Snouts in the Trough

In England

When I returned to the UK about 10 years ago, I bought a home. Immediately after the purchase, I found that the surveyor, who was supposed to be working for me, had deliberately covered up some faults with the property. I threatened to sue him and he quickly handed over £2,500. Moreover, the conveyancing solicitors, who were supposed to be working for me, also tried a few tricks to make sure I bought the property. I did sue them and they gave me around £4,500 and another £10,000 to the ‘no win no fee’ lawyer I used to go after them.

I suppose the problem is that in any town or area of a city, all the estate agents, surveyors and conveyancing solicitors know each other, have worked together on many property sales and so are more interested in colluding to ensure properties are sold than in actually representing the interests of those who pay them.

I am/was in the process of buying a new house. Except that I have to pull out. The estate agent and the vendor’s solicitors have tried to hide from me the fact that the house has a ‘pre-emption certificate’ on it. A ‘pre-emption certificate’ gives the estate company, which formerly owned much of the land around here two things. Firstly, it gives the estate company an option to buy the property at ‘market value’ should it ever be put on sale. That means that the property doesn’t have ‘clear title’ and makes it very difficult for any potential buyer to obtain a mortgage.

However, the option to buy isn’t the real deal breaker. Also within the ‘pre-emption certificate’ is an ‘option period’. This gives the estate company the right to buy the property at market value any time between 1 September 2029 and 28 February 2030. This means that anyone buying the house can be thrown out after living there for just thirteen years. Nobody in their right mind is going to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy a house they can only live in for thirteen years. The house is virtually unsaleable.

So, it’s not surprising that the estate agents selling the house and the solicitors working for the vendor tried to conceal the existence of the ‘pre-emption certificate’ from me as long as they could. Liars, thieves and crooks!

The English way of selling homes is hugely biased against purchasers and open to corruption and fraud by estate agents, surveyors and solicitors. As about one in five home sales falls through, the English system also creates lots of well-paid work for surveyors and solicitors at the expense of purchasers.

In Denmark

Let me explain how home sales are done in Denmark:

Firstly, in Denmark the seller commissions a survey which is provided to all potential purchasers. So you don’t have several potential purchasers all having to commission a survey. This hugely simplifies the sales process.

Now you might think that a survey commissioned by the seller would be biased in favour of the seller. But the Danish system has a way of avoiding this. When a home is sold, the seller and buyer share the cost of an “ejerskifteforsikring” – that’s an insurance policy that insures both seller and buyer for any faults with the property not identified by the survey. So, if a surveyor was biased in favour of the seller and hid faults, insurance companies would soon find that claims were being made on properties surveyed by that surveyor and refuse to insure properties surveyed by that surveyor. This keeps surveyors honest as biased surveys would soon lead to them losing their jobs.

Conclusion

The clarity and checks and balances in the Danish system for selling homes shows how the English system of selling homes is just one more example of how those in power have rigged things to their benefit and against the interests of ordinary people.

And if you’re wondering why the much simpler and clearer Danish system isn’t adopted in England – well it would mean an awful lot less well-paid work for English surveyors and solicitors. So the surveyors’ and solicitors’ professional bodies would never agree to a simplification of the English system of home purchasing.

As far as I can see, most English estate agents, surveyors and conveyancing solicitors are lying, greedy, thieving scum!

What’s the most important Christian festival? Probably Christmas, celebrating the birth of Christ. And what happens at Christmas? Christians get together with their families, shop a lot, eat a lot and pray for peace on Earth and goodwill to all men (and women and LBGT of course).

What’s the most important Religion of Peace (RoP) festival? Probably Ramadan, celebrating Allah revealing the Koran to the Prophet.

And what happens during Ramadan? Lots of fasting, praying, screaming and shouting and a ramping up of Jihadi mayhem and murder.

In an average month, there are around 125 religiously-motivated RoP attacks (4 a day) in 21 countries killing 770 innocents (26 a day) and injuring 1,279 innocents (43 each day).

But things seem to hot up a bit in Ramadan as RoP fervour hits new heights. In the first nine days of 2016’s Ramadan, there have been about 8 attacks a day (double the normal average of 4), 68 people killed a day (two and a half times the normal average of 26) and over 66 injured (150% of the normal average of 43):

So, not only are there many more religiously-inspired attacks during Ramadan, but they also seem to be more deadly.

At the same time there have been no such attacks by any other religion and no victims of the supposed scourge of *ls*mophobia that our rulers are always warning us about.

Judging from these figures, I would humbly suggest that not all religions are the same and that the Third World War is coming our way.

Here’s what our friends from the world’s most peaceful religion have been up to during the first 9 days of their holy month of Ramadan. Expect an awful lot more fun and games before Ramadan ends and things settle down to the normal level of slaughter and chaos:

Here we go again. An American M*sl*m who openly declared sympathy with ISIL, regularly attended his local mosque and was twice interviewed by the FBI about his radical views shoots over 50 people at a gay nightclub.

The reaction of our rulers – “the man was mad, the man hated gays etc etc”. But the attack “had nothing to do with any religion”. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is lambasted for saying what everybody knows – this attack had everything to do with religion.

Coincidentally, about 6 weeks before the attack, a M*sl*m scholar (ok I know that’s a ridiculous oxymoron) was invited to give a talk at a mosque in Orlando in which he insisted all gays should be killed:

So, please repeat after me: “the shooting had nothing to do with religion, the shooting had nothing to do with religion, the shooting had nothing to do with religion…..”

Hey, if you say it enough times, you might even start to believe it!

Here’s the EU’s plan for making the 19 Eurozone countries into one single state ruled by corrupt puppets in Brussels controlled by Germany:

https://ec.europa.eu/priorities/sites/beta-political/files/5-presidents-report_en.pdf

As usual, the EU’s solution to any problem is “More Europe, more Europe and even more Europe”.

There are only 24 pages of utter tripe. But I stopped reading after this farcical claim: “The euro is a successful and stable currency. It is shared by 19 EU Member States and more than 330 million citizens. It has provided its members with price stability and shielded them against external instability”.

I suspect the fifty percent of young Greeks, Spanish, Italians and Portuguese who don’t have a job and will never have a job, might disagree with Juncker’s claim that the Euro “has shielded its members against external instability”.

As for Juncker’s proud boast of “price stability”, well prices tend to stay stable or even fall when a recession has been going on for nine years and there is no sign of it ever ending.

Though it is interesting that the five overpaid, over-pensioned lunatics responsible for this report – Juncker, Draghi, Tusk, Dijsselbloem and Schulz – no longer claim that the Euro has brought its citizens “prosperity”.

That used to be one of their favourite claims. After all, when the Euro was launched, we were promised that the Euro would “make Europe the economic powerhouse of the world”.

Ooops!

We have to get out of this madhouse! Vote Leave on 23 June!

Normally I try not to write more than 500 words. But I found this essay by an expert on radical Islam quite interesting, so I reproduce the whole essay below:

Islamic violence is nearly impossible to deny. But why is Islam violent? The usual answer is to point to Koranic verses calling for the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims. That certainly covers the theological basis for Islamic violence. But it fails to explain why Muslims continue to practice it. Even against each other. Violence has become the defining form of Islamic exceptionalism.

Optimists speak of reforming Islam. But such reforms had over a thousand years in which to take place.

Islam is an ideology. Its violence is a strategy. That strategy fit the needs of Mohammed. Mohammed chose to use force to spread his ideology. He needed to recruit fighters so he preached the inferiority of non-Muslims, the obligation for Muslims to conquer non-Muslims and the right of his fighters to seize the property and wives of non-Muslims as incentive for them to join his fight. Furthermore he even promised them that if they should fall in battle, they would receive loot and women in paradise.

The strategy was barbarous, but quite effective. Mohammed had created a new super-tribe in a tribal society. The tribe of Islam united different groups in a mission of conquest. The Islamic religion allowed the varying clans to be more effective and ambitious than their victims. Within a surprisingly short amount of time the chain of conquests made Islam into a world religion. The most effective Islamic conquerors could not only claim vast territories, carving up civilization into fiefdoms, but they could prepare their sons and grandsons to continue the chain of conquests.

Islam made the standard tactics of tribal warfare far more effective. Its alliance was harder to fragment and its fighters were not afraid of death. But at the same time Islam remained fundamentally tribal. It made tribal banditry more effective, but didn’t change the civilization. It codified the tribal suspicion of outsiders and women into a religious doctrine. That still drives Islamic violence against non-Muslims and women today.

And yet Islam could have reformed. All it had to do was choose a different civilizational strategy.

The current clash of civilizations is between cooperative societies and hierarchal tribal societies. Western countries are cooperative societies. They succeed by bringing together a variety of peoples into cooperative organizations. These organizations negotiate and exchange everything from goods to mutual defense. Primitive versions of such organizations existed in Mohammed’s time. They have also existed within Islamic societies, but they have been inhibited by the tribal instability of Islamic civilizations. Cooperative societies emphasize internal conscience over external posturing. Religion is a matter of personal morality, rather than collective conquest. Economic resources are developed by harnessing new ideas and techniques to provide wider benefits to the society.

Islamic tribal societies are governed by extended family groups and other hierarchies that, like Islam, serve a similar role. While such societies can be locally stable, albeit backward, expanding them is difficult because their only point of unity comes through conflict with outsiders. Without external conflicts with non-Muslims, tribal societies degenerate into internal tribal conflicts.

That is what happened in Iraq and Syria, not to mention Yemen and Libya. Most Muslim countries are delicately balanced on the edge of a precipice and they can be very easily tipped into horrifying violence between different groups if their fragile internal order breaks down and there are no outside enemies.

The Muslim expansion became unsustainable once the external spread of conquest limited the access of Muslim armies to non-Muslim victims. Islamic unity did not survive Mohammed for very long. Stability came through feudal societies which were slow, backward and unwieldy, but prevented conflict.

Ultimately the only stable Muslim society is a slave state. Modern dictatorships, which strive to imitate modern countries by building up professional elites of doctors, engineers, lawyers and generals, are eventually undone by them. It’s the genuinely backward kingdoms that rely on oil wealth and slave labor which best weathered the changes of the past generations and maintained their ruling privileges.

And here we come to the fundamental crisis of Islamic violence.

Islamic civilization is fundamentally unstable and unsustainable. Contact with the modern world destabilized it setting off a series of chain reactions. Islamic civilization, particularly in the Middle East, could not make the transition to modernity. Those countries that had oil could buy their way out of the problem with generous subsidies at home while purchasing influence abroad. The Saudis made their own people rich while controlling the West. They financed wars without needing generals by funding terrorists. They kept a tribal society going by hiring foreign professionals to do most of the technical work.

Most Muslim countries however couldn’t buy that type of immunity from modernity. And even the Saudis had only bought a temporary immunity that is running down along with oil prices. The most Islamic societies had followed the old Mohammedan practice of exhausting the land. But where were they going to move on to?

The mass migration to Europe is part of the answer. While Europeans are shocked at the sight of millions of people just picking up and walking away, the Middle East still has deep nomadic roots. Most Muslim countries are political and historical fictions. Family groups matter far more than national identities.

Outside Israel, agriculture in the Middle East is sparse. The strong attachment to the land that is found among Israelis or Europeans is absent. Feudalism associates working the land with inferiority and feudalism is a more recent memory among Muslims than among most Europeans. Success means expanding into someone else’s land and living off the spoils rather than staying and working your own.

Western cooperative societies eagerly welcome Muslim migrants because they expect them to cooperate and contribute. But that is not happening. Muslim societies are hierarchical, not cooperative. The new arrivals expect to fit into a hierarchy. If they don’t encounter a strict hierarchy, they seek to “conquer” by establishing their hierarchy with the supremacism of the Koran as their guide.

Western societies seek to settle permanently. They plan for the long term. Nomadic tribals burn through resources, viewing cities and institutions as assets to strip, raid and dispose of, before moving on. The Islamic migration is not a new phenomenon and Europe is not meant to be its stopping point.

This is a variation of Mohammed’s old strategy. While some Islamic groups, such as ISIS and Al Qaeda, stay behind to battle for the dying lands of the Middle East to establish their own perfect society, large numbers of Muslims are choosing to move on to fresher pastures. This cycle will only repeat itself.

This strategy is why Islam continues to be violent. It’s why exporting democracy is useless.

Democracy works in cooperative societies. It can only work within tribal societies as a democracy of groups. And it requires that these groups prefer cooperation to conflict as a civilizational strategy.

Islam favours conflict over cooperation. In the absence of outside enemies, its doctrine allows its quarreling groups to name each other as infidels, heretics and enemies. To reform Islam, Muslims would have to make the civilizational transition to a cooperative strategy. They would have to fundamentally change their values, their priorities and how their societies function.

And there is no sign of that happening.

Islamic civilization becomes unstable once it expands beyond its tribal limits. Its only coping strategy for that instability is violence, whether directed externally at non-Muslims or internally at other Muslims. Its economic development tools are limited and make supporting a modern society very difficult because they emphasize maintaining internal hierarchical stability over innovation and progress.

Islam is violent because it’s unstable. Its only tool is violence. Its societies exhaust their limited resources and then invade their neighbours. They repeat the same strategy until they are stopped. Then the exhausted Islamic civilization becomes a staid slave society that is stable, but backward. If that society is disturbed, then the egg cracks and the whole horrible process of war, invasion and exhaustion begins again. That is what we are experiencing right now. And there is no easy answer to this problem.

We can inhibit the expansion of Islamic migration. Or it will wash over our societies and destroy them.