Plane Stupid

My email sent to Plane Stupid, the climate change protesters who caused havok at Stanstead this morning.

Subject: You bunch of cunts

You useless pricks. My kids are in tears because their mum didn't come home today.

I have to take time of work tomorrow and Wednesday to sort out sitters because I work nights. This involves me driving the 2 kids around instead of them catching the school bus home.

Petrol wasted.

My sister in law who drove my wife from Eastbourne to Stanstead will have to drive her back there again on Wednesday.

Lots of petrol wasted.

We have to pay for an alternate flight with Flybe. Money I don't have just before Christmas. Why do you think I work night shifts in a factory? As a hobby? It's because I need the money.

Money you have stolen from me in your stupid, pointless protest.

You useless, useless shits.


Stewart Paterson

A plague

The picture is from The Times

The suffering of Zimbabwe's people continues – and worsens. The Infectious Diseases Hospital, about five miles south of Harare on the pockmarked highway to South Africa, is the only government hospital still open in the capital. Between five and 15 cholera fatalities arrive at its mortuary every day.


"It's well past time for Robert Mugabe to leave," Condoleezza Rice, the outgoing secretary of state, said on Friday. "I think that is now obvious.
"If this is not evident for the international community, that it is time to stand up for what is right, I don't know what would be."
Miss Rice, speaking on a trip to Denmark, said it was up to Zimbabwe's neighbours to take action. "Frankly the nations of the region have to lead it," she said. "Southern African states should be the most responsible."
The country's cholera epidemic has given new impetus to condemnations of Mr Mugabe, who retains the presidency despite coming second in the last contested election, in March.

I get to vote again

I've just voted in the 2008 élections prud'homales.

The what?

France has a unique system of industrial tribunals. Employees and employers vote to select their representatives in these tribunals. The elect are called "prud'hommes" - "valiant men".

The French industrial tribunals are different from other European systems because they are wholly elected and jointly-run courts. The 271 tribunals are composed of elected non-professional judges, half of whom are employers, and the other half paid employees.

They mainly decide pay claims, compensation, descrimination etc and apparantly tend to rule in favour of the employee. The elections are held every 5 years and the last time round turnout was poor, just over 30%. So there has been quite a bit of publicity this time.

I voted Force Ouvriere FO because they get the most done at the factory.

The French Minister for industrial relations said "Have you tried these croissants? They are magnifique". Bernard Thibault, the general secretary of the Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labour, CGT) the largest of France's five main trade unions added "This year's oyster harvest has suffered from bad weather, but the No. 3 "Pepins" from Ile d'Oleron are delicieux"

I'm on a roll!

After the gate, I'm now progressing nicely with the trailer. It's ridiculous how expensive a new trailer is. I little one will cost 500Euros.
My little blue trailer (you can see the carcass beside me) was made of wood. Because I had been given it, I was a bit careless with it, left it outside too often. So it got rotten, and one day recently, when the guy at the sawmill was lowering a charge of wood into it with his forklift it cracked underneath.
The wooden one also had the axle bolted to the blue box and the towbar bolted to the box, so it was possible for the towbar to come away, and leave the trailer careering down the road.
The new version I've welded up has the towbar integral with the frame. I've also welded on four nifty threaded chain links on the sides that can be used to attach ropes or chains.
Today I must finish decking the floor of the trailer so I ca at least use it to fetch more wood.
Then I must work out a cunning way to build the trailer box, and I want the hinged tailgate to be removeable, so I need to find a plug that can take the 5 wires for the lights/indicators.

The trailer's first job will be to cart the old blue box down to the tip.

In other news, France is in a panic over Tunisian supporters whistling during "The Marseillaise" during the International friendly the other day. This lack of respect for the national anthem is causing angst because it is evident that the Tunisian supporters are in fact French born, children of immigrants.
The locals are full of "send them all home". When I point out that they ARE home the response is "send the whole family home".
The government's response is to abandon any future match where such whistling takes place. the difficulty is that matches are played under FIFA rules. Only the ref has the authority to cancel a match and whistling during the national anthems is not one of FIFA's criterea for abandonment of a match.
There is an added difficulty of trying to get thousands of dissapointed and angry fans out of a stadium after the game they have paid to see has been abandoned because of te actions of a few hundred.

It is EXACTLY like the cricket crisis in the UK a dozen years ago. English people were appalled to discover that the children of immigrants were supporting Pakistan or India during Test matches against England.

Zimbabwe - hyper inflation

The press is always going on about Zimbabwe having an inflation rate of 200,000%

It's hard to understand what numbers like that mean.

2 days ago I tried a currency calculation on XE.com

It gave 1USD worth $4,952,500,000.00 ZW Dollars.

Today I tried it again.

1 USD now = 6,718,055,555.56 ZW dollars.

That's a drop of nearly 2 Billion dollars in just 2 days. the currency is devaluing at the rate of 1 Billion dollars a day.

Try it yourself and see how much its fallen since this post.

It's abit of a worry since my parents still live there.

Get the bucket I'm gonna puke!

via Devils Kitchen I find out about a mob called Les Jeunes Européens Fédéralistes, a bunch of painfully annoying young people who are gung-ho a&bout a larger, constitutionalised Federal Europe.

Why are they annoying?

Watch their video.

Lipdub Europe United par les Jeunes Européens - France
Uploaded by JeunesEuropeensFrance

Watching it may cause nasea and rage blackouts.

As DK says:
"Murder them all, the nauseating French bastards...*

* Not because they are French, you understand, but because they are nauseating, fucking naive federalists. I mean, what kind of stupid cunt would associate "democracy" with the European Union?"

Strictement Interdit!

Many things in France are against the law. Smoking in public places for one. And while the French legislature and parliament love making new laws, the French people largely ignore them. Which is why Michel, our café proprieter always has a 'clop' hanging out of his mouth.

L'interdit ? C'est une pièce fermée à clef avec tout ce que je désire à l’intérieur.
Richard Hawley, chanteur

- Qu'est-ce que l'interdit ?
En gros, ce qui est "interdit" n'est pas consenti. POURQUOI PAS ? Qui dit "interdit" dit "on a interdit". Il y a dans l'histoire un être humain, ce petit con aux motivations souvent puantes d'arrogance, de peur, d'ignorance, de rancœur. Il faut fouiller là où l'on nous dit "interdit". Car, dans l'absolu, tout est permis
Jasmine Bande, chanteuse

According to Charles Bremner there are 9,500 laws in force and parliament passes 70 new ones every year. A further 120,000 decrees have been issued by trhe state ranging from "interdit", through "formellement interdit" to "rigoureusement interdit".

One such law is the ban on using foreign words in advertising or broadcasting without an accompanying French translation. Thus, theoretically a football announcer should not say "A la suite d’un corner, le Cosmos a bénéficié d’un penalty" but rather "A la suite d’un coup de coin, le Cosmos a bénéficié d’un tir de réparation". This one is known as La Loi Toubon. It is largely ignored in everday use because it is so impractical, and impossible to police. A list of troublesome words (bulldozer, computer, disk-jockey, design) and their improbable replacements is discussed here.

Some of the French laws seem very odd to Anglo Saxons. The dates of shop sales being fixed by the Prefecture for example. The interdiction of selling products at less than cost price. It is illegal to cut any children out of your will.

But more bizarre still, is the things that are NOT illegal in France. Like incest. Apparantly incest was dropped from the Penal Code by Napoleon 200 years ago.

Anyone know of other crazy French legalisms?

Panic on the streets of Chassenieul

First many thanks for the concern for Callan. He is feeling much better and will be back at school tomorrow. He is currently in a sulk because I told him off after I found out he has just been skateboarding in the barn. "I'm not doing jumps or anything!" I can just see myself back at the hospital trying to explain to the surgeon and the social services why he was skateboarding 3 days after an operation to pin a broken arm.

Anyway, back on topic.
Hard-up french fisherman are blockading access to fuel refineries at Gonfreville in Normandy, La Rochelle and Port-La-Nouvelle in the south. They are also blocakding the ports at laRochelle, Le Havre and elsewhere. They want the price of marine deisel to be pegged at 40 centimes per litre. Currently running at 80, they say it is no longer worth them putting out to sea with fuel at that price.
They did it last November too.
All of a sudden, panic sets in at the fuel stations around our area. The pumps at the Champion chain of supermarkets were closed, so the whole world gets in the cars and form queues at all the other stations. According to the rumours at the factory, at one station, the till operator was forcibly restrained for a short time while motorists filled their cars for free.
I phoned Fiona when I heard of the "crisis". She looked out the kitchen window, saw no cars at the pump over the road at the cafe. She put 30 Euros in since the car was empty.
Now, days later, everything is as normal, all the pumps have fuel, and the whole thing was stampeded by panic buying.

News from May 24th indicates the fishermen are getting bored and going back to sea.


Technorati tags: France
politics
press

French Taxman supports gay marriage

I wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry.

In today's Charente Libre newspaper is the story of Mr Gérard Chaillou, a habitant of Cognac. he is divorced with one child. As such he is entitled to a family allowance.
He has a friend, who lives alone in a large house. "My mate had a very big house in which he lived alone. He invited me to move into one of the rooms to avoid paying a rent."
This Gérard did, in October 2005, and being a good and conciencous citizen, he noted on his tax forms, that he was staying rent-free.
But he then received a letter from the hôtel des impôts saying that this benefit is only applicable to widows, single parents or divorcees, and "according to their information" Gérard was living "en concubinage" with the man who owned the house. Thus, equivalent to married, no single parent benefit.
Gérard is very bitter about the way he has been treated by the female civil servant in charge of his file. She had always refused to meet with him to discus his case.
"Basically, she's treated me like a homo" said the sixty year old through gritted teeth. The "according to our information" suggests someone had had shopped him.
He moved out of the house, and through a mediator was re-embursed the missing allowances, amounting to about €100 per month.
What has made him bitter was that he received no apologies or any recognition that he has been treated badly.
PS - I've taken some liberties with the translation, not being au fait with french fiscal terms like CSG, RDS and une demi-part fiscale, but I'm not far off the sense of the thing. Anyone who can clarify is welcome.

So civil servants have absolutely nothing against same-sex unions, provided there is some kind of tax to be gained from it. This is the way forward for equal rights. Don't bother arguing about social justice or equality, just find a way to point out to government that they can earn revenue from it. Man those equality laws will be on the books before you can say "ooh get her!"

Tony Blair & God

There is an interesting article on the online Spectator by Rod Liddle entitled "God's role in politics - God’s role in politics is not to underwrite bad ideas"
The crux of the article is in these paragraphs:

The longer Blair remained in office, the more pronounced became the shift away from that first and crucial god — public opinion — and towards some other higher being. As that BBC documentary cleverly evinced, towards the end of his tenure Blair rarely expanded upon his reasons for doing some deeply questionable act beyond the look-I’m-an-honest-sorta-bloke shrug of the shoulders and the repeated mantra: ‘Well, I did it cos I thought it was the right thing to do.’ Over and over again Blair cited this as his sole reason for embarking upon one or another catastrophic course of action; he never said, ‘I thought it was the right thing to do, but sadly I was mistaken,’ and still less, ‘Look, I did it cos it was politically expedient and seemed attractive at the time.’

This seems to have been the gift which God bestowed upon his mate Tony Blair: not humility, an intimation of human frailty, an understanding that human knowledge and human abilities are most definitely finite, that given free will we are at liberty to make the wrong decisions as well as the right decisions, but instead a suffocating and deluding certitude. Blair’s favourite phrase — ‘I did it cos I thought it was the right thing to do’ — is an absolutist’s argument: it cannot be gainsaid. And of course the implication is that he thought it was the right thing to do because he was a man of faith and conviction — and so even if everything turned out badly, as in Iraq, his motive or judgment could not possibly be questioned. So it is a statement that requires no evidence, no explanation and still less anything in the way of an apology.

I always knew Blair was flakey, because of his mud rebirth ceremony with his harridan wife and her new-agey Kaballah bullshit, but I had no idea that he actually believed he had a one-on-one link with God, and felt that that justified his decisions. I always thought his support for America was historical and political rather than because of a shared fundamentalism with George Bush.
At least he had the good sense to be embarrased about it and keep it quiet while he was in office.

Heroes from History

We have been warned that Christianity knows no neutrality and history has verified the warning. It is incapable of co-existing permanently with a civilisation it does not inspire; and any such that came into contact with it has withered.

Who wrote those words? One of our modern atheist philosophers - a Dawkins or a Hitchens? Perhaps an anti-colonialist - Gandhi or Garvey?

It was Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury three times Prime Minister of Great Britain after Disraeli in the Victorian era.
Ironically the British Empire was at her height, Victoria had just celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and Salisbury wrote those words to his daughter explainiing why he was not inclined to support the work of missionaries in Asia and Africa.
He was an enigma - while the British Empire controlled one fifth of the globe he persued a foreign policy of "splendid isolation" trying to maintain a balance of power by not entering into permanent alliances or commitments. While his contemporaries like Rhodes "I would annexe the planets if I could" dreamed of further expansion, Salisbury had said "Seizing a coloured man's land and giving to a white man is an operation now generally known as the progress of colonisation."

I was born in the city named after Salisbury, in the country that Rhodes named after himself. So I am a product of British colonialism. (And very grateful for it - a more priviliged and luxurious childhood could not be wished for) And so it comes as a great surprise to find that Lord Salisbury is the author of these quotes and thoughts.
I leave you with three quotes of his on liberty, morality and common sense:

By a free country, I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like.

Speech to the Kingston and District Working Men's Conservative Association (June 1883)

On general grounds I object to Parliament trying to regulate private morality in matters which only affects the person who commits the offence.

Letter to Sir Henry Peek (1888)

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Letter to Lord Lytton (15 June 1877)

A Catholic Bishop gets all my respect

My wife & I were both born in Zimababwe. My parents still live there.

It is a country that has descended, with ever-increasing speed into chaos and madness. The thug in charge is Robert Mugabe, who has been in power now for 28 years. He recently celbrated his 83rd birthday in a year where his fellow countymen can hope for an average life expectancy of 35.
Mugabe does not tolerate opposition. His political rivals have had car accidents, drowned in swimming pools, disappeared, been jailed, tortured, beaten.
A long-time critic of his is the Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pious Ncube. Most other churches and church leaders have either turned a blind eye to Mugabe's antics or sucked up to him.
The Pastor of my church, Noel Pashapa is now a vocal supporter of Mugabe, and turns out at his rallies.

Ncube, on the other hand has said:

I'm very angry with African leaders for letting their people down. They have cared too much for themselves and too little for their people. Their record, since the end of colonial rule, is enough to make you weep.

He will carry on protesting, he said, even if doing so risked making himself a martyr. "The Church has a prophetic role to speak the truth when no one else dares to. I accept that it may mean that I lose my life."
His faith has been put to the test, but it is the frailty of humans and their failure to use their brains which is to blame, he said.
"We can't blame God if we don't use them and stand up to our leaders," he said.

I was prompted to blog this, because the article appeared in yesterday's telegraph, but also because the Sacred Slut blogged about church activism on her blog A Whore in the Temple of Reason

I know exactly how she feels. I think it would be scandalous if churches could get away with defying the state and the authorities, but you only have to read the accounts of Pious Ncube in Zimabwe to see that there are countries and situations where if the church wasn't making a stand, no-one would be.
Of course I use the phrase "the church" in the widest possible sense. I have already mentioned that in Zimabwe the church is divided, with some denominations supporting Mugabe.

Update: The transcript of an interview SW Radio Africa's Violet Gonda talks with Archbishop Pius Ncube, Pastor Ray Motsi and Bishop Trevor Manhanga for the HOT SEAT programme.
The Bishops are asked if this coming together of catholic bishops is in any way official or sanctioned by the Pope. Could the church ex-communicate Mugabe, and what would be the reaction to that? Notice Ncube's veiled criticsm of his counterpart the Archbishop of Harare, Mugabe's diocese.