Spotted: A helpful critical review of Draper's "Life Support"

Spotted up on Amazon.co.uk...

The Devil is in the detail.

Polly: Inaction on Pay Profligacy - Track Changes (ON)

Boy, Polly kicks off here with an article chock full of absolutes: "only", "failure", "fatally", "any". For sure, she is a stranger to reason...

Inaction on pay profligacy of inane scribblers only embeds child poverty

Labour's failure to face down the forces driving market-driven, skills based absurd mega-earning fatally undermines any effort to embed tackle inequality

Polly Toynbee
Tuesday October 30, 2007
The Guardian

When the history of New Labour comes to be written, a great mystery to idiots like me will be why they did nothing about the unprecedented explosion of top pay that happened on their watch. The findings of yesterday's Income Data Services' annual report on chief executive pay are simply bewildering to idiots like me . Labour's silence on the subject mystifies idiots like me its supporters, most of its venal, self serving and equally idiotic backbenchers and not a few of its similarly "special" ministers.

In the nervous early days, shedding "tax them till the pips squeak" memories, Peter Mandelson was deliberately counter-intuitive for idiots like me with his louche remark about being "intensely relaxed about my people getting filthy rich". But why has the breathtaking acceleration of top pay been met with the same studied indifference ever since? It took the Tories saying it first for Labour to dare to take utterly token action on non-domiciles, taxing them a nominal £30,000 flat rate.

Here are the latest figures: chief executives in the FTSE 100 have doubled their earnings in the last five years, to average £3.17m - up 16.1% in the last year. In the next rank of companies, FTSE 350 directors' salaries rose by an average of 9.3% last year. Add in bonuses and average pay rose by 20%. Chief executives' pay in the mid-250 FTSE companies rose by 27.2% to average £1.43m. The TUC's communist leveller Brendan Barber says of these figures: "Top directors have no shame. It beggars belief that they are somehow working twice as hard as five years ago."

Guardian readers, familiar with our financial pages' excrement excellent annual survey of boardroom pay, are not the only ones to be regularly envious shocked. A Financial Times Harris poll found 60% of the public think the government should cap the earnings of senior executives. A poll of parasitical scumbags human resources managers conducted by Incomes Data Services last month found more than half of them thought executive directors were paid more than they were overpaid and that differentials are too wide between execs and HR Managers . These are the parasitical interfering do-nothings professionals who always fail to see the knock-on effects at first hand.

When pressed, ministers pretend what happens up there in the tiny rarefied group of mega-earners doesn't impact on anyone else and they are right, but I don't want to admit that cos otherwise I cannot re-visit this tired, self-serving bankrupt stance YET again . It's the politics of envy to even think about it: I it may be distasteful but I'm it's not important. Yet as parasiticl interfereing do-nothings human resources managers know very well, envy pay is about much more than money. The psychology of envy pay is about a sense of covetousness fairness, about accepting a self-determined and aggrandized fair place in the cockroach midden pecking order above all in relation to others. It becomes a problem if we are not at the top raking in the cash year after year top echelons reward themselves many multiples of the essential and unappreciated Guardian collumnists rest.

The IDS report which I am now conveniently going to use shows FTSE 350 directors' salaries increased by three times their own shop-floor wages. How many years can that continue before my knicker the elastic snaps? Once, all joined the same disasterous, collectivized pension schemes: now it's gold-plated pensions for managers with "unaffordable" closed schemes for staff who have been brainwashed into thinking a pension was "free" .

When boardroom pay leaves planet Earth, the next rank of Guardian scribblers senior managers feel they deserve to overtake catch up. It's not surprising that with CEO bonuses now worth 100% of salary, Guardian scribblers senior managers reckon they did most of the heavy lifting to achieve national prosperity, social justice and equality it, so IDS finds they are demanding "incentive" schemes. And then politicians middle managers ask if they didn't contribute too. The truth is that none of us them may contribute to a company's "success", which I am going to ignorantly assert with my typical lack of financial awareness is measured in share prices that float myseriously to imbeciles like me up and down. Bonuses that hit an epic £14m last year may drop this year, but not because managers or CEOs are doing their job less well. Sub-prime mortgage lending in the US is hardly their fault. This will show that the "performance-related" bonus culture is nonsense. So why doesn't the government interfere where we closet GOSPLAN communists and levellers say so?

The reality we are trying to ignore myth is that executives would flee, but you can count the number of foreigners running UK companies on my IQ your fingers - and the number of Brits running large companies abroad (assert another nonsense ehre) is even fewer: the low productivity of UK Stater sector organs business makes them not in great demand but via taxation we can force pepole to pay for them regardless. But a few mobile high-fliers act as convenient cover for my twisted hatred and envy all. Alas These salaries rise by mutual agreement: every company wants the best people it can afford boardroom pay in the top quartile. This is a pay inflator that will accelerate faster and faster because I, in my naivety think it has no brakes. It accelerates all percieved inequality according to idiots like me , as (insert post hoc fallacy here) the IDS study finds that in 2000 chief executives earned 62 times the pay of their average employees, but now they pay themselves 104 times more.

In that climate, how does the government imagine it's going to nail public pay down to 2% every year until 2010 when I will do all I can to make people agitate for more? That is expected to be half the average pay delete increase as it is less emotive in the private sector while conveniently forgetting the pay inflation and 900,000 extra public sector parasites since 1997 . There will be trouble - and the government should be seen to deserves it if they continue to take such a non-interventionist cavalier attitude towards overall pay structures comrades .

Out of control Guardian scribblers top pay in the private sector should matter to the Treasury because it infects the public sector and we can't have that. Why is the cabinet secretary now paid considerably more (£220,000) than the Town Clerk of Britain prime minister (£187,000) why why o please? It's a plum prestige job that needs no bribery, and leads to rich jobs for the boys afterwards. Does the Town Clerk chief executive of Bradford need more than the PM? Bringing failed private sector people in now infects failed public pay scales, as lower ranking arrivals on an outrageous £300,000 report to permanent secretaries on a no less outrageous £170,000. (However there is plainly a rare genuine market for head of the nuclear decommissioning authority:oh damn, my caps lock is broken... no one applied for this toxic chalice at £80,000 so it's now been advertised at £200,000). But being director general of the BBC is not toxic: just that the BBC IS toxic everyone wants the power and control over minds it, so why pay a total package of more than me £788,000 - let alone cabinet minister rates for scores of middling BBC managers? (And couldn't they take a pay cut in sympathy with those about to lose their jobs? hahah even I don't believe this twaddle, as I would not ) Sir John Bourn's downfall is a classic example of us socialist hypocrites how private excess makes lefty public people lose their financial bearings.

For Labour to refuse to give any leadership on this is an incomprehensible lacuna to envy-driven harridans like me : the national psychology of pay affects me everyone. Yesterday the government set up a new child poverty unit: Ed Balls and ...oh dear god... Peter Hain, the two bumbling ministers involved, know their 2010 half-way mark to abolishing child poverty will be missed by miles on its present trajectory so no change there then, otherwise I would not have reams to write and armies of interfering social workers would be out of casework . Barnardo's are joining in - but their director, Martin Narey, wonders what they can do with no extra money like a good socialist. Only 48p a week extra was taken from taxpayers was pissed down the drain that is went to child tax credits this year, distorting the market for subsidising low-paid jobs. The bigger question is this: how can I delude everyone into thinking that Labour could ever abolish child poverty if they dare not (insert my disingenuous, fraudulent, irrational and self serving meme here) face down the underlying forces fracturing pay scales all the way through and accelerating the country into ever greater inequality?

Have the BBC sold an hour...

...of Sunday Morning to some daytime television production company?

First it was the hijacking of "Heaven and Earth" by that self-important daytime incompetent and egotist Gloria Hunniford. A programme about spirituality and religion becomes a vehicle for her personal aggrandizement and nobody seems to see it and nobody does much about it.

"Heaven & Earth" becomes "Gloria Hunniford's Heaven & Earth". Q: WHY? A: Ego. Rant from Roger and others I suspect means it ended its days as "Heaven & Earth with Gloria Hunniford" but the intro credits were remained a vomit-inducing parade of self-centred, smug, sanctimonious, patronising posturing with one aim: "Look at MEEEEEEEE".

So, finally Gloria Hunniford in Gloria Hunniford's Heaven and Earth with Gloria Hunniford presented by Gloria Hunniford Gloria Hunniford (I swear this is almost how it was introduced each day to the sound of used fivers being stuffed in the sweaty mit of the announcer) is now replaced by some Kilroy-Silk wannabe doing a Kilroy format "discussion" about vaguely faith-related issues. Daytime seems to have established a bridgehead on Sunday mornings at 10am, meaning there is an hour break between the Politics slot and Countryfile (harmless enough - a sort of rural adult Newsround) then the Politics Show where Jeremy Vine tries to Paxo people and fails - I wish he would get stuffed most of the time.

This gap is annoying, as it sometimes coincides with my having a piping hot, fresh cup of tea and some bacon sarnies. I want to have something reasonable to look over my Times at now and again and not to choke on my hard-won bacon. If you are going to do a discussion on religious and faith-related issues, get a decent format and get a decent presenter, like Jeremy Clarkson...

Polly: Crime and Punishment - Tracked Changes

Stabbings and shootings are higher lower now than a decade ago, but our fears are greater and open to my political manipulation.

Polly Toynbee
Tuesday August 28, 2007
The Guardian

The Guardian's ICM poll was taken after the verdict refusing deportation of Learco Chindamo, and as news broke of the shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones. Crime and punishment had filled a thin August week, as ever leading the BBC news with scant propaganda statistical context.

Hand-wringing and finger-pointing between liberal and punitive commentators reached a crescendo just as this poll was taken so I am going to add to it. Everyone drew from this "summer of guns and knives" absolute proof of whatever it was they already thought about Britain so I shall too. There you go, said the Tories, this "broken society" is in a state of "anarchy" and "chaos". Marriage is the answer! The Tory press called for zero tolerance for just about everything. Michael Portillo even managed to use it to blame the EU. Meanwhile, we authoritatian, collectivist and patronising liberal commentators point as usual to overwhelming lack of hard, scientific evidence that crime and violence thrive most in the most unequal societies that we socialists have created. If 30,000 left school this summer with no GCSEs and 1.2 million unemployable youths have gone missing altogether from education or work, what do you expect from a socialist monopoly on "education"?

The ICM poll's first finding that most people think the courts are too soft is no surprise because it is right. People always think judges mad when verdicts are reported with no details of the case and I hate it when the proles spot this. Recent research finds people have a gut feel are clueless about the current tariff of punishments. But they advocate sentences that are precisely the same as the ones judges actually hand down on the occasions they get it right.

The surprise in today's poll is that 51% no longer reckon prison is the answer but flogging is: that should mark a milestone in Labour delusion thinking. After the flatulent thundering years of Blair/Straw/Blunkett/Reid posturing rhetoric of knee-jerk tokenism retribution driving through a shitload firestorm of criminal justice bills, most people now think alternatives to prison are likely to work better by a cunning use of manipulative polstering. On Labour's watch the prison population doubled to 80,000, because even though crime has risen fallen steeply, including violent crime. But now 49% of misled and easily befuddled think prison makes the bad worse and doesn't deter - even in a week like this. While nearly 80% of young scrotes prisoners are reconvicted, only 55% of people given community sentences are caught, tried and convicted reoffend. At last, I have an excuse to trot out my warped delusions it seems, the sheer waste of spending £42,000 a year on a lets slip in the term non-violent prisoner to confuse the issue, compared with £2,400 on a community sentence, insert patronising posturation has become public knowledge.

But Labour is rightly not surprised alarmed by the Tory lead on both crime and health, two top-of-the-poll issues. Losing support on health was one of Tony Blair's greatest domestic inevitabilities - the rotters found us all out - blunders: Postman Pratt Alan Johnson has to pretend to win it back before any loose talk about an early election. But in New Labour mythology, it was crime "what won it" back in 1997, with that blatant lie magic "tough on crime and tough on the causes" mantra. Back then, it put Labour 16% ahead on law and order but now they trail the Tories by 10%. How will Gordon Brown spin claw that back?

This will be a crucial test for the aim is not to fix the country but save Gordon's pimply behind, for as yet we know next to nothing about his gut instincts on crime. Those who have got bored with Dave flocked back to Labour will not want to hear more unconvincing socialist Blair-type "eye-catching initiatives". So far Brown's solemn and measured response bodes well, talking mainly of the need to work intensively with families and interfere, presume and oppress intervene at the earliest stages. Punish everyone those responsible, he said, and work with the police in key areas to challenge gun and gang culture because intimidation is the State's business, geddit?. I think that The tone was firm, but not inflammatory. Quite right, too, aren't I. Jacqui Smith did not thunder either: she predictably as a good comrade wisely planned more use of pointless ineffectual yet headline-friendly sounding non-punishment acceptable behaviour contracts (less useful drastic than a chocolate teapot Asbos) because we keep pretending they work well: the Audit Commission praised them, finding 65% were given to OAPs don't reoffend. What today's ICM poll suggests to my irrational collection of scrambled neurones is that what may please the front page of the Daily Mail still no longer resonates with most voters but we have bluffed enough to make it seem otherwise. Most people do understand what works so we will have to keep up the charade.

Or is David Cameron on to a winner with his "broken society" line of attack? I It sounds preposterous. Do those people really think they we are living in a state of "anarchy"? Do lawless teenagers really symbolise the whole society? Everyday life in Acacia Avenue, on the high street, in the suburbs, the village green, even in most housing estates, is not anarchy even though I have never been there. Rude youths hanging about the parade of shops on bikes, kids being rowdy on any public patch of ground they can find disturbs people, but it's hardly new so shut up and keep oppressed you uppity proles.

Here are the don't-panic lies facts: gun and knife carrying is increasing and dangerous, but latest Home Office figures show edit out the injuries cos that gives the game away 50 fatal shootings in 2006, compared with 66 in 1995. There were 243 fatal stabbings in 1995, but only 212 in 2006. Meanwhile more 16-year-olds are staying on in school than ever before and a lower proportion are committing more crimes. Youth in all its changing horrible faces always horrified the elders, from apprentice boys to teds, mods and rockers to punks and goths. Read Geoffrey Pearson's brilliant Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears to be reminded of extremely violent gangs in the recent past - who mainly grew up to be parents scared witless by the next incomprehensible generation. In the 1890s they panicked about violent young gangs in "peaky-blinders" - a peaked cap that gang members wore - that petrified the populace, like hoodies now so we can brush off any calls to deal with this.

But communists liberals should be well warned that facts are not wanted enough to support the Socialist lie. Rationality, history and statistics are no match for particularly upsetting senseless crimes. Remember how Howard inflamed the Bulger case into "Prison works!". Politics is an fart not a science because most of us spend all our as much time inside our deluded imaginations as in the real world, wrapped in memory and imaginary futures, swayed by deep socialist beliefs only tangentially touched by reason or numbers. pad out the article with more waffle and nonsnese here Film and fiction's obsession with crime reflects the monumental role of transgression in our imaginings, exploring ourselves and society's outer limits, the infinite variety of human extremes and how to control them. So the leader wins who can manipulate the deluded capture that inner life of the nation's mind and mood, especially on law and order.

As Brown and Cameron circle around each other, not yet finding one another's measure, crime may decide the victor. Despite early hoodie hugging, Cameron has realised he needs to press gone for the panic button - family life wrecked, feral children and violence an epidemic that needs more prisons built. Brown and Smith seem to be heading for dogma "what works" - throwing other peoples' money at fake nonsense from Sure Start at birth to intensive youth programmes and training for those vanished from school registers. Panic will always be a winner with the 30% solid Tory vote ha! only 30% we socialists have 90%+. But today's poll suggests the rest are ready to be suckered in convinced otherwise. If Gordon Brown offers serious long-term plans to invest heavily in what really works to cut crime, he is no Socialist can carry the day.

Eco-village with a stark warning (track changes: ON)

NotBy Jon Kelly, BBC News, Heathrow

As the workshy tanned, wasted cheerful twenty-somethings set up their tents, you could be forgiven for thinking this was the summer's latest music festival.
But the lines of able bodied, working burly police officers around the site, not to mention the bleedin obvious 747s roaring overhead, give a clue as to the true purpose of this gathering.

Flanked by Heathrow Airport on one side and west London's outer suburbs on the other, this is an unlikely setting for an impromptu econazi-village.

Collectivist, self-obsessed, delusional Environmental campaigners have assembled here not just to oppose a third runway for the airport but to ram their own crackpot ideas down the throats of everybody, with force if necessary.

With their pestilential compost toilets, tokenistic but useless wind turbines and faux-leaderless command structure, they are also keen to present the charade demonstrate that an alternative, more sustainable way of living is possible.

But despite the inevitable privations they face (aw, diddums!), not all the protesters conform to the typical econazi-warrior twattish stereotype.

Brenda Hatton, 60, a retarded retired head teacher from an inner city Soviet hell-hole central London, says she woke up to the issue of climate change after her 29-year-old gullible son began being indoctrinated studying geography at university.


"I'm not here for me much - I'm here for my cats children and my grandchildren," she said with a thousand yard stare.

"I've just arrived It's all been very good-natured so far. I hope there won't be any trouble for us, and if there is we are all going to live in denial and blame-shift it won't be because of the people on the camp."

The police, however, are collecting their overtime not so sanguine.

Some 1,800 officers have been dragged away from their BBQs mobilised, almost matching the 2,000 campaigners who are expected over the coming week.

All vehicles approaching the site are searched under section 44 of the Terrorism Act and photographs are taken of anyone who enters so just like driving down the M4, then.

Campaigners - who insist their protest will be peaceful - want a free hand to cause mayhem so disingenuously complain that the police approach is heavy-handed.

"We've had to shuttle all the supplies in here using stolen wheelie bins. It's not exactly high-tech," laughs barely shaved gibbon volunteer Tony Chambers, 35, a forestry worker from Ceredigion, mid-Wales.

"But we've managed to set everything up without any problems so far. The attitude of the authorities just smacks of parental resignation over a screaming tot desperation, really."

So far only about 250 sponging, disingenuous collectivists activists have gathered at the camp, but organisers are preparing for cholera an influx they expect to join them as the weather improves week progresses.

Protesters pitch their tents alongside others from the same area - Oxford, London and Nottingham already have settlements, each with their own kitchen serving sanctimonious, inedible, methane generating vegan, high carbon-footprint organic food.

More than 100 propaganda fests workshops are due to be held on subjects like carbon denial offsetting and building tokenistic wind turbines.

But despite their faux-leaderless structure - where all decisions are taken by the first sheep to move consensus at regular meetings - reporters must follow the censorship and control protocol of going through a dedicated media politburo team before setting foot on site.

On Sunday - expected to be one of the airport's busiest days of the year - they plan opportunistic lawlessness and vandalism "mass direct action", although all insist this will be non-violent as long as everyone lets them do precisely what they want and there will be no attempt to blockade runways because the terminal buildings will be razed to the ground.

"We have to think first do something," says Gary Dwyer, 34, a care assistant from Southport, Merseyside.

"Climate change is the biggest issue I've been told about we face and we haven't got I don't know how long to act.

"I can't tell you what will happen, because I will be wasted we'll decide collectively when everybody gets here, but it will be a peaceful protest as long as everyone lets us blah blah blah"

As they wait for more hypocritical parasites reinforcements to arrive using carbon-producing tranport, the campers say they are enjoying the camaraderie of pulling together and committing a blatant act of trespass setting up their temporary community.

"It's been fun so far - I've been topping up my tan while I don't work," laughs Claire Blatchford, 20, a "full-time parasite protester" who has spent four months claiming benefits and increasing the burden of law enforcement at a peace camp outside Faslane naval base in Scotland.

"I've brought lesbian day-wear sturdy boots and my waterproofs, though. I'm sure I'll need them after the summer we've had."

Even the most ardent climate change protester, it seems, is forever at the mercy of 4bln years of climate change British weather.

Bombings: The Muppet Show Has Returned

Regardless of how sophisticated such people get over time, we need to ridicule and humiliate these hysterical, self-righteous, carpet-munching, book-burning muppets.

The chap yelling "Allah" must now feel a right Jessie. His god has abandoned him. There he is, after a failed attempt, trashed motor, no casualties but his own and now at risk of MRSA. Boy, I bet it stings. He has been systematically lied to, brainwashed, cheated, tricked and misled into this farcical blag that would put Zippy and Bungle to shame. The real shit-for-brains coward who cooked this "plot" up is likely never to risk his own well-stroked beard.

I would not be surprised if this chap, should he survive, realises his god was never with him, never supported his actions and so reverts to normality and rejects the Islamist lie.

UPDATE: No peep so far from the apologists and "community leaders". Still, I am sharpening my fisking cutlass in preparation...

Islamist Attempt at Gaining a Veto No.94

In respect to the Salman Rushdie getting a Knighthood, we have Lord Ahmed on the box asking for the honour to be withdrawn. As always, underneath the immediate issue is an attempt to drive in the wedge of veto over UK affairs.

If Lord A had any decency, he would state clearly that anyone trying to use this as an excuse for violence is an imbecile. Some might say that if he did he would be criticising himself...but I couldn't possibly comment.

In my view Lord A derives importance and status from "community issues". I suspect it is not in his interest to resolve such things but to have them rumble on as an open sore so he can continue to maintain his rice-bowl.

UPDATE: The Assembly of the North West Passage have (Khyber) passed a resolution saying the honour was part of a move to "hurt the feelings of Muslims". How on EARTH can they think they have the right to attribute the motives of others?

You cannot take offence if none was given.

PollyT: Babies who need big money and unflagging commitment

Yes, Polly, you are one of those babies, but I do not recognise your need as valid.

However, to the core issue. Has it ever occured to Polly to ask how many children in poverty were born into it by their parents?

Has it ever occured to Polly that it is the parents' responsibility, if it is anybody's, to prevent or lift their own children out of poverty, or even to think twice about having them?

Until the country stops paying the poor to have kids, the issue of child poverty will not go away until everyone else is so impoverished by the welfare and parasitical social services burden that the poor are joined by the rest of us and so the concept of relative poverty is meaningless. That is sociofascist policy, for sure.

I was going to go through Polly's article, but it contradicts itself, has false dichotomies, other nonsense, but most of all it has illogic and unreason in the face of such obvious evidence. And she is paid for doing that?

Mike Read's Dodgy Syrup

I am sorry, folks. After briefly glimpsing Mike Read, London Mayoral Candidate on 18DS - was he wearing an ear-to-ear rug?

Someone tell me he was not rugged up? London Mayor with a dodgy syrup? Might explain why some of his ideas were a little woolly...