Thursday blog
Sometimes you have to forget the disaster the fake Tories are inflicting on us and just have a laugh:
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Thursday blog Sometimes you have to forget the disaster the fake Tories are inflicting on us and just have a laugh: Friday-weekend blog Some years ago, I was in touch with a news service (SWNS) about one of my books. Since then I get occasional messages from SWNS asking for ‘interesting’ stories from people with ‘interesting’ lives. Here’s an extract from the latest SWNS email. I’m blogging about this as it shows the utterly trivial drivel it seems many newspapers and magazines feel is of interest to their readers. If any of these apply to you, you could sell your ‘interesting’ story to SWNS: (apologies about some text being unreadable. WordPress have just ‘upgraded’ their system. Like most IT upgrades, the newer version is much more complicated than the previous one, so I’m still trying to work out how to use it)
Tuesday-Thursday blog All the mainstream media are saying it – “The world is becoming much more dangerous so Britain needs to spend more on defence”. And as we found out during the Covid lab-leaked plague disaster and are slowly finding out about the man-made climate apocalypse global boiling nonsense, when all the mainstream media agree on something, it must be true. Mustn’t it? Being a really boring person who still believes that facts are possibly more important than feelings, I decided to look at which countries spend the most on defence. Here are the facts from 2022 for the top ten defence budgets, though clearly Russian defence spending will have hugely increased since then:
If these figures are in any way near accurate, this means that the UK – a small, wet, dismal, overpopulated, multi-culturally-enriched island floating pointlessly off the European mainland – has the world’s 6th largest military budget. Yet the powers that be and their useless, lying, self-serving prostitutes in the mainstream media bleat on about how we desperately need to increase military spending while beating the war drums with the spectre of a coming war with Russia. The “NHS’s Money-Spaffing Syndrome”The NHS’s budget in 2022/3 was around £182bn. That’s more than £6,000 for every taxpayer. And what do we get for this massive amount of money? If we just take the NHS England, in the last 10 years:
We should welcome the increase in the number of medically-trained employees. But perhaps we should question why NHS England has felt it wise to increase the number of bureaucrats by 125,510 (+45%) and the number of infrastructure staff by 62,758 (+41%) in just 10 years. Maybe the NHS is geting so much money that it has no problem wasting billions on useless penpushers and other unnecessary garbage? For example, I estimate the NHS has around 800 employees pushing diversity, inclusion and equality (DIE) nonsense plus another couple of hundred dedicated to the making the NHS greener to save the planet idiocy. The latest example of the NHS spaffing millions down the drain is the NHS introducing electric ambulances which will probably spend much of their time and their crews’ time having their batteries charged and so be unable to respond to 999 calls. The NHS claims that these milk-floats pretending to be ambulances can work for a full 12-hour shift. But they have an awful lot of equipment running off the battery – airconditioning, medical devices and so on. The “official range” of EVs is not based in reality. Only on the first day out of the factory (if it’s sunny, with no wind, temps between 15-20C, on a straight stretch road with no hills) would an electric ambulance ever live up to its range expectations. Moreover, battery power reduces with age and EV users are warned that batteries should only be charged up to 80%. So if these wonderful ambulances can do a 12-hour shift on a full battery charge, this means they can only do 9.6 hours with the recommended 80% battery charge. And if it’s a hot or cold or rainy day, the effective functioning hours will be even fewer. What if the NHS fired these thousand or so DIE and greeny waste-of-skins? That would save over £100m which could be used for something old-fashioned like patient care. Then there are the 188,268 non-medical staff hired by the NHS over the last 10 years. What about sacking a third of those? That would give another £5bn to £6bn in savings. Then the NHS wouldn’t be short of money at all. There were newspaper stories last week claiming the NHS was the aspect of Britain that most people were proud of and that most people felt we should increase spending on the NHS. I humbly suggest that the NHS os drowning in an ocean of our money much of which is wasted and that the NHS’s budget should be cut by 2% to 3% a year every year and the useless buffoons running our NHS should be forced to find these savings from reducing the number of non-medical staff and scrapping all the pointless and costly initiatives launched by these pointless staff to justify their excessive salaries and pensions. Has our military got “The NHS’s Money-Spaffing Syndrome”?That brings us to that other great cistern into which we pour billions every year – the Ministry of Defence. Virtually every purchasing project run by the worse-than-incompetent Ministry of Defence (MoD) has come in years late and vastly over budget:
In fact, I have been writing about the Ministry of Defence’s catastrophic mismanagement of its military procurement since my 2006 book Plundering The Public Sector and also in my 2008 book Squandered: How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money. And in those 18 years since Plundering the Public Sector, despite numerous damning reports from the National Audit Office and hundreds of millions spent on management consultants, there appears to have been absolutely no improvement in the Ministry of Defence’s performance. I have been fortunate enough to work in almost 100 organisations in both the private and public sectors in 15 countries. And I understand that when you throw money at any bureaucracy, at least 30% will be wasted. Many times I have seen bureaucracies finding that they have some money left at the end of the financial year. So they desperately try to find whatever nonsense they can to spend that money because if they don’t, they’re afraid their budget for the next year will be reduced. Whereas if they manage to overspend, they can demand a budget increase for the next year by claiming they didn’t get enough money. This leads to enormous amounts of profligacy and waste (usually of our taxes). Many people may believe that the answer to the problems in the NHS and our military is to hose ever more billions of our money into these two abjectly-failing organisations. Another approach might be to impose annual budget cuts to force some financial dicipline and managerial control onto the profligate, bungling incompetents who make an excellent living at our expense from failing to run these organisations? weekend blog I suppose there will be another huge hate march in London this weekend accusing Israel of murder and genocide and whatever. None of us knows how many civilians have been killed in Gaza – anyone who trusts anything said by the ludicrously-misnamed Hamas-run Gaza Health Authority needs their head examined. But what I find odd and even confusing is that we didn’t have any of these massive protests demanding a ceasfire and humanitarian aid when our friends from our favourite religion were busy slaughtering each other with a gusto the Israelis could never match:
So that’s over 750,000 of our friends from the world’s bestest religion slaughtered by their co-religionists and yet no sign of any outraged mobs marching through London to protest about that. Or we could look at something else – the numbers of Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus and anyone else who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time killed each year in Jihadi attacks:
So, it would seem that the real reasons for the screaming, foam-flecked mobs staging their weekly protests can have very little to do with any genuine concern for our Arabian friends. Of course, there will be many reasons why people attend these marches:
Wednesday-Friday blog NHS worshippers’ liesAt the weekend, I used the latest Office for National Statistics figures to show that NHS England staff levels had increased by 30% to 40% in most medical and non-medical departments over the last 10 years (2013 to 2023) whereas the population of England had only increased by around 7%. So the NHS worshippers’ constant bleating that their hallowed NHS needs more staff to cope with a supposedly ‘rapidly-rising’ population is a pack of lies. In my Monday/Tuesday blog, I used the Office for National Statistics figures to show that NHS staff levels in the three smaller parts of the UK – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – had gone up by 20% to 30% in most medical and non-medical departments over the last 10 years while the population had only increased by a tiny 2.7%. More proof that the NHS worshippers’ constant bleating that their beloved NHS needs more staff to cope with a supposedly ‘rapidly-rising’ population is a pack of lies. I also showed that Britain lies on the OECD average in the amount spent per capita on healthcare: (left-click on image then left-click again to see more clearly) This rather undermines the NHS adorers’ constant moaning that the NHS needs ever more of our money as countries where health spending per capita is less than the UK don’t appear to be permanently on the verge of collapse like our NHS. So a rising population and a lack of spending cannot be the main reasons for our NHS’s complete failure and constant state of near collapse The cancer disasterI’ve just done a quick Google search on charts showing cancer survival rates by country. On all the charts I’ve seen (here are just a couple – for lung cancer and pancreatic cancer) the UK has some of the lowest cancer survival rates for a developed country: (left-click on image then left-click again to see more clearly) And here’s a chart from The Lancet on overall cancer survival rates by country: As you’ll see, England, Scotland and Wales come in worse than the European average. I’m really begining to wonder what our million or so NHS employees actually do all day. I suspect that due to incompetent management and a general ‘nobody gives a damn’ attitude there are vast amounts of waste – operating theatres are idle most of the time, expensive kit like MRI scanners are underutilised, patient files and blood test results are constantly getting lost, tens of thousands of hours of frontline staff’s time are wasted on garbage like ultra-woke critial race theory and diversity training, an increase in ethnic diversity has led to a huge increase in corruption and billions are lost through finanical mismanagement and appalling purchasing. When I was very briefly an elected governor for my local hospital, I tried to raise the issue that a whistleblower had claimed to me that the hospital had been cheated out of over £1m due to overcharging (using what’s called ‘cover pricing’) by the construction company which built the hospital’s £5m+ multi-storey car park. Cover pricing (also known as cover bidding) is a common form of bid-rigging scheme. It is used during a competitive tender process as a way of fixing a bid to give an unfair advantage to a specific bidder. The objective is to give the appearance of genuine competition, when in reality the bids are not competing. Hospital management informed me in no uncertain terms that hospital internal management matters were none of my business and, when I had a meeting with the NHS’s own corruption investigators, they refused to look into the matter. My proposition therefore is: The real cancer killing us is the uselessness of our failing NHS full of arrogant, lazy, incompetent but ethnically- and gender-diverse staff and worthless over-paid, over-pensioned, self-serving and in some cases corrupt bureaucrats. Monday-Tuesday blog NHS England’s ‘understaffing’At the weekend, I wrote a blog using the latest Office for National Statistics numbers to show that NHS staffing in the NHS England had hugely increased between 2013 and 2023, in spite of just a 7% increase in England’s population over the 10 years and a very small increase in the average age of the population:
I have now crunched the numbers for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Here they are: NHS Scotland’s ‘understaffing’(left-click on chart, then left-click again to see more clearly)
Yet during these 10 years, the population of Scotland served by the NHS only rose by 2.7% NHS Wales’ ‘understaffing’(left-click on chart, then left-click again to see more clearly)
Yet during these 10 years, the population of Wales served by the NHS only rose by 2.0% Northern Ireland’s ‘understaffing’I have also done the numbers for NHS Northern Ireland and these show a similar pattern – increases in NHS Northern Ireland staff of between 20% and 30% in almost all areas: Yet during these 10 years, the population of Northern Ireland served by the NHS only rose by 4% Overall, the number of NHS staff in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland increased by over 20% while the population rose by only about 2.7%. As for our ‘ageing population’. Yes, it’s true that the average age of the population is increasing very gradually. But today’s older people are much healthier than previous generations, particularly as smoking has almost disappeared, and older people lead much more active and healthier lives. So the NHS’s constant claims that it needs more and more and more and more and more and more money and staff to cope with a rising and ageing population is a load of complete nonsense. The NHS has more than enough money and more than sufficient staff. But the NHS is so badly-organised and so incompetently-managed that it wastes much of the vast sums we pour into it. Time to scrap the NHS and sell it off to a company which knows how to run things? Monday-Tuesday blog I wanted to write about something else. But to avoid legal problems, I need to wait for a certain situation to evolve before throwing in my ignorant contribution. The illusion of freedomAnyone who watches the Neil Oliver monologues available on YouTube will be aware of his hypothesis that the idea of democracy and freedom is a lie which has outlasted its usefulness for the ruling elites – politicians, bureaucrats, bankers and our supine prostitute media. The lie was perhaps finally exposed by the Chinese lab-leaked plague lockdowns when we were imprisoned in our homes and many people were forced to allow an untested and possibly dangerous new medical procedure they didn’t need if they wished to keep their jobs, travel or just remain part of society. Our cringing obedience to the lockdowns surprised our rulers and made them realise how easy it was to force us to act against our own best interests. So now they don’t care what we think or want:
I just found this quote from rock musician Frank Zappa. It seems to me to perfectly encapsulate our situation where our ruling classes have no use anymore for the illusion of democracy or freedom. Instead they intend to impose their totalitarian fantasies on our increasingly-restricted, increasingly-impoverished lives whether we like it or not: weekend blog Roll up, roll up your sleeve for the mystery jab(with apologies to the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour) A few weeks ago, I got an sms message from my local NHS surgery offering me a jab commonly given to infants and those of more mature years – the pneumococcal vaccine. From what little I understand, giving such jabs is a very lucrative source of income for many GP surgeries. According to (the not always accurate) Wikipedia: “Pneumococcal vaccines are vaccines against the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae. Their use can prevent some cases of pneumonia, meningitis, and sepsis. There are two types of pneumococcal vaccines: conjugate vaccines and polysaccharide vaccines.” A member of my family got their pneumococcal vaccine about a year ago and recently had to be hospitalised in an isolation ward with a severe case of meningitis – one of the diseases which the wonderful pneumococcal jab should have given protection against. The person is still slowly recovering their balance and hearing more than a month after being discharged from hospital. I had to have the two AZ vaccines as I wanted to travel, especially so I could escape prison Britain and sit in the sun enjoying all kinds of pleasures during all the disastrous Chinese lab-leaked plague lockdowns. The AZ supposed ‘miracle vaccine’ was eventually withdrawn, I think, because of the many vaccine-related injuries so well reported by the brilliant Mark Steyn until Ofcom forced him off air for some trivial mistake he made in one report. Fortunately, I didn’t get any of the mRNA ‘death vaccine’ boosters. So I still haven’t made the decision whether to have the proposed pneumococcal jab as I have more than slightly lost faith in our politicised, giant-pharma-controlled medical establishment. Fancy the RSV jab?There’s another jab often offered to infants and people of my age group – the RSV vaccine. Wikipedia informs us: “A respiratory syncytial virus vaccine, or RSV vaccine, is a vaccine that protects against respiratory syncytial virus. RSV affects an estimated 64 million people and causes 160,000 deaths worldwide each year. The RSV vaccines Arexvy, and Abrysvo, are approved for medical use in the United States.” I have the impression that the pneumococcal and RSV vaccines are somewhat similar in function and the groups to whom these vaccines are offered (though please correct me if I am wrong). So, I noticed the folowing on-line article (in red below) which I rather doubt will be reported in any of the UK vaccine-pushing mainstream media: Health officials are investigating whether there’s a link between two new RSV vaccines and cases of a rare nervous system disorder in older US adults. The inquiry is based on fewer than two dozen cases seen among more than 9.5 million vaccine recipients, health officials said on Thursday. And the available information is too limited to establish whether the shots caused the illnesses, they added. But the numbers are higher than expected and officials are gathering more information to determine if the vaccines are causing the problem. The data was presented at a meeting of an expert panel that provides vaccine policy advice to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Officials said they were investigating more than 20 cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare illness in which a person’s immune system damages nerve cells, causing muscle weakness and paralysis. An estimated 3,000 to 6,000 people develop GBS in the US each year, and it’s more commonly seen in older people, according to the CDC.
Most people fully recover from the syndrome, but some have permanent nerve damage. Guillain-Barre can occur in people after they are infected with a virus, but in some instances, cases have been linked to vaccinations. RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, is a common cause of cold-like symptoms but it can be dangerous for infants and the elderly. Last year, the CDC signed off on a recommendation made by the advisory panel, aimed at Americans age 60 and older. It was for a single dose of RSV vaccine. There were two options, one made by Pfizer and the other by GSK. The CDC said that patients should talk to their doctors about the vaccines and then decide whether to get it. ‘Potential increased risk’ Officials were aware that instances of Guillain-Barre had been identified in clinical trials done before the shots were approved for sale, and that different systems were watching for signs of problems. At a meeting of the expert panel on Thursday, CDC officials presented an analysis of the reports taken in by those systems. About two-thirds of the cases occurred in people who got a version of the vaccine made by Pfizer, called Abrysvo. But officials are also doing follow-up tracking in people who got Arexvy, made by GSK. About two cases of Guillain-Barre might be seen in every 1 million people who receive a vaccine, health officials estimate. A CDC analysis found the the GSK rate was lower than that, but 4.6 cases per million were reported in recipients of the Pfizer shot. Data from the US Food and Drug Administration also showed an above-expected number of Guillain-Barre cases being reported in RSV vaccine recipients, with more among Pfizer shot recipients. “Taken together, these data suggest a potential increased risk” in RSV vaccine recipients 60 and older that must be explored, said Dr Tom Shimabukuro, a CDC vaccine safety monitoring official. Officials from GSK and Pfizer made brief statements during the meeting, noting that sorting out a safety signal is complicated. “Pfizer is committed to the continuous monitoring and evaluation of the safety of Abrysvo” and is conducting four safety studies to look into the possibility of vaccine-related GBS, said Reema Mehta, a Pfizer vice president. As usual, those involved in pushing the vaccine claim that: “the benefits of vaccination outweigh the possible risks”: CDC officials also presented estimates that the vaccines have prevented thousands of hospitalisations and hundreds of deaths from RSV and that current data indicates the benefits of vaccination outweigh the possible risks. Oh dear, it’s Pfizer again. Aren’t Pfizer the company which spent possibly millions on lawyers to try to keep the results of the clinical trials for their supposed Covid vaccine blocked for 75 years? Here’s the Pfizer mass-murdering boss – sorry, Freudian slip there, I meant wonderful, selfless, humanitarianmodern saint – with apparently one of his best chums, the EU’s fragrant and always immacculately-coiffed Ursula fond of Lying, an eager buyer of billions of somewhat dubious and questionable ‘vaccines’: As for the claim: “current data indicates the benefits of vaccination outweigh the possible risks,” I seem to remember we’ve heard that story before. So I won’t be rolling up my sleeve again for the RSV or pneumococcal ‘vaccines’ any time soon. Thursday-Friday blog Does immigration increase national wealth?Our useless, lying, fake Conservative government has massively increased immigration to 1,200,000 in 2022 while promising us it wants to bring the numbers down to the ‘tens of thousands’. The spurious reason given by the open-borders Establishment for ever more immigration is that immigration will supposedly increase our national wealth. After all, won’t most of these migrants be hard-working, tax-paying citizens who are delighted to have come to our freedom-loving country and who will make a positive contribution to our country and not (as I and many other people suspect) poorly-educated, mostly unemployable, benefits-scrounging, UK-hating, violent, imbecilic parasites intent on bringing their whole village of dependents and all kinds of other human garbage to the UK by claiming they are beloved relatives? Britain’s GDP seems to be increasing: But so is the UK population: Here are a few figures which suggest that the Establishment’s claims about the positive contribution migrants will make are complete and utter hogwash:
So, in the 19 years from 2000 to 2019 (the last full year before the Chinese lab-leaked plague), spending per person has gone up around 33% from £11,120 per capita to £14,791 per capita after peaking in 2010 to £15,661 per capita. If all the millions of wonderful people invading our once great country were hard-working, self-reliant individuals, then government spending per capita should have decreased, not increasesd by 33% More people, more in debtNow let’s look at another set of figures – how much the government collects in tax minus how much it spends:
I have a feeling that most of our MPs and journalists don’t understand the difference between deficit and debt. Probably most voters don’t understand this either. That’s possibly why, when a budget is on the way, we get politicians and journalists claiming that the Chancellor has “£20 billion” or “£30 billion” or £-whatever-billion to pay for tax cuts. But, of course, while you have a deficit your debt increases: So, as long as there is a deficit, the Chancellor should not be giving any tax cuts. Moreover, the ludicrously-misnamed Office for Budget Responsibility informs us that: ‘In 2022-23, we expect debt interest spending to total £83.0 billion. That would represent 5.2 percent of total public spending, and is equivalent to £1,900 per household and 2.5 per cent of national income.’ Though debt interest is expected to rise in 2023/4 to around £116bn, making debt interest the third highest item of government expenditure, much higher than education, policing or defence: (left-click on images, then left-click again to see more clearly) So, in spite of the supposedly wonderful contribution made by the millions of migrants, our government keeps on having to tax us ever more while also borrowing vast amounts of money to pay for our ever-worsening public services – our collapsing NHS, our impotent military, our joke-woke police, the unutterably useless Home Office, our failing education system and so on. It is far from obvious that open-borders migration is making our country a wealther, healthier place to live. In a way, I’m not sure the coming Labour government can be much worse than the bunch of lying, self-serving, expenses-looting, incompetent charlatans currently pretending to rule us. It’s likely that financial markets will soon lose all confidence in whatever government we have and so will make UK government borrowing so expensive that Labour will find they can’t tax us any more than the fake Tories are doing and so may have to make real cuts to government spending to avoid national bankruptcy. Let’s hope someone in the Starmergeddon government has the IMF’s phone number so we can call them to beg for a bail-out, as happened under a Labour government in 1976, when the borrowing taps dry up. Monday-Wednesday blog I hope readers who looked at my weekend blog noticed the likelihood that there will be over 75 million members of the Religion of Wonderfulness and Delight living in the European continent by 2050. That is an awful lot of people who may not particularly like either us or our way of life: In case you think I’m exaggerating, I attach below a blog I wrote just over 5 years ago – 18th January 2019 – about the Republic of Ireland’s “Plan 2040”. Here’s what I wrote: The Irish Plan 2040 The Irish Government has published a national planning strategy called “Plan 2040”. Here are some of the main objectives of this plan:
Some interesting issues arise with this plan. Firstly, most governments can barely plan beyond next week, so how can the Irish government plan for more than 20 years ahead? Secondly, there are general elections in Ireland every 5 years and presidential elections every 7 years. So what would be the point of one government or one president producing a 20-year plan? This would only make sense if the main political parties and the presidential candidates were almost indistinguishable from each other and if they were all pursuing almost exactly the same polices dictated to them by the Bilderberg Brussels bureaucrats and WEF billionaires. This would make Irish elections meaningless as whichever party or presidential candidate won would follow the same policies The 2040 ‘population increase’ But the main problem with Plan 2040 is the expected increase in population of about one million people. The Irish birth rate is around 1.9 children per woman down from 4 children per woman in the 1960s and 1970s. The UK is at 1.8. But replacement level is 2.1 children per woman. So, the indigenous Irish population is actually declining. Ooops! Where are the extra more than one million people going to come from? Hmmm, I wonder. OK, I remember now – the extra more than one million people will come from Africa, the Middle East and places like Crapistan. That’s 50,000 a year for 20 years – about 1,000 a week. Of course, many of these wonderful people being imported by Ireland’s rulers may be highly educated, very Westernised and eager to roll up their sleeves and get to work paying taxes to support Ireland’s ageing population. On the other hand, many may be poorly-educated, barely-literate, low-IQ, violent, lazy, unemployable, West-hating, benefits-scrounging, deeply criminal human flotsam and debris who will impose a massive economic burden on the working Irish, destroy communities and strain public services like health, education and the police as has happened in so many other Western European countries. A minority in their own country? The Irish population is around 4.8 million. Let’s assume that the indigenous population will decline to about 4 million by 2040 because of the falling birth rate and a long history of native Irish emigrating to the UK, Australia, Canada and other English-speaking countries in search of new opportunities. Then, of the 5.8 million people who (the Irish government predicts) will be living in Ireland by 2040, around 1.8 million – almost one in three ‘Irish’ – will be from Africa, the Middle East or places like Crapistan. Let me just repeat that – one in three Irish will be from Africa, the Middle East or Crapistan! Am I really the only person who has realised what the Irish government’s plan will do to the country? Ludicrously, the plan has nice pictures of rolling Irish countryside and happy white Irish families: Perhaps photos of no-go, inner-city ghettoes with women dressed like Darth Vader on a bad hair day and the men screaming about their snackbar and demanding the introduction of Sharia Law would be more appropriate? Most other Western European governments are following a similar strategy of white race replacement. The UK government claims to be trying to bring immigration down to the ‘tens of thousands’ while actually increasing it to around 1,200,000 in 2023. But no other government has actually announced its plans so openly and so clearly as the Irish. And yet few people in Ireland seem to have objected to or even protested against this catastrophic destruction of their country and culture. Though, of course, now Ireland has signed up to the UN Compact on Safe and Orderly Migration and has passed some of the world’s most draconian hate speech laws, anyone daring to criticise mass migration will probably be committing a criminal offence. If the Irish establishment import over one million in the 20 years from 2020 to 2040 as is made clear in the “Ireland 2040” plan, what will they do after that? Import another one million plus in the following 20 years? If so, the Irish will be a minority in their own country sometime between 2060 and 2070. I wonder if the Irish realise what their establishment is up to? What I absolutely fail to understand is why Western leaders are deliberately destroying their own countries. |
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