The perfect excuse

Perhaps one of the daftest headlines I've seen for sometime is this one from The Telegraph.

Men owe women for 'creating beer' claims academic

You may not be surprised to find that the "academic" in question is a woman. Her claim is based on the evidence that for hundreds of years it is was the job of women to brew beer.

Fair enough, I'm not disputing that claim, but that doesn't prove it was a woman who "created" beer any more than it proves that it was a woman who created bread. It just proves that for hundreds of years it was left to women to do the job of making beer.

And for hundreds of years it was left to women to do the job of laundry, child rearing, sewing, cooking, cleaning and looking after the home.

So if men have women to thank for beer - then, by the logic of this academic, women only have themselves to blame for creating housework. So excuse me while I pop to the local for a swift half and a game of darts while the missus gets on with the ironing.

Predictable and pointless

A task force set up to investigate the state of social work in Britain after the murder of Baby P under the very noses of social workers has come up with some wholly predictable and pointless recommendations.

Basically, they suggest more pay and higher status for social workers.

Yes, really. The reason Baby P wasn't helped, apparently, is that social workers - as well as, presumably, the police officers and health care workers who also ignored Baby P's sorry plight - failed to act because they don't get enough money or social status.

The leader of this task force was one Moira Gibb - a member of the social work profession for some 25 years herself. It's like asking MPs to investigate the expense scandal (yes, I know they did - and I know they came up with the idea of more pay and status for MPs).

I'll tell you why social work is failing. There are two fundamental causes.

First is the feminisation of social work. I have no idea what the percentage is, but the majority of social workers seem to be female. The vast majority also happen to be left wing which is the second problem.

The way to solve the crisis in social work is not to throw yet more money at the industry, but to rebalance it. More men and more right wingers in social work.

Why will this help?

Because men (heterosexual men, anyway) are more likely to be emotionally dispassionate and right wingers are far more likely to be judgemental and be more balanced in that judgement. Left wingers are, by their own admission, non-judgemental - except when the person or thing they are judging conflicts with their left wing ideology in which case they come down on it like a ton of bricks.

Hence a married Christian couple who dare to expose their child to the "horrors" of Catholicism are much more likely to have their children taken away than a drug-addled single mum who has a succession of psychopath boyfriends with a taste for extra strong ultra cheap supermarket lager and a penchant for tattoos.

Social work, though, is a self-perpetuating industry. It's very existence depends on having the right social conditions in place to need a social work industry. It needs a drug culture, a welfare culture, a binge drinking culture, a domestic violence culture, a single parent culture and so on to enable it to grow and expand. Other peoples misery is the life blood of social work - social workers need it to justify their employment and pay.

The last thing they want to do is actually solve anything.

Fags and booze

I've never been a cigarette smoker, but I do like a pint or two and I know my limits when it comes to booze. I've never been a big drinker, but once upon a time I would have been out every night of the week and more often than not I'd spend the evening in a pub with my mates. As I got older I tended to do this less and less until I reached the point where, as a married man with two kids, my evenings out with my mates are restricted to once or twice a month.

Last night was one of those nights and I met up with a couple of guys I hadn't seen for quite a few years. One of those was a chap who used to be a heavy smoker, but after spending the last 10 years living and working in California he has since given up the fags and gained about five stone. It's not hard to see why.

When I used to see him regularly before he went to the USA he would drink, at most, about five pints in a night while smoking the best part of a packet of cigarettes. Last night I watched him put away eight pints of premium strength lager in three hours before staggering out of the pub. I was a little surprised to see him downing so much so I asked him why - and he told me that he tends to drink faster since he quit smoking.

Perhaps I've inadvertently stumbled across a link between the rise in binge drinking and the decline of cigarette smoking? If my mate is typical of cigarette smokers then it would seem that having a few fags with your beer moderates the intake of alcohol - and drinking less alcohol tends to make one less drunk.

And with the cost of a pint of beer what it is today it makes economic sense too - with three extra pints costing close to £9 compared with around a fiver for a packet of cigarettes. I don't know, but it's a thought isn't it?

One thing is certain - nobody wanders out of a pub and gets into a fight because they've had one too many cigarettes.

Arrogant or stupid?

You'd be hard pressed to find a more liberal luvvie than Sir David Attenborough. Thanks to some excellent natural history series, Sir David seems to have become one of those people who can do no wrong - but he's never fooled me. Attenborough was behind a lot of the changes that took place in the BBC in the sixties that turned it from a conservative institution into the mouthpiece of the liberal left.

Anyway, it seems Sir David might have upset a few liberals by becoming a patron of the Optimum Population Trust - a fairly benign name for a group that wants to see a cull on human beings.

“There are three times as many people in the world as when I started making television programmes only a mere 56 years ago,” he said, after becoming a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) think-tank.

A hundred years ago there were 1 billion people on earth. By the time we reached the turn of the millennium there were 6 times as many - and this despite two huge global conflicts and the curse of communism which killed off a couple of hundred million. Imagine where we'd be without that!

I can't for the life of me understand what the fuss is about. The earth will sustain as many people as it can sustain - if there are too many then the earth won't be able to sustain them. The population will fall. You'd think that someone like Attenborough would understand that - but apparently not.

I also can't understand why liberals like Jonathan Porritt - another "environmentalist" and patron of the OPT - think that the earth can only accommodate a certain number of people, but Britain can somehow find room for hundreds of thousands of immigrants year after year without ever bursting at the seams.

It's also odd that these people seem to believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming which they insist will kill billions of humans. Why do they worry if that is what they want? Perhaps they know damn well that it won't, but it's a good excuse for limiting the very thing that provides for population growth - economic progress through abundant power supply.

Anyway, I don't know what they are worrying about. Eventually there will be a new Ice Age and the human population on earth will be slashed down to a few hundred million. The earth is a funny thing - no matter what we do it seems to follow its own destiny. Only the supremely arrogant or incredibly stupid think otherwise.

The sick and twisted mind of social services

The Telegraph reports that at least seven children have been taken away from their parents and placed into care because social services deemed that they were too fat.

Earlier this month, Tam Fry, a member of the National Obesity Forum's board, told a conference that youngster over-fed by their parents should be treated as victims of abuse, as happens with malnourished children.

Another bloody quangocrat deciding how we should live our lives and bring up our children. I'd be interested to know just how many malnourished children have been taken into care recently? Only a social servant could find the two comparable. And of course, like all social services creeps, Fry justifies ripping children away from their parents and families by saying it's "for the children".

Mr Fry said: "It is drastic but it's a long-term therapy. For the sake of the children it does need to be done because we have got children who are horrendously fat." (My italics).

We've got social servants who are horrendously stupid as well. Who's gonna save the kids from them? If you are seriously worried about causing long term damage to a child then the last thing you should be considering is taking them away from their parents. It's also well established as a fact that children do best when brought up by a married mum and dad in a traditional family unit where mum stays home to look after the kids and dad goes to work - but that hasn't stopped social liberals making it easier for parents to split and mums to abandon their children to strangers while they go to work.

This is the sick twisted collective mind of social services. They and their liberal progressive colleagues have wrought havoc on this nation with their Marxist ideas and authoritarian ways, but they refuse to accept it. When the revolution comes - as it will - these people will need to be winkled out of the fabric of our society along with their ideas. The enormity of the task is frightening, but if Britain is to recover as a nation it is necessary.

A global warming experiment you can try at home

As I frequently mention, I'm no scientist but I am endowed with a degree of common sense and common sense tells me that "global warming" is entirely or, at worst, mostly, due to natural causes - and mostly due to that big ball of fire we call "The Sun".

Canutists scoff at this suggestion - even while conceding that the sun was indeed the cause of previous warming cycles. They claim that they know the sun isn't causing the warming this time because there has been no significant increase in something called Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) during this warming cycle. What they frequently fail to mention, however, is that TSI has been at historically high levels both before and throughout this period of warming.

So, armed with this info and my common sense I conducted a small experiment which you can try at home. All you need is a "sun", an "earth" and a little time. As the earth is predominantly water I used a large saucepan of water. For the sun I used a gas hob.

Now turn on the heat and set the setting to low then place the pan of water on the hob. You'll notice that, the water does not suddenly become warm, but, at first, the water remains cold - over time it gradually heats up. What is more, that heat dissipates out of the pan - if you hold your hand over the water you will feel the heat.

Now turn the heat up to medium. What happens? Yes! The water heats up some more and the heat it gives off is increased. Now turn the heat down to low and you'll notice that even though the source of heat is decreased, the warmth from the water remains high for some time after. It does not suddenly return to the previous temperature. This is because the water stores the heat and releases it slowly into the "atmosphere".

Now the clincher. Turn the heat right up and leave it there on high for 30 minutes (to simulate thirty years). Does the water reach it's optimum temperature in the first minute? Not even in the tenth minute. It keeps getting warmer and warmer and giving off more and more heat until it eventually started to boil (about 25 minutes in my case). When I turned the heat off the water did not suddenly become cold - it only cooled gradually.

So, you see, TSI didn't need to get any stronger - just by being turned up high it warmed the oceans for 30 years and those oceans stored up the heat and gradually released it to the world causing a slight warming. Now the sun has "turned off" and those oceans are starting to cool - very slowly. As long as it stays turned off that will continue to happen - hopefully that won't be too long.

I know it's not "scientific", but I have limited resources. I'm sure if the IPCC were to give me some of the billions it spends on research - say, £5,000,000? - I could come up with a peer reviewed (reviewed by my peers down at the Red Lion) study.

You can keep all your bull about watts per sq metre, upper tropospheres and minute increases in an essential trace gas - my common sense says warming is natural and normal and so is cooling. Only one is better for humanity than the other. Can you guess which?

Looking for a needle in a needle stack

One of the problems with the social sciences which leads me to the conclusion that they are, on the whole, the modern day equivalent of alchemy practiced by the modern day equivalent of snake oil salesmen is that they always find what they are looking for.

This is why I have no confidence in the sort of inquiry which are useless Home Secretary has initiated.

Jacqui Smith said that Vernon Coaker, the Police Minister, will carry out a two-week appraisal of recruitment and promotion practices in forces across England and Wales.

Miss Smith is quoted as saying "[t]he police service is determined to offer fair and equal opportunities to all its members, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or background" even though that is far from the case. If you are a white heterosexual male you have far less chance of having your application into the police accepted than a black female lesbian applicant. And ethnic minority police officers are promoted five times faster than their white colleagues.

I don't want to prejudge Mr Coaker's methodology, but I suspect he will be getting the points of view from a lot of ethnic minority people and their race-hustling support groups. I doubt whether he'll bother to solicit the views of many white policemen or applicants. As a result, I believe Mr Coaker's report will say something like "things are improving, but we have to do more to root out racism ...." and so on.

So as a worthwhile study it is the equivalent of trying to find out if kids are overweight by only measuring overweight kids and completely ignoring the vast majority who are not overweight.

In other words, it will find what it is supposed to find and nothing else.

Wouldn't say boo to a Tory

A study in the US suggests that conservative voters are more likely to be startled by loud bangs or threatening images than liberal voters according to the Washington Post. Or, at least, that is how the WashPo frames it .....

People who startle easily in response to threatening images or loud sounds seem to have a biological predisposition to adopt conservative political positions on many hot-button issues, according to unusual new research published yesterday.

Yeah, right - which is why so many conservatives hate guns so much. All those loud bangs are likely to send them running for the Kool Aid - except, hang on, isn't that liberals?

It should also be a major concern for the US Army too. As an overwhelmingly conservative bunch it must be a bit of a worry that their soldiers are likely to run and hide like startled rabbits at the first sound of gun fire.

Except, of course, that it is all bollocks.

What the study did find is that, across groups of people, there seems to be an association between sensitivity to physical threats and sensitivity to threats affecting social groups and social order.

So what the study actually determined is that conservatives are more sensitive to real threats while liberals are more sensitive to perceived threats.

Yep- that sounds more likely. The study is, of course, a prime example of quack science in operation and only goes to prove that the best thing to do would be to round up all the social scientists and dump them on a remote island completely cut off from the rest of the world. They are, after all, half way there already.

What's it like on planet Liberal?

Say what you like about liberals, but you have to admire their consistency - or rather their consistent lack of it.

Of course, honouring a "pioneer" like Marie Stopes might seem like an obvious thing for liberals to be pleased about. She was the architect of "family planning" after all - a great feminist breakthrough in the eyes of the left. The fact that her rationale behind family planning lay not so much in her belief in feminist issues, but her belief in racial purity and she openly advocated compulsory sterilisation for those she considered unfit to be parents - which seemed to include the short sighted as she cut her son from her will for daring to marry a woman who wore glasses.

Despite her racism, apparent support for Nazism and her belief in the questionable "science" of eugenics she remains, for some reason, a heroine of the left. It must be tough being a liberal when you have to balance such things - deciding which of your favourite victim groups takes precedence. On the one hand a feminist, on the other a racist - do we support her or not? Heads we do, tails we don't ........

Sickos!

The case of Darren Harkin exposes the real sickos in our society. Having murdered his six month old step brother at the age of 12 Harkin escaped form a low security psychiatric hospital and went on to rape a 14 year old girl.

Darren Harkin, 20, who was originally detained for the murder of his six-month-old stepbrother.

Detained? Detained is what happens to you when you are late for an appointment. Sick murdering bastards who hack babies to death should be imprisoned - and then hung by their neck until dead.

In January 2000 Harkin, aged 12, had walked into a police station in Bristol and confessed to the murder of his stepbrother. He had stabbed the baby in the head and chest with a kitchen knife and cut off his right arm.

Remember that point - that Harkin had walked into a police station and confessed to killing his step brother. It is crucial.

Harkin could give no explanation for his actions, and doctors later diagnosed schizophrenia and “autistic spectrum disorder”, which meant that he was unable to comprehend the consequences of his actions on other people.

He understood his actions well enough to hand himself in to the police and confess to murder. That in itself demonstrates that this sick sod understood entirely the "consequences of his actions on other people.". But the authorities preferred to ignore that obvious point and come up with some deficiency through which they could justify his actions to themselves. Boy, I bet they were ever so pleased with themselves when they came up with "autistic spectrum disorder".

So having had a bunch of doctors confirm that Harkin had something wrong with him which meant that he was quite happy to go around dismembering babies, our criminal justice system kicked into action and classified this psycho as a victim.

He spent several years in a medium-security psychiatric hospital before being transferred to the Hayes in the village of Pilning near Bristol, which is managed by the National Autistic Society.

So instead of mouldering in a top security prison for his heinous crime, Harkin was treated with kid gloves and offered "help" and "understanding" for his condition and looked after by a charity. A charity for goodness sake!

This help and understanding included the following healthy educational activities.

He was taken by staff to snooker clubs and to watch violent horror movies. He was also allowed to build up a collection of violent and pornographic movies on DVD which, no doubt, he was allowed to watch in his cosy little room.

In February Harkin absconded but the supervisor did not raise the alarm for half an hour for fear of “panicking” other residents.

Very thoughtful of them. They don't tell us if they mean residents of the hospital or the village of Pilning, but I expect they mean the other residents at the hospital. I doubt whether the welfare of the innocent law-abiding citizens of Pilning even entered their head.

After his escape, Harkin burgled a nearby house before crossing the Severn Bridge on foot and abducting a 14-year-old schoolgirl at knifepoint in Chepstow high street. He threatened to kill the girl before raping her twice. After his arrest it emerged that Gwent Police had not been alerted about his escape.

Well, why would they need to know? After all, is it necessary to let the police know about every violent knife wielding psychopath with a history of murder and an exposure to violence and porn roaming the streets? Surely that would distract from their real job of hounding motorists and filling in forms.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the title above refers to Harkin and his like. It doesn't. The sickos that concern me are the fools who run are criminal punishment systems that do everything they can to excuse someone like Harkin of his crime and allow him to commit further revolting acts.

Thanks to them a 14 year old girl will suffer for the rest of her life. Thanks to them this is neither the first case of this kind of thing nor will it be the last. Of course Harkin had something wrong with him - murdering psychopaths always do. Hanging a label on it and trying to treat it is neither desirable or necessary. What was necessary is that this violent sick pervert should have been prevented from ever being able to do something like that again.

Thanks to our sicko liberal society he wasn't.

The Stan theory on obesity

We keep hearing about the "obesity timebomb" - a rather tired phrase relating to the fact that people seem to be getting fatter these days and we've all seen dozens of suggestions as to why people are eating more, but there is one that seems to have been overlooked.

The relative warm climate we've enjoyed over the last 20 years or so.

No, I've not been converted to AGW - I still think the warming was entirely natural - but equally natural is for animals to take advantage of times of plenty and mild weather to feed and put on extra layers of fat in preparation for when it gets cold and food is harder to come by.

I think people are getting fatter for the simple reason that we still have our animal instincts - buried deep within us - and for many people that instinct is telling them that there is a period of intensely cold weather and severe shortages ahead. So they have been eating more, storing fat and adding layers to prepare themselves for that cold spell and period of scarce food.

Many scientists have been warning that the sun is heading into a "cool" phase and this may lead to mini-ice age conditions lasting for up to 50 years - a scenario which may see Britain enduring conditions similar to Dickensian times when the Thames regularly froze over.

Should these scientists be proved correct the fatties may yet have the last laugh on the preachy fatists.

Life is ......

I've seen a few blogs and commentators musing on the question of why conservatives tend to be happier than socialists.

As usual the social scientists have waded in with their various viewpoints wrapped up in impervious jargon and impenetrable waffle - but the reason why is actually very simple.

It's a question of attitude.

Left = life is so unfair.
Right = life is what you make it.

There you go. Question answered. No need for government grants and a four year study by social scientists who can't decide if their arse is their elbow.

Swindling the viewer

The makers of the Great Global Warming Swindle have been given a slap on the wrist by the broadcasting watchdog, Ofcom (who makes up these stupid names). Apparently the ticking off was not because the programme misled viewers in any way, but it did, so Ofcom claim, break Channel 4's own rules on "impartiality".

A couple of things about this decision intrigue me. First of all, why would anyone think that a programme entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle" would be impartial? The clue is in the title, guys.

Secondly, seeing how Channel 4 news run considerably more reports which do mislead the public regarding global warming and very rarely provide any balance to the opposing viewpoint why is it that Channel 4 News hasn't been criticised for breaking it's own impartiality guidelines?

Thirdly, why did this Ofcom finding get so much news coverage? The Great Global Warming Swindle was made, in part, as a response to Al Gore's much vaunted and totally one-sided "An Inconvenient Truth". This film was not only very partial, is was found to be far from the truth and contained no less than 11 inaccuracies which did materially mislead the viewer according to British judges.

Did that news receive the same sort of coverage as this? I don't think so.

It's one of the reasons why people like Al Gore and the equally disreputable Michael Moore prefer to make "movies" rather than TV documentaries. If you make a documentary for television you have to abide by certain rules like "being honest" - but if you make that "documentary" for the cinema those rules don't apply. So you can lie as much as you like, you can be as partial as you like, you can cut and edit to twist the words and views of people as much as you like - it's only a film. Doesn't stop those films being shown on television, though.

Anyway - having made this ruling, I wonder if Ofcom will get off their backsides to do anything about the way broadcasters - especially the BBC - present man-made global warming as "fact" without ever questioning it?

I won't hold mu breath.

Who's a clever boy, then?

As a general rule I have a mistrust of anything which has the word "social" in it.

As soon as someone starts muttering about "social inclusion", "social cohesion" or "social justice" my inner self triggers a warning mechanism that tells me - beware, loony leftie about. It still amazes me that people are unable to equate people who talk incessantly about social this and social that as being social - ist. David Cameron is one of the worst offenders in that respect - always harking on about his "social agenda". Just admit it, Dave - you're a closet commie.

Anyway, nowhere does this mistrust of the word social manifest itself more with me than in the "social sciences".

It's one of the many peculiarities of this post modern world that if you stick the word "science" up against something then people suddenly seem to think it's factual, pertinent born out of solid research, empirical evidence and observation.

Don't get me wrong - some of it (far too little, in my opinion) is based on sound common sense, but the vast majority is just intellectual bullshitting. The trouble is a lot of people like intellectual bullshit and Daniel Finkelstein writing in The Times appears to be one of those when he discusses "social psychology".

[A]n intellectual revolution is under way that will change the way we think about public policy just as the free market economists did in the 1980s. I wonder whether one day soon a future party leader will turn round to his agent and say: “Finally, I've got it! Human behaviour.”

No shit! The trouble with human behaviour is, just as you think you have it figured, someone comes along to completely contradict you. There you are, post 1918, thinking we've had the war to end all wars and that the League Of Nations will ensure that nothing like that will ever happen again and then up pops up some turd with a tache. Human behaviour is such a bummer.

The breakthrough came with E.O. Wilson's controversial work Sociobiology, first published in 1975. Since then a number of academics, including familiar names such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, have illuminated aspects of human behaviour by explaining how they arise from our Darwinian struggle.

Brilliant! OK, never mind the fact that the "Darwinian struggle" itself remains an unproven hypothesis surely it's obvious that you can still draw valid conclusions from an erroneous starting point? If not, then the IPCC are in deep shit.

The second stream of thought is behavioural economics. For twenty years now, some economists have been looking at the psychology of economic decision-making. Instead of seeing humans as rational calculating machines, behavioural economists have been conducting experiments to assess how real choices are made.

Uh oh - I can see where this is going.

On paper, two alternatives may look economically identical. But the way that they are framed and the context will, in the real world, determine the choice.

Astounding. So this intellectual breakthrough consists of revealing that people make different choices depending on their circumstances. Did we really need anyone to tell us that? Nevertheless, Finkelstein thinks he's on to something here.

The most important step forward has come with David Cameron's correct insistence that social change is as likely, or more likely, to come through influencing behaviour as it is through regulation.

Yes, yes - go on, Danny boy - you're are getting there. And .......

[T]he work of social psychologists on the power of public commitments is entirely absent from the debate on marriage and on reducing delinquency; and our struggle to overcome our tribal instincts doesn't figure in the discussion of immigration.

Damn - he lost the plot again. For a start, there is plenty of input from "social psychologists" to the debate on marriage and delinquency. The trouble is, progressives won't listen to them because they tend have titles like "Bishop of York" or The Pope".

And the only people struggling to "overcome our tribal instincts" are progressives. Most of us just accept that that is human behaviour - always has been and always will be. It doesn't matter how much you struggle to change it you never will - and if you try then I guarantee that one day it will come back to bite you on the arse very very hard. Ask the people of the former Yugoslavia if you don't believe me.

Finkelstein has fallen for the oldest trick in the book. Taking something old, repackaging it before selling it on as "new and improved" and charging twice the price for it. You see, "social psychology" is just another way of saying "religion" and we've just had fifty years of progressive policy to eradicate religion and the moral authority, personal discipline and individual responsibility it provided from policy making. Now they've discovered it's essential?

Wow - aren't you the clever one, Danny.

Correlation does not imply causation

Ever heard that expression? I believe it comes from the world of science where it is used to caution against jumping to the wrong conclusion. Which is why it seems odd that a team of scientists from Kings college London have come to the conclusion that gun crime is caused by poverty and inequality.

[The team] said ministers should instead address a "direct correlation" between economic inequalities and violent crime.

How can this be? How can scientists well versed in the above phrase suddenly abandon this scientific standard?

Because they are not real scientists - they are social scientists. Criminologists to be exact - but they are all the same. Social scientists are the very opposite of real scientists in that they don't rely on empirical evidence or observation to come to a conclusion. Instead they rely entirely on the belief that correlation is proof of their hypothesis.

But hang on, aren't we missing one small point here? We've always had poverty and inequality - far worse than we do now - and we've had guns for hundreds of years. There is far less poverty and inequality now than there was 50 years ago so how come there is so much more gun crime now?

It's also quite odd that people who are so poor can afford to go and buy a gun. It would be a lot lot cheaper to pop down to their local ASDA and buy an interview suit - but for some reason that doesn't occur to them.

It seems their theory has failed at the first hurdle - it doesn't even pass the correlation test. However, I do believe they are on the right lines - but for the wrong reasons. The "economic inequalities" they cite are real - but they are the economic inequalities of the underworld - particularly drugs.

A lot of people see their peers swanning around in their BMWs and Mercs, living the life of Riley with multiple homes, lots of "bling" and surrounded by pretty women and they know that they got that through dealing in drugs (and, often, prostitution). They see that these people have "respect" from their peers because if anyone disrespects them they will shoot them and they want what they have. So they go and buy a gun and start to deal in drugs.

In that way, these young gun thugs are much like social scientists - they also believe that correlation is causation.