The 2005 general election is nearly upon us. Which way will you vote, and you reasons why. Here is a brief list of the potential contestants, please add your own.


More tax!
Less tax!
Dont know!
Death to all infidels!
Who gives a shit?

The great pretender.

It is important to realise how most of the decisions on this planet are made.

They are not made by considering the facts & coming up with a logical conclusion.

They are usually made with personal self interest or sometimes with just a gut feeling.
(Jumping to conclusions also plays a large part in the positions that people take up.)

THEN the evidence is slanted to support that decision.

The person involved concocts whatever kind of story he/she can to back it up.

The person usually searches around for facts or half truths or unproven information or lies to back it up.

They often use things that they know have already been proven wrong & hope that you havent heard about them.

The other side of the coin is that they will do their utmost to avoid facts that prove that their decision is utterly baseless.

They will also do their utmost to avoid facts even slightly contradict them.

This is how decisions are made in meetings.
I have seen this occur wherever decisions are made or opinions are given. I have seen it in TV documentaries & news programmes. I have seen it happen in the daily life of families.
I have seen it happen in shops.
This is what lawyers do in court, they are not there to expose the truth, they are there to win.

This even occurs in industry including situations where large sums of money are involved. Yes, even then, reality is pushed to one side.

It wasnt until I recognised this, that I started to win the arguments in meetings instead of getting involved in a heated argument.

Somebody once said, Choose your facts carefully.

This is what people do but mostly not carefully.

Never take arguments at face value, work out what makes people tick.

Quite often, it just boils down to someone not wanting to learn a new software package but they never actually say what the real reason is. Indeed, the discussion in the meeting may be totally unrelated to software. Instead of saying what the real reason is they just become more & more inventive with their illogical arguments & their slanted & selective disclosure of information.


The classic example of this is (Yes you guessed it!) Blairs decision about invading Iraq.


Here is another example for you.

Standber, I accuse you of Choosing your facts carefully. In message 154.

You said:
PR? No way. Ask the Eyties. After WW II, they had an election and new Gov every 12 month for about 20 years.
Sheer waste of time and effort. The idea sounds good but it just does not work.

You chose Italy.

I think PR works in Scotland but your definition of works really depends on whether you agree with what they have done.
You may not agree with the abolition of student fees in Scotland, a compromise that they were pressured into by the liberals.
You may not agree with the long term state funded care for the elderly already in place in Scotland & now to be copied here.
(Well you never know, it might be.)

However, you cannot dispute the fact that hasnt been an election every 12 months in Scotland.

I think that PR has got an exceptionally good record in Denmark but YOU didnt choose Denmark.

Germany has got PR & Germany used to be the economic power house of Europe until it threw all it Deutchmarks into a big bottomless pit called East Germany.

Neither Germany nor Denmark has had its government fall every 12 months.


Lets get back to Italy for a moment.

Italian politics was distorted by the Mafia with the backing of the CIA from world war 2 up until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Many Italian politicians were bought & paid for by the Mafia.
I suspect that many of them still are because the depth of corruption was so great that it is very difficult to reverse.
Many Italian politicians have been put on trial, some have been convicted but I think that many have got away with it due to continuing threats, corruption & blackmail.

The US did this in order to keep the communists out of power.
The digging up of the arms caches was covered on Newsnight & Channel4 news at the time. If the communists ever took power then they were to be told the location of these weapons & to use them to overthrow a communist government.

This was openly admitted to by the Americans involved on Newsnight & Channel4 news at the time.

You can check this for yourself, go & ask the BBC & Channel4 for the records of their programmes. They may even dig them out of the archives for you & let you watch them.

If you wanted to select a biased example then you would choose Italy but the problems of Italy are just not relevant to PR.


Sorry to single you out Standber but you provided a convenient example of Choosing your facts carefully.


The other great clichis Being economical with the truth.

Politicians practice very hard at being economical with the truth.

Howard does it.
Blair does it.
Even Kennedy does it.

Kennedy needs more practice.


--------------------------------------

My suggestion for PR is an additional member system so that every constituency still has a link with an MP.

BUT NOT with a Party List for the Additional Members.

A Party List IS A STITCH UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I suggest an additional member system with A VOTERS LIST!

Here is how it would work:

1.
Double the size of the constituencies & thereby halve the number of constituencies.

2.
Directly elect 1 MP per constituency on 1st past the post.
So half the MPs will be constituency MPs.


3.
For each Party, make a Voters List of all the candidates that came second & put them in order of those who got the highest percentage of the vote in their constituency.
So top of the list would be someone who came so close that his voters could almost taste it but they felt robbed by just a few votes.

(In this way, it is the voters who decide who gets a seat in Parliament, not the Party Hierarchy who would give priority to arse-lickers.)
(This allows us to keep out candidates who we definitely do not want instead of having our wishes bypassed by the party.)


4.
Allocate seats for the additional members to top up their totals to match their percentage of the vote.
This would be done by taking the required number of candidates from the top part of the Voters List for each Party.

5.
Additional members must be disqualified from ministerial office.
(That will make some candidates try harder to explain themselves at the election.)

6.
MPs who sit on committees must also be disqualified from ministerial office for 5 years.

--------------------------------------------------


With PR, the politicians would not be able to coerce people by saying that they were wasting their votes.

They would not be able to con people into voting for them by saying that a vote for a smaller party would let the other big party in by the back door.

Almost every vote would matter, not just those of the floating voters in the marginal constituencies.

Currently, unless you are a floating voter in a marginal constituency then YOU DONT MATTER!

Bristles I am not quite sure what you trying to say.

Is it the following:- John Major ran off with someone elses wife. I dont think either participant seemed to have done much running.

I think Michael Howard, if he did run off with someone elses wife certainly at least seems to have good taste. However, I didnt think that a wife was somebodys property and also, it takes two to Tango.

Sometimes I wish somebody would run off with my wife. (I hope she doesnt find me writing this.)

I think also in consideration of illegal actions, there is a difference between Criminal Law and Civil law. Many of the actions of Blunket, Howard and other Home Secretaries, which have been appealed against were civil actions. (Like appealing against a decision made by a jurys, a hire court may overturn the decision and judges decisions. Neither the jury nor the judge has broken criminal law. )

The latter actions were done openly, not corruptly, in private discussion in private rooms behind lock doors.

I think in Blairs case of Iraq, he deliberately and knowingly attempted to deceive Parliament, the cabinet and the British public and possibly himself. (He now seems to believe his own flawed arguments.)

He has a case to answer. I think he is responsible for a large part of the disillusionment felt with politics in this country at the moment, by his disregard of international law and the United Nations, which will give others the right to go to war on a whim.

I think it is unlikely that you will have politicians in position of power who do not show the foibles of the rest of society, but in the case of Blair I would like to see his foible exposed and he humiliated.

I dont usually have such strong feelings or wish to see somebody destroyed, but I think his crime and the consequences of his crime has done so much harm that I think it is necessary, in an attempt to prevent reoccurrences by him, or similar actions of others of his ilk in the future.

There are no penalties for politicians who act illegally.

Consequently, there is nothing to hold them back so they go ahead & do it because they might as well try it & see if they can get away with it.

If there were penalties then they would take very careful legal advice before using prerogative powers.

They wouldn't want a tame, compliant Attourney General.
They would want one that was right.

apple
Proportional Representation............read about the Italian political scene
post WWll. Disaster.

That caught my eye. Don't know what else you had to say. Too long. Skipped to the next post.

Standber,

You didn't read it but I said that I accuse you of Choosing your facts carefully.

When you cite the Italian situation.

I have completely demolished your use of that example.

I know we are all financial giants on this bulletin board, and being so I would be grateful if someone could reveal to me the financial costs per week of the Iraq war and cost of sustaining the "peace".


Also, just as interesting to me, what gains we may have gather if the sums involved were use in Overseas Development? (even with all its problems of implementation.)


Again, why has no party discussed the ongoing economics of the war in relationship to pensions and hospitals costs, etc.?


Not all of the politicioans can have shares in Armaments or the construction industries.

Fred1new,

I seem to remember Blair being pushed into giving the cost on TV.

He said that the total cost of IRAQ to us so far was about 5Billion.

Whether you believe him or not is up to you.

As for the ongoing cost per week, he didn't say.

Has anybody noticed that our 'secret' vote isn't?

Check it out when (if) you go and vote this Thursday. You will notice that the ballot papers have an index number on their top corner, which is written down against your name when you present yourself at the polling station. Hence they (the men in grey suits) are able to determine which way you vote.

Don't believe me? I have been concerned(ish) about this for a long time now. At the last election I actually wrote on my ballot paper about my concerns that my vote was in fact not a secret. Several days later I received a letter from one of my local MPs (I won't say who) attempting to explain and becalm my concerns. The MP informed me that the only person who has cause to consult the ballot papers and cross-reference them against the electoral roll is the Returning Officer, and that this would only be done if there was allegations of double voting. So, its for security reasons. Sounds fair enough. But hang on just a moment - where did this particular MP get my name and address from - and how did they know about my concern? QED

Nothing new about that StarFrog.

I too have pointed that out to people.

Politicians don't like to to talk about it.

If it has EVER been discussed on TV then I missed it!

But I doubt that it has.

The dire (& normal) state of politics causes us to make some very distasteful choices but Im not voting Labour or Tory.

moneyplus,
So you think the Tories are more competent?

As far as I know, avoiding a recession in this country while most of the world goes into recession has never been done before.
(At least not in the last century.)


There are all sorts of things being promised in this election.

None of them are going to matter at all if the economy goes down the pan. There will be spending cuts AND tax increases AND mortgage increases if the economy goes down the pan. You could be paying less tax if you lose your job. Do you want to lose your house?

Better NHS, more police, better transport etc.
You can forget all that if the economy is screwed up.

You still might not get them if the economy goes well but at least you will still have your house & your job.


It's not all rosy but on balance the economy looks as if it will remain stable. I base my opinion on the significant dangers that I see & on Browns good track record.

I dont like Brown but he has got a good track record & every year, the Tories & the international economic organisations say that his budget is bad or even disastrous.

Every year they are proved wrong, & the economy keeps on steadily growing.
Almost the whole world started into recession in 2000-2001, but we didn't.

The Tories gave us 2 very deep recessions, 1 boom & a very feeble crawl out of recession.
Then they tried to take the credit for the slow recovery when all they had done was stop kicking the economy so hard while it was down.

The thing about the economy is that is so easy to screw it up & it isnt the government that can actually put it right when they have stopped kicking it.
It is only business that can do that.

Brown has given the economy some kicks & I thought that they were significant BUT I was proved wrong & so were the Tory critics.
The economy just kept on growing. Even with the red tape.


To avoid a recession while most of the world goes into recession & out the other end has never happened in this country before.

(Perhaps you can dig up an example if you go back more than a century but different economic circumstances would make it irrelevant.)

I don't want the Tories to screw it all up AGAIN but I will have to put up with a distasteful arrogant Blair for a while for the sake of a stable economy.

I fear for the economy if we get an intellectual Pigmy like Letwin as chancellor.

Hes the Tory that they gagged when he did a Howard Flight during the last election. How many billions of spending cuts was that Mr Letwin?

The slogan of Bill Clintons campaign was,
Its the economy stupid.

That is ALWAYS true!

-------------------------------------------

Give me a hung parliament because that gives them less power.

Labour has changed since the abysmal years of the Wilson/Callaghan government of the 70s but oh dear, look what they have turned into.
I cant say that they have turned into a monster because they already were a monster BUT at least they havent screwed up the economy yet.

Im voting Liberal, I dont agree with ALL their policies but if it gives me a hung parliament then Ill be pleased as long as Brown is still chancellor or Labour leader.

The arrogant Blair says, dont take the risk but that is not a risk in my constituency.

Weigh up the numbers in your constituency & you decide!

Economy what economy, we owe the IMF billions and in case you forget it was the PREVIOUS LABOUR GOVERNMENT that owed so much to the IMF that they were dictating how we run our economy and don't forget the inflation and interest rates that went with it.
Took the Tories ages to sort out and they set in train the Economy that labour are now messing up.
How about the biggest TRADE DEFICIT ever courtesy of labour.
How about Industrial output started declining ever since Labour took power, on what was claimed a sleazy government. But labour has shown them what true lies and bullying is all about.Dr Kelly he stood for the truth look where that got him-harrased to death.
How about most of our Gold reserves that were sold at a knockdown price and then the silly idiot went and bought loads of Euros. Dah
Pensions that Gordon has raided and left in a mess (work to your 70),(He He i'm retired so i'm alright Jack but you lot will suffer for these labour dopes and they will be alright because they dipped into your pockets to top up their shortfall) ) under the Tories the pension schemes had enough funds to allow Companies a Pension Holiday.
How about the Institutions and BBC that have been infiltrated by LABOUR HENCHMAN.
Business has now declared in favour of a Tory Goverment.
In a way I hope that Labour wins and then you will really see how they can mess up the Economy for the IMF have warned we are heading for a BLACK HOLE and then labour will have to sort it out. L O L

Whatever about the imf debt...that will be repaid from taxpayers pockets.


The real problem is personal debt, fuelled by the enhanced property boom, people using thier houses as cash dispensers...the cows must come home sooner or later.



Hopefully when Brown is at the helm, let him pay for it!

Rather than a hung parliament, wouldn't it be better to hang parliment?

Sound idea Fred!

A labour supporter, but blair is liar, took us to war on a lie. Why doesnt any one care about the iraqi people that could be your brother, sister, mum, daughter, grandfather etc Its not their fault Hussain was in control. My conscience will not allow me to vote for that. The tories would have done the same, so its the liberals for me (though it hurts to vote for them).

Kivver.
Blair dearly wanted a "Maggie", so he lied and put himself in hock to Bush......and has been found out.

No, it was not the Iraqis fault that Soddem was in power. And they lost 100,000
in the second war. But how many had Soddem put down of his own people if not his own brand of Islam? With many more to be killed over the years?

The French did not ask for Boney. Nor the Germans Hitler or the Russians Stalin. It's an endless argument. Should we go and get rid of Mugabe?

Read about the disaster that is Darfur......and it's cause. Should we mount an Expedition? There would not be many takers for that idea, I can assure you.

Sleep well on your dilemma :~)

The MOST Important issue is not being discussed.

That issue is ENERGY!

It is energy that makes people rich.
I am not talking about individuals, I am talking about everybody.

Of course information & education can make 1 person rich but that is mainly due to the shifting of wealth from a group of people to that person.

It is just not possible for everybody on this planet to lead happy & fulfilling lives until we solve the energy problem.

The amount of cheap, easily available energy places an upper limit on the tangible wealth of the people on the planet.

Global warming is going to kill billions of us if we dont hurry up & solve this problem because China & India are likely to exceed the CO2 output of the rest of the world by several hundred percent.

Hydrogen & Helium are SAFE.
Uranium & Plutonium are NOT SAFE.

The solution is NOT the current form of Nuclear Power.
Once again, we are being lied to by the politicians because they want the Nuclear Fission Industry because they want the weapons.

Current Nuclear Power stations use Nuclear FISSION.

Nuclear Fission Power stations are dangerous, they are terrorist targets, they require fascist style security, they produce radioactive waste & they lead to the spread of Nuclear Weapons.

AND Nuclear Fission Power stations do not give us any extra energy!
(See below for the reasons why!)

Fission SPLITS Atoms into smaller ones.
Fusion COMBINES Atoms into bigger ones.

FISSION is NOT a solution!
FUSION is our only hope of Nuclear Power!


Hydrogen & Helium are NOT RADIOACTIVE.
Nuclear FUSION is inherently CLEAN & SAFE.
(See below for the reasons why!)

But its harder to do.

15 years ago, at the Joint European Torus project, at Culham in Oxfordshire, they reached break even point where they got more energy out than they put in.

They needed to build a larger version for their next prototype.
This has not been started!
WHY? Because the USA, Europeans, Japanese & Russians decided to get together & try to save money by having 1 joint project.

Since then, they have been arguing about where it was going to be built & who will get the contracts.

This is the most URGENT issue facing the planet BUT ANOTHER 15 YEARS HAVE BEEN LOST!

With the Manhattan Project when they developed the 1st Atomic Bomb, they didnt care how much it was going to cost & they gave it whatever resources that were asked for because they wanted it as quickly as possible.

Nuclear FUSION requires greater URGENCY!

The energy released by Fusing Light Atoms together is many times greater than that released by splitting Heavy Atoms like Uranium & it doesnt produce such appalling radioactive waste.

Fusion produces clean energy with no radioactive problems, no danger to the public no matter what goes wrong or what crashes into it.

We need to get started with a huge investment into Fusion Energy so that we can abandon oil & coal completely. It may be huge but it is cheaper than the Iraq war.



===============================================

What can Fusion do for us?

Looking back at history, Democracy has a habit of growing & spreading but is limited by a ceiling that rises as our technical ability to access energy grows.

Democracy increases & decreases from time to time but it cant go above that limit.

You cant have Democracy without Energy.
Without fossil fuels, we would be working on the land just to grow enough food to stay alive. That kind of society can support only a few people who dont work on the land so the rest of us would be under the foot of a handful of barons & their thugs.

Competition for energy/wealth causes war not democracy.

Do the Fusion thing & there will be so much available energy that there will be no competition for it & it will be clean, safe energy.

Renewable energy will only be enough to buy us some time until Fusion is developed. It is not enough to take everybody out of poverty.

Energy is Wealth.



******************************************************

How is it that Fusion can be CLEAN?

When Deuterium & Helium3 are fused together, the result is ordinary Helium4 (a very useful gas) & a proton which is Hydrogen1 & is also rocket fuel.

There is nothing radioactive & the energy is carried off by the kinetic energy of the Helium & Hydrogen nuclei which are steerable because they are charged particles & can therefore be deflected by electric & magnetic fields.

A movement of charge is an electric current so we go straight to electricity
WITHOUT the wasteful intermediate steps of boilng water & running a steam turbine to turn a generator & losing 60% of the energy.

All we have to do is pass the fast moving nuclei down a particle accelerator in reverse to produce an alternating current to get the electrical energy into a more usable form.

Only around 2% of the energy would be lost in this process & the amount of energy produced for a small amount of fuel is staggeringly large.

When the waste Hydrogen is burnt, it produces Water but it is much more efficient to put it in a fuel cell & produce even more electricity.

Fuel cells can also be used to run electric cars.


**********************************************************
Why Nuclear Fission Power stations are no good.

It takes the output of 5 power stations to supply the energy that goes into the building of 1 Nuclear Fission Power station.

That figure comes from the Open University.

It takes about 7 years to build a Nuclear Fission Power station.
SO
It takes about 35 years to get back the energy that you put into building it.
BUT
They only last about 35 years.
SO
Nuclear Fission Power stations do not give us any extra energy!

The older they get, the more chance of an accident.

BUT Its WORSE than that because it takes a large amount of energy to run them & maintain them & fix them & they dont run all the time.

It also takes a large amount of energy
to mine & process the fuel,
to deal with the waste,
to store the waste & look after it for thousands of years.
to decommission them & deal with the radioactive rubble, metal & other junk at the end of their life.

So you cant win with Nuclear Fission Power stations.

This is of course explicitly demonstrated by the fact that British Energy keeps going bust.

British Energy didnt have to pay for:
The building of the current ones.
The building of the fuel processing facilities.
The building of the waste processing facilities.
The fuel & waste transportation facilities.
The security systems.
The repeatedly aborted building of the waste disposal facilities.
(Do you want the waste in your back yard?)

The government keeps on handing over more & more of our taxes to bail it out.
It still keeps going bust.

The government hands over another half Billion & another half Billion & another half Billion & so it goes on.

Even with all that, British Energy still cant make a profit.
This shows that Nuclear Fission cannot give us the energy we want, all we can do is dangerously try to get back some of the energy that went into building these things.

We must develop Fusion.

apple.

If it was as easy to control fusion, i'm sure someone would be knocking out takeaway fusion power stations next week. It's not that simple, at the moment there is no known way of controlling fusion reactions outside dial a yield. It's very crude, you cant simply turn it on and off. Fission at least can be damped down to control the reaction, not quite so esy with fusion. Also there are problems with containment, there is no none way to control fusion once set in motion.


Or at least thats what i believe...I am ready to be persuaded otherwise.

BTW. Thers something fishy going on with the polls, there would appear to be lots of tactical voting which is making the news seem wrong.


Any ideas?

Maxk
How ya doin?
Is apple lardy by any chance? He's got the same complaint.
Cheers.