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By  David Craig, on February 2nd, 2015We should congratulate Andy Murray. He couldn’t beat Djokovic in Melbourne yesterday, but he is still a tremendous sportsman and brilliant athlete. But the most impressive part of Murray’s story is that he and his family achieved his success through extraordinary hard work and determination and by completely bypassing the incompetent over-paid, over-pensioned bureaucrats running and ruining British tennis. For seven years up to his departure at the end of 2013, the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) was run by a certain Roger Draper whose final salary package was around £640,000 – about 4 times that of the Prime Minister. Draper received a basic wage of £394,000, a bonus of £201,000 and a pension contribution of £45,000. Under Draper’s extremely lucrative (for him) time in charge, if I have my facts correct the LTA didn’t produce a single player to consistently achieve a world ranking of above 100 (or even 200?). Yet countries with a tenth of the UK’s population and a fraction of the LTA’s massive budget can produce champion after champion. Moreover, in the four years up to Murray’s Wimbledon victory the number of people participating in tennis declined. In fact the situation was so bad that in 2012 Sport England described the LTA’s plan to improve numbers playing the game as ‘simply not strong enough’ and threatened to cut the LTA’s funding by £10.3m a year if it failed to increase participation. Following Murray’s success, which was achieved without the help of the LTA, participation in tennis did increase. Hence, I suppose the £201,000 bonus for the lucky Mr Draper. Many outsiders have wondered where the LTA’s annual £15.3m staffing costs and £17m spent on participation actually goes. I think they’ll find that executive salaries for the LTA’s many bosses and Five-Star, First-Class junkets to the world’s major tournaments for the bosses and their significant others eat up a considerable chunk of the LTA’s many millions leaving precious little for training the next generation of ‘champions’. The LTA was criticised by Baroness Billingham, the chair of Parlaiment’s All-Party Tennis Group in December 2012. She said: “The LTA is one of the wealthiest sporting organisations in the country and it’s my honest and genuine opinion that they are useless.” Draper’s £640,000 salary package was also described by Billingham as “unthinkable”. Like so many other organisations in today’s Bureaucrats Britain – the NHS, the military, the police, councils, many charities – the LTA has become a sclerotic bureaucracy that seems to exist only to support the privileged lifestyles of its bosses. In January 2014, Canadian Michael Downey took over as chief executive of the LTA. Downey was Tennis Canada’s president for nine years. Downey will be paid a salary of £300,000 with a chance to earn up to 30% more in bonuses if he meets performance targets. But will anything ever change at the preposterously poorly-performing, junketing bureaucrats’ paradise that is the LTA? Or will it just be more snouts in the trough? I think I can guess. (click on title to see comments) By David Craig, on February 1st, 2015As the sad news spreads of the second Japanese hostage held by *sl*mic State (ISIS) being beheaded, we have the usual expressions of outrage from world leaders at ISIS’s ‘brutality’ and ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’. David Cameron said last night that the murder “is a further reminder that [Isis] is the embodiment of evil with no regard for human life” (Though, of course, as any fule no *sl*mic State ‘has nothing to do with *sl*m” and “*sl*m’s values are British values”) And the Japanese PM announced: “I feel strong indignation at this inhumane and contemptible act of terrorism, I will never forgive these terrorists”. Well, the Japanese PM should know a bit about terrorism and crimes against humanity as ISIS’s spree of rape and murder is mere child’s play – a bagatelle – compared to what our Japanese and German friends were up to just over 70 years ago. Japanese: From the invasion of China in 1937 to the end of World War II, the Japanese military regime murdered almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including thousands of Western prisoners of war. These included about 300,000 Chinese civilians slaughtered in Nanking and perhaps 400,000 Chinese who died from experiments testing cholera, anthrax and the plague. About a third of all allied prisoners held by the Japanese died, many from disease, but also from beatings and beheadings. Japanese officers used to have competitions for fun to see who could behead the most allied prisoners with just one sword swipe:
In order to save bullets, the Japanese would kill their millions by bayoneting their victims or beating them to death with spades. The women would be slit open after being raped. Or sometimes the Japanese took a short-cut and just buried their victims alive. Germans: Around 12 million people (including 6 million Jews) were murdered in German concentration camps:
Using poison gas was a useful way of saving bullets which could then be used to kill British and American troops. In addition about 20 million Russians were murdered including around 17 million Russian civilians who were deliberately slaughtered, often after being herded into churches and then burnt alive. More bullets saved. A further 3 million Russian prisoners of war were starved and beaten to death. Compared to these massive, industrialised murders of tens of millions by the Japanese and Germans, ISIS’s activities could seem almost amateurish and restrained. Of course, ISIS haven’t really got into the swing of things yet and no doubt have great plans for all of our futures. But amidst all the real and manufactured outrage against ISIS’s latest killing, there seems to be a certain forgetfulness over what supposedly ‘civilised countries’ were gleefully doing to their fellow human beings not that long ago. There’s a cheerful thought for Sunday. By David Craig, on January 31st, 2015I recently read this explanation of one reason Arabs loathe Israel and the West. It’s written by a Lebanese Arab woman, so she probably knows slightly more about the Arab mentality than people like *sl*mo-Dave Cameron and politically-correct BBC and Channel 4 supposed ‘reporters’ (Jon Snow and Cathy Newman, for example?): “I believe the degraded state of Arab societies is caused by *sl*m. It kills self-expression, self-improvement and empowerment because the religion demands that *sl*m be the centre of one’s life and existence, and it dictates how you should be, how you should live. Unless you live under Sharia Law, according to *sl*m you are considered less of a human being and should be killed. It has spawned generations of people who celebrate death over life, who glorify mass murderers, who exhibit a lack of forgiveness and instead have the drive for revenge. It is their lack of open culture, their lack of advancement and their continuous disrespect for infidels and anything non-M*sl*m that is the poison killing them from within.” “From the moment they are born, Arabs are programmed to blame Israel and the United States for their ills. Instead of practising self-examination to discover why a third of their men and half of their women are illiterate, why they are not free under their governments, why creativity in science and technology is non-existent, why they have economic sclerosis despite having the world’s oil wealth under their feet, they turn their eyes and look for a scapegoat. It is much easier and more bearable to put the blame somewhere else instead of facing the truth. This tactic is freely employed by their fundamentalist mullahs and corrupt leaders to mask the detrimental effect of corrupt values and lack of freedom.” “While many countries in the world are advancing, Arab countries are not only not moving forward, they are sliding backward. The Middle East is lagging behind because of social and religious values.” The author also pointed out that, in spite of having a population of hundreds of millions, only about 330 books are translated into Arabic each year compared to around 1,500 into Greek each year and close to 100,000 into Spanish each year as an indication of the intellectual backwardness of Arab countries. I personally have the image of a family with three children. Two of the children (the West and the Far East) study hard, get an education and develop to have fulfilling and contented lives – not perfect (nothing is ever perfect) but reasonable. However one child (Arabs) doesn’t want to learn, disrupts others’ education, fails to get a decent job or establish proper relationships with others and then spends the rest of their life causing havoc within the family and blaming the two more successful children for their own failure. Probably many of us know families like that. As I’ve written before, just look at a map of Arab countries (in green) and Israel:
How can the tiny sliver of coastal land that is Israel with its paltry six million inhabitants be responsible for the widespread poverty, backwardness, idleness, ignorance, filth, overpopulation and violence of the massive Arab world? (and on a lighter note, here’s a BBC report of a Sudanese man being forced to marry a goat after being caught having sex with it https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4748292.stm I don’t know which is worse, the fact that he was screwing the goat or that the local mullahs used the teachings of a certain holy book to decide that he should now marry the goat!!!!) By David Craig, on January 30th, 2015You’re probably aware of the heat and noise in the Eurozone since the Greeks elected a government that would rather not pay back most of the money the Greeks have borrowed and spent in the 11 years since the euro was launched. So, let’s quickly review the facts: 1. The euro was a political project – the introduction of the euro was claimed to be an ‘economic project’ to make the EU more competitive and prosperous. This has always been a lie. The real aim was for the EU elites to increase their power and accelerate their dream of creating a single European superstate ruled by unelected, undemocratic, wasteful, corrupt bureaucrats in Brussels 2. The books were cooked – in order to persuade the world’s financial system that the euro would be a solid currency, the Maastricht Treaty set out criteria regarding the level of deficit and debt countries could have before being allowed to join the euro. Unfortunately for the eurocrats, the Mediterranean PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) were all a million lightyears from meeting these criteria. No problem. BoE Governor Mark Carney’s former (and probably future) employers Goldman Sachs and other clever bankers were called in and using a series of complex financial derivatives, they managed to fiddle the PIGS’ deficit and debt levels (with the full knowledge of the Brussels bureaucrats) so that magically all the four Mediterranean PIGS suddenly qualified for joining the euro 3. Germany prospered – had Germany kept the Deutschmark, this would have risen and made German exports uncompetitive. By being in the euro, Germany was able to swamp the world with its machinery and cars at competitive prices 4. The PIGS borrowed and spent – prior to the introduction of the euro, the corrupt, financially-incontinent PIGS would have had to pay interest rates of 10% to 15% or more if they could find anyone stupid enough to lend them money as most have defaulted several times in their history (Spain, for example no fewer than 13 times). But once they were in the euro, they could borrow at the same rates as the fiscally-responsible Germans as lenders assumed the Germans would always bail them out if they got into trouble. The PIGS went on a massive borrowing and spending spree allowing them to bribe their people with millions of unnecessary public-sector jobs, offer full pensions at 55 and infrastructure projects like roads to nowhere, pointless bridges, unnecessary airports and millions of new homes nobody needed. PIGS politicians and their business cronies became very very rich and, of course, never bothered paying any tax on their massive earnings 5. The PIGS’ debt levels shot up – borrowing like Gordon Brown and Ed Balls on a bender, the PIGS piled up totally unrepayable levels of debt, with Greece having the highest level, closely followed by Italy and Portugal (click to see more clearly) (The figures in the chart are from a couple of years ago. Since then Greece’s debt has climbed further from about 160% of GDP to around 175%) 6. Each Greek owes almost as much as we Brits – Greece’s government debt amounts to about €27,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. That’s almost as much as Britain’s government debt at €28,400 per person 7. We’re all Greeks now – of course, even though the useless Coalition Government has doubled our national debt in just 5 years from £750bn to about £1.5trn, we’re not quite as bankrupt as Greece because our GDP per capita is almost double that of the lazy, tax-dodging Greeks. But it’s still a slightly sobering thought that our supposedly ‘fiscall-responsible’ government has borrowed more per person than the laughably, ludicrously profligate Greeks 8. Grexit won’t happen – most economic pundits are predicting a ‘Grexit’ (Greece leaving the euro). And if we were dealing purely with economics, that’s probably what should happen. But as mentioned in Point 1, the euro is a political project and our rulers in Brussels will never allow any backtracking on their dream of a European superstate run by Germany. After all, if Greece was to leave the euro and prosper, then other PIGS might want to leave too. Greece recovering outside of the euro would spell disaster for the great European project. So of course it will not be allowed to happen by the idiots in charge of Europe. By David Craig, on January 28th, 2015I normally like to write my own blogs. But this piece by Rod Liddle in the Spectator is so good that I thought I’d use today’s blog to recommend it: https://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/rod-liddle/9420582/its-all-kicking-off-in-the-islamic-world-nothing-at-all-to-do-with-islam-of-course/ Rod Liddle may be the only journalist in Britain with the courage to question the glorious Religion of Tolerance and Peace. And here, for your enlightenment is a review that has just been written on Amazon by someone who bought my latest book THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL: It’s hard to disagree that the charity sector needs an overhaul, however this piece of drivel has nothing to offer except Guardian-reader bashing. I am probably still slightly to the left in my politics, but have no brief for the Guardian, or it’s readers, but this stuff actually pushes me more in that direction. A vile and moronic excrescence Clearly the reader was somewhat upset by my book. I wonder why he bothered buying it: By the way, THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL is available for another three days at the knockdown price of just £0.99. So, if you want to read “a vile and moronic excrescence” this is your chance! By David Craig, on January 27th, 2015You’ve probably all heard the official politically-correct narrative: 1. The NHS is in crisis. 2. The NHS needs more money. 3. The reason the NHS is in crisis and needs more money is that there are too many old people requiring expensive treatments. There are a few things this oft-repeated narrative doesn’t mention: 1. In the last 15 years the NHS budget has shot up from £45bn a year to around £110bn a year. 2. Since New Labour decided to open the borders to rub our noses in multiculturalism, about 7 million people flooded into Britain with around 46,000 still pouring in every month and they all expect free health care from the NHS. 3. Immigrants have much higher birth rates than Brits and, because of first-cousin marriages, the rate of birth defects has rocketed. 4. Most of the old people, who are supposedly bankrupting the NHS, have worked and paid taxes all their lives (unlike our 7 million immigrants) and believed that when they fell ill, they would be looked after and not pilloried for still being alive. The NHS has tried various ways of dealing with these expensive old people. At the time I published WHO CARES? by Amanda Steane, I found an NHS report that estimated that (when New Labour were supposedly ‘saving the NHS’) around 34,000 people die unnecessarily in NHS hospitals each year and another 29,000 were severely disabled due to poor care. Just in one hospital, Mid-Stafford NHS Trust, about 1,200 patients died due to poor care. That report has since ‘disappeared’. Then there was the inappropriately-named Liverpool Care Pathway. (Perhaps it should have been called the Liverpool Pathway to Heaven?) This wonderful end-of-life plan was scrapped after a review found that hospital staff ‘wrongly’ interpreted its guidance for care of the dying, leading to patients being drugged and deprived of fluids in their last weeks of life. So, hospital decides patient will soon die, hospital deprives patient of fluids, patient suffers kidney failure and dies, hospital is proved right that patient was about to die. Brilliant! The ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. Now the NHS has come up with a new way of disposing of the elderly. It’s called “Cristal” (Critera for Screening and Triaging to Appropriate aLternative care). It’s a checklist that NHS hospitals can use. It has 29 questions and if you unfortunately tick all the right boxes, then you might as well start booking your funeral as you’ll be deprived of life-prolonging medical care and sent home to die. And, of course, your death will prove how accurate Cristal was in predicting that you would soon die! The NHS assures us that the aim of Cristal is “to kick-start frank discussions about end of life care, and minimise the risk of invasive ineffective treatment”. And, of course we need some procedure to decide when it is no longer appropriate to prolong life. But there are two certainties with Cristal: 1. It will be abused by bonus-hungry hospital managers keen to get rid of expensive old people in order to protect their budgets. 2. The rich, the famous, politicians and NHS bureaucrats themselves will never be subjected to Cristal – it’s just for us worthless plebs. So, enjoy your life while you can, because one day Cristal may come and get you. (Oh, and if you haven’t read my book WHO CARES? which I ghost-wrote with Midlands housewife Amanda Steane, it might be worth giving it a go. It reveals what really happens when NHS managers put their own precious careers before patient care. You can even get a used copy for just £0.01p plus postage) By David Craig, on January 25th, 2015Let us give thanks to the good people of Sri Lanka for the extraordinary generosity they have shown to their leaders. It has just been revealed that the former president Mahinda Rajapaska is estimated to have stolen about $5bn in just 9 years in power. That’s about $550m a year or $10m a week. No wonder he’s always smiling:
Sri Lanka’s average wage is around £2,400 ($3,600). So each year, President Rajapaska stole the amount earned by around 153,000 working Sri Lankans. And that was just him. When you add in what all his family members and cronies have also stolen, you’re probably well over $2bn a year. Of course, Sri Lanka is a supposedly ‘poor, developing country’. So it gets lots of foreign aid – around $880m a year. A study by the Global Financial Integrity project has estimated that Sri Lank’s rulers steal about $1bn a year. However, after the latest revelations about former president Rajapaska’s generosity to himself with his country’s money, they may need to revise their figures upwards ever so slightly. We in the West fail to understand the mentality of leaders, officials and businesspeople in Third-World countries. When there’s some natural disaster or war, we show solidarity by collecting and distributing hundreds of millions or even billions. But for the local elites, these are just opportunities to get rich by plundering the aid money. In Sri Lanka, where the Boxing Day Tsunami killed 35,300 and made 516,000 homeless, customs officers impounded vehicles and medical supplies we sent and would reportedly only release the vehicles and aid in return for an immediate payment of around $1m in cash bribes and a further $2m later. Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan Government, seeing all the aid money pouring in imposed a special tax on foreign aid. It’s not difficult to imagine where this tax money ended up. In fact, if you look at the Global Financial Integrity project’s estimates for the amounts stolen each year by Third-World leaders, it usually comfortably exceeds the amount their countries receive in aid. Here are just a few examples:
In just these ten African countries, which receive around $12bn in foreign aid each year, the rulers are siphoning off about $38.3bn a year. That’s more than three times as much as they receive in aid. I could have produced a table for over 100 Third-World countries and the results would be the same. So forget all the bleating by Guardianistas and professional handwringers about the need for foreign aid. If Third-World kleptocracy could be reduced by just a third and the stolen money invested in new schools, hospitals, roads, power plants, water supply, ports, trains, power stations, universities etc, we could stop all foreign aid immediately and hardly a single Third-World country would be worse off. If we could halve corruption, we could stop all foreign aid and most countries would actually be better off. That’s something you’d never find anyone in the mainstream media mentioning as they’d be terrified of being labelled a “waaaacccciiiiissssttttt!!!!” So the wholesale plundering across the Third World continues unquestioned by our supposedly ‘free’ press. And as for bankrupt Britain increasing its aid budget to these worthless kleptocrats from £7.9bn a year to over £12bn a year. I have pointed out several times that just the £4.1bn increase in our aid budget to the world’s greatest thieves would have been enough money to pay for 32,400 police and 39,000 military being fired here by the Coalition government to save money. By David Craig, on January 24th, 2015As it’s the weekend, I’ll lighten up a bit. A few years ago I had a typical ‘mid-life crisis’ and did all sorts of uncharacteristically strenuous things like going up Kilimanjaro, trekking in the Himalayas, scuba diving and going on weeks-long, bum-achingly tedious cycling holidays. The Himalayas trek was a bit of a disaster. There were only five of us in the group. A family – father, mother, 23-year-old son and his girlfriend. At dinner the first evening, this family went on and on about how fit they were and many marathons they had run and how they cycled miles to work bla blah blah and how they hoped that small, fat me with my vertically-challenged legs wouldn’t slow them down and prevent them completing the whole trek. In the end, I arrived back in Kathmandu three days before them. The reason – as we got higher up into the mountains, instead of going at a steady pace, they wanted to rush ahead to show how wonderfully fit they were. This led to two of them getting altitude sickness and of these two, one had to be virtually carried down the mountains for about two days. Twats! Anyway, back to Papa John’s ‘cycling’ holiday. One trip I did was cycling through parts of Northern Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. All the people in the group were pretty young and fit. After all, cycling 80 miles a day in blistering heat being chased by packs of dogs at every village was a bit tough.
But there was one exception – John – a former army officer who was then in his seventies and more than slightly unsteady on his shaky old pins. Each day John would cycle for a couple of hours then, exhausted, would climb into the bus that carried our luggage and drinks not to emerge again till we had reached our destination. Then most of us would have a shower, eat early and collapse into bed. But not John. He’d freshen up after a tough day sitting in the bus enjoying the view of the rest of us struggling along hour after hour and then disappear off to consort with the local ladies of the night. As most of those in whose arms he found delight were probably about a third of his age, I found out they used to call him “Papa John”. So why did Papa John go on a pretty gruelling cycling holiday? After all, he must have known he wasn’t in any condition to complete the holiday. My suspicion is that Papa John was probably married to some old bat back in the UK and that it was probably many years since Papa John had his privates out on parade. Moreover, I’m sure Papa John would have had lots of very respectable friends. So, he could hardly tell his wife and friends that he was off to the fleshpots of the Far East for a few weeks to bonk his gin-addled old brains out. And he could hardly take an organised tour as his no doubt charming wife would assume she should accompany him. And that’s why the only way Papa John could escape his wife and the embarrassment of admitting his real intentions to his friends was to sign up for a quite unnecessarily expensive cycling holiday where he could be sure that nobody he knew would wish to accompany him. When he finally left to travel home, I imagine there were many young ladies in three Asian countries who were sad to see Papa John leave. And, when he got home, I suppose he had wonderful stories to tell about the ‘cycling’ trip, but probably left out the exact details of his nocturnal philandering with his military pension. I hope Papa John is still alive and I hope he has had many more ‘cycling’ holidays since the time I first met him. (back to more serious stuff tomorrow) By David Craig, on January 23rd, 2015Until about five years ago, there were two main routes to becoming a published writer: 1. Literary agent and publisher – you sent your masterpiece to every publisher you could think of and most chucked it on the ‘slush pile’ and then into the bin without even looking at it on the principle that if it was any good, a literary agent would have snapped it up. Or you sent it to every literary agent in the Writers and Artists Yearbook and most of them chucked it in the bin or returned it to you if you sent an envelope and postage. If you were lucky, an agent might look at it and send you a rejection letter. Most likely you’d get a standard preprinted letter thanking you for your submission and informing you that the agency wasn’t taking on any new writers. But in the rare case where a literary agent did agree to represent you, you had a very good chance of a publisher eventually buying your book as the agent would know what each publisher was looking for 2. Vanity Publishing – you might have noticed the small ads in your weekend newspaper saying something like “Authors Wanted”. These ads are put in by so-called “Vanity Publishers”. For a fee, they’ll publish your masterpiece however good or dire it is (they don’t care) and then you can order a few copies to sell to your hapless friends. Your friends will, of course, feel duty bound to both buy a copy and to tell how how wonderful your book is and how it should have been a best-seller. But you’ll probably be left with a huge pile of unsold copies and you may lose a few friends in the process. But now anyone can become a published writer thanks to something called “Print On Demand” (POD). With POD a printer only produces a book for you each time you actually sell one. So you no longer have the danger of being left with heaps of unsold copies. And, of course, with ebooks you don’t need to print anything at all. The best POD and ebook service for authors is run by Amazon and is called CreateSpace https://www.createspace.com/ With CreateSpace, you just log in and you can build up your book and design the cover completely free of charge using their templates. If you need a photo for the cover, you can get one for just a few pounds from a website called “Shutterstock” which has four million for you to choose from. If you struggle a bit with the CreateSpace templates, you can pay a professional probably about £150 to £200 to do the whole thing for you or you can pay CreateSpace to help you. Once you’ve built your book, it will feature on Amazon.co.uk and anyone can buy either an ebook version or a paperback (or hardback) copy. And you get paid for every copy sold. So it can cost you almost nothing if you do everything yourself and probably less than £200 if you get someone to do it for you. A standard paperback should be about 60,000 to 70,000 words (though you can get away with 40,000 to 50,000). But if you can express your great thoughts in fewer than 30,000 words, then you can use CreateSpace to publish a Kindle Single – a shorter ebook version of your genius. My publisher decided to publish my latest book THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL as a Kindle Single rather than going to the bother of producing a full book. I think that around 1,000 copies have been sold so far. By the way, THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL is on a special promotion for January for just £0.99. So hurry if you want a copy. Remember you don’t need a Kindle Reader to read it. You can read it on any device – computer, tablet, smartphone. All you have to do is go here and download the free Kindle reading app to your device: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/digital/fiona/kcp-landing-page?ie=UTF8&ref_=dp_kinw_strp_1 But once you’ve written, produced and got your chef d’oeuvre onto Amazon.co.uk, you have the issue of how to sell it . If you really have something original to say, then it might be worth paying a PR person about £500 for 15 hours work to push your book with newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. Most PR people are total rubbish and just send out streams of emails to their supposed ‘contacts’ which are routinely ignored. But I do know of one who is quite good and you’re welcome to contact me if you have a story that the world needs to hear. That’s it. You’re a published author and then you can click into Amazon.co.uk each day to see how sales are going. So you don’t necessarily need a publisher (although it’s best to have one as they give you an advance payment when they buy your book and will promote it). And you certainly don’t need and should never use an expensive Vanity Publisher. Hope this is useful to all budding authors out there. |
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