|
|
By  David Craig, on January 12th, 2014 I’ve written about this before, but yesterday I learnt a bit more about how the jet ski rental scam works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsPuoaktoAw
I was down at the main beach shooting the breeze with a couple of expats and in just a couple of hours we saw three groups of tourists lose a considerable amount of money when they were caught by the jet ski scam. Here’s how it works:
1. Some tourists (usually young men) decide to have some fun out on the water by hiring some jet skis.
2. They ask the jet ski boys how much it costs to rent a few jet skis. They are quoted a ridiculously high price and then manage to “negotiate” this down. Pleased with themselves, they take their jet skis and off they go whooping and yelling with excitement. The jet ski boys don’t mind dropping their prices as they know the big money will be made later.
3. Tourists come back to the beach and hand back their jet skis. The jet ski boys drive the jet skis up onto the beach and “notice” a lot of scratches and dents on the underside of the jet ski. Or there may also be some trimming which has broken off.
4. The jet ski boys point out the “damage” to the tourists and demand they pay for repairs. Typically they will ask for up to 100,000 baht (£2,000 – a huge amount of money here where the cost of living is about a fifth of that in the West and a monthly wage may be less than £400 per month)
5. While the tourists argue with the jet ski boys about the damage, one of the jet ski boys calls one of his friends in the police. Although you hardly ever see a policeman here, two large, extremely well-fed policemen mysteriously appear
6. Seeing the police, the tourists are relieved and believe the police will help them out of their trouble with the jet ski boys. And sure enough (as part of the charade) the police seem to be sympathetic to the tourists and they suggest that 50,000 baht (£1,000) would be quite enough to pay for the “damage”. (The police, of course, get a healthy cut of money extorted from the tourists)
7. At this point, many tourists will agree to pay and one of the young men will be forced to stay on the beach with the jet ski boys while his friend(s) go off to get the money. Or else, if the tourist is alone, he’ll be marched to the nearest ATM by a couple of jet ski boys to get the cash. I once saw a tourist try to escape the scam by running away, but with jet ski boys all along the beach, he was quickly caught and relieved of his money
8. If the tourists still refuse to pay, things can get quite nasty. They may be taken to the police station where they’ll waste hours waiting and filling in forms and being interviewed until they realise that the whole thing is futile and the only way they can get away is by paying up. Some tourists even get their passports confiscated and held till they hand over the money.
There seem to be two main versions of the scam:
The basic model – here the jet ski is in the water when the tourist rents it and so the tourist can’t see if there is any damage to the underside. But when he returns the jet ski and it’s driven up onto the beach, the damage can be seen
The advanced model – according to the expats I was talking with, there’s another version where the jet ski boys paint over all the scratches and marks with a water-based paint. Then when the jet ski is taken out, the water-based paint starts to come off revealing all the damage which was already there. Or else if some trimming is breaking off the jet ski boys glue it back on knowing it will soon break off as the jet skis crash through the waves at high speed.
So, next time you take a beach holiday and are tempted to hire a jet ski, please remember the jet ski scam – it might save you a lot of money.
By David Craig, on January 11th, 2014 Here’s a quite amusing short (2 minutes) YouTube video from the USA called “God made a liberal”. www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUzMPlQb2G4
In the USA, the word “liberal” applies to anyone who believes in Global Warming, tax and spend, welfare for everyone, immigration is good for you, big government is good for you etc. So in Britain, that would include Gay Dave Cameron plus anyone who votes LibDem, Labour or Green or anyone who is pro-EU.
The video is worth watching. Thanks to the reader who sent me the link.
And here’s a picture from the UK of a liberal brain (click to see more clearly)
By David Craig, on January 9th, 2014 Today some pub-level political philosophising. But given that our leaders and the mainstream media seem unable to grasp what I’ll be discussing, it may still be worth writing this post.
About 500 years ago, most European countries were to some extent theocracies – they were governed by a monarch and the Catholic Church. When a country is ruled by a religious group, there can never be any democracy. After all, if the group in power represents God’s will, logically there can be no reason for it to be replaced. So, anyone daring to criticise the political set-up was also criticising God’s representatives and was thus a heretic. Punishment for heretics was usually being burnt at the stake after a goodly dose of torture to get appropriate confessions:
Moreover, once a group like the Catholic Church achieved power and had no democratic opposition, it set about looting every country where it ruled for the benefit of its own members. Hence the vast wealth accumulated by the Catholic Church and the many wonderful cathedrals built when most people lived in little better than mud huts.
The only way democracy could start to develop was when Henry Vlll, due to his genetic and possibly sexual failings, split with the Vatican in order to get his first divorce and established the Church of England as subservient to and separate from government.
Now spool forward 500 years or so to today. Iran, Egypt and Turkey plus many other Middle Eastern countries have become theocracies. The group in power believes (or claims to believe) that it represents God’s will on Earth. So, the same logic applies as applied in the Catholic theocracies hundreds of years ago – you cannot have democracy coexisting with theocracy. If the group in power represents God’s will, then any opposition or criticism become heresy and the punishment for heresy is hanging or beheading or something equally unpleasant.
Iran is probably one of the most extreme theocracies and is quite uncompromising with those who appear to be attacking God’s will. Elections in Iran are, of course, a farce. And the ruling Mullahs are raping the country enriching themselves and their associates.
In Egypt, the idiot Morsi blew the chance of establishing an open, modern Muslim society and instead he and the Muslim Brotherhood tried to drag their country back to the Middle Ages while allowing a massive increase in corruption as they plundered the country for their own benefit. Morsi was, fortunately for Egypt, stopped by massive protests and the intervention of the military.
In Turkey, Erdogan has made some attempts to modernise the country, but also started a process of Islamification of a once secular state. And now that many of his close associates and family members have been caught in a massive corruption scandal, he’s clamping down by firing hundreds of police investigators who could have exposed the corruption the ruling Islamic elite and protesters are harshly dealt with. As for fair elections, forget it – Erdogan has made his view clear when he described democracy as “a bus ride … ‘once I get to my stop, I’m getting off’'”. The destination for Erdogan is an authoritarian one-party state, clothed in democratic garb but shorn of the rights and habits that go with genuine democracy. Meanwhile, like Morsi in Egypt, Erdogan has been modifying the constitution to ensure that he keeps power.
When the so-called Arab Spring kicked off, our leaders and the mainstream media kept telling us that this was the beginning of a new era of peace, democracy and prosperity in the religion-blighted Middle East. But what they failed to understand was that, just like in Europe hundreds of years ago, you cannot have democracy in a theocracy – though a theocracy will always turn into an utterly venal oppressive kleptocracy.
So the problem facing the Middle East and the world is not the racist “Muslims don’t do democracy”, it’s that theocracies (whether Catholic or Muslim or whatever) don’t do democracy.
History is there to teach us about the future – it’s a pity our leaders and media experts have learnt absolutely nothing.
By David Craig, on January 9th, 2014 As we move into the centenary year of the start of the First World War, most people realise that it was the punitive reparations imposed on Germany after WW1 that contributed to the rise of the Nazis and the deaths of about 40 million people in the Second World War.
Incidentally, though they were the driving force behind the harshness of the reparations, the French made only a limited contribution to winning WW1 and, of course, no contribution at all to winning WW2. In fact, the collaborationist French forces may have killed more British servicemen in WW2 than the pathetic Free French Army killed Germans. You may have heard the joke that when the French Concorde, filled with German tourists, crashed near Paris airport, the French killed more Germans in that crash than they killed in WW2.
At the time the reparations were imposed, few people if anybody realised the horrific consequences. So, what mistakes are we making today that are similar to the mistakes made after WW1?
Here are 3 suggestions:
1. Surrendering British sovereignty to a corrupt, wasteful, self-serving Brussels bureaucracy
Britain is still widely admired throughout the world for our democratic history and for our sense of fair play and we have a role contributing some moral rectitude to the United Nations and international politics. It is tragic that today’s political pygmies (particularly the repulsive liar Clegg and the laughable Miliband) are hell-bent on handing sovereignty over to the greedy, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Because, as many people are beginning to realise, once power is carelessly given away, it’s almost impossible to get it back. To turn Britain from a proud, independent country into a minor administrative sub-region of a massive socialist superstate is a disaster for Britain and the world.
2. Committing economic suicide to save the world from supposed Global Warming
I don’t know how many people across Europe and in Britain have lost their jobs and their livelihoods because of the EU’s and Ed Miliband’s craven acceptance of the myth of Global Warming. A few hundred thousand? Maybe more. But what is certain is that hundreds of thousands more will be cast on the scrapheap as British and European industry is unable to compete with Asia and the US because of our high energy prices due to replacing cheap energy with costly and inefficient renewables. In 20 years, historians will look back in amazement at how our leaders committed economic suicide (while feathering their own nests) even when all the evidence showed that Global Warming was a myth.
3. Surrendering our democracy to Islamic fundamentalism
But perhaps the decision to appease Islamic fundamentalism, instead of confronting it, may to be one of the great moral failures of our time and may be the mistake that leads to the most bloodshed in the future. In 1939, Hitler correctly identified that Britain was weak and would do almost anything to avoid war. So he launched his takeover of most of Europe. Today Islamic fundamentalists similarly see our craven weakness and the way the British establishment and the media do everything to allow their hatred and intolerance to flourish while trying to destroy anyone who raises concerns about Islamic intolerance and hatred.
There are around 50 million Muslims in Europe. Within 25 years, there will be over 100 million. Research in Britain has shown that about 40% of Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 said they would prefer to live under sharia law in Britain, one in eight young Muslims said they admired groups such as al-Qa’eda that “are prepared to fight the West”, 36% of the young people questioned said they believed that a Muslim who converts to another religion should be “punished by death”, 75% of young Muslims would prefer Muslim women to “choose to wear the veil or hijab” and 58% believed that many of the world’s problems are “a result of arrogant Western attitudes”.
If just one in every 100,000 European Muslims becomes radicalised against us, that’s 1,000 who would happily die trying to kill us. If one in every 10,000 European Muslims becomes radicalised, then that’s 10,000 who will fight us. Pity the BBC never mentions these kinds of figures.
Of these three great mistakes, the cowardly surrender of our values and way of life to appease Islamic fundamentalism is probably the greatest and the one we will all come to regret most.
Buy hey ho, what do I know?
By David Craig, on January 8th, 2014 A trivial post today as the next few days are going to be ultra serious.
As housewives’ favourite, Rolf Harris, faces charges of indecent assault and possessing illegal images, I wonder if he can see any small irony in the titles of some of his greatest hits.
There’s Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport – perhaps if Rolf had tied his kangaroo down, he would not be in so much trouble now?
Then there’s Jake the Peg – “I’m Jake the Peg diddle diddle dum/With my extra leg diddle diddle dum” – it seems to have been Rolf’s extra leg that has led to his current difficulties.
He also did a song called I touch myself – if only it was just himself that he had touched, then he’d be enjoying a carefree, wealthy old age instead of appearing in court over the next few months.
As for Rolf Harris’s famous didgeridoo – I wonder if that’s just another name for his extra leg?
And, if Rolf did commit the alleged offences – which he has denied – as he allegedly took out his kangaroo/extra leg/didgeridoo to show it to his alleged victims, did he use his famous catchphrase “Can you tell what it is yet?”
Rolf will have lots of money to pay for the best lawyers. But if he needs a bit of cash, perhaps he could update one of his most famous songs and reissue it – Two Little Boys could be rerecorded as Too Many Little Girls.
Rolf Harris’s CV shows his extraordinary talents – from champion swimmer to artist to cartoonist to TV entertainer to musician. But like so many others in the sixties, seventies and eighties, he like the other housewives’ favourites, Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall, allegedly got carried away by his ability to use his fame, money and power to exploit those who were helpless when he allegedly abused them. With their fame, money and power, Harris, Savile and Hall could have had as much consensual sex as they wanted. But that wasn’t enough for them – they were all (still allegedly in Harris’s case) such vile human beings that they could only get satisfaction by abusing vulnerable girls and sometimes boys. For this, they deserve to be punished. We know Savile and Hall are guilty. Rolf Harris will no doubt continue to claim he is innocent long after he has either been freed or convicted.
By David Craig, on January 7th, 2014 Those of you who watch Sky News or read the Sunday Times will know that Adam Boulton is a leading political correspondent. In the Sunday Times this weekend, Boulton wrote a piece seeming to support the idea that human activity is responsible for supposed Global Warming.
Boulton wrote “But evidence is mounting and it goes beyond anecdote. Last week the journal Nature published a paper reporting that the Earth’s climate was more susceptible to carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought, and predicting global temperature could go up by 4C this century. True, as the tireless climate change “realist” Lord Lawson points out, the global temperature so far has not risen as much as some of the direst predictions but, equally, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded last September it was “unequivocal” that global warming was taking place because of human actions. The panel said its view was supported by 97% of scientific research.”
There are so many things wrong (deliberately?) with these few lines, that I can’t deal with them all here. But to answer just a few:
1. Boulton writes “ the global temperature so far has not risen as much as some of the direst predictions”. That is a ridiculous statement. Temperatures have NOT risen at all over the last 16 or so years while CO2 emissions have shot up. This alone suggests no link between temperatures and CO2 whereas Boulton dares to write “the Earth’s climate was more susceptible to carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought”. Utter tripe from Boulton!
2. Boulton writes about climate change “realist” Lord Lawson and puts the “realist” in inverted commas as if laughing at one of the few people in British public life who dares to question the new Global Warming religion/cult
3. Boulton trots out the old “97% of scientists” argument as if it was actually true. Ever since their infamous “Hockey Stick” graph was shown to be based on fraudulent data, the Himalayan glaciers didn’t melt as predicted and the earth stopped warming more than 16 years ago, the Warmists have been desperately looking for a new weapon with which to attack anyone who didn’t subscribe to their Man-Made Global Warming fantasy.
The Warmists thought they had found their latest weapon of mass deception when some guy called Cook (or should that be “Crook”?) published a study claiming that about “97% of scientists agreed that Global Warming was caused by human activity” (Anthropogenic Global warming – AGW). There’s only one problem – Mr Cook (like Mr Boulton?) was (IMHO) either a liar or a buffoon.
Mr Cook’s group looked through the abstracts of 25 years of articles about supposed Global Warming – they didn’t read the actual articles! Based on just a few lines of each abstract (not the full article), they classed each article into one of 7 categories ranging from articles that appeared to endorse the AGW theory to those that rejected it (click to see the categories more clearly)
The results were as follows:
1. Endorsed AGW with quantification – 65
2. Endorsed with no quantification – 934
3. “Implicit” endorsement – 2,934
4. Uncertain – 8,269
5. “Implicit” rejection – 53
6. Reject without quantification – 15
7. Reject with quantification – 10.
Total papers included – 12,280.
Then Mr Cook’s group did something very clever/dishonest (delete as appropriate). They took out the 8,269 papers which didn’t take a position. That left 3,933 papers which possibly endorsed the AGW theory and just 78 which rejected it. So suddenly you have just 4,011 papers which expressed an opinion and of these 3,933 (97%) could be interpreted as endorsing the AGW theory. This is madness. This is an absurd abuse of all mathematical and scientific processes.
Let’s look at the figures another way. There were 12,280 papers discussing supposed Global Warming. Of these, a minuscule 65 (0.5%) endorsed the AGW theory and were confident enough to quantify by how much the earth would warm. Then there were just 934 (7.6%) which endorsed the AGW theory, but were not confident enough to make any numerical predictions about the expected warming. So, we actually have a pathetic 8.1% that explicitly backed up the theory of AGW. This is laughable! And it’s rather far away from the claimed 97%!
Then we have a big bunch – 2,934 scientific papers (23.9%) – which Mr Cook’s group (perhaps creatively) interpreted as “implicitly” supporting the AGW theory. So in total, out of the 12,280 abstracts reviewed, a mere 3,933 (32%) explicitly or “implicitly” could be interpreted as supporting the AGW theory and the rest (68%) either didn’t express an opinion or else disputed the AGW theory.
So, to claim that 97% of scientists agreed that humans were responsible for supposed Global Warming is utterly ludicrous. As usual with figures used by the Warmists, there seems to have been blatant manipulation of the data to prove a point that the data didn’t actually support.
Sorry there are so many numbers in today’s blog. But hopefully this analysis of the figures totally debunks the “97% of scientists” claim.
It’s a pity that our leaders and journalists like the ever-podgier Adam “Global Warming” Boulton don’t check their facts before trying to mislead us with comp-letely bogus claims. What are you Mr Boulton? A liar or a fool or both?
By David Craig, on January 6th, 2014 Until recently, people in Britain and other countries would protest against our self-aggrandising leaders’ attempts to involve us in pointless, unnecessary wars. And we would see scenes like this (click to see more clearly)
But since the mass arrival in Britain of millions of people belonging to a certain religion, we now see protests in support of hatred, intolerance and war – scenes like this (click to see clearly)
And like this (click to see clearly)
And anyone who voices their concerns about what is happening in Britain is immediately branded as a bigot and a racist by the mainstream media and particularly the overpaid, over-pensioned, greedy, self-serving, self-righteous liars at the Burka Broadcasting Corporation.
How have we allowed this to happen to our once tolerant country?
If, like me, you are deeply concerned about the way we are allowing bigotry, hatred and intolerance to flourish and, like me, you find these demonstrations deeply disturbing – I guess that makes you, like me, bigots and racists in the eyes of the politically-correct establishment and the Guardianistas who run the Burka Broadcasting Corporation.
By David Craig, on January 5th, 2014 Probably over 10 million people in in the EU have lost their jobs since the start of the EU debt crisis bringing the total number of unemployed in the EU to a staggering 27 million. That’s 27 million people, most of whom want to work, who cannot have the self-respect of knowing that they can support themselves and their families, who have nothing useful to do all day, who are stagnating and ignored by Europe’s worthless, overpaid, over-pensioned leaders.
In some countries with youth unemployment at over 50%, many young people’s lives have been destroyed as they will never get the jobs for which they have studied or trained. But at least the EU’s blundering economic incompetence has given some work to one group of people – cartoonists.
Here are some views of the wonderfully successful Greek bailout (click on pictures to see more clearly)
And here are some more:
And mighty David Cameron’s promises to reform the corrupt, wasteful, Stalinist EU:
And the increasingly desperate efforts of the EU’s political pygmy leaders to hold things together:
And the utter hopelessness of their feeble efforts:
By David Craig, on January 3rd, 2014 Currently Europe’s (excluding Turkey) 50 million Muslims only make up about 7% of the total population. However, as Muslim communities tend to be found in the main cities, here the percentage of the population that are Muslim is much higher than in the general population.
About 30% of Marseille’s population are Muslim, around 25% of Rotterdam’s and 24% of Amsterdam’s (see table)
A rough rule of thumb is that the Muslim population of major European and UK cities and towns is growing at around 3% a year due to immigration and higher birth rates. Meanwhile the indigenous population of many cities and towns is falling by about 1.5% a year due to lower birth rates and “while flight”. If these two trends continue, and there is no reason to suppose they won’t, then within 25 years Muslims will be in a majority in European cities like Marseille, Brussels, Amsterdam and Rotterdam and British cities and towns such as Birmingham, Luton, Slough, Bradford and Leicester.
The implications of this change are quite profound. For example the politically -correct, immigration-loving Equality and Human Rights Commission estimates that half of Muslim men in Britain and three quarters of Muslim women don’t work. If this doesn’t change, then with “white flight” leading to the departure of those who can afford to leave, major towns and cities could become massive slums where most people live off benefits.
Moreover, when Muslims reach a majority, then we can expect the kinds of decisions taken by local mayors and councils will be very different from those taken today.
We risk a future where cities and towns become increasingly Islamified, possibly causing social conflict between urban centres and the rest of the country.
There are certainly interesting times ahead.
On the subject of the Islamification of Europe and Britain, my thanks to a reader who sent me this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTLeZWdr328 It’s a YouTube video made by someone called Pat Condell in which he recommends that the Islamophiliac Burka Broadcasting Corporation’s favourite moderate Muslim Anjem “Andy” Choudary should be given a knighthood. It’s one of a series of videos by Condell where he comments, not always politely, on multiculturalism and religion, some of which have been removed by YouTube moderators. Many people will not agree with his views, but being an award-winning stand-up comedian, he’s quite an articulate and forthright speaker.
By David Craig, on January 3rd, 2014 I thought I’d start 2014 gently with a few travellers’ tales from the Land of Smells. Tomorrow’s post will be much more serious.
The background to the first two stories is that it’s only in the last few years that Russian tourists have been coming here and so most aren’t aware of some interesting local customs..
Russian tourist Vladimir Bodrov 28 found himself a beautiful “girl” on Walking Street and agreed “short time” with her for 1,000 Baht (£20). But on getting to a short-time room and taking his clothes off for his fun, poor Vladimir found that his “girl” had a certain appendage where a certain appendage should not have been. This made Vladimir quite angry and he thumped the ladyboy breaking her nose. But the ladyboy fought back and the police were called.
Following the incident, the ladyboy demanded that Vladimir pay her some of the 80,000 baht (£1,600) that he/she had recently spent on plastic surgery to make his/her face more feminine – plastic surgery which the angry Russian had somewhat damaged. Vladimir refused. The police decided to take no action and Vladimir returned to Russia, hopefully a little wiser in the customs of the Land of Smells. Here’s Vladimir and his ladyboy in the police station:
Evgeny Gerasimenko, 40, also was unlucky in love. He too chose a girl who was not all he/she should have been and had more things than a girl should normally have. Evgeny’s ladyboy did what many ladyboys here do to earn a living – she suggested Evgeny and her have a drink before boom boom, drugged his beer and made off with his camera and 10,000 baht (£200).
Here’s Evgeny pointing to the offending ladyboy who took him for a ride, but not the ride he expected:
But the stupidest tourist this year wasn’t a Russian. It was probably New Zealander Bernard John Griffiths 65. He too fell in with a ladyboy. Apparently they agreed some kind of commercial arrangement and Mr Griffiths went with the ladyboy to an ATM to withdraw money to pay for the “girl’s” services. The instructions on the ATM screen were, naturally enough, mainly in Thai. But there is always an option (written in English) letting you choose another language. Dumbo Griffiths didn’t notice this option. So the ladyboy, rather than showing Griffiths how to choose English, instead helpfully offered to take out the money for him. Griffiths gave the ladyboy his card and PIN number and the ladyboy withdrew the cash and gave money and card back to Griffiths. Then, as usual, the ladyboy suggested a drink before they went off to do happy happy. And, as usual, the ladyboy drugged Griffiths’s drink.
Griffiths told police they shared a beer together, but that he saw the suspect shaking his beverage before giving it to him. Asking why, he was told it was to clear the foam from the bottle. Griffiths took the ladyboy’s word for it and drank up, then quickly passed out in a corner and the ladyboy made off with the New Zealander’s wallet, visa card, a diamond ring worth 8,000 NZ dollars, a gold necklace worth 3,000 NZ dollars and the 10,000 baht cash that was withdrawn from the visa card prior to the drink.
Hey ho, life’s never dull in the Land of Smells
|
|
