#quango

[smgxsposts]

[retrocgads]

UK 1985

[fozmeadows]

asmr: 20 seconds of a fluffy cat being skootched

[dustedandsocial]

Hygiene - Private Sector [Full]

This new Hygiene album was just released with seemingly no promotion, their first in nearly a decade. There is no more perfect band for the climate in the UK right now, and I’ve been listened to it non-stop the last few days. 

The lyrics range from dry and tongue-in-cheek (one song functions as creatine testimonial) to matter-of-fact denunciations or the powerful. The subject matter can veer dark (”Dolphin Square”), with the debasement of politics and culture seen from different points of view. But yet every song is just fucking addictive. This band can turn anything into a chorus.

+ “Bring Back British Rail” is an epic closing track and I can’t stop shouting along with the refrain.

(Jonah Falco of Career Suicide and Fucked Up makes a guest appearance, contributing piano to “Bring Back British Rail”. Lucy Anstey of Primetime contributes guest vocals.)

“Private Sector” is an absolute masterpiece.

[fozmeadows]

In these dark times, Quango extends a paw of reassurance

[fozmeadows]

Meet Quango, our new rescue boy! He is extremely soft and good and gets along well with BB :)

[weatheryear]

Restore Britain

This goes back to the ancestor of the EU, the EEC - European Economic Community. This was a trading union. And this is where the dichomy of Britain to the EU comes from. Britain has always been one of the strongest voices for the EU, while being one of the most Euroskeptic. This is because Britain was a trading power, and long before they became the largest empire every created, (back when they were a backwater), they had the most trusted currency in the world. Most countries trusted the pound more than their own currencies.

What Britain was not looking for was a massive, antidemocratic fascist bureaucracy controlling every aspect of your life.

And this is something that pro-EU people simply cannot comprehend, that Britain wanted trade but not fascism. How can you support trade but not fascism? How can you support human rights without fascism?

And these are thoughts that pro-EU people genuinely have in their heads.

Well, the EU project was never democratic, and several powerful individuals kept expanding it's powers, while always avoiding any democratic scrutiny. To this day, the Members of the European Parliament, have no powers. They have the power to recommend changes to laws. They cannot draught laws, they cannot retract laws, and they cannot force any modifications for laws in progress.

As the EU got more and more powerful, Britain got more and more skeptical of it. The problem is that the unelected technocracy was preventing them from creating any change. Britain went through several phases where they voted for the most Brexit party. It got to the point it could not be ignored, and then...

kind of happened. Britain did not decouple itself from the EU technocracy, including the European Court of Human Rights. Now, the EU, under Angela Merkel decided that the EU had the obligation to accept every - single - person in the world, and their enforcement vehicle was the European Court of Human Rights.

This meant that Britain got to enjoy the benefit of diversity. And this happened under the Conservative Government. The only one in the government that tried to do anything about it, and her most token efforts were quickly stopped by the technocracy, and she was ejected.

This lead to the collapse of the Tory/Conservative party.

Labour was the next biggest party, and while they lost as well, they lost less, and so now have the government. But, the problem is their voter base, the British working class, have completely abandoned them, as they more and more started to feel the benefits of diversity.

To put this into context, a teacher was refused a job teaching because of a criminal background check. He honestly had no idea why this was, and so asked the police. The police had received a non-crime-hate-incident report against him, and recorded in his file, without telling him. The hate incident reported was that he had a St. George on car, (the flag of England). He actually had a Union flag, (the Flag of Britain). You could not speak it.

Nigel Farage was at the head of the Brexit movement, but in truth, he is hated. He's a swamp creature that was just being opportunistic. His current party is literally picking up former Conservative politicians, the party that had so wholly betrayed them. They refer to the Boris Wave, whereby Boris Johnson, a conservative prime minister elected on anti-immigration promises allowed more low-skill aliens into the country than any previous government.

And then Restore Britain shows up, and doesn't care about being called racist. They care about actually Britain, and are willing to do things to fix the country.

And when they campaign in the streets, all of the disillusioned Brits had something to believe it. It's only a few months old, and is polling as well as the two previous main parties, Tory and Labour.

At first, the establishment wanted to defame them without acknowledging them, which I will admit, was hilarious, as they could not acknowledge what they were speaking against. But now, they are attacking Restore. And the attacks against Restore are the most successful campaign ads, because Restore's policies are cut off welfare for foreign illegals and deport foreign rapists. And removing the unelected technocacy, (Quangocracy*), that is crushing them under their iron boots.

We'll have to see how this goes, as the war is not yet won, but they've accomplished more in a few months than most parties have done in decades if not centuries.

*QuaNGO: Quasi Non Governmental Organization. These are organizations that are controlling the government that have no public oversight. They are NGO's because the government has no control over them, but they are still funded by the government, and vested with powers and control by the government.

[brianjohnspencer]

Northern Ireland's fair nepotism

Newton Emerson wrote in the Irish News, September 15 2016: "The specific problem in Northern Ireland, identified by McQuillan as cronyism, should be more dispassionately described as nepotism. In his interview, the former deputy chief constable was at pains to distinguish this from sectarianism. He noted a “one of ours and one of yours” culture in public appointments – fair nepotism, if you like. Nepotism is the great unmentionable in Northern Ireland’s armoury of fair employment and appointment rules. It seems too intrinsic and inevitable in such a “very small place”, and hence too hard to address. So we courageously assure ourselves that the other rules cover it. In 2012, Sinn Féin former minister Conor Murphy was found guilty of religious bias by an employment tribunal after appointing a Catholic acquaintance to chair the board of Northern Ireland Water, ahead of four Protestants. Murphy did not help himself by claiming he was unaware of the appointee’s religion – nobody in the North is unaware of anyone’s religion. However, I believe Murphy was right to complain of being branded sectarian. His fault was nepotism. It just so happened that as a Catholic person from an overwhelmingly Catholic area, any acquaintance of Murphy’s was most unlikely to be Protestant. This is the square peg the tribunal had to bang into a round hole. Nepotism is traditionally regarded as a difficult issue to quantify but a breakthrough was made three years ago by the Italian economist Prof Roberto Perotti. Boiling the question down to first principles, he surveyed the incidence of matching surnames in Italian university departments and uncovered so much duplication it caused a nationwide scandal. The Perotti score is more an indication of a problem than a measure as it does not capture friends and acquaintances. But it would still be worth running on public sector organisations in Northern Ireland, if only to disprove toxic perceptions. Local government is widely considered a family business and policing certainly used to be. Nor should private enterprise escape attention. Manufacturing still has a notorious father-to-son culture, which matters when so much public money is pumped into firms to ensure fairer access to jobs and training. McQuillan’s concern was reserved for the more rarefied world of boards and agencies. A Perotti method matching everyone’s previous jobs should give an interesting result – I would guess Northern Ireland’s core quangocracy at well under 200 people. We could use this information as a serious starting point to ask how much nepotism matters and how firmly we are prepared to act against it. Offsetting the power of personal relationships in a small place would require quite drastic measures – quotas for underrepresented groups, for example, or time limits on individual service. We may also have to accept that the pool of willing applicants is as small as Northern Ireland itself. In a case before Belfast High Court, 11 people – many with extensive backgrounds serving on public bodies – face lengthy disqualification as company directors because they sat on the board of a tourism quango that collapsed in 2007, amid findings of irregular accounting. Their positions on this board were unpaid and they believe they are being made scapegoats for failings by civil servants. How many of us would rush to take their place? See here: http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/newton-emerson-the-north-is-riddled-with-nepotism-1.2791337