Apparently the Irish do.

Today our gubmint is parting with €1.25bn to gamblers without any compulsion to do so.  Yup – €1,250,000,000 that might as well be going up in smoke.

But it’s not just the gubmint.

The fucking people of Ireland are at it too.

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people being interviewed and saying that they know the property tax is “necessary” or “fair” or even “right”.  They say they “accept that Ireland is in a mess” and then go on to say they are keen to “do their bit”.  Un-fucking-believable.

I have been paying taxes all my life.  Every time I enter a shop, I pay VAT.  Every cent I earned was taxed.  They are even taxing my pension.  I have moved house a couple of times and paid massive Stamp Duty each time.  I inherited a few bob and was taxed heavily on that.  Every time I fill the car with petrol I pay Excise Duty and VAT.  Every pint I drink is a huge donation to the Excise Man.  Every ounce of baccy I buy is mostly tax.  Every fucking move I make is taxed.

Only yesterday I filled the oil tank [the neighbours found my syphon again].  It cost me over €700, and a hundred of that went straight into the gubmint’s coffers.  €100 for what?  What did they do to deserve that much?  It was a private transaction between myself and the oil company but they still have to sneak in and grab a large chunk of it.

it is NOT my “duty” to pay extra taxes.  It is NOT my “duty” to bail Ireland out of a mess I didn’t create.

It IS the gubmint’s duty to stop throwing my fucking cash away like fucking confetti.  They needn’t throw away that €1.25 billion for a start.  There is no reason to pay it.  Someone gambled and lost.  Tough fucking shit.  But why do we still have to pay?  Because the fucking EU says we must.  And why do they say that?  Because it’s their fucking banks who are the gamblers.

Apart from that, they still throw money around like there is no tomorrow.

I really am pissed of with this country.

And I am also getting pissed off with the people in it.

I’m not a great fan of VB and even less so of TV3, but the one thing I will say about him is that when he askes a question, he won’t be fobbed off.

As a background to this I had better explain that For a couple of years now our gubmint has been paying off billions [not millions, billions] to bond market gamblers when there is no legal reason for them to do so.  Those gamblers took a punt and lost, yet our gubmint is insisting on paying them back in full.  Why?  It may be the merest of coincidences that these gamblers are mainly German banks, but whenever the gubmint is asked why they are paying these debts, they usually mutter some crap about being told to by the ECB.

Yesterday there was a press conference held by the “Troika”.  Fuck but I hate that word – it lends them a sense of respectability, when in reality they are only a tiny step up from the Mafia.  They are here for one reason and one reason only – to make sure that they are milking us for every last fucking cent in our pockets.

In the clip below, one of them – a smarmy little bollix from the ECB “praises” the Irish for their deep insight into financial matters.  This apparently is based on a chat with his fucking taxi driver.  If I ever find out who that taxi driver is, he’s going to end up in a shallow grave in the Dublin Mountains.

Our Vinny then asks him why we are paying these billions to the German gamblers.

His answer [or rather, the lack of] speaks volumes and illustrates fairly conclusively that as far as the EU is concerned we are here merely to be raped and pillaged.  The body language alone is worth watching.  [It’s a long video, but don’t worry – the juicy stuff is in the first seven minutes or so]

http://www.tv3.ie/videos.php?video=44511&locID=1.65.169

Maybe that will explain my utter contempt and distrust of the EU?

Any time the Bully State wants to impose more regulations and crappy laws on us it’s always a case of “think of The Children”.  We mustn’t drink in front of the little darlings and God forbid that anyone should smoke in front of the little dears.  We must watch their little waistlines from birth for the first signs of obesity.

Even worse, when the group about to be bullied hears the Children card being played they always fold and concede.  The mere mention has us standing there, cap in hand as we give a moment’s revered silence for the little brats.  You would swear it was some form of deity we are talking about.  They are just kids, for fucks sake – mere adults who haven’t grown up yet.

For some unknown reason the mention of Children conjures up an image of a little five year old girl called Heidi with golden curls, blue eyes and dimples.  What a steaming load of crap.  Your average kid these days is just as likely to be a five year old snot gobbler called Gazzer, with a shaven head, track marks on his arm and HATE tattooed on his knuckles.  He will probably already have an impressive criminal record and also smokes and drinks twice as much as his mother [no one knows who his father is, least of all his mother].

I am a firm believer in experience and in finding things out for myself.  I was brought up in an age where a boy wasn’t a boy if he still had intact skin on both knees.  I discovered that a whole barrel load of actions resulted in pain.  I discovered that it is not really advisable to pedal hard on a bike with no brakes.  I discovered which dogs in the area were prone to biting.  I discovered the taste of some quite unmentionable things through sheer experimentation.  I discovered that it is not advisable to clamber over a wall if there is broken glass embedded in the top of it.  I inhaled the equivalent of a pack of fags every time my father drove us somewhere.

And not one squidgen did me any harm at all.

Nowadays the little darlings are wrapped in cotton wool from the day they are born.  Signs go up in the car saying “Baby on Board”.  No one is allowed smoke within a three mile radius of the house.   The house is regularly disinfected from top to bottom, killing 99% of all known germs, just in case Little Precious catches something.  The Little Darling is ferried everywhere by car just in case someone might throw a lecherous glance.

And what is the result of all this?  The little brat has never been exposed to a good dose of germs from chewing dog shit or eating a sweet that was found on the pavement, so his or her immune system is non-existent.  His or her hands have never been allowed remain dirty so the immune system hasn’t a clue what a decent bug looks like.  He or she thinks that bicycles are perfectly safe because he or she has always been protected with a hard hat, elbow and knee guards, so falling off has no memorable consequences.  Of course he or she has no idea how to interact with strangers because we all know that every stranger is a child rapist or an abductor.

Paradoxically, the children nowadays are living in a much more hostile environment that I ever experienced.  They are surrounded by chemicals and poisons every day.  And where to these chemicals and poisons come from?  From the parents, of course.  Every day the child has to breathe in air fresheners or fabric conditioner.  They are surrounded with fire retarding chemicals on their clothing.  The carpets and curtains the house are probably saturated with chemicals from floor cleaners and shampoos.  The very air they breathe is a heady mix of of carcinogens and poisons, and that is before they even leave the house and head into the wondrous cocktail of traffic fumes.

Personally I would like to see all parents who mollycoddle their kids like this locked up for child abuse.  They are rearing brats who are totally unprepared for life both socially and physically.  It’s nothing short of cruel.

The next time someone tells me not to do something “for the sake of the Children”, they are going to get a resounding “fuck off”, and I’ll report them to the authorities for child abuse.

I hate the dark evenings that are still getting darker.  The weather is miserable and damp, and we a long way short of the worst of it yet.  I hate the false jollity of the advertisements on television trying to convince us to have “The Perfect Christmas” with their tacky products.

And then there is the budget.

Yesterday I listened to a smug little bollix on the radio.  He is part of some fucking quango that advises the government on taxation, and was gleefully explaining how they were going to milk us for every last cent.

The little pox-bottle happily went through a long list of ways to screw me, from property taxes and residential taxes through car parking taxes, water charges and septic tank charges through to a new brain-child – the sugar tax.

Yup.  The Nudging has started.  The little fuck talked about the “obesity epidemic” that is sweeping Europe and how we must put a stop to it, and how they are going to tax sugar because it is bad for us.  Next it will be fats or carbohydrates or some other shit that gets taxed and it’s “all for our own good”.  One again the gubmint has decided what is good for me and I get no say in the matter.  I just have to pay more.  As fucking usual.

So this little failed abortion listed every single conceivable way they are going to screw me.  They will tax the food I eat and the water I drink.  They are even taxing my fucking shite.  No doubt when my time comes, they will rip open the coffin to make sure I’m not bringing anything of value with me.

But that is not the end of it.

Oh no.

This gubmint that is ripping my pension asunder is happily giving away one billion dollars today.

I will rephrase that.

Our gubmint is making a present of seven hundred and fifteen million euro to a shower of fucking gamblers.

They don’t have to do it.

The gamblers are well aware of this.  They read the small print – you know the bit about how investments may go down as well as up?  They are not expecting any money but our fucking shower are giving it to them anyway.

Why?

Because they want the world to see what nice people the Irish are.

I’m sorry, but I don’t feel very nice at the moment.

They come along in Spring when the days are full of promise for warmer times ahead and when nature is at its best and they rob an hour off me.  Without so much as a please or thank you, that hour is gone.

Then in Autumn when days are getting short and the weather ain’t at its best, they come along and give the hour back again.  I don’t want an extra hour of Autumn and I resent having to lose an hour of Spring.

I see there is talk of getting rid of all this faffing about.  The Brits are talking about making it Summer Time all the year round.  [Now if they could make it Summer all the year round, that would be brilliant?]  They say they are happy to do that if Scotland agrees.  No mention of Ireland, I note?  Of course it has fuck all to do with the Scots, as the Brits will find out.  It will depend entirely on whether Brussels agrees or not.  How long, I wonder will it be before we are all working off EUST [European Standard Time]?

Of course the Brits have one ace card up their sleeve.  All they have to do is turn Greenwich Observatory into a car park and the whole world is fucked through a lack of basic reference.  Time would go into free-fall just like the Euro.

Of course I now have to go around the Manor and change all the little yokes that keep time.  God be with the days when we only had clocks to worry about.  Now just about everything has a little built in clock somewhere.  A right pain in the hole.

In all probability I will waste the entire hour I have just been given, going around resetting everything.

And it will be getting dark in the afternoon instead of late evening.

I fucking HATE that.

I was sitting here with my eyes closed, enjoying the scent of freshly cut grass from the garden and just thinking about nothing.  I then made the mistake of switching on Lyric FM.

I like Lyric FM.  It is a classical station that isn’t as snobbishly highbrow as Radio 3 and tends to play what I would call middlebrow classical.

As I said, I switched it on and kept the volume low to accompany my idle thoughts, but was very rudely awoken.

Some fucker seems to have taken over the station and is playing Jazz!  Instead of some gentle Mozart, Brahms or Beethoven, what I get is fucking Art Tatum.

There is a style of jazz that I cannot tolerate.  It makes my ears bleed.  It’s the type of jazz where four or five blokes come on and they each play a different, totally airless tune all at the same time.  It seems to be obligatory that there is a piano, a saxophone and a trumpet, and the only talent required is that they be able to play as many notes as possible without any regard for what the others are playing.

I have a theory that everyone in fact hates jazz.  They are just afraid to admit it.  It’s a case of the king’s new clothes where no one dare be the first to admit that jazz is tuneless shite.

I kept the volume on very low in the hopes that the presenter would see the light and play something decent, but no – all we got was Art Tatum after Art Tatum.

I have given up on the radio.

I would like to go back to my doze.

But my ears are still hurting.

I fired up my Mail thingy and the last mail that I had downloaded was dated last February.  That indicates reasonably fell my fondness for Windows.

The Other Fella tells me that this is a fairly good laptop.  He says it has a Double Core Processor, which sounds like some kind of kitchen yoke for mashing apples.  He says it has four gagas of memory which is more than I have.  He also said something about sixty four bits, but he didn’t say what they are bits of.  He’s weird. 

Leastwise, it is supposed to be a fast machine.  I wish someone would tell Windows that.  The fucking thing is driving me mad.  It is so fucking slow that I swear I could work things out faster with a pen and bit of paper.  It keeps nagging me about updates for various things and I keep trying to ignore it, but it is so fucking persistent.  It just keeps nagging on and on and on.  It’s worse than Herself, and that is really saying something.

They say that the majority of offices use Windows.  It is no fucking wonder that the world is in a state of chassis.

And the games are fucking crap as well.

Coinage consisted of the farthing, ha’penny, penny, thruppeny bit, sixpence [or a tanner], shilling, florin and half crown.  There were notes for ten shillings, a pound, a fiver and the rest upwards were rarely seen unless you worked in a bank.

The relationship between the pennies, the shillings and the pound was very simple too. There were twelve pennies to the shilling and there were twenty shillings to the pound.  It couldn’t be easier.  Any child could, and did cope with it on a daily basis.

In fact it was all so simple we tried to make it a little more difficult by using English currency at the same time.  They used the same denominations but slightly different shaped coinage.  One thing that did piss me off was that the Irish were literate enough to use both coinage systems, but the British weren’t and would rudely refuse the Irish versions.  That was enough to convince a young lad that the Irish were far more intelligent than the British, but that’s another story.  Heh!

Then back in the early seventies, they fucked the whole thing up by introducing decimalisation.  It was sad seeing a tradition being killed off in the name of dumbing down but there it was.  We had to cope with a new range of coinage. 

That changeover wasn’t too bad and within weeks we were all used to the new coins and the over-simplified conversion of a hundred pennies to the pound.  Slapping down the correct price of a pint was no problem whatsoever.

Ten years ago we changed to the Euro.

I don’t know what it is about the Euro but I fucking hate it.  After ten years I still can’t get the hang of those fucking coins.  They are small, fiddly and a pain in the fucking hole.  Every time I have to pay for something I find myself twiddling coins to see what number is stamped on the back.  The coins are too small and there isn’t enough difference in size.  Fucking Mickey Mouse money I call it.

The sooner that fucking Euro implodes the better.

Then we can get back to the good old pounds, shillings and pence.

Real money.

What’s wrong with zippers?

Have you never thought of Velcro?

But buttons?  For fuck’s sake.

Buttons on a fly are fucking lethal.

At my age I never know when I might need emergency access.

Fucking buttons!

Idiots.

It’s not too demanding and won’t cost a red cent.

All I ask is that you STOP USING THAT FUCKING ABBREVIATION “APP”.

I don’t know what it is about app that gets my dander up but I cringe every time I hear it.  And I fucking hear it too much.  I started to watch a video about the release of Windows 8 purely because I had nothing better to do.  Every fucking second word was ‘app’.  I had to switch off.  I couldn’t listen to any more ‘apps’.  I received a magazine to which I have a subscription, but plastered across the front page was “APPS – Everything you need to know”.  The magazine went straight in the bin.

I think the main reason I hate the expression so much is that it is so fucking typical of modern yoof.  It summarises the obsession with fucking mobile phones.  It encapsulates the utter laziness where any word over five letters long has to be abbreviated.  It typifies the inability to spell anything longer than three letters.  In other words, I would describe it as a Neanderthal word for a fucking Neanderthal world

Let’s get one thing straight.  The word is ‘application’.  OK?  Got that?  That’s not too hard now, is it? You didn’t feel any pain reading that word?  Do you think you could possibly remember just eight more letters?  No.  Probably not.

I am hereby warning you.  Anyone who uses ‘app’ within my hearing is liable to get his [or her; I believe in equality] face smashed in.

You have been warned.