Sholay! pt IV

July 30th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

The final instalments today. I hope you enjoyed it.

Parts 16 through to 21.

Sholay! pt III

July 29th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Want to know more? Here’s the Wiki page and the IMDB.com page.

Today, you get parts 11 through to 15.

Sholay! pt II

July 28th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Here is todays editions of Sholay! Parts 6 through to 10.

Exciting, isn’t it?

Sholay! pt I

July 27th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

While I’m on holiday visiting er, erm, whatever they have up in the lake district, besides lakes, you lot can broaden your horizons too.

Instead of the usual scheduled holiday posts this, and the next three posts, are Sholay! The greatest Hindi movie ever made.

Today it’s parts 1 through to 5. Enjoy.

Summer Holiday

July 24th, 2009 § 2 comments § permalink

The whole world entitled to free health care on the NHS

July 22nd, 2009 § 2 comments § permalink

The Daily Mail hasn’t earnt itself the nickname The Daily Fail for no reason. This one is an epic.

Apparently some failed asylum seekers are to be allowed free health care on the NHS, that is currently denied to them. Sorry, I should’ve said ‘proposed’. They’re not currently allowed, and it isn’t definately going to happen.
It’s just a proposal.

According to the Daily Mail, the headline goes…

A million failed asylum seekers will get free NHS care in human rights U-turn

A million people will get NHS treatment. That is an assertion of fact. But it’s not a fact. It’s a proposal.

Digging deeper, but not much deeper. In fact only as far as the first line of the story itself…

NHS treatment will be available for tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers to ensure their human rights are honoured, it was announced yesterday.

So it’s not a millon failed asylum seekers, after all. it’s only tens of thousands. Not quite so shocking that number, is it?

The number has dropped significantly because certain criteria would need to be fullfiled, rather than just any asylum seeker. They would need to be destitute with children and various other things. So the proposal’s not open to all.

Strolling through the article the figures get a little more specific still…

There are understood to be around 450,000 failed asylum seekers who have not left the country, although only 10 or 20,000 are directly affected by the new rules.

So there is ‘understood’ to be less then half a million failed asylum seekers in the country and only just tens of thousands at the biggest guess or estimate.
Just think a little about what is being told here.

There are 450,000 failed asylum seekers. What proportion of total applications these failures are I don’t know.
Lets take the bigger 20,000 number that would be directly affected by the proposals. Which means that approximately 4.5% of failed asylum seekers are affected (for the better, remember).

But for the headline to be correct, 50x more failed asylum seekers would need to be eligible, which if it stayed at the same rate would mean there would have to be 22,500,000 failed asylum seekers. Let that sink in for a moment.

Twentytwo and a half million. Failed. Asylum seekers. A number equivalent to a third of the population of Britain.

As I said earler I have no idea of the proportion of total asylum applications the failed ones make, but how many applications are gonna be needed to get a failure rate of 22.5 million?

And where did this original one million figure come from?

According to the Mail, MigrationWatch.

Notes:

  1. I originally came to this Mail article via a post on the BNP site. That article says pretty much the same thing but with out the 10-20,000 figure and a bit more pro-BNP propaganda.
  2. I just realised that there is no time scale mentioned, either. Are these figure for a five year period? A year? Month? Half a week?
  3. I hope my maths has not let me down

New link-lurve

July 22nd, 2009 § 2 comments § permalink

On my old blog my blogroll got quite large and I am purposefully trying to keep this one here not quite so big and ungainly.

Sometimes though there are blogs that I shouldn’t have been left off so long (not that I was leaving these off deliberately). I won’t tell you about them cos I won’t do them justice, but leave you to find out about them yourself:

The Daily Quail

BackTowards the Locus (BTtL has recently had a change of URL, so check out the archive at the old URL, too)

And also, D-Notice a.k.a Gareth Winchester (or should that be the other way round?) is running for President member of Parliament for the constiuency of Bethnal Green & Bow.
There probably isn’t anyone that reads my blog that doesn’t already know that, but I’ve also added a link to Gareths’ They Want To Work For You page at the top of the Campaigns section of my blogroll.

Three links there for you. If you haven’t already, go have a look.

Ken vs The Mail

July 21st, 2009 § 2 comments § permalink

Apparently in March it was reported in the Mail that Ken Livingstone dodged a train fare and avoided a fine.

The PCC (via email)…

Articles published by the newspaper in March concerned an allegation that, despite not having a ticket for a train journey between London and Slough, Mr Livingstone was not asked to pay a penalty fare. This, said the newspaper, contrasted with his ‘zero tolerance’ policy when Mayor of London.

Red Ken complained to the PCC that the Mail misrepresented the situation and should’ve spoke to him to get his side of the story before going to print, as Ken may not have had a ticket for the whole of his journey, but neither did about 10 other passengers. They all paid for the unpaid part of their journey when they got off the train.

The main thrust of Kens’ complaint is that how the story appeared in the Mail was that he received preferential treatment or was a hypocrite (avoiding paying for a train journey whilst having a zero tolerance whist Mayor).

The PCC hasn’t upheld the complaint because…

…the Commission did not agree that the newspaper should have obtained Mr Livingstone’s comments because it was clear that the thrust of the story was true (and had been witnessed by the freelance reporter responsible for writing it). The Commission did not consider that the newspaper’s coverage was misleading or that the “failure to mention that ten other individuals had avoided the fine…would have altered the general understanding of the situation…in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code”.

What bollox. The thrust of the story (from what I understand) was that Ken either used his ‘fame’ to get himself let off a fare or that he is a hypocrite for avoiding fares whilst espousing zero tolerance. If he had been a lone in in what had happened, then yes that charge may have some validity, but if ten other people did the same, then it is a bit of a non-story and has detail has been omitted to blacken his name.

Nice one, PCC. Showing us some of the common sense there that makes a mockery of self-regulation.

Comparing the BNP Language and Concepts Discipline manuals

July 21st, 2009 § 9 comments § permalink

In April, the BNPs’ definition of British in their Language and Concepts Discipline manual, of which I took a copy of at the time, came out in the news.
It looks like this event prompted the BNP to update their manual, as it was written in 2005. This update completely passed me by.
Thanks to Dave Cole, it has been brought to my attention.

So what are the changes?

So you don’t have to sully yourself by going to the BNPs’ site, I have copies of the manuals:
BNP Language & Concepts Discipline Manual (July 2005)
BNP Language & Concepts Discipline Manual (updated April 2009)

It’s a long post so I’ve tucked them neatly below the fold, but my impression is that this new document is from a party much more comfortable with itself. There are only thirteen rules in the new pamphlet, as opposed to twentytwo in the old.

The old manual had a lot of negative in it, statements that began ‘we are not…’. Nine out of twentytwo rules begin ‘The BNP is/does not…’. The new manual is a lot more positive in its’ wording: Three out of thirteen start in the same way.

With the positivity comes confidence. A confidence that it doesn’t need to explain itself or deny what it thinks it isn’t, or at least what it doesn’t want us to think it is.
In the old manual the BNP felt it needed to deal with accusations of racism and fascism. In the new, the charge of racism is dealt with, swiftley, but the only mention of fascism is in a description of the European Union.

The BNP has been working hard to clean up it’s image, this updated version, drafted before the European elections in June is part of that. This, along with the collapse of the main parties vote in the Euro Elections means that they are on a high at the moment and in a good place to capitalise on their good fortune that has put them in Europe.

That fortune needs to be reversed.

When the crunch comes, power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate.

~Nick Griffin, Leader of the British National Party

» Read the rest of this entry «

Gambling with other peoples money

July 17th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

British Airways are fucking with the people again

The cash-strapped airline will… take control of another £330m in bank guarantees which had previously been set aside for its pensioners in the event of BA falling into insolvency. This comes just three days after BA warned it might not have enough liquidity to survive the economic downturn.

So BA may go to the wall, and to try and stop it, with no guarantees that it will, they have raided the very pot of money that their ex-workers will need if things do turn to poo.

Maybe BA should concentrate on turning a profit rather than trying to maintain their “position as a leading global premium airline”. It’s no good being a premium airline if you ain’t making money.

Where am I?

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