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.

The very fabric of society is breaking down around us. What the hell is there left to believe in?
Charlie Brooker The Guardian, Monday 13 July 2009

It's all gone wrong. Our belief in everything has been shattered by a series of shock revelations that have shaken our core to its core. You can't move for toppling institutions. Television, the economy, the police, the House of Commons, and, most recently, the press ... all revealed to be jam-packed with liars and bastards and graspers and bullies and turds.

And we knew. We knew. But we were deep in denial, like a cuckolded partner who knows the sorry truth but tries their best to ignore it. Over the last 18 months the spotlight of truth has swung this way and that, and one institution after another was suddenly exposed as being precisely as rotten as we always thought it was. What's that? Phone-in TV quizzes might a bit of con? The economic boom is an unsustainable fantasy? Riot police can be a little "handy"? MPs are greedy? The News of the World might have used underhand tactics to get a story? What next? Oxygen is flavourless? Cows stink at water polo? Children are overrated? We knew all this stuff. We just didn't have the details.

After all their histrionic shrieking about standards in television, it was only a matter of time before the tabloids got it in the neck. Last Monday even the Press Complaints Commission, which is generally about as much use as a Disprin canoe, finally puffed up its chest and criticised the Scottish Sunday Express for its part in the Dunblane survivors' story scandal. You remember that, don't you? Back in March? When the Scottish Sunday Express ran a story about survivors of the Dunblane massacre who'd just turned 18? It fearlessly investigated their Facebook profiles and discovered that some of them enjoyed going to pubs and getting off with other teenagers, then ran these startling revelations on its front page, with the headline ANNIVERSARY SHAME OF DUNBLANE SURVIVORS.

"The Sunday Express can reveal how, on their social networking sites, some of them have boasted about alcoholic binges and fights," crowed the paper. "For instance, [one of them] - who was hit by a single bullet and watched in horror as his classmates died - makes rude gestures in pictures he posted on his Bebo site, and boasts of drunken nights out."

Nice, yeah?

As I'm sure you recall, there was an immediate outcry, which was covered at length in all the papers. You remember their outraged front pages, right? All their cries of SICK and FOUL and VILE in huge black text? Remember that? No? Of course you don't. Because the papers largely kept mum about the whole thing. Instead, the outrage blew up online. Bloggers kicked up a stink; 11,000 people signed a petition and delivered it to the PCC. The paper printed a mealy-mouthed apology that apologised for the general tenor of the article, while whining that they hadn't printed anything that wasn't publicly accessible online. All it had done was gather it up and disseminate it in the most humiliating and revolting way possible. Last Monday's PCC ruling got next to zero coverage. Maybe if it had happened after the News of the World phone-hacking story broke it would have gathered more. Or maybe not. Either way, the spotlight of truth is, for now, pointing at the press.

But this is just one small part of the ongoing, almighty detox of everything. There's been such an immense purge, such an exhaustive ethical audit, no one's come out clean. There's muck round every arse. But if the media's rotten and the government's rotten and the police are rotten and the city's rotten and the church is rotten - if life as we know it really is fundamentally rotten - what the hell is there left to believe in? Alton Towers? Greggs the bakers? The WI?

The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There's surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it's suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we're all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It'll be set in Basingstoke and called, "Cuh, Typical."

What about each other? Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

As the very fabric of life breaks down around us, even language itself seems unreliable. These words don't make sense. The vowels and consonants you're hearing in your mind's ear right now are being generated by mere squiggles on a page or screen. Pointless hieroglyphics. Shapes. You're staring at shapes and hearing them in your head. When you see the word "trust", can you even trust that? Why? It's just shapes!

Right now all our faith has poured out of the old institutions, and there's nowhere left to put it. We need new institutions to believe in, and fast. Doesn't matter what they're made of. Knit them out of string, wool, anything. Quickly, quickly. Before we start worshipping insects.

....

Hmmm? Does anyone know if you can trust insects? Or wool? How about wool with 5% lycra?

Anyway, Grasshopper be praised.

I was being serious.

This_is_me,

I know you were I have seen it myself.
How come they now like to be called travellers, when most of them don't.

Alan,

I feel your last post was going a bit too far in stereotyping certain groups of people, (perhaps the odd train spotter).
Perhaps they are a bit loco, but all train spotters are not odd.

ExecLine,

My, and I thought I had it bad.

The Government state.....We are not a soft touch (sic) on immigration, (could have fooled me).

The comments in the report bracketed are obviously mine.

In the press a few weeks ago......Gordon Brown was last night accused of striking a bad deal for the taxpayer after agreeing to give France 15million to help tighten its borders.
Under a deal agreed, the money will pay for new technology to search vehicles heading for Britain (why not sell it to them).
A trial of the systems will be carried out at Calais before being extended to Boulogne, Dunkirk and the Channel Tunnel terminal at Coquelles.

Also In the press a couple of days ago....

MIGRANTS trying to sneak into Britain illegally from France are to be offered (bribed) 1,700 of taxpayers money and a plane ticket to return home in a new scheme that is set to cost millions.

The plan, called the Global Calais Scheme, is the latest in a list of incentives totalling 2,500 to encourage (I would encourage them alright) the 2,000 migrants who try to board ferries and trains bound for the UK every night to go home.

Volunteers (Excuse me sir/madam, would you like to participate in a money for nothing scheme, you can't loose honest) will each be handed the cash a fortune in the worlds trouble spots and a plane ticket home worth up to 800 at a new office soon to be opened in the busy port.

French officials are desperate (then let them fund it all) for the scheme to work following a public backlash in France against a plan of forced deportation which was scrapped at the 11th hour in November last year.

The scheme will be funded using British taxpayers money through the International Organisation for Migration which has been contracted by the Home Office to implement the project.

Comment....Of course our beloved Government has denied that this will encourage more people to try to get into the UK, or that some who receive the money wont make multiple attempts.

I know someone who used to work in the film industry and is good with makeup/disguises. Now all I need I need is a Burka, fly to France legally from the UK, get stopped at the port, no passport, ID or speak the English and I'm in the money.

We are always being told that if something looks too good to be true etc.
You couldn't make it up.

I'm becomming so angry, I could crush a grape

Welcome to Britain

Don't you mean Great Britain, (or should that be Grate to irritate or annoy). Well it does me.
But in all seriousness, the government could save squillions of wonga by buying a job lot of welcome mats and placing them at all entry points in the UK.

Greek - but what language would you write "welcome" in!

I can think of a few suitable French words.

Man City to make 50m bid for Newcastle United supporters

Premier League billionaires Manchester City have today launched an audacious bid for the entire fan base of recently relegated Newcastle United.

The unexpected move has come as part of Citys plans to be the best supported club in the world, and the so-called Best Supporters In The World have provided a logical starting point.

The move will see each of Newcastle Uniteds 50,000 regulars offered 1,000 to change their allegiances to Manchester City.

Our competitive advantage is our financial position, and we will buy anything and everything we feel will help us improve this football club. Said City boss Mark Hughes.

Securing the Newcastle United fans offers us a great opportunity to improve our position as the best supported club in the league,

They have just the sort of experience were looking for, in that theyve enjoyed fleeting periods of great expectation followed almost immediately by abject failure, which will be useful to us in the next two years.

Unlimited funds

Hughes continued, Well happily pay top dollar for supporters who will blindly follow their team and defend them as the greatest in the world in the face of over-whelming evidence to the contrary.

And in that respect, the Geordies really are second to none.
The Newcastle fans, who will not be subjected to a medical, are expected to have a fully clothed at all times clause inserted into their Man City contracts.

A Newcastle spokesperson said that although the move has come at a bad time for them, the entire fee will be used to rebuild the supporter base into a slimmer, better looking unit which they hope will be the envy of the Championship.

Skinny

I think you would have to have 'Welcome' in every known language as if one is left out no doubt it would leave an opening for prejudice action.

This-is me.

I have been a Newcastle supporter for ages, (well since I read your post), where do I sign.

To get to the top of the queue write to Mark Hughes at Shity, The Wastelands, MiddleEastlands, Far from Old Trafford, Manchester.

You could also offer him a cash and supporters exchange deal, taking all the Bitters (Shity Supporters) to the wilds of the North East.

This-is-me,

I have been on the 'how to spot a scam' course.

I was just about to send you a few quid thinking you had some influence with the Newcastle directors, when I spotted that there should be a space between Middle and Eastlands. I have therefor decided that you are trying to pull a fast one, and the address is false. Better luck next time.

The too clever for you one. Greek.

Another example of our none democratic government.

It will be announced today that motorists who drive to work will have to pay up to 250 per year to park in/on any land owner by their employer.
There are many companies that are drastically trying to cut costs, due to the recession, who will find this charge/tax yet another nail in their business coffin.
My son works for a businesses that is not on a direct transport route. If he was to travel by public transport he would have to catch a bus from our village (we have 3 per day outbound, 4 returning), travel 3 miles to a small market town, catch a second bus, travel 11 miles to the town where he works, then either walk 2 miles or catch a third bus that passes within 1 mile of his workplace. Obviously doing a reverse to get home but walking or taxi for the final 3 miles as our last village bus is at 1620 hrs.

The government is just not getting the fact that to millions of people a car is a necessity, not luxury (or is it that they just don't care).
And just what gives them the right to charge someone to park on land they have no right over.

What next. A tax on parking on your own private property, after all where is the difference.

For many years I believed that when people screamed big brother, meaning not just surveillance, but treading on our freedom of rights, the risk was not that serious. I am now convinced we are fast approaching a more oppressive society that it may be difficult to extract ourselves from.

Democracy in the UK may not be dead, but it is dying.

Time for a march?

Well, for now let's give it just a month or two. My heart is strong and my mind is set but my feet are killing me.

Greekman

I heard about this parking fiasco about 3 months ago. As a landlord of industrial premises who gives free parking to tenants (about 50 cars) this tax will cripple us, as one of our selling points is lots of parking (we are just outside a small town near Brafdord). The alternative for our customers will be to park on the main road (which has no yellow lines) and walk the last few yards to work. This will then block the major road to the nearest town, causing severe congestion. The council will then paint yellow lines on the road, our customers will be unable to park and move elsewhere when their leases expire, within a year or two we will be out of business and on the dole claiming benefits, instead of paying a fortune into the system like we do now.

Well done labour you set of total fcuking winkers

Hi dcb,

My brother lives just outside Nottingham where the first charges are being planned for 2011. Many businesses in that city have already stated that they will move out of the city as this parking charge will be the final straw.
But as I read this morning, several other cities are considering the same scheme.
As this scheme will reap millions for the cities concerned no doubt it will spread UK wide, then of course there will be nowhere to move to avoid the charge.
I also read that all the money received must be spent on Public transport infrastructure, so it will not just become part of the general tax pot, local or national.
Yer, right. I remember they said the same about Vehicle Excise Duty.

It is often said that the powers that be will squeeze till the pips squeak.
Well my pips are squeaking load and clear.

Perhaps what is needed is a bit of French style action.
We should all (if this tax comes in) take to the streets in our vehicles and cause the biggest congestion ever seen.

No wonder more and more people look at work, savings etc and compare that with being looked after by the state from cradle to grave.

Becoming more and more totally p****d off.

Just a thought. I wonder if our honourable (sic) MP's and Civil Servants will have to pay the charge, probably not, but silly me, if they did it would be us paying anyway.

And then there's the teachers who are parking their cars in the school's car parks.

Schools qualify for this, because they are Employers too and have more than the requisite 11 parking places, which are required to be had by the employer to qualify for the tax, and so they are going to get clobbered too.

All the teachers are going to go on the dole too. Stands to reason.

I'm glad they warned me, as I would never have guessed.

My local swimming pool now has hazard warning signs on the pool side telling people that, 'Caution the sides of the pool may be wet and slippery'.

A few of these signs are next to the steps that lead into the water, making the signs themselves a hazard.
Perhaps they should put up another set of signs warning, 'Caution the signs saying the sides of the pool may be wet and slippery are dangerous', Then they could put another set of signs, OK you get the gist!

You have to compromise in life.

eg, If your wife wants a cat and you want a dog, then simple, get two dogs.