The Robot Revolution

Call me an old cynic but over the years a large number of donors to the Conservatives, and Labour for that matter, find themselves kneeling in front of the Queen before leaving Buckingham Palace with a title.
( Kevin Maguire )

Madness is the emergency exit.
You can just step outside and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened.

The Deliberate Weakening Of Armed Forces.
The deliberate weakening of armed forces so we can no longer carry out any significant military intervention is paying off for the Government.
This plan was a result of Iraq and Afghanistan, which left politicians fearful of taking part in future wars.
The upshot is, if we wanted to intervene to honour our agreement with Ukraine we could not do so.
Not only did we assure Ukraine’s security, we also bear responsibilities as a permanent UN Security Council member – which we honoured up until our refusal to act in Syria.
Now instead of speaking softly and carrying a big stick, we have thrown away our stick and speak of “political and economic consequences”.
Our military impotency will not only undermine respect for us, but will eventually put us at great risk.
( Col. Richard Kemp, 28.04.2014 )

The only sensible way to live is without rules.

There is no escaping the truth that Hitler’s major influence was Darwin, ‘The survival of the fittest’ being a philosophy which could not ‘give a fig’ about any species except humanity.
This has continued to spell doom for all life on Earth since it was adopted by atheists worldwide.
( David E Langford )

Courage, sacrifice, determination, commitment, toughness, heart, talent.
That’s what little girls are made of.
To hell with the sugar and spice.

The Robot Revolution.
I beg you to join my boycott of automated tills in supermarkets and other shops.
If you don’t, human staff will vanish from these places and go into the dole queue instead.
Why should we help these big greedy businesses to make our lives more miserable, and to make more people unemployed?
We were fooled by the banks in the same way, and realised too late that we would never again be able to discuss our accounts with anyone with a pulse and a brain.
Surely once is enough.
And yet, day by day, I see my fellow shoppers marching to their own doom by submitting to the robot revolution.
( Peter Hitchens )

I think stupid people were put on this planet to test my anger management skills.

If bankers refuse to do the job for reasonable, rather than extortionate, salaries then replace them.
Let’s call their boardroom bluff.
We ordinary citizens could do a better job for considerably less.
I’m up for it.
Are you?
( Kevin Maguire )

I don’t think it’s age that makes us forgetful.
I just think there’s too much worthless crap to remember.

The Royal Mail’s Privatisation Was A Costly Mistake.
If a postie lost a precious package they would be disciplined yet politicians just get their knuckles rapped for losing taxpayers £1.2billion.
Liberal Democrat Business Secretary Vince Cable and his Tory deputy Michael Fallon’s refusal to accept responsibility for the Royal Mail sale (robbery) is unbelievable arrogance.
The irresponsible pair filled the bank accounts of City fatcats at the expense of taxpayers by giving away, on the cheap, a huge chunk of a valuable public service.
So taxpayers deserve an apology.
And their point-blank refusal to say sorry is what drives voters mad about aloof politicians.
The Royal Mail’s privatisation was a costly mistake.
We’ll add it to the lengthening list of blunders by an incompetent Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.
( Daily Mirror, 30.04.2014 )

It’s good when someone replies to your sarcasm with more sarcasm.
Instead of getting offended.

There is overwhelming evidence that wind turbines cause serious health problems in nearby residents, usually stress-disorder type diseases, at a nontrivial rate.
( Dr Carl Philips, U.S. distinguished epidemiologist )

Do you ever want to grab someone by the shoulders.
Look them in the eyes, and quietly say, “No one gives a shit.”

UK Chancellor Wants Bankers To Have Unlimited Bonuses.
George Osborne is going to court to challenge a new EU cap on bonuses intended to limit City excesses.
Yet it is EU rules allowing shareholders to veto big bonuses that the Government is using against RBS.
The truth is the City has handed out more than £80billion in bonuses since the financial crisis.
Making banks work in society’s interests needs more than bonus caps – we’d have more for schools and hospitals if they paid their fair share in tax.
Other European countries are pressing ahead with a “Robin Hood” tax but guess what?
Osborne’s going to court to try to stop that too.
( David Hillman, 26.04.2014 ) 

Wind energy is unreliable and intermittent, with no real market value because it requires near 100% back-up by conventional fossil-fuel power.
( Dr Gordon Hughes, Edinburgh University )

I don’t judge people on race, religion or gender.
I base it on whether or not they’re an asshole.

Wind farms are the greatest political blunder of our time and a monument to an age when our leaders collectively went off their heads.
( Christopher Booker )

A Stitch-Up Between Tories And Big Business.
Cedric Brown was the British Gas boss whose salary went up 900% in the decade after privatisation in 1986.
Back then there was as much hatred towards bosses of newly-privatised industries, who gave themselves lavish rewards for running monopolies, as there is towards today’s bankers.
They were despised, not just because they were the first of the fill-your-boots chairmen to justify outrage at their obscene pay (Brown earned 47 times what the average British Gas worker did) with patronising lies about the marketplace determining their worth.
But because they were perceived to be literally living off the fat of the land.
Britain’s water, gas and electricity had been owned by all of us, until Thatcher sold it off to big business.
Or rather her ad-men conned the nation into believing, with their campaigns like “Tell Sid”, that privatising our utilities would mean a share-holding democracy and wealth for all.
Cue millions of grasping mugs buying shares, then selling them again within months to multi-nationals for a few hundred quid’s blood money.
It was a stitch-up between the Tories and big business, which saw their chums get richer, energy and water become dearer and taxpayers lose the national assets our forefathers had spent decades building.
( Brian Reade )

Don’t mix between my personality and my attitude.
Because my personality is me and my attitude depends on you.

A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.
( Texas Guinan )

The Biggest Health Scandal Of Our Age.
Wind farms arraying people’s lives, destroying the environment, destroying the economy.
But instead of opposing it, all three main political parties are committed to building more of them.
And it’s not accidental.
This is a stitch-up between the wind lobby and its friends in Parliament and it’s an outrage.
It’s the biggest health scandal of our age and the metropolitan elite just don’t care.
If this were the nuclear industry, this is a scandal which would be on the front pages of every newspaper.
( Chris Heaton-Harris, Conservative MP for Daventry )

He’s so camp.
I love all the dramas, the intrigue.
But what he has done to the British music scene is completely devastating.
( Rupert Everett on Simon Cowell )

We Should Be Proud.
In our free, inclusive and open society faith schools must have a secure place, and need freedom to operate.
A tolerant society cannot refuse the same rights to Islam, now a major religion in this country.
But freedom is in the end reserved for those who believe in it themselves.
Reports that small children have been told by teachers to beware ‘the white prostitute’, a general insult directed at non-Muslim British women, suggest that the limits of tolerance are being reached.
Happily, the great majority of Muslims reject such attitudes.
That is why our best answer is to assert our own tolerant, Christian traditions more firmly and confidently.
We should not mistake that tolerance for weakness, but declare it to be a necessary requirement for full membership of our society.
We cannot expect to marginalise extremist Islam’s fervent preachers if we ourselves appear to believe in nothing.
To defeat this new bigotry in our midst, we must stop being ashamed of our own religion and culture.
We should be proud that we have created a civilisation in which people from all over the world – including many Muslims – wish to live.
( The Mail On Sunday )

I love William and Harry, and I feel we would be better off being ruled by the Queen than by Cameron.
( Rupert Everett on the Royals )

The Final Revolution.
There will be in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak.
Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.
And this seems to be the final revolution.
( Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963 )

I don’t have an attitude problem.
You have a problem with my attitude and that’s not my problem.

The Needs Of Ordinary People.
Predatory greed has been celebrated and proliferated to the point where your willingness to work just makes you much more convenient to exploit, without ever affording any significant opportunity to see long term improvement in your life circumstances as a result of that willingness to work.
And some of us still think that life is about more than work, that it should have room in it for living, and that pushing ourselves ever harder and seeing less of our children and enjoying less of life as a result is not actually something to strive for or celebrate.
It’s clear where we need to look for the money we need to supply the needs of ordinary people.
Tax the wealthy and the corporations.
After all, that’s where all the money is.
Sadly, that’s also by definition where the political influence is, too.
( Rose Winfold )

Our leaders proclaim war will bring peace.
But for whom. For the women and children who die because they could not run away fast enough?

Crime Figures Are Fiddled.
We understand that all important Government statistics are fiddled, and that the crime figures are so violently massaged that they bear no relation to reality at all.
Yet fashionable opinion has until recently denied this truth, accusing doubters of ‘moral panic’.
Lofty commentators and social scientists have proclaimed a new era of social peace and order.
When normal people, living in the real Britain, complain that this does not seem to be true where they live, they are sneered at as if they were deluded.
But last week, we learned the truth.
At an astonishing hearing of the House of Commons Public Administration Committee, experts and former police officers lined up to reveal the myriad methods by which the police make crime and disorder disappear from the figures.
At the heart of the trick is this simple aim – to pretend that large numbers of incidents that would once have been crimes are now reclassified so that they don’t appear in the official returns as such.
In short, crime has ‘fallen’ because we have now redefined millions of crimes as non-crimes.
You may still be attacked or robbed.
But it doesn’t count.
And this barely touches on another issue, of the vast amount of internet crime that goes entirely unpunished and unrecorded.
( Peter Hitchens, 24.11.2013 )