The perils of citizen journalism

I just chanced upon a new website called Human Times which aims to be a citizen journalist news agency. The idea is that anyone can sign up and post stories. It's an interesting idea, but unfortunately I think they a few quality control issues to address before they're ready for the big time though. Take this story for example.....

A shocking new dossier financed and compiled by the British National Party has revealed that every day in the UK, over 1000 Billy Goats are drugged and sodomised against their will by ‘Un-cleansed individuals’. The dossier, named ‘We don’t want you...to do that’, claims that a recent influx of Polish migrants and increased Catholicism is to blame for the barbaric act becoming rife, and is a past time in these circles. However the dossier also raises the possibility of other minorities joining in, perhaps creating some sort of underground ‘super immigrant animal raping group’, much like the Irish.

Typically the Billy Goat is lured in and fed with a calpol laced cinnamon bun, before having its front legs clubbed repeatedly... After the make up and cocktail dress are applied, the ‘fun’ begins in a large and patient group. This awful practice can be traced back to many areas of Eastern Europe, particularly those countries now members of the European Union. A popular late night Romanian TV show translated as ‘Fun in the barn’ uses the practice as part of a game its game show, were contestants must catch and penetrate greased up farm animals in exchange for prizes such as swimming goggles.

Eastern Europe has suffered some disastrous side effects from the practice, with as much as 60% of the areas population now related to an animal in some way. In the early 80’s, the Bulgarian town of Varna was the birth place of the Worlds first human/sheep inter-breed. A stunned farmer helped deliver the hairy, two legged mongrel using a leather lasso, before raising it as his own offspring. Since then it has been a common occurrence, with many farmers making money by charging entrance fees to their barns and watch either a conception or a birth... How long before this story is mirrored in our wonderful country?

Vick roster, BNP member and founder of www.poles-are-getting-on-my-goat.com, is leading a campaign to stop our country becoming populated by zoo mongrels and be known as ‘Brilliant Britain, rather than ‘Bestiality Britain’. She said “Years ago, immigrants used to come to our country and offer an invaluable service like delivering milk or strangling badgers. Nowadays if you go to any building site across the country, all you will find is lazy men swooning the local wildlife by whispering sweet polish nothings into their ears. No wonder the country is in recession. But due to our government being a bunch of cat stroking tree huggers there is nothing we can do, as wave after wave washes up pointy panted polish perverts onto our shores.”

Reaction to the dossier has been mixed, ranging from ‘it distracts them from incest’ to ‘cull them like kangaroo’. However some people are refusing to acknowledge the looming disaster, with even the government claiming the report to be exaggerated. Perhaps it’s too late, and our hippy liberal leaders have already been got at by the fiends. But the BNP say they will watch and wait, for the time when the anarchic beasts roam and famine spreads death. Her Majesty will call them for God and country, and there will be plenty of cheap Polish meat for us all.

Free movement and democracy

The must-read article today is Janet Daley in the Telegraph, wondering if the EU chickens aren't coming home to roost.

What the strikers at the Lindsey oil refinery (and their brother supporters in Nottinghamshire and Kent) have discovered is the real meaning of the fine print in those treaties, and the significance of those European court judgments whose interpretation they left to EU obsessives: it is now illegal – illegal – for the government of an EU country to put the needs and concerns of its own population first. It would, for example, be against European law to do what Frank Field has sensibly suggested and reintroduce a system of "work permits" for EU nationals who wished to apply for jobs here.

It's an interesting moral dilemma for liberals when an undemocratic body like the EU has put in place laws that are liberal in nature. Democracy is likely to give us protectionism and economic depression. Of course under a liberal constitution, movement of labour would not be subject to democratic control anyway, but a liberal constitution being about as likely as Gordon Brown winning the next election, the most likely outcome is that democracy will win out.

It's a worrying prospect.

Read it and weep (Part 2)

A consultant surgeon

The standard of UK medicine is nose-diving terribly and all around those who should be sorting it out are playing their fiddles like Nero!

Shooting starts in Gaza again

Story here.

NHS managers

Read it and weep: a list of managers at an NHS primary healthcare trust. 

This is what happens when things are run by bureaucrats.

Urine tests for welfare recipients

From a reader:

I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to earn that pay cheque, I work on a cruise ship for a major shipping line. For the safety of all the passengers and the crew with whom I work, I am required to pass a random urine test, with which I have no problem.

What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don't have to pass a urine test. Shouldn't one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare cheque because I have to pass one to earn it for them?

Please understand that I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sit on their ass drinking beer and smoking dope and making babies, that they do not want, cannot feed nor look after properly. Could you imagine how much money the government would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a benefits cheque?

Another fine mess you've got me into

Struggling to make ends meet? Worried about your job? Well I've got some bad news for you. Having just had the pleasure of being forced to bail out most of Britain's banks, it now looks like the European colleagues are going to relieve you of a whole lot more money, this time to subsidise a completely different set of impecunious barrow boys in suits.

Iceland will be put on a fast track to joining the European Union to rescue the small Arctic state from financial collapse amid rising expectations that it will apply for membership within months, senior policy-makers in Brussels and Reykjavik have told the Guardian.

And that means just one thing. You are going to be filling in the hole in the Icelandic accounts. Remember that when your employer goes bust.

Do your volunteering overseas

The Independent says that VSO are receiving record numbers of applications, apparently giving the lie to my theory that CRB checks are destroying volunteering in the UK.

Except that when I search for CRB on the VSO website I get nothing, and when I search for VSO on the CRB website I get nothing either. It looks as if CRB checks are not required for VSO applicants.

Does this mean that everyone is going their public service in other countries now?

The ice storm that wasn't

EU Referendum: Why would the Telegraph report a heatwave that killed 19 people in Australia, but not an ice storm that killed 42 in the USA?

The BBC and the WMO seem to have missed the ice storm too. Funny that.

There was also a snowstorm in the United Arab Emirates, which I haven't seen reported over here.

More crime prevention

In days gone by, they dealt more firmly with bureaucratsThe Magistrate is irritated by having to complete a Criminal Records Bureau check so that he can volunteer for a charity. He is a JP of twenty years' standing.

This is another example of the madness of crime prevention. In order to prevent a couple of crimes a year, we take a major step towards the destruction of volunteering in the UK. The bureaucracy expands and swells and only harm comes of it.

Of course the government's solution to this will be to increase funding to the fake charities that can't get people to volunteer for them any longer, and the cycle of sovietisation and despair will spiral on downwards.

It will end in tears, I tell you.

Escape to Santiago

The idea that the whole world is going to hell in a handcart is pretty much universal right now. Brown has lost the plot, Obama is going to copy him and hose the economy down with stolen cash, the protectionist barriers are going up around the world.

There's no escape.

Or perhaps there is. According to the Wall Street Journal, things are looking up in South America, where much of the continent is quietly being transformed from banana republic to stable democracy. The media here may drool over the student-revolutionary-friendly antics of Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Most of Latin America is [...] undergoing a period of unprecedented political and economic transformation. In Chile, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama, the Dominican Republic and, yes, Mexico -- which is most decidedly not a failing state -- there has been a quiet but substantial movement toward the creation of societies that are characterized by increased economic opportunity, social mobility and political democracy.

Chile sounds pretty good to me. And they have wine and beaches too. What's not to like?

Image of a woman being wheeled to hell in a handcart by Sacred Destinations.

Europravda.eu

European Union invites tenders for the creation of a news aggregator service. It will have full editorial independence apparently, "as long as it respects the journalistic ethic and its public mission."

Fair to say that Eurosceptics should not apply then.

Broon the loon

The theory that Gordon Brown is in fact a certifiable madman is still brightening up these dark and sombre days. I remember being roundly berated for suggesting so a couple of years back in a comments thread. There certainly seem to be strong hints of it in the mainstream media.

And when you see him proposing rises in National Insurance at a time like this, you know he's a few cards short of a full deck.

School for social problems

Chris Woodhead says that schools are giving up on teaching knowledge and are delivering discussion groups in social issues like homosexuality and "fair trade".

Don't I know it. In the day job I sometimes see school textbooks and it's clear to me that a lot of what goes on is propaganda. If I had a penny for every time I've seen the Hockey Stick graph in a school science book....

How to repel pirates

From the FT: how to stop pirates from boarding your oil tanker. You should probably be taught this kind of thing at school.