Bishop Hill Feb 4, 2009 Civil liberties There is a petition which requires the attention of civil liberties supporters:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to to remind his government that parents must remain responsible in law for ensuring the welfare and education of their children and that the state should not seek to appropriate these responsibilities.
Bishop Hill Feb 3, 2009 Economics Last year, when the oil companies were making a killing on the back of a rising oil price and politicians and other assorted lefties were falling over themselves to demand windfall taxes of the oil majors and crucifixion of their executives, I pointed out that the whole thing was a storm in a teacup which was due to an accident of accounting rules.
British companies are required by law to state their profits using the historic cost convention. That means you measure the profits on the basis of what you sold something for, less what you paid for it. This is fine for many businesses, but for a company which is experiencing fluctuating raw material prices, the effects of this rule is to make the profits fluctuate wildly.
With all the criticism they took, the oil companies seem to have taken note. Instead of issuing media advisories for its quarterly results on a historic cost basis, BP has started used replacement cost instead. Of course their accounts will still have to be on a historic cost basis, because that's what the law demands, but the media don't look at those - they only cut and paste from the press releases and then only the bits that are written in big letters at the top. So the oil companies can probably steer journalists to the more meaningful replacement cost figures and we can do away with the whole media hysteria cycle that runs alongside the oil price cycle.
Bishop Hill Feb 3, 2009 Quotes If Scrooge had forbid Crachet from putting on more coal because it would contribute to global warming, he’d be the hero.
Bishop Hill Feb 3, 2009 Foreign The Guardianistas' favourite South American leader, Hugo Chavez, is making another bid for permanence. He has launched another referendum on whether to make him president for life, just 13 months after the last one. The start of the campaign has been marked by increasing political violence and intimidation of opponents.
The Guardian, those stout defenders of liberty, describe him as "a beacon for the left".
Bishop Hill 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.
Bishop Hill Feb 2, 2009 EU Liberalism Politicians 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.
Bishop Hill Feb 2, 2009 Health 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!
Bishop Hill Feb 1, 2009 Health Read it and weep: a list of managers at an NHS primary healthcare trust.
This is what happens when things are run by bureaucrats.
Bishop Hill Feb 1, 2009 Nanny state Tax 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?
Bishop Hill Feb 1, 2009 Economics 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.
Bishop Hill Feb 1, 2009 Nanny state 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?
Bishop Hill 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.
Bishop Hill Feb 1, 2009 Civil liberties Crime 
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.
Bishop Hill Feb 1, 2009 Economics 
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.
