The Will Rhodes Portmanteau

A long time ago I was having a conversation with my dad. This conversation was about how life was in the British army during world war II. He did say it was hard. Not just the fighting - that was obvious - but it was hard living. You took rest when you could and you fought along side those who were with you.

You shaved in cold water, ate cold baked beans - and I won’t say what they had to do when the bathroom was needed. Dad used to joke quite a bit about what it was like fighting along side the Americans - some of the stories would literally make me scream with laughter. But one thing dad always said was that the American soldier was looked after. They had the best - even Turkey was flown in for thanksgiving and Christmas.

Some times, more often than not, in fact - they would share with their fellow warriors. (more…)

I thought that Gordi Brown was a bit of a wishy-washy PM, but to say that Bush is owed a debt of gratitude means he is ready for the loony bin!

Brown added, “The world owes George Bush a huge debt of gratitude” for his efforts against terrorists.

Erm - no it doesn’t! What has Bush actually done? Certainly not rid the world of one terrorist - in fact he has given rise to many more! Next Gordi Brown will be saying that Bush deserves the Nobel Peace Prize!

Pathetic!

British MPs will vote any legislation into law that make the ordinary person a criminal if they don’t pay their council tax (local taxes). Yet, and not at all surprisingly, they have the ability for the country to pay those taxes for them - through taxation paid by the people of Britain! And you thought you were on to a good thing.

In Britain, if you didn’t know, you have to pay a fee for having a TV. About $450 a year. But, and you all know this guy - Tony Blair, he had the country pay for his TV license in his SECOND home!

I wonder how many of the British parliament agree with this theft from the British people?

The full story here!

Read on!

Just, just when you think that teachers are about to take a stand on the PC brigade - albeit they are some of the biggest proponents of the dreaded political correct, wishy-washy defunct doctrine, they shoot themselves in the foot - with a Howitzer!

How?

You have to look at this story first - I read it with consummate glee that finally, finally teachers were siding with parents and backing them so they can parent and discipline children at home. How radical is that!?

Most people KNOW that the government intervention in bringing up baby has been a mishandled farce - governments can’t do these things you see - they rely too much on 25/30 year old women who are never going to have kids because their career means too much to them, and their boyfriend is probably called Geoffrey, Bartholomew or Craig. He will always back her because “It’s the thing to do for an oppressed gender”. But this is the focus group that details policy and the PC government agrees - so you can’t discipline a brat because the social services will get involved and the fear of losing your child become apparent. Then this happens:

It cited examples of children who stayed up to the early hours and played on violent computer games.

It described a mother who celebrated the fact she had been able to get her five-year-old to bed at 1am instead of his previous bedtime of 3am.

But this doesn’t affect Ms Whomever and Geoffrey. They don’t have kids and it gives them something to complain about on the BBC or in The Guardian. What joy!

Mr Sinnott said the problem lay with parents who were struggling with little or no help to bring up their children in a heavily commercialised world.

Erm..no it isn’t - it is PC government sticking their noses into things that they shouldn’t. You and government allow business to do just about what they please and then blame them for doing it later on - isn’t it about time the government took some responsibility for their actions? See teachers later in this blogpost.

But all that aside - I agree that parents should be allowed to be parents so I applaud the teachers for saying so.

And then…

This story. I did, really, really did shake my head at the futility of it all.

Teachers criticising the government and parents they then are going to deprive kids from days of education - because they are having a temper tantrum about pay.

Ian Murch, from the NUT’s ruling executive, said: “If I were you Mr Brown I would be doing my sums again.”

He added: “You wouldn’t like us when we are angry - and we are getting a bit angry now.”

Ye gods - he uses a tag line from The Hulk!? How childish is that!?

Delegates have now endorsed a motion which will enable the executive to call further strikes if a 10% pay rise is not agreed.

10% Yes - 10%!

Whenever there had been an increase in teachers’ pay, inflation always caught up with that rise, he said.

Welcome to the world of those parents you have been dissing!

But still - rewarding good behaviour is what is said will bring the brats into line and make them nice kids again - I wonder what will bring teachers into line with the real world?

Certainly not Ms Whomever and Geoffrey - they are the teachers who advocate going on strike.

Gordon Brown has revealed that he wants to set up a civil defence network - people to help out in the event of a natural disaster or an atom bomb attack, well something like that anyway. They will be much like the guys who helped out during the blitz.

For example, it said the highest threat currently faced is an influenza-type pandemic which the Government believes could kill up to 750,000 people in the UK.

How much will the flu jabs cost? Wouldn’t it be better to let everyone have a free jab at the onset of winter? 750,000 dead - I wouldn’t want to be around while that happened - will the new wardens be fitted out with full bio-suits?

The latest document set out moves by ministers to deal with a wide range of threats, including terrorism, nuclear attack, natural disasters such as extreme weather and flooding, international crime and cyber attacks.

Cyber attack!? Hold on a second! I thought that the government had said the detail we give them would be secure and couldn’t be got at because you are protected by Norton or some other firewall. That’s the death knell of the ID cards! YAY! Victory!

And just what kind of cyber attack do they envisage? What would these wardens do - they can’t exactly jump inside a PC and fight off the doom virus now can they? Those bio-suits must be good.

People would volunteer to join their local civil protection network, run by town halls.

Uh oh! Local councillor John Smyth will be in charge - that doesn’t bode well at all, Captain Mainwearing come to mind?

The new risk register will be updated annually and may be available online.

Well - it can’t really be online because of all the NuARPs running around in cyberspace fighting off the cyber attack!

This is a true story. Read it here.

Is simply rubbish!

Not only do they bill you for things you don’t have - they bill you for things after you have sent the equipment back to them!

Waiting on hold for 56.32 minutes isn’t customer service either, we put the phone down after this long.

They say that they are a progressive company, so progressive that they will say you can get a particular service and then, the very next day, say that this service isn’t available - and, as I said before, bill you for it.

Thankfully we tracked the equipment through the post and proved that we sent it back. Otherwise I could see our bill for non-extant equipment and service rising as each month went on.

As always, buyer beware. They will promise so much and deliver very little - deregulate the phone and internet services in Canada, customers will get some services much better than now, and we in the rural areas will be brought into the 20th century at least.

I’ll bet a certain New York Governor does!

As we look into the life of Governor Spitzer - and this one doesn’t seem to want to go away - we see that he, like so many before him, got wrapped up in the power of office and found that he was lacking. Just like so many others but what was the difference this time around?

Bill Clinton is shouting out how he supports his wife in the presidential race - but he was involved in a scandal just a few years ago. We all saw it, but he recovered.

So what makes these men, and I would say women, go off the rails?

A good story here.

So is it all about the power? I am sure that politicians are not that sex crazed - just human. Should we, as those who vote for them, forgive and forget? But as politicians have been held up as an example and clearly failed over the years - why do we still act so shocked when something like this comes out.

As the feminists will say - “Leave him!’ Yet there have been a few who are women in the world of scandal and sex, but as I am going PC over this weekend, I won’t say that - it is men and men alone who can be corrupt in such a way as to what to have a shag with a 22 year old woman who just happens to be a singer of mediocre standard.

Should we blame social networking?

That is of course if you can afford a second home.

Well, how about if you had 23,000 GBP ($46,000) a year to do it? Sound good? Well - what if you didn’t have to find the money yourself either!? What would be better than the very country that you live in - paid for it?

That has to be good! You would think that this is about the poorest of poor people who are homeless with little or zero income to afford the basic necessities of life - but it isn’t, it is about British MPs.

If you want to see how much for each item click here.

Disgusting don’t you think? But if you do read that link - you will see that they can, oh love the little poor MPs - claim their mortgage interest payment if their name is on the mortgage - now how about that for having a well paid job!?

There is a good debate going on here at the BBC WHYS (World Have Your Say) site about the need for women to have, or not, positive discrimination. There are a few people speaking in the debate, myself included.

My view is that women and men should have equality - that is what I am positive about. What I don’t agree with is discrimination. Positive discrimination is still discrimination - and personally, I cannot understand why people have difficulty understanding that. One poster referred to it as “affirmative action” - yet the outcome of that would be discrimination against men favouring women.

Another poster, Steve, came up with something that I agree with:

As for this Norwegian rule, under it would not 100% female directors be okay, but 65% male directors be illegal? That’s simply wrong. This political correctness is absolutely sickening. It’s funny how you tolerate discrimination when it benefits you. You should be ashamed of yourselves if you support discrimination like this. Maybe one day YOU will be disadvantaged by it.

A very apt point - this is all fine as long as the discrimination is in your favour. But we see in this world, not only does it turn, the political landscape changes so much it is unrecognisable to just a few years ago. As anyone knows who reads this blog I am for forward thinking, I am for, as I have said, equality, and we as a society baulk at the racism that was endemic just a few decades ago - yet now that kind of persecution is tolerated because of, not colour, but gender. The tables are turned because of a few loud voices and some very dubious academic text books.

I will never sit and type that women were once subjugated by ‘men’ - it was by society as a whole but I am simplifying things. I read on in the debate and Steve once again came up with this:

I’m curious about what percentage of people who work at slaughterhouses are women. Say if it’s less than 50%, should there be laws passed that say that women must constitute 50%? But there should for the highest level jobs? Picking and choosing equality, eh?

And this argument can go on and on. What is obvious is that it is about power play and how this certain few women have hoodwinks so many into believing they have due cause - with rational people they don’t. Again we have to promote equality, education can give that a broad field to work in.

Barring a few armies around the world we see that women are not front-line troops - yes it is an old argument but still a pertinent one. We see less women in the US getting the death sentence than men - and black or Hispanic men even worse! I only use that as an example because I do not agree with the death penalty at all. As Steve spoke about - do we dictate that ‘X’ number of women MUST be truck drivers, engineers, Janitors? Or do we give all people the choice as to what they want to be and facilitate a way up the promotional ladder if they wish it?

Do we then add a 50% quota on these things? 50% of front-line troops MUST be women? Must that same 50% be sent to the electric chair because they are women?

Discrimination is a one way street - and that direction is backwards, I will gladly stay off that street because it sickens me.

There seriously is a problem when even a cynic like me begins to laugh out loud while reading the news. I am not a government man - I am, and always will be a Socialist. But in that belief I have to understand that some things do need to be changed for the betterment of any given society - and as I am English I want the betterment of society to apply to England and the United Kingdom and her people.

I was looking at David Cameron and somewhat Nick Clegg, too, as real opponents of Gordon Brown and his government - to give this supposedly left of centre government a good run for their money in the next election. We will see what happens in the locals that are coming up - but I think that they will be a protest vote against the government - especially when you see the Tories and LibDems begin to speak like fools!

I read this story and gaffawed at George Osborne, he used a word that no one and I mean no one wants to see in political rhetoric at the moment - ‘tax’.

So the Conservative are going to put a tax on things that they, and middle-Britain, think are the causes of ‘Yobbish’ behaviour? Interesting way to deal with such things. But they do say that they will reduce taxation on beers etc that are low in alcohol? We have to give them credit for that - take a penny off a pint with APV of 3% or slightly above - yep, that is going to stop people buying alchopops. I love the way politicians think that this is the way forward - reduce taxation on something and increase it greatly on another and they are tackling the problem head on!? The real problem that I see is that middle-Britain will believe them - of course it is those evil alchopops that is the cause of such things as teen drunkenness. What is better is this:

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne told the BBC: “These drinks are targeted primarily at young women. They disguise the taste of alcohol by putting very sweet mixtures in so they taste like lemonade.

Ah - I get you George - those poor little females can’t take their booze so you will be taxing it more to make them stop drinking it? I almost laughed.

I would like to get George - and some of his mates, in hoodies and take them out for a night. They wouldn’t do it because they have about as much street as a lame frog. George - the little ladies all meet up at their friend house, buy a few bottles of vodka, drink that first and then go out on the town - but you should know this. Your focus group must have told you this. But wait…maybe they just watched some forlorn academic sit whimpering about something or another and deduced that alchopops were the real concern of the British people - coming up with the idea to tax these drinks out of the pocket of the drinking public. Amazing!

The Tories throw a lifeline to Labour by indicating they are going to tax the public more, good show, David, I think you have a great person in George.

Nick Clegg on the other hand can’t keep his party on track after such a short time as leader of the LibDems. A few resigned just to get the vote they wanted. OK - that isn’t so bad after all - they were voting with their conscience. But Nick drops a wonderful bombshell - he is going down the route of private medicine in the UK - or that is how it will be spun.

The Lib Dems’ NHS shake-up plans include directly-elected local health boards and greater use of the private sector.

See, Nick - I can do it from my shack in the outback’s of Canada!

When will you all learn? The NHS is something you cannot keep playing politics with. The British people will not allow the NHS to be broken up and privatised. No matter how much some want it, politicians I mean by that, it isn’t going to happen because it is one thing that the people will come out and give you a crowning over. Let the NHS get on with what it needs to do and that is treat the sick. I agree that it needs to be streamlined and needs to help those needing it the most - but just saying that the private sector can do it better has, and believe me I am not the only one who reads or listens to the news, handed a LibDem plank to hit you over the head with. So if you and the Tories wish to snatch defeat from the mouth of victory - keep saying you are going to tax people more and break up the NHS.

Sound-bites are getting old, the British people want a government that works for them. Deliver what Labour can’t, and that is…well, you work it out for yourselves.