Somehow I ended up on a site belonging to a British MP.  Now this little twat calls himself a liberal yet he is one of those idiots that believes that selling cigarettes in plain packaging is somehow going to stop people smoking.

He seems to be under the impression that the colour of a cigarette package somehow entices “children” to buy the things?  This must be one of the most deluded ideas that the Puritans have come up with yet.

When I started smoking, it was a case of nipping into a tobacconist and buying a cigarette.  Yes.  That’s right – one cigarette.  To this day I couldn’t tell you what brand it was or what colour its packaging was.  I know that practice of selling single fags has been stopped but it does indicate that packaging played no part in my choice.  Later on in life, I started buying them by the pack.  As far as I remember, I used to smoke Country Life which had a rather drab design, but was nice an cheap.

I have never heard of an instance where a twelve year old wanders into a tobacconist, sees the packs all stacked up behind the counter, and thinks to himself  “Wow! I must buy one of those.  They look great!”.  For a start, there is an age restriction on buying the things, so if he is under eighteen he shouldn’t be able to buy them anyway.

Plain packaging will have several effects.  It will make the tobacconists life far harder as he now has to read every label to make sure he is selling the right brand.  It is going to cost a fortune. The biggest consequence though will be a boom time for counterfeiters.  One outcome I can guarantee won’t happen though is that fewer people will buy them.

So far, the efforts of the Righteous have resulted in the closure of hundreds, nay thousands of pubs with the consequent loss of jobs.  It has divided society and stigmatised a large minority of the population.  The one thing it has failed to do is to reduce levels of smoking.  On the contrary, levels in Ireland have increased by 2% since the bans came in.

It’s worth reading that article.  It is a scary insight into the mind of a deluded bigot.  Here is a man on a mission to save people from themselves.

The best reading though is in the comments!

Like me, I would guess that you are sick and tired of all the half truths, exaggerations, evasions and bare faced lies you hear from our politicians these days. It has become a complete waste of time to listen to any of them on the media. Sometimes you know they are lying, sometimes you suspect it and other times you are not sure. Any wonder then that we are totally in the dark as to what is actually happening around us.

This has troubled me for some time now because I really do want to hear the truth, no matter how bad that might be. And then it struck me one evening, how I could get it. Like most great ideas, it is so simple. All you have to do is listen to exactly what the politician says, and then reverse it in your own head. Just think the complete opposite of what you just heard, and that will be the truth.

Here are samples of the sort of thing I mean.

Politician:  "There is simply no alternative".

What it means:  "There’s hundreds of alternatives but we’re too lazy to consider any of them".

Politician:  "We are committed to protecting the poor and disadvantaged".

What it means:  "We are really going to shaft those bastards".

Politician:  "I’ve never worked so hard".

What it means:  "I have not done a decent day’s work in my life".

Politician:  "This Government will try everything to ………..".

What it means:  "We intend to do fuck-all about ………..".

Politician:  "And let me be completely clear about this ……..".

What it means:  "This next bit is utter bullshit".

Politician:  "It is my intention to ……..".

What it means:  "I have no intention of ………".

Politician:  "The party leader has my full support".

What it means:  "I’m plotting with others to get rid of the bastard".

Politician:  "Having carefully studied all the facts of this matter".

What it means:  "This is the first I’ve heard of it, so here’s an off-the-cuff remark".

Politician:  "I will be giving this my full attention in the future".

What it means:  "This is the last I expect to hear about this shit".

Politician:  "There will be no hospital closures in the lifetime of this Government".

What it means:  "We’ll be shutting hospitals left right & centre".

Politician:  "My strong feelings on that matter are well known".

What it means:  "I couldn’t give a flying fuck either way".

Politician:  "We want to be transparent and accountable at all times".

What it means:  "There is no way we will ever be transparent and accountable in my lifetime".

Politician:  "The people have spoken".

What it means:  "The people in Government that is".

Politician:  "We are doing everything we can".

What it means:  "We are doing absolutely nothing and won’t do anything either".

Politician:  "This is now a priority".

What it means:  "It’s even off the back burner".

Politician:  "I have dedicated my life to public service".

What it means:  "The public will serve me for the rest of my life, if I can get away with it".

So, if you listen to any of them, on radio or television, try this out. You will be horrified at how accurate it turns out to be!

The fire brigade is going to charge €500 for a callout.

Yup.  You read that correctly.  Half a fucking grand to put out that chip pan fire or that smoking chimney.

At the moment this only applies to Dublin but how long will it be before other councils realise that there is another fat cash cow out there?

This charge raises all sorts of questions though. 

For a start, if I were a councillor I would send out a discreet memo to all my brigades ordering them to fill the water tenders with good old fashioned petrol.  After all, we are constantly being told of water shortages, and anyway at the best part of €500 an hour, we wouldn’t want them to put the fire out too quickly, now would we?

They claim the costs can easily be reclaimed through insurance, but what happens if the householder doesn’t have insurance?  There are one hell of a lot of people who don’t have it, either because of the cost or no company will insure them.  Of course even if you are insured, you’ll still pay as the insurance companies are just going to increase premiums to cover the extra claims.

So supposing your house goes on fire, and you have no insurance?  The brigade arrives and happily spends a few hours putting the fire out.  You then inform them that you are broke and can’t possibly pay the couple of grand they are demanding.  What are the brigade to do then?  Their only recourse to to reignite the blaze and leave the poor householder to it.

Of course with the way house prices have gone in the last couple of years, it would be a lot cheaper to just let the house burn.

There are times when it seems to work against the common good for the benefit of the few.  There are too many petty laws and restrictions, and frequently laws are introduced where existing laws are perfectly adequate.

On Friday however a new law came into effect that does meet with my approval.

Householders are now legally allowed to use any reasonable force to protect themselves and their property.

There are two things I like about this law.  The first is that the householder only has to perceive a threat.  Now I am a very insecure and paranoid person [for the purposes of this act] and I frequently perceive that a raised eyebrow or nod of the head is an implied deadly threat.  The second is that “reasonable force” covers the full range up to and including dispatching the intruder off to his [or her] maker. 

I had a busy day yesterday.  I have now secreted pitchforks, bill-hooks, pistols and grenades at various points around my property, ready for that intruder. 

I am now waiting for the first knock on the door.

Indeed, it is a good law.

They really fucking annoy me.

Some people seem to think this is a Good Thing so I decided yesterday to have a look at them.  I just wanted to see what the fuss was about.

I typed the name into the browser and it came up with a company that makes clips to fix a net to a goalpost.  I pondered this for a moment and decided something was wrong.  I was right.  I had misspelled their name.

I got into the site and had a look around.

OK, so it’s another variation on the video shop theme.  I have had membership of a video shop in the past, and have also been a member of one of those places that sends you your DVD of choice through the post.

I had a poke around the offerings of this latest crowd and as I suspected, it’s a load of crap.  I’m not blaming the company, but there just aren’t many decent films out there.  There are some, but I have either seen them or I can live without them.  There wasn’t a single offering in Netflix that I wanted to see.

Then I noticed something strange.

That white square on their front page is trying to entice me to sign up.  And the strange thing is that it lists four of my Facebook contacts.  I thought that this must be just a remarkable coincidence that they should happen to pick four people that I know.

I reloaded the page.  The four “friends” changed all right but I still knew them all.  Each time I loaded the page it threw up people I know.

I have a very simple question at this point.

To list my Facebook “friends” they must know who I am.

How?

How the fuck do they know that it’s me looking at their site?  I never gave them my name, address or anything.  I just typed their address into the browser without giving any hint as to who I am.  I didn’t follow a link that might have all those strings of letters that let the site know my identity.

I can only come up with one answer and that is that somewhere I have one of those “cookie” yokes belonging to Facebook sitting on my puter, and somehow Netflix have managed to read it, which I thought wasn’t possible.

One way or another, I find it rather creepy.

And no.  I won’t be joining.

I was reading Róisín Shortarse’s framework for tobacco control in Ireland and I came across That Figure again.  Incidentally, this is the same Róisín Shortarse who thinks raising the price of booze will cure all alcohol problems.

And what is That Figure you may ask?

“It is estimated that [smoking] related healthcare costs account for up to 15% of all annual healthcare costs here”

Strangely the paper then talks about “between 6% and 15% of all annual healthcare costs” which seems rather vague to say the least? And that would also assume that 85 to 94% of all healthcare costs are incurred by non-smokers?

But that’s beside the point.  The point is

How?

How do they estimate that smokers cost the health service €365 million a year?  What exactly incurs these costs and how do they know they are “smoking related”?

I have been smoking now for over forty years.  I have never been to the doctor with anything that could remotely be described as “smoking related”.  I have had my medical trials and tribulations but none of them had anything to do with smoking.  What’s more, I know a lot of people who smoke and they have the same story.  Sadly I did know a few people who died of cancer but the majority never smoked in their lives.

So what is this mysterious ailment that is incurring these huge costs?  Are they counting everyone who presents with a cough and assume that they are all smokers?  Are they assuming that all cancers are “smoking related”?  Is every child who presents with Glue Ear counted amongst the smoking casualties?

I would love to know where they get their figures from.

And why do I suspect that they are figures that are gleefully plucked out of the air to scare the sheeple?

Supreme Cunt Bertie Ahern ordered 7,000 electronic voting machines.

No one really knows why he did this.  He claimed that if we didn’t have them that we would be the laughing stock of Europe, which seems a little off beam as most other countries don’t have them either.  But then logic was never Ahern’s strong point.  He maintained that for people to vote using a pen and ballot paper was old hat and he wanted to brag to all his pals in Brussels that we were a high-tech country.  Now the wish to brag sounds a lot more like Ahern.  The little shit always did like the limelight.

What Ahern failed to realise is that the old system works.  Pens don’t get viruses and rarely break down.  They are pretty much fool proof.

The new voting machines were a different kettle of maggots altogether.  They were flaky.  They were unreliable.  Worst of all, they were wide open to tampering.  In short, they were the last thing people wanted to use when dealing with a totally corrupt system like our gubmint.

So for the last ten years all 7,000 machines have been sitting around cluttering up the place in various storage depots.

Our current gubmint has decided to dump the machines as the storage fees are mounting.  They now have to find a way of dumping them.

Total cost of this fiasco – €55,000,000

Current value – €0

*Sigh*

This recession thing is getting very tiresome.

There are a lot of avenues when it comes to raising cash to fill the EU gubmint’s coffers.  They could introduce all sorts of taxes on the higher earners [“Oh no, we can’t do that – no one would come over here and start up new businesses”]  They could chase down those who fleeced the country during “the good times”.  Feckit; there are dozens of ways.

But what are they doing?

Milking pensioners.

Yup.  That’s right.  Need a few million? – let’s force pensioners to pay more tax.

They sent out somewhere in the region of 150,000 letters to pensioners telling them that they are going to have to cough up a lot more tax. 

Of course this has led to blind panic which in turn led to 20,000 of ‘em phoning their tax offices to find out what the fuck was going on.  Chaos and confusion.

Frankly I am more than a little nauseated at this turn of events.  My theory is that they are scraping the pensions simply because they haven’t found a way of taxing children, the disabled or the handicapped. 

For once, I don’t blame the gubmint except in so far as it refuses to stand up to Brussels.  No – the blame lies squarely at the feet of the EU.  The bastards are here at the moment going through our books to make sure that we are all bled dry in order to save their precious fucking Euro.  Apparently the pension fiasco is their idea.

The Meeja insists on calling them the Troika, which is much too honourable a name.

They are just three blood sucking leeches.

“Government plans to ban cheap booze”

I’d link to it but I can’t find an on-line version.  I did a search using the above words and got a mere 29 million results and I ain’t gonna plough through that lot.  It seems to be a popular concept?

So Róisín Shortarse, our Junior Health Minister, reckons she is going to solve Ireland’s “drinking problem” by raising prices?

You really have to admire these bozos for their consistency.  The answer to any problem is to raise prices.  And then they whinge about Ireland being uncompetitive? 

There was a repeated reference in the article to “slabs” of beer.  I presume this refers to those carry-out trays of Budweiser and the like that you see in supermarkets?  Now Budweiser is nothing short of unadulterated horses’ piss, and to charge people extra for drinking it seems a tad cruel.  Generally the only people who drink it anyway are the Skobies.  Seeing as they are all unemployed then it strikes me as a good idea to have them semi-inebriated at all times as it keeps them quiet.

By sheer coincidence [?] I see there is an article in today’s Irish Times –

MP advise two alcohol-free days a week

Ignoring the painful grammatical error of mixing the singular with the plural, my first thought here is that all the UK’s MPs must be qualified doctors.  Why else would they [or he?] be giving medical advice?  And are the Great Unwashed going to be so impressed with this that they will forgo their Tuesday and Thursday slots down the pub?  I doubt it.

I really am getting very tired of these wankers deciding what’s good for us and trying to manipulate us into their way of thinking.  I admit that alcohol consumption is a major problem BUT it is a small group that is causing that problem.  Why the flying fuck can’t they target that small group, if they are so fucking worried?  Why do the rest of us have to suffer from their little bright ideas?  There are tons of laws that already exist to deal with unruly drunkards so why the fuck can’t they use those?

I really am getting pissed off with the Righteous deciding what is good for us and trying to engineer our lives to fit their vision of the ideal world.

I wish they would all just go and fuck themselves sideways.

In the meantime, I’m off for my couple of afternoon pints.