Cads, Scoundrels and Hypoctites – Guess Who?

Little Nicky looked in on the excellent Mr. Eugenides today and found that estimable blogger complaining of the way people like him and my good self are often characterised as curmudgeonly misanthropes by the kind of people who would have you all believe that everything we are told by politicians, the meeja and people who have a vested interest in avoiding being made to answer difficult questions.

So are we and other such bloggers wrong to be sceptical of all that “THEY” tell us. Should we be a little more trusting, try harder to see the positive aspect of things and always look on the bright side of life (dee dum deedumdeedumdeedum) ?

Well to help decide whether us whiners, carpers and moaning bastards can safely be ignored or whether in fact, despite all out best efforts we can never adequately depict the depth of cynicism, duplicity and hypocrisy that prevails in public life, Mr. E. pointed me at this item on Guido Fawkes blog concerning Labour’s exploiting the sad death of Gwyneth Dunwoody for political gain by carrying out a data mining exercise on visitors to the tribute website set up in her honour.

You will be gobsmacked at the sheer gall of these people, and yet when found out they complain that telling the truth about their mendacious machinations is grossly unfair.

Today We Commented On:
Great Britain: mocked by the New York Times
Well British bloggers, myself included, spend so much time mocking America its beyond time someone had a go back…

House prices drop for the first time since 1996

Off Target – counting teenage pregnancy when judging schools
Isn’t it time The Government understood that bureaucratic meddling never solves anything?

Law of The Boot

In the news today rail user Julie Pickford described what happened when she asked a group of teenagers travelling in the same carriage to stop throwing popcorn at her.

Instead of realising that what they were doing might not seem funny to the person on the receiving end, the young people crowded round her, dragged her to the floor and gave her a good kicking.

Coming only a few days after the killers of family man Gary Newlove and goth Sophie Lancaster were sentenced for murder this is another shocking reminder of the state of our society. Gary and Sophie were killed in completely separate incidents but in both cases had asked members of a gang to leave them alone.

The regularity with which such incidents occur highlights once more the fundamental dishonesty of the government in publishing bogus statistics that purport to show crime rates falling once again.

TODAY WE COMMENTED ON:
Salon.com – Eating The Amazon

First Post: Sweet and Sour, The Miracle Berry

Nurses Bogged Down With Bean Counting

The Royal College of Nursing has complained that NHS nurses are spending so much time on bureaucracy it is detracting from patient care.
The administrative tasks being laid on nurses include form filling, filing, copying, ordering supplies and keeping accounts. None of these tasks require the professional abilities of a highly trained healthcare professional according to Peter Carter, general secretary of the RCN.
Some nurses leaders think the administrative burden is harming recruitment to the profession.

Once again Little Nicky Machiavelli has been saying since the start of this blog is proved true: our national Health Service is controlled by bean counters and patient care is a lower priority than paperwork.

TODAY WE COMMENTED ON
Beyond The Pleasure Principle The credit crunch, rising food prices, oil prices through the roof; is this the end for hedonism?

Orwell Turns In His Grave Emily Bell asks can a media degree ever make a decent journalist or is experience more important?

Time To Bring Back Campbell Daily Mail politics blogs throws Gordon Brown a lifeline

BBC rewrites political history Lib Dem blogger appreciates the blogger who started the rumour that Harriet Harman had joined the Tories.

Boxing Brides sounds like an episode from Shameless but it really happened in America (where else?)

Tory Boy is alive and well and living in…

Do you remember Tory Boy, the spotty, sneering, triumphalist young conservative created by Harry Enfield?
Tory Boy was a fictional character, a comic caricature like Loadsamoney or the grotesques created by Little Britain or The League of Gentlemen. Or was he?
I always believed Tory Boy was real, you see I was setting up computer and telephone networks in the City of London during that tsunami of unrestrained greed known as The Thatcher Years. I met Tory Boy every day. He was easily identified by his inability to differentiate between style and ostentation. His witless sneering was always aimed at easy targets and was generally so off target it was just off.
When the political mood changed Tory Boy disappeared but he did not die. All through the bleak years of John Major and the three stooges who succeeded him Tory Boy was lurking sceadugengan – like in the shadows of Conservative Central Office, unable to comprehend why he was no longer in the ascendant.
Before he could re-emerge into the light the political pendulum has to swing. In the event it was not the pendulum that swung but the Labour Party, so far to the Thatcherite right Conservatism became acceptable again.
Yesterday I logged the first sighting of Tory Boy in fifteen years at Iain Dale’s blog.
Dalie, normally an intelligent and witty blogger, worth reading even for those of us who will never agree with his politics, posted a bizarre blog about the Liberal Democrats. He asked why the Lib Dems are ducking a head on fight with the BNP.
It seems BNP candidates around the country will be opposed by Conservatives in all but 9 wards and by Labour in all but 10. The Lib Dems however will not fight around 120 wards where there is a BNP candidate.
What is the point of this question exactly other than a typically inept Tory attempt to smear the Liberal Democrats by trying to imply there is some covert arrangement with the BNP?
The Liberal Democrats are a small party, who can blame them for concentrating their resources in areas where they expect to do well, i.e. rural districts in the West and prosperous middle class suburbs.
The BNP are a small party, who can blame them for concentrating their resources in areas where they expect to do well, i.e. rundown inner city districts and industrial areas.
A head to head between these two parties was never likely any time soon.
So why is Iain Dale, whom we expect to be a Conservative Candidate at the next election trying to suggest the Lib Dems are ducking a fight with the BNP.
Could it be that next week the Conservatives anticipate the edge will be taken off their annihilation of Labour by successes at their expense by both Lib Dems and BNP?

If that is the case, a return to Tory Boy tactics is not going to help the cause.

Americas tradition of self loathing liberals

Who Profits From The Food Shortage

One of the objectives of Little Nicky Machiavelli has always been to undermine the spurious arguments of those snake tongued swindlers who proclaim the virtues of free market economics.

This excellent article that raises the question of who is actually benefitting from the global food crisis, which is causing minor hardships to the poor of the industrialised world.

feasting on famine

It explains how as houlsehold budgets in the west are squeezed we should not be fooled by the lies of free marketeers into thinking the hard pressed farmers of Eastern Europe and Asia or even the fairly prosperous farmers of the USA, Canada and Australia are benefitting. The people who are reporting increased profits are the food producers, the commodity brokers and the bankers who finance them. These bankers are the same people who are bleating about needing handouts from our tax money to cover the losses they have made on fraudulently mis-selling mortgages and “secured” investments.

Is anyone stll naive enough to believe all that Thatcherite bullshit about the trickle down effect. The only thing that trickles down is misery.

Well Done hillary but…

So Hillary Clinton is back in the race with a slim but realistic chance of grabbing the nomination.

Nothing much changes though. The prospect of any of the candidates in The White House is effing frighhtening.

TODAY WE COMMENTED ON:

Democratic Party Candidate

Same Old Stuff from the Labour left

The Real Effect Of The Teachers Strike

Is Religion The Biggest Threat To Rationality

Teachers Strike Leaves Pupils At A Loose End.

The first teachers strike in over two decades is due to take place on Thursday of this week. Teachers Union officials give as the reason for the strike a derisory 2.4% pay offer. The root causes go much deeper however.

Bad behaviour in class, including an increasing number of physical attacks on teachers by pupils, increased levels of bureaucracy causing teachers to spend more time on administration than actually teaching, the removal of disciplinary powers and constant politically motivated meddling by the authorities have combined to bring morale in the teaching profession to an all time low.

We must suppose that government policy is driven by the idea that if it cannot be privatised it must be abandoned.

Our major concern about Thursday’s strike though must be for the pupils. With a thousand schools set to remain closed, the poor little mites will have nowhere to not go.

Today we commented on:

Democratic Party Apostacy
Are the Democrats grass roots supporters the biggest force working against their candidates?

Faith No more
If 54% of Britions claim to be Christians how come only 6% go to church?

McCain in 2008 = Clinton in 2012
As Barak Obama get closer to the Democratic nomination he looks increasingly less capable of winning the big one in November. So is Hillary playing a long game?

Creating a Client State
Is the abolition of the 10p tax band a betrayal of Labour’s core voters?

50 Billion Pound Mortgage
Are the government ripping us off to bail out the banks

Alternative Medicine
Should Alternative Medicine be funded by the NHS

Windfarm madness etc.

Today Little Nicky commented on:

Wind farm on historic Lewis: Just say no!
The plan to put a giant windfarm on an area of ecologically sensitive peat moss on the Isle of Lewis is just plain crazy and reeks of corporate opportunism railroading politicians who have far too many crises going on and not a clue how to deal with any of them.

McCain Anger Management Issues
John McCain has problems conrolling his temper. Do we want to put the finger of such a man on the red button?

Is child abuse OK for followers of crackpot cults
The enclosed compound built by the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints has been raided, a number of girls and young women removed for their own safety and a number of “elders” (all of the willie wearing gender) arrested for child abuse.
What makes these loonies think a 50 year old man shagging a thirteen year old girl is any more acceptable if it is done “in the sight of God,” than if it is done in a brothel.

Give a working class child a chance – kill an academic.

For many years now Little Nicky has been saying that universities have become little more than safe houses for the terminally unemployable.
The latest proof of this comes in a proposal by a team of education academics on dealing with behaviour problems in the classroom. Note, not a team of teachers who have spent years in the classroom trenches, but “educationalists”, who have spent their working lives in University libraries poring over the latest theories about how to educate children, without ever having to look at a child who has not first been sedated and soaked in sterilising fluid.
Apparently the way to deal with disruptive behaviour is to ignore it. The little darlings are just attention seeking and to tell them of or put them in detention is gratifying their desire and thus rewarding their bad behaviour. As well as ignoring bad behaviour teachers should reward good behaviour.
Such fuckwittery is never going to address real problems only exacerbate them.
Ignore the unruly kids and give the well behaved ones a chocolate bar and all that will happen is the Little Bastards will wait ‘til break time and then beat the crap out of the Little Angels and steal their chocolate.
For sheer stupidity it rivals the climate change policy of certain American preachers, keep driving the SUV, turn up the air conditioning, pray and shoot anyone who does not accept Jesus as their saviour, along with faggots, druggies, people who like dancing and communists and piff, paff, poof, problem solved.
Only academics (and psychologists) could have so little understanding of how the mind of a child or adolescent works. Such people were obviously the victims of pushy or politically correct parents and thus were never allowed to be children themselves.
When bad behaviour is described as “attention seeking” it implies the child is seeking the attention of a parent or teacher. WRONG!
Disruptive behaviour is just showboating. The reward ought is laughter and the respec’ of fellow pupils.
Peer group approval has far more value in the school environment that housepoints (which are likely to get the recipient bullied) or sweets and chocolate which can easily be shoplifted anyway, and shoplifting is a good way of getting respec’
Teachers in today’s schools have a hard enough job without pokenose academics trying to make it harder.

Today Little Nicky commented on:
Its me or the Thatcherite

One Fundamental difference between Clinton and Obama

What on Earth are human Rights

Today Little Nicky Machiavelli has…

A new chapter in Little Nicky’s blog as across the pond commitments continue to take up much time.

Today Little Nicky has commented on…

Gordon Brown, a man of hidden shallows
The Prime Minister keeps telling us he will deal with the stampede of problems “after the May elections. But will he have other things on his mind by then?

Smell the coffee
Chummy breakfasts with CEOs of leading banks is hardly likely to solve the crisis, after all it was the banks and their CEOs who caused it and now they are looking for Government money to bail them out.

Biofuels Madness
How can we hope to save the planet when the alternative to fossil fuels are even more damaging to the climate?

Recently Little Nicky’s alter ego has been hosting a discussion on what happened before Big Bang. Catch up with Part 1 and Part 2 at Gather.com