But it’s a relatively small story – in the big scheme of things it makes little difference at all.

The problem is the papers need to attack on something but the politicians are so risk averse that they don’t do anything which is either daring or actually life changing as if it were to succeed could cause a lot more  problems.

Take the dodgy policy of windmills for generating power. They have a nice visual reminder that they are “doing something” to us all even when we are in the free countryside but they don’t do much.
Now imagine they invested the same money in nuclear fusion and it came up trumps so gave dirt cheap energy for all.
We’d get permanent traffic jams of electric cars – people being lazy and working less, getting drunk all the time and making high demands of luxury.

Well, that might be a pessimistic way of seeing it, but even so – these are good problems to be called up on.
Better to be daring, do well and have problems of prosperity … people problems of the type that you’d go in to politics to solve rather than some heat magazine celebrity type “problem” which doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

HERE

OK, well I did think it would be the plague that comes with the olympics that would be a catalyst but it was at that point that I had decided it was too late to turn things around to avoid it.

…and it was over a year later which we got the coalition who haven’t exactly been bold of late. The disconnect people feel with the control of the lives seems as wide as ever. At least they stopped the ever increasing inhumane policies of labour of the time – Who now appear to be encouraging discontent by going on about cutting too fast then doing exactly that to important services in the local councils they control, and some like livingstone going out of his way to do interviews that blame it on the cuts.

Let’s just hope that’s the end of it now – I expect these particular scuffles have peaked, but if the government doesn’t find some self confidence soon (in a libertarian not authoritarian way ) and stop u-turning when small mobs complain about good policy then I expect the riots will be back

Apart from the deleting of certain messages, I’m not sure anyone cares that much about the listening to voicemails – more people cared about the custard pie than the rest of the story.

..but the media feel threatened  so are showing that they still do set the agenda even in these internety days. By using ambiguous terms like Phone Hacking and going OTT by saying people are “victims” of it as if they’d been stabbed they’ve been able to keep this going for weeks and get parliament involved.

I’d say most people accept that surveillance by a multitude of private media companies was actually a good thing.
Sure it may have gone too far and they listened to too many people’s messages and so that’s why they got the slap in 2006 – fair enough.

The alternatives are either let things go on which shouldn’t or that people should know about, or nationalise it and leave all the spying to government – who then aren’t watched themselves.

Imagine it was real hacking and they’d got into private CCTV cameras.  There’d be outrage and they’d stop – But then crimes would go on and the people would shout “Do something”. So in RIPA style, the government could come along and demand they get a feed from all the cameras whenever they want.

So instead of papers just telling others of wrongdoing we have expensive and scary big brother style snooping by people who can arrest/fine you.

Really, it’s a bit of a non-story – a leftie distraction from their failing Euro. Which is why they are calling for Cameron’s blood even though there’s no logical reason for that, but they let Brown lie to parliament and Milliband to have a dodgy advisor still in place.

Cameron & government has shown to be weak by going along with it and extending parliament and even cutting short a foreign visit – this isn’t a national crisis.

oh.. and I’ve seen “hackgate” used a couple of times now – I sincerely hope that is with high irony on both parts of the word.

And yeah I get that it’s silly that I’m moaning about the media setting the agenda but then talking about it myself.

Latest post from Conservatives on AV: here

WHY YOU SHOULD VOTE ‘NO’ TO AV
AV is unfair: With our current system, everyone gets one vote. But under AV, supporters of extreme parties like the BNP would be more likely to get their votes counted more times, meaning their votes are worth more than yours.
AV is unclear: Under AV, the candidate who finishes third can be declared the winner thanks to an unclear, complicated voting process. It’s like someone coming third in a running race winning the gold medal.
AV is unpopular: Just three countries in the world – Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Australia – use AV, compared to almost half the world’s electors who use our current system.
AV is expensive: Calculating the results is a long, complicated process, which could cost the taxpayer millions.

Here’s my response to that.

AV is unfair, FPTP is unfair, life is Unfair: With our current system, everyone gets one vote. With AV everyone gets one vote.
AV is clear: Under AV, the best candidate who could finish third under FPTP can be declared the winner thanks to an clear, uncomplicated voting process. It’s like winning a match but losing on aggregate.
AV is unpopular: Britain is unique and its parliament the envy of the world, we should choose the system that is right and make it popular around the world.
AV is expensive: Democracy is expensive but as AV and FPTP are similar in cost I don’t think it’s relevant here.

On any logical basis for either stats or science, a test which from the same source can produce a much more accurate and informative result without affecting the source too much, for such a small additional energy cost has got to be right.

The race analogy used by Cameron is either insulting or very telling that he views politics as a tribal, everyone for themselves type affair. Which goes against what he said when trying to get a coalition. I wonder why he’s making himself look stupid and untrustworthy like this – given I would expect it would make little difference his and the Conservative party being elected (AV might improve it I would guess) then I can only assume it has something to do with the EU who seem to be the basis of everything counter intuitive or silly. I’ve just not worked out why yet.

So since doing stupid analogies appears to be the fashion,  I have a fish analogy which I’ll stretch to fit….

Suppose you have 100 various tropical fish but only 1 tank and you want to know how to salt the water

25 Like sea salt.
19 Like rock salt
21 Like a salt mix
35 Like no salt at all.

Under FPTP you’d put in no salt and most of your fish die – not ideal.

OK.. So we’re told FPTP is simple,  maybe for counting but not on the voters (which is the wrong way round seeing as the counters know how the system works and voters may not)  so I’ll take this into consideration…

Perhaps if the fish were smart they could second guess their tankmates and so considering some could handle other salts the voting may go:

12% Sea, 18% Rock, 39% Mix, 31% none
So FPTP has appeared to work (assuming they understand the complex way they have to vote to stay alive) and most of your fish survive.

But you own a pet shop that has 600 tanks and you only want to get one type of salt, or make up one mix.

The majority of tanks have voted for a mix so this doesn’t tell you much.  You either have to just do what you want and risk upsetting a lot of fish if you get it wrong,  or take a guess from the data you do have.

So you’d make a mix using mostly rock salt as this came second of those that wanted some salt and even though you were trying to do the right thing, you haven’t as Sea salt is the 2nd most popular.

Next time round, Sea salters are apathetic and stay home, Rock salters are enthused by nearly beating Mix splitting the salty vote all over the place and making None win again, killing most of the fish and causing the banking crash.

So let’s apply AV:

First round would come close to being their preferences.

25 Sea, 19 Rock, 21 Mix and 35 None.

Rock gets kicked out and 2nd choice is mix, Sea next and goes for Mix and we end up with the Mix winning- Only this time we can see that we’d prefer a mostly Sea salt mix both improving the system and meaning that chances are it will give a well fitting result next time too

Now obviously this isn’t perfect. It could turn out many of the No Salt lot and all of the Sea lot wouldn’t mind Rock salt so that would be  a better answer but this would mean counting everyone’s second vote in the second round and then reapplying this to decide who should have gone out in the first round – this would further simplify the voters job, moving the complexity onto counting which is fine as long as it’s open and obviously fair.
This probably would require computing power and therefore electronic voting machines. Chances are even if we keep FPTP we’d get these at some point but this is irrelevant to this referendum as the AV on offer can be done simply by moving piles around and just redistributing the losing candidates votes.

Perhaps this whole idea of governments being voted in every 5 years is outdated and we should all be able to vote on the internet whenever we feel like it to create a fluidly dynamic system – Of course there will be people that say it will cause unstable government as people would vote them out every time they do something unpopular but necessary but that’s just like saying the printing press should be banned and all learning should take place in church on Sunday… The public as a whole isn’t as stupid as they make out and realise that some unpopular things are actually good for the country and everyone in the long run – If there was an actual general election tomorrow, I’m sure we’d probably end up with a pretty similar result to what we have now rather than some huge labour landslide the polls suggest.  So after some initial violent swings as the system is introduced it will settle down.
The voting site can include a blog for the government to defend against the sensationalist media story of the day.
Perhaps it would be advantageous to only change the Prime Minister on a yearly basis for now though.
It might take the fun out of all the election, but then would mean the parties wouldn’t have to spend loads of time and money every 5 years making stuff up about how they are different to the others or how wonderful they are when that’s about as truthful and useful as judging someone based on just their CV/Interview.
It’s right that we should get to vote bad governments out and wrong that a PM gets to choose when to have an election, so this resolves this issue in a much more democratic way than having to wait 5 years.

OK, I appear to have rambled far from the issue in hand – Time for tea.

The releasing of the Stig’s name is just to get more publicity for TopGear – They’ll deny it is that guy and/or just replace him anyway like they did with the black one.

The arresting of the WikiLeaks guy was to get extra publicity to make it seem like a government conspiracy.

The catholic church are releasing details of how they covered up child molestation  to distract from the real harm they do to kids by bringing them up with harmful and deceitful personality disorders… ie. If you said “I hate what they do to kids” before then it would be the latter thing and they’d have no defence. Now if you say it then they can pretend you mean about the molestation stuff and claim it’s just a few bad apples.

I paint my foil hat black to avoid being spotted.

They’re trying to make us pay more and hide away each time we drink.

They showed Leicester Square and this demonstrates where they have got their way and where it doesn’t work.

Drinkers are made to go inside unless they are sitting with food and only within about 2 yards of the door of the pubs.

This means that as soon as you’ve found your spot, you’ll keep it till you can drink no more, get too drunk then fall over or get in a fight.

Open it up… put seating all over the square (remove the fencing) and let people eat and drink there – the bars can share the seats.

People will turn up, have a pint or 2 then go.
There’ll be more business so this can pay for the security and then some tables can be taken away when there’s a premier at the odeon.

Making drinking a special case which can only be done in darkened rooms will only serve to make the drinkers drunker and everyone else more annoyed.

It’s not just this nice new era of non-oppressive coalition which is said to be around, but also we’re living in a HD, LED, soon-to-be-3D era that I think does represent a significant change.
We’ve had a decade of nothing happening – yeah, odd little changes like having screens on the escalators and  projectors on the platforms made it feel like the future but it felt like we were going backwards.

Sure, we still might have the plague and riots I’ve been predicting for 2012-15, but I think it will still turn out to be a time we look back on fondly for both progress and art/music reasons.

You can’t say that for the last decade of nothingness on both counts – and that’s not just because it’s just happened… come 2000 you could look back on the 90s and although some things were laughable you had britpop and grunge for music and the internet revolution as a tech thing.

We should draw a line. 2000-2010 didn’t exist.

2010+ is the first decade of the century (which is handy as it lines the numbers up)

Included with it was a pamphlet featuring their nuclear sunset on the cover and a load of celebs saying not much on the back Here

On every page they have a bit of scaremongering about what the tories would(n’t) do, but this one takes the biscuit:

click to enlarge

Claiming that they will help pubs and postoffices!!! as if they haven’t been the cause of them closing through one way or another.

Now it could be that people were just waiting for an excuse for LibDem not to be a wasted vote – ie. as soon as they thought it was possible for them to win then they said they would vote for them – The people who’ll “Never Vote Tory” but also want Anyone But Brown.

But let’s look for the simplest solution….

I read earlier that the lib dem bounce started just before the debates.

About the time of the Ash cloud maybe?

Could it be that (with strong stereotyping):
- Tory voters  have travelled further afield but can afford the cost and time off to stay where they are.
-Labour voters are expecting our government to do it for them and so are stuck.

LD voters may have holidayed at home or have just gone to Europe so have been able to work their way back.

Given the numbers involved (millions watched on TV, only hundreds of thousands were abroad), I expect I’m wrong.

Sip:

Cameron:
Change
Big Society
NHS

Brown:
Measures (drink a measure of scotch)
Started in America/Global Recession
Tories
..also If he does an evil glare (was gonna say the mouth thing but don’t have enough booze for that!)

Clegg:
Vince Cable
Fair
Traditional Politics/”Labservative”

Any:
Future
Failure
Iceland

Down your drink:

Cameron:
Thatcher
Post-Bureaucratic Age

Brown:
Peter Mandleson
Cancer Guarantees

Clegg:
“Change that works for you building a fairer Britain” (if said in full)

Any:
Tax on alcohol (down a pint of cider)
Peter Steele (They should pay a tribute)
EU (no chance of it being mentioned!)