, moderate the site, or block Russian IP addresses).

So here's a final warning to the weird deranged cunts attacking the Mighty B&D:

If Boatang & Demetriou continues to be targeted by Russian spammers, we will start writing articles that criticise Moscow. The more spam, the more articles. It's that fucking simple.

Anonymous postings.

Boaty & D welcome posts and comments from anyone who wishes to make a comment, particularly if it concerns the subject matter of the piece to which the comment is appended. We prefer it if people used, if not their own name, then a handle so that their comments can be aptly attributed to an identified author. We are not anal about pseudonyms or anything like that, but one 'anonymous' is no different in identity to the next, even though they are often different individuals behind the post.

We are delighted and encouraged by the recent standard and content of comments on our site. Be they critical or approving. Many good comments have come from 'anonymous' posters, so that has been great.

That said, when we receive abusive comments, it is somewhat infuriating when they come from an 'anonymous', purely because of the sheer gutlessness behind the exercise. If you want to be particularly rude and abusive, that's fine, but it reeks of cowardice when it is not even penned under a handle.

It is doubly infuriating when the abuse is posted on threads which are months old. This is horrendous bad manners and poor blogging form, not to mention sly and pathetic. Guess what, you didn't get the last word in, because the debate is dead and we only see your comments pop up by email notices to our account.

Here's one such example of a post, which was attached to an article we did on Libertarianism in September of this year.

"Nah. The Libertarians are the 'fascists' in the modern useage, who would finally rape the last of the assets out of the UK and go live with their pedo buddies in Thailand or Cambodia on the proceeds.

You cunts are a joke. You rail against socialism/statism, and yet haul the least able to verbally defend themselves for trying to,because they have suffered in the schools of Frankfurt School socialist propaganda, leaving them bereft of the ability to string together cogent arguments.

If you two weren't devoid of compassion, just like Libertarian in Chief (even if she quibbled about the lables she was attached to), Ayn Rand you soulless bastards, you would pity them rather than mock them.

Still you'll die eventually, probably at the hands of the Moslems when they take over once the BNP and anyone else standing up to them have been shut up by a pair of cultural Marxists like yourselves. Or like Thatcher, covered in your own piss and shit, unable to talk or wipe your arse.

Shitbags"

This semi-literate, incomprehensible rubbish scores 1/10 on originality and 0.5/10 on amusement value. Intellectually, it scores a minus, and in terms of addressing any actual view we have stated past and present, the comment is in 6 minus figures.

Apart from getting libertarianism wrong, our politics wrong, the whereabouts of us and our associates (Cambodia?) wrong, and concepts of life and death wrong (don't we all die eventually, you prick?) this chap, like with so many abusive trolls, eventually gives away his true motivations.

Racism.

It is no co-incidence, in my mind, that the rise of the far 'Right' in Britain has brought with it a new surge in ultra nationalist and racist blog comments. Probably because there are more of these people, and also because they realise the value inherent in spreading their hate across the internet.

So not only have we been hit by Russian spam over the last year or so, we have also been hit by numerous (including this) fucked up racist diatribes which fail to address any points we have made and fail to advance discussion.

The spam 'comments' will be deleted, but the comments from the lunatics and morons will not be.

But for the sake of your own pride, nationalists, we ask this: that if you want to make your views known here, you do so in a coherent and identifiable manner. Use a nickname, and try to address points we make and views we hold. It will make your shit sound that little bit more plausible and interesting.

Gary McKinnon SHOULD be extradited

No one else is going to say this, so it comes down to the greatness of B&D.

There is a totally bullshit campaign doing the rounds, led by the Mail but including pretty much every rag out there, that poor Gary McKinnon shouldn't be sent off to America. Oh woe, poor fucking Gary.

He is just a poor lad (aged 43) that got a bit caught up in looking for little green men one day and, all of a sudden like, hacked into the United States' secure network. Whoops!

Sorry, but he just didn't.

First off, let's just clarify here what this guy did. Between 2001 and 2002 (keep in mind those dates, you may remember the sightly heightened state of panic America was going through at the time) Gary from North London hacked into 97 NASA and Pentagon computers. Ninety-seven. Not one, nearly a hundred. Over a sustained period. That is known as systemic hacking to anyone who cares to look at the facts of the matter.

The crime was described by the US as:

He deleted critical files from operating systems, which shut down the US Army’s Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours, as well as deleting US Navy Weapons logs, rendering a naval base's network of 300 computers inoperable after the September 11th terrorist attacks. They claim the cost of tracking and correcting the problems he caused was $700,000.

Ah, bless him. You may think that this is possibly slightly over-egged, and it maybe is. But this is a quote the Mail will ever publish, posted by McKinnon himself on a site during the attacks:

US foreign policy is akin to government-sponsored terrorism these days? It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand-down on September 11 last year...I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.

Kind of harms the guy's defence that he was innocently blundering through for UFOs, using the propaganda of living with his Mummy to suggest it was all in his bedroom. If you aren't aware, the guy works as a systems administrator.

All this is ignored by his supporters. They will pull out the corker in their hatbox and remind you that he has Aspergers. Or as the Mail and others prefer to refer to it as, autism, mainly because it makes it sound like he spends all day drawing perfect charcoals of Tower Bridge. This isn't helped by him no longer giving any interviews.

Aspergers? Hmmm, really? As I said McKinnon is 43. Guess when he was 'diagnosed'? Yup, last year. Which coincided very nicely with his appeal hearing. His diagnosis was made in August 2008 by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen. Not when he was 10, or as a teenager, not even shortly after being charged with hacking. In fact, not even when America sought extradition. No he was diagnosed a full two years after America declared they wanted him. I'm not a doubter of the autistic spectrum, but there is no doubt that it also goes to quite a large area.

Sorry, not an excuse in any case and certainly not so late in the day.

All of this just smacks of desperation not to be prosecuted, as does the relentless campaigning by his mother and various musicians.

So he is guilty as sin. What about the morality of the treaty? Well it is one sided there is no doubt, but let's put a couple of spins on this.

First off scenario one. Gary McKinnon is in fact being sought by America because for two years he has groomed children and had them him send naked pictures of themselves. Would anyone at all, let alone the Mail, disagree with his extradition? No.

Okay, number two. Gary McKinnon has a Aspergers but is also Muslim. During a period, 2001-2002, of intense security following Islamist terrorist campaigns resulting in 9/11, Gary hacked into NASA, the USAF, the US Army and the US Navy and deleted a series of files and declared openly that this was only the beginning. Anyone have a problem with the extradition? No.

Last one, number three. The hacking was actually committed by a man known as Omar from Cairo who hacked into GCHQ and the MoD systems and accessed top secret files. His extradition from Egypt to the UK is being held up because his Mum claims he has a form of autism. How would people, more so the Mail, feel about that? Hang him from a tree would be the call.

The British court system, and the state itself, have a duty to protect our citizens from foreign powers, but in return our citizens have a duty not to commit massive criminal acts against those foreign powers.

Gary McKinnon knew exactly what he was doing, did so for a long period of time and openly declared the fact. When he was caught, he pleaded innocence and started a publicity campaign. When the United States requested his extradition in 2006, he upped this to a crescendo and two years later declaredhe had Aspergers and as such a mental illness that he could not possibly stand trail in America. Even now we have claims that he has been diagnosed as having a compulsion to kill himself if he is sent there.

Claims of Camp X-ray, of 70 year prison terms, even the death penalty have been put forward by his family and his legal team, whereas the reality is that he is likely to be sent down for a year and then given a job.

Gary McKinnon is not going to prison for 70 years. Going to Guantanamo is simply not on the cards. He is however, up to his neck in guilt and in any other situation it would be straight forward. The fact America is involved, that a slightly one sided treaty was signed and that he then 'discovered' he had Aspergers has completely clouded the fact that this man committed, knowingly and over a long period of time, a serious criminal act upon a sovereign nation.

It makes me very cynical, in fact I await the book launch in the coming years. Let America have him and if he is oh so inncent then he can prove it in a court of law in fornt of the people he did it to.

Cyprus: The Republic of Authoritarian Stupidity

You've got to love the bubbles.

Many readers of ours may have formed the view that because this half of Boaty & D is of Greek extraction, he must therefore be biased to all things Greek. Au Contraire. As with anything in life, I believe in consistency and weighing up all the facts before making an informed decision. This means that nationalism or patriotism or whatever you want to call it mean precisely zero to me. I do not see the point of it.

There are over 60 million people in Britain. Most of them are British. Similarly, there are around three quarters of a million people living in Cyprus; a majority of whom (in the Republic) are ethnically Greek Cypriot. And guess what?

In each instance, I've met well under 0.0000001% of them. And of those I have met, a reasonably large proportion haven't been overwhelmingly nice to me.

So why should I be biased towards any group of people, based on flag and nationhood? It is a bollocks concept, and I ask all who read my articles to consider the logic in supporting a country's politics, people or culture out of tribal loyalty.

Yet, as ever, I digress. What I rail against today is one of my usual targets: authoritarianism. Except this time I am not talking about authoritarianism and its pernicious effects on the individual in Britain. You may read this and feel a modicum of relief, if you are one of our UK readers, because I sincerely believe things have not plumbed quite such ridiculous depths over here...for now at least.

I seek to draw your attention to some goings on in a land of my ancestral heritage and a land where I spent a few years living and working as an ex pat earlier this decade.

Today I read a staggering story in the Cyprus Mail (a correspondence piece may also be found in the Daily *gulp* Mail) about a bunch of very old women who were arrested and charged for playing gin rummy.

The women, from Limassol, Cyprus, were charged on Sunday.

According to the Cyprus Mail piece:

"Officers found the 42 women at the club run by two women aged 79 and 70. The oldest person arrested was a 95-year-old. The raid took place around 6pm on Sunday after a series of complaints by neighbours about noise in the evenings when the women were coming and going from the house. Officers found that one of the rooms in the house had been set up with several tables covered in green felt. The 42 women were caught seated around the tables playing poker and gin rummy for cash in a similar fashion to a gambling club.

Playing cards for money is illegal in Cyprus and police regularly carry out raids around the island at betting shops, clubs and associations particularly coming up to Christmas, and through New Year, when more people go out to play cards and socialise over the holiday period."

Lovely stuff, eh? Some old women get together on a winter's evening, because they unlike everyone else don't want to spend their remaining years in front of a TV and would rather do something different with their private lives, and they are arrested. For hurting precisely...no-one.

As the Mail correctly reports:

"Many Greek Cypriots, including mainly middle-class women, are passionate card players. But it is a criminal offence to play for money, even in the privacy of one’s home."

As the articles on both publications spells out quite clearly, not only is this a law in Cyprus, but it's a law that the police are more than happy to enforce in the most heavy handed manner. To the extent that they don't care about nicking and banging up ancient grannies who like to diddle about with a few Euros once every now and then.

"I've got a Full House, dear! No, not my hand, I mean there's a SWAT team in my lounge..."

This reminds me of a trip I took to Cyprus back in '02, where I stayed at a hotel in Larnaca with my parents and decided to get the cards out in the hotel bar and play brag with my mum for matchsticks. The barman came over and bumptiously told me to stop playing and put the cards away. I was bewildered at the demand, and my attempts to explain that we were not gambling came to nought.

Plainly this is because he feared his joint getting busted up by the filth, because the sight of two consenting adults playing a game of cards provides reasonable suspicion of a twisted felony in action over there. The fucking tools.

My position is this: if a law exists that stops people engaging in voluntary activities, as free individual agents, where those activities are of no consequence or hindrance to the liberties of third party agents then that fucking law should not exist in the first fucking place.

It's that fucking simple.

There is another howling example of this sort of mindless, disgusting authoritarianism in Cyprus: the laws that forbid teachers from teaching. Yes, you read that correctly. Only state employed teachers, and teachers who are documented as working for (and within the physical confines of) private schools are allowed to teach pupils of any age. Child or adult.

I read several stories in the press of young people in their thirties being arrested by the filth and charged, because they were caught...giving private tuition at home to students studying for their exams.

Want another example? In Cyprus, you're not allowed to let your property to tenants without getting permission and a license from the Cypriot government. There is much hoo-ha out there because of the numbers of Brits who live in Paphos and let out their first and second homes to foreigners for periods of the year - there are spies in Cyprus who keep an eye on websites to track down people who try and advertise their property.

"You is arrested, you slaggos, do you 'ave anything to say in your defence, innit?"


"How many times do I have to tell the little fucker, you never end a sentence with a fucking preposition!"

Their fucking property. An individual has no right out there to do with his or her property, what he or she wishes, and the state gets to muscle in to try and wangle a piece of the pie for their greedy little coffers.

However, in areas you would not expect, libertarianism as a concept is taken, injected with a crack-adrenaline-diesel fuel cocktail, bottle fed to a rabid Alsatian, and unleashed upon the kindergarten pen of unsuspecting toddlers.

For example, they don't bother with drink drivers in Cyprus. My experience of the Cyprus police is that they are hideously lazy and corrupt. They bum about the station eating and smoking fags, and when they're not doing that, they are cruising up and down the sea front checking out girls and stopping off at tavernas for free beer and chips.

I had a mate out there who told me of a friend who was at a party out near the mountains where two guests were police officers. They were steaming drunk, and when asked if they thought it was a good idea to drive home, they scoffed and said 'yeah sure, why not, we do it all the time!'

Boy racers and football hooliganism are a serious issue out there now. Larger numbers of young lads think nothing of spending all their time and money on ridiculously fast, turbo injected Japanese motors and racing them at weekends and evenings in residential areas at in excess of 80-90 miles per hour. The rate of accidents because of stupid pricks like this is rampant.

Then there's the Russian Mafia and the 'Cabarets' (sex clubs staffed by forced Eastern European labour, often consisting of very young and scared girls deprived of their passports and any sense of dignity).

The cabarets operate openly. Their clubs are easily identified by their neon lit signs and they are ubiquitous in the extreme. The Russians, who run these clubs and other illicit enterprises) settle disputes with grenades and guns. They tend not to get arrested or hassled, because they bribe and back hand government officials and the police.

The Greek Orthodox church gets to see about 1% of the fall out of the horrific human rights abuses meted out to sex slaves through the charity and refuge work they do, by taking in scared and abused Russian and Eastern European girls who have escaped captivity or who attempted suicide and wound up in hospital where outsiders could reach them.

What sort of fucking joke is it, that normal, innocent, peaceful and harmless people are pursued relentlessly by the state and turned into outcasts and criminals, while the real pricks and villains are allowed to go about their mayhem without fear or obstacle?

This is just the sort of madness that I fear will envelope Britain, though for very different reasons.

EDIT TO ADD:

I almost forgot to mention. The filth confiscated a combined pot of 90 Euros at the iniquitous gambling den of Granny gin rummy evil. Apparently, 45 old biddies were in attendance, including the 95 year old. That means each granny went along to this gambling fest armed with 2 Euros each.

2 Euros doesn't even buy you half a fucking pint of Keo out there. What a bunch of fucking cunts. Tosser police bastards.

Our leaders are sociopaths and we're asleep at the remote

There's a simple yet devastating equation that aptly sums up the state of modern Britain. For those involved in the equation, I doubt it all matters that much. For those, like me and you, whom it does not involve but who it affects, it matters much.

Simply put, what we face is thus.

Sociopaths + political power - the democratic process (20) x the average British adult (100) = national terminal decline.

Here's an image of your average member of the Great British Public.

"X-Factor or Strictly. X Factor or Strictly...fuck it, I'm a Celeb. That'll do... ZZZzzzzz"

You might be forgiven for thinking that it is of little or no consequence that so many people are addicted to junk TV and vacuous, pointless, empty existences. Their lives, right? Well, this isn't quite so. Because you see, back in the day, freedoms and liberties were fought for and won by regular punters against the powerful land owning masses.

Emancipation, right to vote, the Magna Carta, English Common Law, Habeas Corpus, property rights, freedom to roam and live in peace and civility. These things weren't achieved because a handful of bored people took political power and decided they were nice ideas. They were gained because of pressure from below, not above.

The trouble with modern Britain, is that people are so wrapped up in their own weird house-bound, TV obsessed lives, they don't even realise that essential basic freedoms and norms were once achieved and that to hold onto them, you need to hold leaders to account.

This means becoming politically aware and astute, and more active, and it certainly means voting and insisting that politicians maintain their promises and their integrity.

What we have now is mass apathy, a total lack of interest in politics and what political decisions mean for people and it means basic standards in political life are left to rot.

I'm not talking about the Expenses row. As far as I'm concerned, all that became hot news because information was leaked to the Telegraph. Anyone who seriously thinks that expenses abuses weren't happening for eons before the recent scandal are naive in the utmost extreme.

What I am talking about here is the bottom line. The core, basic fundamental essentials, before everything else, that our senior political leaders must possess if the country is capable of functioning on a base level, morally and economically.

Over the last decade, we have seen two Prime Ministers. Anthony Blair and Gordon Brown. It has come to pass that both men are quite possibly the most damaging, sociopathic leaders this country has seen in the last century.

Anthony Blair decided to throw all our political and moral capital into the cauldron that was George W. Bush's neo-con brand of corrupt and vile imperialist politics. In other words, he wavered not for a moment in declaring war against a country that had no nukes and no immediate foreign ambitions. He sent a massive portion of our armed forces and huge amounts of military hardware into a country essentially at peace, and proceeded to help the Americans blow the living shit out of it, directly and indirectly leading to the deaths of countless thousands of people.

When people talk about Anthony Blair as a 'war criminal', I don't believe they are being unreasonable. This morning, Michael Howard was pressed by a Radio 4 journalist on whether he thought Blair should face proceedings for war crimes. Howard gutlessly fudged the question, obviously, because all politicians these days seem to have this sort of 'code of the club'.

I won't 'go there', if you don't 'go there'. It's called 'consensus politics' in the trade, which is a euphemism for 'we can both get along quite well if we ignore the will of the people and leave certain tricky issues alone'. It's why we have experienced slightly diluted socialism for the last 6 decades, unhindered.

But look closer at this issue. Blair launched a dodgy war that led to many deaths. He broke international law in doing so. Ergo, he is a war criminal. Yet how many people out there really give that much of a shit?

If that is not worrying enough, let's look at our current mad man. Not only does he insist on Afghanistan like a recalcitrant junkie insists on his afternoon fix, he insists he is the saviour of the world, despite being the man largely responsible for the total collapse of the British economy and the bankruptcy of the country.

Even Mervyn King has come out and spoken out against his former colleague and cosy mate.

Let's not forget a couple of simple facts here. Brown spent most of the early part of this decade cultivating a false, hugely inflated property boom and debt bubble, because it helped to spur on public receipts of taxation and it helped make him look like the master of the economy. When it collapsed, he stepped aside and flapped about by blaming the bankers.

What we face are years and years of high tax, poor services, crap job opportunities and low pay. The haves will be fewer and richer, the rest of us will founder, except those who have been designated as the beneficiaries of the massive wealth redistribution schemes. Labour's underclass heartland, in other words. People bribed to get that dick out of the throat and go vote.

Brown won't hear a word of criticism. He is incapable of taking blame or admitting error. The bloke is a sociopath. A highly temperamental, brooding, moody, angry, stubborn, dark-minded, dim witted, cold, uncaring and dogmatic sociopath. I doubt he really cares deep down that he has fucked it all (and at least a large part of him deep down will undoubtedly realise that he fucked it).

He believes that the top job is his by right, and if it all goes to shit, then fuck everyone for not doing enough to make it go right for him. He divests himself of all responsibility (despite the gigantic stakes) in the face of massive evidence that he messed up and in the face of continued opinion polls showing that he is unwanted.

It takes some doing, to run a country so badly that you bankrupt it and send the majority of the people and their off spring into long term serfdom. It takes a great deal of stupidity and short sightedness to blow a financial surplus and a great economy on a huge, cash obsessed gamble, in some vain hope that social democracy can take root for generations to come - and to consider these plans at all sustainable beyond a period of 5-10 years.

The two Labour leaders we have had (Blair, Brown) are so bad in every way, that one has to wonder - why did the British put up with it?

Well, it might have something to do with the fact that all anyone seems to really care about, while Rome burns are this and this.

So when people like me turn on Question Time, and see Labour politicians like Phil Woolas use the word 'unfair' on more than half a dozen occasions to describe his and his party's treatment by those who dare to question them, I despair.

"My plan for Labour success is to go for the sympathy vote. Why not? It worked for Jedward"

I was amazed that no-one picked him up on it. Last Thursday on QT, Woolas just kept saying that people were being 'unfair' on him and Labour. Unfair? Is that not a weird choice of word to describe a situation where people hold the ruling power to account?

Oh, I'm sorry Phil, how rude of people to ask questions and expect answers from the government and its ministers. How appalling. How, er, 'unfair'. Yes, that's right. We're all bullying you and it is very sad and unkind how people are so horrid to Gordon Brown.

I think you deserve another go. In fact, all this talk of unfairness has convinced me that Labour are fit for a fourth term.

The sad thing is, even in the hilariously fantastical event that the masses switched over from their shite, dumbed-down, low brow ITV bullshit and watched Question Time for a bit, they would fail to pick up on Woolas's disgraceful attempt at 'pity poor me' martyrdom.

Because most people, like the blubbing idiots on these non-talent contests and reality TV wank fests, operate on this very level. Responsibility, you see, is something other people do. And politics is for the boring grey suits.

Will they wake up when the repo man comes for the Plasma?

No, I say, because they are too stupid and apathetic to even appreciate what is about to befall this country.

Just...I mean what the...how many kids am I paying for?

I read this story in the (gulp) Metro yesterday, although it was also in its big bro the Mail. I obviously take a rather huge pinch of salt when reading things of this nature in tabloids like those and I have, for the first time ever, released a picture of the B&D salt provision that we have set up in a top secret location for these purposes.

I was pretty fucking shocked when I read this, let's just make that nice and clear.

We were spending a lot on pinches of salt, so we went to Macro. Sorted.

This 'lady' has popped out a really rather remarkable 13 little shits (14th on the way), sorry I mean kiddywids at almost the rate of one a year for the last dozen. She just loves 'em she says, can't stop 'avin' 'em she says. And she won't either until she gets twins.

After the bullshit of 'Jedward' and the total freak show that inbreeding has produced, I'm a amazed anyone wants twins at all.

That's fine though, her choice. But wait a second, it's fucking not is it.

Oh no indeedy, because this bastard is on £50,000 benefits a year to fund her unrestrained, 1920s Catholic, 'Ain't you 'eard of con-tra-cep-tion', breeding programme. Fuck me she's skewing the graying north statistics by herself.

Fifty large, fifty big ones. Yes, they have a 3-bed council house and the fella works building canal boats. And yes, they collect over four grand a month in benefits. And yes, she - pinch of salt alert - spent five grand on Christmas presents (which, let's work this out, means she spent over £400 on each of her 12 kids, the 13th being an adult and the 14th being avec oven. Maybe more salt.)

But it's all right folks, don't fret, they still go to fucking Butlins every year...

The best bit though is possibly this quote:

If people saw us living in a pigsty they would say that we were a scrounging, low-life family who begged from the state.

They would say I was a slapper for having so many children and that I couldn't even be bothered to keep the house looking nice

And that's so not true. Even when I'm straight I can't put my feet up. I've been known to take down curtains at midnight and wash them.

Well fuck me! This really needs to be read several times for it to really sink in. Maybe even read it in reverse, because it's the opening gambit that is the gem. The whole thing, in the main, reminds me of the Chris Rock sketch where he talks about black people, the bit where he slags people off for saying things like 'Shit, I look after my kids'. Yes, because that's what you meant to fucking do you moron.

Wow, shit look at that, she only washes the curtains, fuck me! She only keeps the fucking house tidy! Well, that seals the deal as far as I'm concerned, she can have as much as she likes, take my cash, go on, you have more benefits from tax in a year that I fucking earn let alone pay.

It takes at least 9-10 people on an average wage to pay enough tax per month to pay for her tribe. Ten people a month are paying tax, not for their health care, not for the boys getting shot at, not to bail out banks, not to fix roads...to pay for her desire to have children.

That opening bit, I feel a break down coming on. I gets me my decks, break that sheet down Boatang:

IF, IF they lived in a pigsty, then and only then would people think: 1) they were scrounging, 2) they were low life, 3) they begged from the state, and 4) she was a slapper. Let Brother Boatang split the shit: 1) they clearly are fucking scrounging, they take 4k a month off the state, 2) that really is pretty fucking low isn't it, 3) they quite obviously beg from the state, they have filled a form in saying 'can have some money please for my breeding experiment', 4) slapper may be harsh and I presume they all have the same Dad, but that is dependant on the position of her legs, not the fucking cleaning.

It's all right on the night though, because she , newsflash just in, washes the fucking curtains!

And here, straight from the woman's mouth, are the names of these kids and why. You can call your children what you want, but after the first one you really have to start asking some serious questions:

Stephen – after his doting dad, Stephen
Malachai – after a character in the horror film, Children of the Corn
Peppermint – after Sara started craving mints during her fourth pregnancy
Echo – after a group of eco-campaigners who Stephen met during a job at work
Eli – another character in the 1984 film Children of the Corn
Rogue – a character in the film X-Men
Frodo – hobbit in Lord of the Rings
Morpheus – a character in film, The Matrix, staring Keanu Reeves
Artemis – book character, Artemis Fowl, an obnoxious teenage criminal
Blackbird – named after a gathering of blackbirds which flew onto Sara's lawn
Baudelaire – named after the Baudelaire orphans which featured in Lemony Snicket's film A Series of Unfortunate Events
Voorhees – named after serial killer, Jason Voorhees in the horror movie, Friday The 13th

Jesus fucking H Christ on a souped up bike with go faster fucking stripes. What. The. Fuck. We have here ladies and gents a sci-fi , horror film obsessed hippy. Her naming conventions appear to be: any name from 'Children of the Corn', the native American custom of naming the sprog after some random event, someone who has slaughtered people, a character in a utterly shite film.

The only reason this woman has this experiment to see how many kids you need to pop out before you get twins and/or what happens to children when you give them absurd names that happen to also be serial-killers in shit films, is because the state will give her shed loads of cash to keep it going. Why? Why the fuck should I be paying these two hippy sex maniacs with a serious issue concerning horror films and 'eco-warriors' to have children?

They can't even use the argument that they pay the tax and therefore claim back the tax breaks they are due to even it out. They are using the entire income tax payments of ten people a month!

I'm not saying they are having a fabulous time, or it's easy. I knew a family that had 12 kids and it was far from easy, but the Dad had a good job with good money and the wife worked when she could and they had a nice house tht they owned. That is, they could afford it and made a lifestyle choice on that basis. Fine, good luck to them.

This lot though can't afford it and expect all of us to help them out. The irony is we can't afford it either.

The Guardian: Labour's Last Mate Standing

New Labour in 2009 is like Toby Young in 'How to Lose Friends and Alienate People'. An unpopular piece of shit. And like all anti-social morons, Gordon Brown and his grubby party has been abandoned by even the most patient of formerly loyal Saints.

The BBC has been successfully wooed by the left wing Conservative Party under the left wing Cameron. The Independent has given up their usual ridiculous demonisation programmes against that party and editorially shrugs its shoulders and accepts the inevitable.

Of the tabloids, only the unread 'Mirror' fails to back Cameron. The so-called 'Great and the Good' and modern cultural figures who appear on TV every now and then have good words to say about Cameron. Hell, even 'Mumsnet' is sucking his dick.

Cameron has sucked up the centre-left like a Dyson sucks breadcrumbs or a hooker sucks schlong.

But Labour has one mate left. One sad loyal cunt, who despite its best pal's unpopularity, refuses to catch the cab home to down a glass of Evian with the Alka-selzter and settle in for a long, alcohol induced period of hibernation.

The Guardian, as exemplified in this utterly absurd Sunday online front page here, seems to believe that Labour are electorally out of the soup thanks to some bullshit survey based on the telephone-call gathered information from a pool of a thousand people in the entire country.

Sorry, I'll adjust that. The Guardian probably doesn't believe this, but wants you mug twats at home to believe it, or at least enough of you to consider Labour as a viable option that inspires some degree of faith and integrity. In other words, it's all hands to the Millbank pump down there in Farringdon, and we're all supposed to lap up the bullshit.

The best bit about this daft article is the headline: "Poll boost for PM as confidence in economy grows"

There are three areas of utterly mind boggling bollocks that must be exposed here.

First: There is no amount of economy growing (and I don't believe for a moment the economy actually is growing or will grow any time soon) that can forestall the blatantly obvious truth of what faces this country - years and years of serious, crippling, high tax inducing debt. So much debt, in fact, that it is highly likely that we will default and go to the IMF.

Because Labour are using a very odd form of super-Keynesian economics in a time of near bankruptcy and surprise surprise, it ain't working. So, er, fuck 'green shoots'. We're fucked, and there are enough voters out there to realise this and know who not to vote for next time.

Second: To focus on bollock number two, I have to quote Sir Robert Worcester (the founder of MORI, the company that did the survey) as set out in the Guardian piece.

"This poll will jolt the electorate into the reality of British politics in the run-up to the election. Whether or not there has been a blip among the electorate caused by short-term events such as Labour's surprise win in Glasgow North East, it will not be easy for the Tories to gain the 117 seats they need for an overall majority, never mind the 140 they require for a working majority."

This is serious, serious bullshit territory. How bad can this man get it wrong? He is like the man who recently scored the joint lowest on Mastermind. Except take away the 7 points and put him in a room with Mark Lawrenson. He is the epitome of wrong. He is the political equivalent to a Dirty Sanchez imposed upon a very polite Geisha Girl. Just fucking wrong, wrong, wrong.

The poll will jolt precisely fucking no-one. You want to know why it won't jolt anyone, apart from Alan Rusbridger's cock? Because it is just a fucking poll, and political polls come out every five and a half seconds. In ten minutes time, I could log on, click through Google news for a bit and find a poll by some other outfit on the rise and fall of political trends. By Christmas, there'll be a compendium of fucking surveys and polls to wank over.

So just shut the fuck up about the daft fucking poll which shows the gap between the Tories and Labour narrowing for a little bit, OK?

Also, the suggestion that the Glasgow North East election has had any kind of mind altering, inspirational affect on the would-be Labour Party lovin' finger lickin' public is beyond fatuous. The fact is, Glasgow North East was not a fucking surprise. Whoever said that lied. Because that seat is arguably Labour's safest in the Kingdom. They were always going to win, they were the sitting party there and have been for nearly 8 fucking decades. It's a bit like saying 'John Demetriou isn't homeless and he has not been declared bankrupt...I therefore suspect he has secretly won the lottery and sleeps every other night in Hugh Hefner's Mansion. Obviously'.

And will it be easy for the Tories to turn Labour over? Well, there's a quick way of answering that: yes, it will be. Labour are fucked. They have alienated every last fucker out there. Their core vote has either disappeared or gone to sleep, the Unions hate them, the anti war reds despise them: they are finished. The Tories are cracking at getting out the oldies on Election day, and I can't see any other result than a Tory win, with or without hoards of fresh voters, of which believe it or not, there is an abundance.

But the icing on the Guardian cake really has to be summed up by this gem:

Thirdly: An unemployment quote from the piece.

"The most recent unemployment figures, which showed the smallest rise since spring 2008, also provide grounds for optimism. The number of Britons out of work rose by 30,000 less than expected to 2.46 million in the three months to September, the lowest increase since May last year."

So, unemployment doesn't go up as much as thought before, and therefore it's time to break open the Champagne and celebrate Labour's 11th hour salvation. Brilliant.

Except even this is nonsense. The fact is, and I realise this from what I have seen of the workplace lately, a lot of people are taking up very short term contracts and temp work in the run up to Christmas.

It is also the case that public sector bodies are raiding the 09/10 budgets, before the April window closes and money is cut off from departmental spends. In other words, there's a bit of hiring going on, but this will drastically shrink after next Spring.

After April next year, not only will it be clear that unemployment is killing this country, it will also be clear that the recession isn't ending, the pound is perilously vulnerable, particularly taking into account the teetering dollar, industry is failing, debt is mounting and receipts are falling.

There are no beneficiaries from all this, and I fail to see how made-up 'economy is growing' rubbish will at all convince even the most die-hard of Brown supporters. Please show me tangible proof that the economy is growing? Who is doing well right now? Apart from some of the usual people who do well, like some Supermarket chains and food retailers?

No, no, no, this won't do. The Guardian will really have to do better if they think they can help their wing man pull at this party. For the love of God, they have pulled the wool over the eyes of too many people for far too long as it is.

The total, abject failure of socialism is what Labour should be nailed on

...And is what the Tories and Dave don't realise.

A whole heap of news sources hit me today like a fucking brick, the sort of moments you have when a pang of realisation happens.

First off was this utterly farcical bullshit. Yes, we, the British people, are whacking 1.5 million bad boys at the traffic problems of third world countries. Yes you did read that right. £1.5 million on poor traffic lights and zebra crossings because bad traffic and driving kills a lot of poor people. Quite why the AA are so up this I don't know, but at a guess I would say they are getting an implementation and management contract out of it.

Then the Tories slammed one home. Oh indeedy, the Murdoch trade off is finally here: local media. It's a shame, they scream out loud, that local papers are not allowed to be owned by one 'group' (read 'person'), that is why they are going under. Nothing to do with the nationals sucking them dry for every penny and reducing your important local print to be a run off from AP. Not at all. In fact my local is pretty fucking good, local interest etc. But it would be so much better if it was owned by News Corp. Course it would.

Then we had the economy. Fuck. Me. Last month we borrowed...11.42 billion Queen's faces. That's the highest October borrowing on record and means we now owe £829.7 billion and have, in turn, 2.46 million unemployed. Public sector net debt as a percentage of GDP now totals 59.2%; the highest on record. That piece of news is buried, you see that swanning about.

But what's that? Oh yeah, it's the piano dropping onto the Rolls. In case you haven't already heard, this is now the longest recession in history. So Gordon's absurd argument that the Tories would make the recession longer and deeper are clearly utter bollocks.

So who is it that is being kicked firmly and squarely in the rotund particulars? The working classes, that's who. As this Beeb article from last month clearly shows, it is not Mr Tory voting, New Labour endorsing tosser that is the loser, it's Mr working bread-winner man.

And that is why socialism has utterly failed.

Labour are a socialist party, fair enough. I don't like them, but they are what they are. The one purpose of a socialist party is to raise up the life of the workers and remove poverty and its affects from their lives. That is the biggest thing Labour has singularly failed to do. Ever.

The stats speak for themselves. Places like Walsall and Hull have gained nothing from the artificial boom Labour created to placate the Rover drivers of Kent and Hampshire. Now it is over, they are the ones getting a good kicking.

And this is repeated again and again over the last century, nothing. Nothing has been improved, nothing gained from the West Midlands to the North West, the North East to Glasgow. Hard Labour voting areas that are still shit holes.

Now they are pledging to cut child poverty, for instance, after 12 years and not one of these areas will ask 'But isn't that why we voted for you?'.

So why do they vote for them? Money. As JD said, it's about getting the cash in their pockets that they think they are 'entitled' to. Which is just fucking sick.

The people in these ghettos generally don't give a shit. They were on the dole in the 80s, the 90s and now and they will be a decade from today. They get their cash, they sit on their arse. And we aren't talking about the early 1980s and over 3 million unemployed here. The bulk of the unemployed are the same million time and again, sitting there on the statistics like some battered fridge on a lawn.

Kids are not ‘poor’, the areas they live in are poor. No jobs, no input or creation. All that happens is their parents sign on and the state gives them money. That isn't a solution. That’s the problem. And why do they keep voting Labour? For the same reason mumsnet thinks Dave will screw them, because Labour gives them cash and stuff in exchange for fuck all. The Tories, traditionally, give them the opportunity for cash and stuff in exchange for work and production.

And that is the solution that Labour cannot see, the voters refuse to wake up to and the Tories have sacrificed in a misguided bid for votes.

The only way to help these areas is to give the Local Authorities the powers and freedom to spend the money and form the partnerships to actually inject genuine regeneration into the community. Give them the power to lower business rates and taxes so that companies want to set up shop there, employ local people and spend cash in local places.

But the Left, old and new, do not see this as a solution. They quite simply do not trust you or I to spend that money in the way they want us to and they do not trust Local Authorities to do what is needed without the iron grip of state on them.

The socialist solution is to take money from A and give it to B. The proper solution is to let C set up shop and employ B to make and produce goods and services for A. But that wouldn't be a redistribution of A's money now would it, and why should B have to work for their money when A has it all sitting there doing nothing in their pension pot. Better tax it.

The clear as day fact is that the A to B solution does not work and never has.

The number of people contributing has fallen and the bill for supporting them has gone up. Yet getting these people off of support and into contributing is anathema, it can't happen. You forget, they are carers and are needed by their slightly hard of hearing wife with a slightly dodge knee.

The result is astounding. You can bet a fair whack on Labour getting voted back in for those areas, but others are lurking: the BNP.

Why? Because they are a left wing party that claims to represent the masses and it is no surprise that these scum filled bastards are cleaning up in areas of high working class unemployment. Even in Scotland the SNP Marxists are dumping Labour on its arse.

Why? Because Labour has abandoned the working masses and the working masses want the gravy train to keep on a'rollin'. They could vote Tory like '79, but the Tories have missed that boat by becoming New Labour. They could vote for a libertarian party but the only one out there is too small for them to see. And anyway, the idea of individualism is terrifying.

So no, they vote BNP or it's lighter cousin the SNP. And Labour cannot see that the reasons for this are not actually immigration, or propaganda, but a total lack of the socialist party of the people no longer representing the people. The working people are losing their jobs, their money, and it's their party that has done it.

And so socialism has completely failed and has in fact never worked. And it is that reason alone that Labour should really be held to account. It's had 12 years with a massive majority and socialism still hasn't worked, it still hasn't solved anything. Because it can't.

What it does provide though is a free ticket on the piss take express. Labour has fucked up a lot of things, but rather than hammering Labour as a party we need to start hammering socialsm as a system. Socialism and social-democracy has not, does not, will not and cannot work, it is a bankrupt belief that people still cling to. They need to be woken up to the fact.