Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

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Could not believe what I read a few days ago. Pakistan who as we know are a country with sufficient money to be a nuclear power and run a space program, have asked that any further foreign aid payments given by Britain are made via cash transfers. They have also stated that they think it is totally wrong that we should have any say in where that money is spent.
To me this sounds totally ridiculous, but no doubt, quite rightly the Pakistan Government think that we will agree to this suggestion/demand.
The thing is I was totally bemused as to why they should demand this change. Of course it can't be so that any existing paper trail, no matter how flimsy, disappears altogether, allowing them to spend an even larger percentage of such aid on corruption, can it!
Also much of this monetary aid, is according to previous reports, being given to the tribal areas, due to most such tribes being in need. Same report gave reasons for why terrorism, especially the Al-Qaeda training camps are allowed to flourish in the remote tribal areas. Several tribal elders stated that, they would never inform on Al-Qaeda members, as many are connected by blood ties to the same tribes.
So one also wonders how much aid money is going to support such groups. How many of out troops are being killed, by bullet and bomb, paid for by the UK tax payer.
No wonder we as a country are the laughing stock/soft touch of the world.
How much longer are the British public going to stand for such nonsense.

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No, I do not feel we have reached that point yet. What I am advocating is pressure within the law. I often contact the media, expressing my views, as well as contacting MPs on differing subjects. Whilst the MPs allowances inquiry (criminal activity) was ongoing, I wore a 'T' shirt with the words, 'Our MPs are institutionally morally corrupt. I often wore this when attending our local speakers corner, where several MPs, both already standing and potential candidates meet with the public. Many commented, all to the positive when they read the message.
I feel that far too many people in this country are content to just keep quite. We need far more people to stand up and be counted.
There is always a time when/if things get so bad, that matters have to be taken further, and I am not saying, things such as the increased student fees, but if things ever get to the stage of a dictatorial, oppressive state such as for example, China, Burma and many Muslim ruled countries, where actual force is the only route open to the populous.
Everyone has their limits.

Having pillaged India, Pakistan, and the rest of the commonwealth for long periods, it would seem reasonable to repay a little occaisonally.

The nuclear programmes would suggest to me thinking of the future wealth and economy of the country, rather than being cap in hand to other more "wealthy "countries"" in the future.

Thus enabling them to lift some of those countries populace to "decent" standards of living. (I have written before people with full bellies prefer to sleep than go to war.)


"It is a pity that Maggie and the present crew didn't have the ability to think of the long term future, rather than the bottom line of short term gains and appeal of strutting the stage to its foolowers. What happened to the industrial base. Is the same sort of result going to occur in education.)



Anyway, it is again interesting another form of pillaging is likely to be happening again, i.e. allowing the educated and professional classes to enter this country to an expense of their own. (That's OK. for now, but you can B. off when Britain no longer "needs" you. By the way we won't pay you as much as you fellows in the "work place".

I wonder why that when they go home they are disgruntled and antagonistic to Britain.


Perhaps. if we had been more sensible when we "controlled", or "ruled" some of these countries and help them provide decent infrastructures, we may not have generated so much hate.

Ah, well.

By that thinking we should be asking the Scandinavians and Italians et al to compensate us for their pillaging. It may have been much further into history but it nevertheless happened. But wait! maybe we should thank them for the civilisation they brought with them. What have the Romans ever done for us?

Did we not benefit our colonial outposts at all? No governance, no roads, railways, agriculture?

RAW.

Built straight roads!

Agree, that there has to be some time restrictions on obligation to recompense for previous actions.etc..

The levels of "compensation" paid, also have to be proportionate to the ability to pay.

It is unrealistic, not to recognise our limitations as a "small country" and have them. But, as an optimist, I think much of the "aid" will have some human benefit, decrease some suffering and probable ameliorating of previous ill feelings towards this country.

However, you could also mention the above to the "Zionists, who wish to go back to contracts with god made many thousands of years ago". eg. "The Promised Land".

"Did we not benefit our colonial outposts at all?"


Yes, but as one would expect, the benefits of the colonisation was disproportionally towards the colonists i.e. Britain not the occupied countries.

I would be happy to reclaim England for the Welsh, Irish and Scots, but find little support for doing so.

(At the moment, but I am working on it.) 8-)

It is difficult to judge if the benefits of colonisation were biased towards us and not. It depends on the timescale. For example, India. We may have taken from it at the time but gave something back over time. If we hadn't colonised India it might have become nothing more than a poor backwater, or indeed many fractious states. Who knows, the deed was done.

You will probably say we are still taking (doctors/nurses) but that is because we have globalised social and economic mobility. We don't pressgang them to come here to work we just dangle the bigger proverbial carrot.

edit - ignoring the 'contracts with god' bit, no interest in getting into religious territory.

It is difficult to judge if the benefits of colonisation were biased towards us and not.

I am sure we sent navies, armies guns and explosives for the benefit of the indigenous populations and didn't extract more than the expense for doing so.

Unfortunately, some of the people of those colonies don't seem to have "advanced" very much by our colonisation.

"If" and "might" are mighty big words but from observation I think Britain and others could "have done better".

It isn't the movement of the " the professionals". which needs examining but outcome of the filters being applied.

Mixed "feelings" about immigration and/or emigration. Feel, that if the "quality" of "life" in the other countries was thought to "equate" more "reasonably" to ours, some of the movements would not occur.

Again, not certain if the results would be good or bad.

What you moaning about now Fred , "you've never had it so good" :-)

Dil,

Not moaning, just observing.

Glad I am retired and doing a damn sight better than expected.

So I am told.

My wife is smiling at me, not sure why, but have noticed the tea tastes a bit bitter.

Spike Milligan has been credited with creating the World's funniest joke.

Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire carried out the biggest internet experiment to discover the world's most popular joke in 2001. It took him twelve months to compile the submitted 40,000 jokes, to be voted by 300,000 people from all around the world.

The result was a joke about two hunters in the woods of New Jersey. One collapses and the other calls the emergency services for help. The operator tells the hunter to remain calm and, firstly, to establish if the collapsed man is dead.

The operator hears a gunshot then the hunter comes back on the line and asks, 'Okay? What now?'

Since then Professor Wiseman has been trying to track the roots of this joke to no avail until he saw an Australian documentary that aired a rare clip of The Goons first television broadcast in 1951.

Michael Bentine: I just came in and found him lying on the carpet there.
Peter Sellers: Oh, is he dead?
Bentine: I think so.
Sellers: Hadn't you better make sure?
Bentine: Alright. Just a minute.
Sound of two gun shots.
Bentine: He's dead.

With Milligan having died in 2002 of liver failure (the last of The Goons), Professor Wiseman then went to Milligan's daughter in an attempt to verify his authorship. She said that she was certain that he had been responsible for it.

Professor Wiseman said, "Doing the experiment I heard so many jokes and many were quite similar, but what is nice about this one is it is totally unexpected. What is also interesting is the fact it does not rely too much on word play or puns, so the joke will not be lost in translation into other languages

Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire seem's to have had a lot of time on his hand's. I wonder how much money this research cost ?

" she was certain that he had been responsible for it " , sound's like she didn't like the joke, lol

Sex is like playing bridge: If you don't have a good partner, you better have a good hand.

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The Defense Industry is not a Defense Industry, it is an assault industry. If you want to see what those people are doing to the Human Species just look at the birth defects from depleted uranium at http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/extremedeformities.html .

The US Administration falsely claimed that they had to go into Iraq to stop Hussein from using nuclear weapons. But the US tested 4th generation nuclear weapons in Iraq that did not make mushroom clouds. Then they used depleted uranium to pretend that all the radiation was do just to that. It was not. In any case, the use of the depleted uranium was inexcusable. It has a half life of 4.5 million years and is destroying the human genome. Neither dust nor people stay in one place. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes is the future their shortsighted policies are making. The human race needs to give up playing war games and start a Manhattan Project style push to learn how to defend without weapons.

delete

I read with some anger, frustration and disgust about a case of utter and appalling injustice.

Once again, it involved the idiotic management at the RSPCA. However, it seems this time that lots more idiots were involved: Mindless uncaring beaurocrats; over zealous policemen; stupid social workers; immoral lawyers and stupid judges - 74, yes, 74 different court hearings (!!!); a bad Parliamentarian Law; childcare "experts" (???) - See how many of them you can count for yourself.

Also, do have a read at the Comments that follow this article. From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8148987/Forced-adoption-another-win-for-the-child-snatchers.html

Forced adoption: another win for the child snatchers
The case of Tony and Debbie Sims illustrates the cruelty of our child protection system, says Christopher Booker.
By Christopher Booker
20 Nov 2010

In 43 years of medical practice, said the familys GP, he had never encountered a case of such appalling injustice. To their neighbours, it was so shocking that up to 100 of them were ready to stage a public protest, until being banned from doing so by social workers and the police.

This was the case of Tony and Debbie Sims, which I first reported in July 2009 under the headline  'Evil destruction of a happy family, and whom I can now name because their daughter, torn from them for no good reason, has finally, after three years of misery in foster care and 74 court hearings, been adopted.

The story of Mr and Mrs Sims was my first introduction to that Kafka-esque world of state child-snatching which I have so often reported on since. It illustrates so many of the reasons why, hidden behind its self-protective wall of secrecy, this ruthless and corrupt system has become a major national scandal.

Until April 2007, Mr Sims, a professional dog breeder, and his wife, then a branch vice-chairman of the local Conservative Party, were a respectable middle-class couple living happily with their five-year-old daughter, who was the apple of their eye. Shortly after Mr Sims was interviewed by the RSPCA over his unwitting infringement of a new law banning the tail-docking of puppies, their home was invaded by two RSPCA officials and 18 policemen, who had been given a wholly erroneous tip-off that there were guns on the premises.

When the dogs were released from their kennels and rampaged through the house, ripping apart his daughters pet boxer, Mr Sims strongly protested verbally but not physically. He and his wife were arrested and taken away, leaving their little girl, aged five, screaming amid the chaos. Social workers were called and the child was removed into foster care. While Mrs Sims was being held for several hours in a police cell, she had a miscarriage. She returned home that night to find her daughter gone.

When the couple next saw their child months later, at a contact she said she had been told they were dead and had gone to heaven. For three years they tried to get her back through those 74 court hearings. The social workers claimed the child had been maltreated, because her home was an unholy mess. But this was only because of the police raid and the dogs a WPC who had visited the house a month earlier on other business reported that it had been neat and tidy.

The child could not understand why she was not allowed to go back home with her parents. The courts were unable to consider a report by an experienced independent social worker which the couple were told described them as responsible and loving parents. The only evidence the court heard was that from the social workers and their own experts.

When the couple were eventually told that their child would be adopted, they appealed. In a judgment last year, which the media were permitted to report, Mr Justice Boden ruled that because the parents had not shown sufficient co‑operation with the authorities (after four psychiatric assessments of the couple, the father refused to submit to a fifth), the adoption had to go ahead.

One of the first people to contact the parents when this was made public was that independent social worker, who expressed astonishment, saying he had assumed that, because the social workers case seemed so flimsy, the family would have long since been reunited. Last week, however, Mr and Mrs Sims had a two-sentence note to say their daughter has now been adopted.

Since I first wrote about this case in 2009, I have come to recognise many of its features in dozens of others I have followed: the mob-handed involvement of the police; the seizing of children for no good reason; the inability of social workers to admit they have made a mistake; the way lawyers supposedly acting for the parents seem to be on the other side; the refusal of judges to look objectively at all the evidence, and their willingness to accept nonsense if told to them by social workers and their experts. Too often, these proceedings get away with standing every honourable principle of British justice on its head.

Such is the Frankensteins monster created by Parliament in the 1989 Children Act. Yet apart from the tireless John Hemming, and a handful of other MPs shocked into awareness by individual cases in their constituencies, the majority seem wholly unconcerned. So what do we pay them for?

And, talking about 'injustice', here's hoping, that you never get caught up in any kind of a legal problem in Dubai:

From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/8149056/Millionaire-owner-of-Dubais-Little-Britain-attacks-jail-term-over-bounced-cheques..html

Millionaire owner of Dubais "Little Britain" attacks jail term over bounced cheques.
A British property tycoon, famous for buying a 43 million man-made island in the shape of Great Britain off the coast of Dubai, has branded the Gulf state backward and unjust after it jailed him for seven years over a series of bounced cheques.
By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor
21 Nov 2010

Safi Qurashi, from Balham, south London, appealed to David Cameron to intervene, claiming he had been wrongly convicted after hearings lasting just a minute each.

Two years ago Mr Qurashi, 41, was featured in Britains Got Talent judge Piers Morgans ITV programme on how Britons were cashing on the Dubai property boom and becoming overnight millionaires.

But, in a letter from jail, he reveals how, since his arrest, his business collapsed and the strain of the ordeal caused his pregnant wife to lose their baby and his mother to suffer a near-fatal heart attack.

The letter, handed to the Sunday Telegraph by his family, says he was mistreated by the Dubai police, who, he claims, handcuffed him to a chair for eight hours, denied him access to lawyers, and that he was convicted without any chance to put his side of the story. He also claims the Foreign Office have refused to help.

I could not believe what I was going through, he wrote. I kept on thinking this is a modern country, it has laws, it depends on foreign citizens and investment, surely its legal system cannot be this backward and unjust?

One of 200 Britons jailed in the United Arab Emirates, where the Queen is due to visit later this month, he added: David Cameron has the power to enforce change. How can we as a nation entertain a regime that allows our citizens to invest money and then (be) jailed?

He wrote: We went from having five staff to almost 100 within two years. We started to enjoy the better aspects of life. We sent our kids to the best school in Dubai and we could enjoy amazing holidays. Our business turnover was 600 million.

His company specialised in beach front properties sought after by stars like David and Victoria Beckham and Rod Stewart, who reportedly invested in the Gulf State as it was transformed into a playground for the rich and famous.

The firm survived the countrys property crash which saw newly built luxury apartment blocks and hotels left empty. But last January, without warning, Mr Qurashi and his business partner were arrested by plain clothes police.

They told me I was being arrested for bouncing a cheque. They said not to worry, in two hours we would be let go.

I was held for eight hours in a cell. No phone calls. No lawyer. Then I was kept handcuffed to a chair for another eight hours.

We were asked two questions: our names and whether we signed the cheques. As I answered yes, we were sent to Port Rashid jail, built to house 80 prisoners, (but with) over 200 people inside.

It was shocking. At night it resembled a refugee camp. For our first few days we slept on a concrete floor, taking it in turns to sleep.

After two days they were met by the prosecutor who said they were being charged over three bounced cheques, made out for millions of pounds.

But Mr Qurashi claims the cheques were handed over as security in a series of property deals and should never have been cashed as the deals had been completed.

The prosecutor said they would face a hearing in two weeks. Just like that, two weeks in jail, Mr Qurashi wrote.

After six days our lawyer arrived. We had been in the same clothes for a week, with no place to wash, no soap or shampoo. The lawyer, who we had hired, omitted to tell us that he was the defence lawyer in a (unconnected) civil case we had filed in 2009. His offer was simple: drop all charges...and I will help you.

Suddenly the Dubai I knew, trustworthy, clean, crime free, non corrupt, all disappeared.

Meanwhile Mr Qureshis wife, Huma, was struggling, looking after their young children, Sara, 12, Maaria, nine, Yousuf, four, dealing with lawyers and trying to keep the business afloat.

My wife who was pregnant at the time of my arrest suffered a miscarriage. That was a particularly difficult thing. Trying to suppress the anger and frustration was difficult and the environment in which we were in was not easy.

We hired a new lawyer who had two five minute with us. He said this is not England, we do things our way.

There were two hearings each one a minute long and I was sentenced. The judge had not read any of our evidence. I was assumed guilty even before I attended court.

After his conviction he was transferred to the countrys main jail. Conditions are better, but the other inmates include murderers, rapists and drug dealers.

He has now been in jail for nine months and is allowed to see his wife each week through a glass window, over a dodgy intercom system.

His final appeal was dismissed last month. My children have been told and they cried for days. They wrote me great letters of encouragement, although it is very hard to read them through all the tears that would flow.

He added: Dubai boasts that it has a very fast judicial process. Thats right. In a one hour court session a judge hears between 30-40 cases - only 90 seconds per case. Guilty or not guilty. This is the legal system of modern Dubai.

Last night Mr Qureshis family said they had asked for help from the Foreign Office but were told they could not intervene.

His brother Farhan Qurashi said: They say a lawyer in Dubai has to say due process has not been followed. But no lawyer in Dubai is willing to put their name to that. In the meantime my brother rots in jail and his family suffer. This is a terrible miscarriage of justice.

See also:

Property tycoon who bought a 43m 'Little Britain' jailed 24 Jul 2010

Safi Qurashi's open letter from Dubai jail cell 21 Nov 2010

I think the US government should pay him for finding the wide open flaw's in their security. What if it was the Chinese or terrorist who hacked in.


Home Office: Your views on extradition wanted (by 31 December 2010)
By fg on November 11, 2010 10:24 PM | No Comments

The Conservative - Liberal Democrat coalition government is allowing members of the public (that means you!) to have a say in a review of the appalling mess which the incompetent and authoritarian previous Labour government made of the whole process of Extradition:

Remember that there was no public consultation whatsoever, and no informed debate and careful scrutiny in Parliament either, when the notorious and twice disgraced David Blunkett forced through the Extradition Act 2003 into law, which he and his apparatchiki then applied retrospectively to Gary McKinnon and to other cases. such as the Nat West 3 Bankers and Babar Ahmed. etc.