snafuMutter, mumble, coff, snuffle, snort, Boer war, gruntle, harkk…
snafuThe CVR usually – or used to – only give the last half hour of audio: there has to be the ability now to record the whole flight…? Same with the FDR, since the basic thinking was that the airliner would have some sort of catastrophic failure, crash immediately, and it would all be recorded and easily solved.
These days there must be the ability to store billions of terabytes of info in something the size of the standard black box, but there has to be the demand from the airlines and backing from the authorities before that sort of thing is brought in.
snafuYou get the feeling Obama is a lemon and the likes of Kennedy or Regan would have been far more proactive, and im not talking the Sweeny
I don’t remember a Kennedy in The Sweeney…
snafuHands up if you believe that the Ukrainian government building occupiers are NOT interspersed with Russian troops in un-badged uniforms…
Mind you, there are a few staged vids about, troops with blank firing adaptors on their Ak’s firing in the air before ‘storming’ a building, running through the script, that sort of thing.
snafu…(like sitting next to the black box on an aircraft 🙂 )…
Yep – sure saved that poor blighter on that Malaysian airliner.
snafuThey are testing to see if they are immortal, and so far so good…
snafuApparently we are all in it together
Up to our necks in the ordure.
Head first, of course…
snafuThat Cliff Edge sign looks fairly permanent… Has the edge there not suffered erosion too?
snafuThey built a house, stuck wings on it and expected it to fly – and you quibble over their ability to use a tape measure correctly…;o)
snafuCharlie, its a long one. Fnarr.
People will always take handouts if they are available.
No, not always.
There have been occasions where people have been too proud to ask for help. There is a man who I mention below who, although his career in the steel industry was ‘destroyed’, was still too proud to seek living assistance, even after his home was repossessed and his marriage broke down, to the point that he was eating – he said, anyway – meagerly once every other day for six weeks, a cheap pot noodle or some soup, occasionally some bread. I was too proud to go to my parents and ask for a few quid when I had my problem with the DWP.
And sometimes you actually have to ask for the handout, they will not tell you it is available: if you visit a Citizens Advice Bureau they routinely ask if you are getting all the benefits you are entitled to – because they know that some departments are forbidden from telling or even dropping hints about, what is available.
Maybe the government needs to make a fact finding tour of a typical third world country and see how the poverty stricken get by without benefits?Of course your average third world citizen does not have a mortage or pay taxes etc.Thats because they live in grass huts and have no work.However there are a lot who are enterprising and find a way to keep their heads up.Mind you Europe has to many rules and regs that would stop UK citizens from doing he same. Yes I live in a so called third world country and see how enterprising people can be to survive.
No, people in third world countries do not just live in grass huts: how ignorant. Some will live in mud huts, some in wooden shacks, some in caves, and some in tin huts or brick houses.
Here is a list of the Least Developed Countries according to the United Nations:
Africa
Angola
Benin
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cape Verde
Central African Republic
Chad
Comoros
Dem. Rep. of the Congo,
Djibouti
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gambia
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Lesotho
Liberia
Madagascar
Malawi
Mali
Mauritania
Mozambique
Niger
Rwanda
Sao Tome and Principe
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Somalia
Sudan
Tanzania
Togo
Uganda
ZambiaAsia
Afghanistan
Bangladesh
Bhutan
Cambodia
PDR Lao
Maldives
Myanmar
Nepal
Timor-Leste
YemenAustralia and the Pacific
Kiribati
Samoa
Solomon Islands
Tuvalu
VanuatuCaribbean
Haitihttp://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/least_developed_countries.htm
Notice anything from the list? There is a lot of civil war sufferers on that list, a few natural disaster victims, and lots which have suffered from all sorts of political unrest.
Probably the last thing any of those countries need is another British fact finding tour. And the last thing people in the foodbank queues in Britain need is a commission set up to investigate what happens elsewhere which takes 8-10 years to report its findings.
I find it outrageous that Labour and their lackeys (The Mirror and Izzard) have the nerve to blame the cost of living crisis on the coalition, when they are at least partly to blame, and Miliband and Balls were making spending decisions, which neither will apologise for.
Without mentioning how industry has been run down by successive governments of all hues? Outrageous…
Why concentrate on who is to blame – is it going to solve the problem, when you know as well as I do that no one is going to accept that they were the cause?
I met a man today (as mentioned above) who complained that Thatcher closed down the steel industry and destroyed his life, Major took away his home and broke up his marriage, and life under Blair hadn’t helped him very much either (he is now trying to make his way in environmental recycling – did you know that, despite government claims to the contrary, the majority of the waste that we separate out for the ‘green’ bin still goes into landfill or incineration? The government is apparently trying to keep him from making a fuss about that, despite their rules that forbid it, so when the stuff hits the fan he says his career will be destroyed again). What do you tell that man?
Where is the backing for workers making stuff? We have become a service industry nation – so what happens when the world no longer needs servicing?
Business owners have Britain bent over a barrel and are happily ramming it home to us; don’t complain or we go elsewhere, somewhere cheaper, with fewer health and safety regulations, more compliant workers, you know the drill. Would you work under a zero hours contract? Could you, but more of them will be in place on the contracts.
The unions have a bad reputation from the 70’s. What more can I say.
Perhaps in the face of this ‘crisis’, it would be prudent to completely halt low skilled immigration, to take the pressure off wages, infrastructure, benefits, housing and probably even the food banks? Other things we could do would be to cut the cushy lifestyles our prisoners seem to enjoy.
And who would do all those jobs the East Europeans for us do now?
Have a long hard think about whether it is actually immigrants who are to blame for the current situation, and have another think about whether their presence – or lack of it – would actually change anything (other than mean dirtier cars, hospitals, more unrepaired water leaks, etc). Yes, it is deplorable that unemployed Briton’s will turn their noses up at – for example – cleaning jobs, but if they won’t take them who will, and are you happy for those jobs to be unfilled (when eldest offspring was in hospital with a broken leg the cleaning appeared to be solely the responsibility of a highly organised family of Poles) just so that you can claim no immigrants are taking British jobs away from Britons?
I wonder how many of these people who visit food banks genuinely need to? How many have luxuries such as Sky TV, intrernet, a car and smart phones? I’m not inferring anything from that, I would genuinely like to know.
Not defending such ‘luxuries’ but I know from my own experience of being hard up that, after the must-haves, some things are paid for in advance, some things you can budget for, and some things get ‘sprung’ on you. I can remember having just put fuel in the car to get us through another week only to find one of the kids had worn his school shoes out dragging them on the ground whilst riding his bike; you can jump up and down, scream and shout as much as you like and hope he learnt his lesson from having detention each day he turned up for lessons wearing non-uniform shoes, but it is little things like asking if we can afford to eat or get him new shoes that bring things home to you.
Smoking – my old bugbear… Is it necessary for those who need the services of a foodbank? It must cost hundreds (maybe thousands) of pounds each year per smoker yet (casting another stone squarely into the sea of warm and friendly stereotypes) many of ‘that sort’ appear to go from one chain-smoked fag straight to another. If you need to use a foodbank you need to prove it by stopping smoking? See that one work…
Drinking; is it only the employed who get drunk at the weekend? I know it didn’t seem to make a difference back when I was a student, but it is much more expensive now. I couldn’t afford the odd bottle or can when I was unemployed, although the kids couldn’t complain about being hungry… Anyway, foodbank = no drinking? Hmm…
Satellite TV went as soon as it could, although the kids complained like bu@@ery. Internet, on the other hand had to be retained; you have no idea how much homework depends on access to the net now. The school insisted that the work could be done after classes, but there was never a teacher available to oversee the access; computers at public libraries are just the pits – even now, a few years later, it can take 15-20 minutes to log on for your hour’s access, and another five minutes waiting for Google to think about your request (we don’t have a printer at the moment…). Yet if you need the services of a foodbank you don’t need to go on Facebook and update your status about it. Every three bloody minutes.
I didn’t have a smart phone when I was unemployed; my phone was then – still is – PAYG without any credit (even now!), but you can get through life using free WiFi if necessary. That said, there was a story I heard somewhere (radio?) about a family who all had the latest iPhones with £35 a month contracts who needed financial counselling because they were apparently not able to afford food – I think the father worked though, so not sure it helps focus on this aspect of the impoverished. But you need to eat more than have the latest release of some fancy phone – or any phone – if you need to utilise a foodbank, yes?
I would like to see every member of parliament live on what the average worker takes home, for at least a year.
Me too, but as their salary, whilst in office, to cut down on career politicians with no life experience other than…
The image of the distraught and starving boy, is actually a perfectly well-fed American child from 2009 upset about some trivial domestic matter.
But then that hardly matters to a ‘journalist’
A picture can paint a thousand words, that’s why such pictures are used. Are all of them untrue, or is it just that the picture that illustrates the story means everything in that story is untrue? Hell, there goes all those jobs in promotion and advertising…Bummer, eh?
This fixation with evil journalists…it is almost amusing. What is it, were you bitten by a snappy scribbler when you were a kid?
Grow up. Then grow up a little bit more, please?
There are good reporters and bad reporters around, just as there are good and bad pilots, good and bad stories, good and bad formunites, even (a few) good and (a lot of) bad politicians, just as there are any hundreds of British kids out there who could have been perfect – or better – to illustrate the story, any one of them in front of you in the queue at the supermarket or in the local precinct.
And just remember that there are people in Britain in the 21st century who have to go to foodbanks for food – just like in America… Oh yes, its happening there too, and has been for quite a while.
But since you don’t read the papers and/or regard everything that comes out of them as lies it doesn’t matter to you, you don’t care and, hey, let them starve, yeah? Don’t think about them and they will go away, eventually.
Now I see why you have this fixation with the evil press – it brings you stories that embarrass you, lets you into other peoples lives, shows you how people less fortunate than you survive and for that you condemn them. (You have other fixations with the press too, but I have just focused on this one.;o)
Got news for you, brother: there but for the grace of some made up invisible friend go you, so carry on breathing that wonderful air of self righteousness. Mmmm-mmm.
Food parcels ?
don’t make me laugh !
It hasn’t shortened the length of the queues at the supermarket checkout. Or, the staggering amount of food we see wasted daily, in supermarket cafeterias. Plates piled high with surplus food and then junked. What I see wasted would feed my wife and myself for a month.
Food parcels? No, that sounds a little too much like a prisoner of war camp thing, with the Red Cross involved.
Maybe the Red Cross is already involved?
Just because YOU are able to afford a supermarkets prices, and visit supermarket cafes and see the waste generated does not mean that everyone would waste all that food. For every plate that has half its original content left maybe, just maybe, there is a plate or two that didn’t have as much on it but still has been licked clean to get every last morsel because the diner was that hungry?
Just a thought: do you go to the supermarket restaurant to eat? Do you pay? Or do you just pick from the leftovers? If no, why not? Is it not good enough for you, after all it could feed you and your wife for a month and save you money…;o)
Agreed John to a degree but the people at the food bank are not those who can afford to join the queues at the supermarket on a regular basis .It is the fact that in this day and age in this ,what is deemed not to be a 3rd world country that food banks not only exist but seem to be needed more and more.
Um, yes, what he said.
Can’t believe it has taken me nearly six hours of interruptions to make this reply and update my replies and everything… Wanna go to bed.
snafuBrooks, Coulson, all their predecessors, rubbish made up stories, panic-inducing headlines, hacking dead kids voicemails, The Sun on Hillsborough etc etc etc
You read that sort of rag you deserve to lose more than a few brain cells and believe what is printed.
Of course some of it is truer than you want to imagine, but a lot of it is utter this (anag). Brooks and Coulson both worked for Piers Morgan at one point or another, both came up through the sensationalist red tops, both found a hunger for gaudy stories. Both are the sort of people you do not ever ever ever tell them your names, if you really must talk to them – they’d have the watch off your wrist, your bank PIN details and your most secret kink just for kicks; they are like those soap stars who are keen to impress you by saying that they’d have to spice up a production of Hamlet before they’d star in it. They are low life scum.
But this story was also covered in the less ‘entertaining’, even serious, section of the media, the sort who don’t usually splatter panic-inducing headlines across their pages, haven’t been shown (yet) to have hacked voicemails, dead kids or otherwise, didn’t immediately take the cops word for it that it was Liverpool fans wot dun it. You go around thinking that because a story appeared in a red top then that story is complete hist (anag) wherever else it gets printed then you won’t believe much news at all.
Just because one paper used what it thought was an illustrative image that turns out to be nothing to do with the story but, even worse, foreign too (*gasp*) doesn’t make the actual story untrue, no matter how much you want it to be.
I’m fairly sure they aren’t untruthful. We have been through, and are barely emerging from, the deepest and longest financial crisis in memory. It would be surprising if many people weren’t suffering.
But…? (Go on, slag it off. You know you want to…)
The problem is highlighted earlier, that when the stories are dressed-up to pander to the LCDs, thinking people can’t help but question the veracity of the whole story. I don’t need to see a picture of a kid from San Francisco to ‘illustrate’ a story about food banks, any more than I need a TV news reporter standing on the pavement at night outside a locked and darkened building in Whitehall to ‘illustrate’ a story that involves the Foreign Office or whatever.
Bingo.
That front page was from a red topped rag.
Ok, if you drew up a list of red tops where would the Daily Mirror rank?
Beneath the Sun, the Star maybe? Under the Mail possibly? Its certainly not the paper it used to be, and it is probably hanging on to its readership only by dint of its political affiliation, not through its thorough and thoughtful journalism. Personally, I can’t remember the last time I even opened a copy of the Mirror – accidentally or otherwise.
But you don’t trust the story because of the picture they used.
Not long ago I believe the Mail illustrated an obit with an image of the old, late, BAe Mosquito T3; did that detract from the deceased’s rather full and very interesting life?
Food-banks are are a very obvious sign of something being ‘wrong’ in Britain but what are they actually a sign of? High food prices? Since we live in a global society how can this be controlled by the government except by subsidising food. Low wages? Again we live in a global society. Low benefits? Well maybe but if you could ‘live’ on benefits who would work (and we clearly have a small proportion of the population who choose not to work, or at least, feel that certain jobs are ‘beneath them’ or feel they would be better-off not working)?
I was laying in bed, thinking about this thread after posting my last message, and it seems to me that in the very near future there is going to be a major problem.
Food prices are comparatively low: Tesco pay the farmer less than its pays the supplier for each carton of milk, so that most farmers are making a loss on their dairy herd, for example. Low wages have always been present – its better than it was with the introduction of minimum wage, yet some employers have hit back with zero hour contracts (for those not in the know that means the employee doesn’t get paid when not working, but they don’t know when they are working until they contact their workplace and might be given just minutes notice that they are required; fine, you might say, but without a fixed income they miss out on certain benefits, miss out on others because they are employed, cannot get loans or a mortgage because their income isn’t guaranteed, and – not certain about this – won’t be classified as unemployed even if they haven’t been used at their ‘workplace’ for up to several months unless their employer specifically designated them not employed, which the employer can be loath to do due to certain tax breaks they get for employing jobless people…). If you are employed but not getting much money then you don’t have much of a stake in the future; admittedly more then if you are unemployed, but then that’s not saying much. Apparently there will be problems soon in London and other, popular and fashionable, cities in the UK since people will not be able to afford to live there; already some firms are busing in cleaners from the cheaper suburbs and charging nicely for the service (not that the cleaners get any recompense for the traveling, just minimum wage for the time they clean). But when the other low pay jobs have to commute – at their own expense – from where they can afford to live, then they will be ructions… And, apparently according to official figures, the number of people keen to live on benefits alone is negligible – much like the number of foreigners come to live off British benefits.
It is a difficult social engineering problem that no government has solved, so far, but food-banks are a godsend to those in opposition and to the editors of the tabloid press.
More to the point, foodbanks are an utter necessity to those who have no other means of feeding themselves. Of course they could always shoplift, get caught and live in prison for a while m- except the prisons are a little full at the moment and so they could end up back on the street… Government needs to do something about it, even it only to quieten shop owners and prison governors.
I wonder how has this compared to the pre war financial crashes where world wars soon followed.
It doesn’t. Not yet, but who knows what could happen if the common man gets fed up [no pun intended] and decides to become revolting man…
Another one that Charlie will not read!
snafuThe same reason why they never land in Leister Square.
Because they can’t find it on their GPS?
There may be evidence 🙂 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/loch-ness-monster-spotted-satellite-3428130 — i hope so
Looks like a Whale Shark made it through the locks…
[ATTACH=CONFIG]227473[/ATTACH]
…with a little help from Photoshop or something.
snafuYou are Michael Winner reincarnated and I claim my £10 note…
snafuThe fact that the Grauniad published this boring story says as much about that paper as anything else!(rolleyes)
****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! ****! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s! *******s!
*******s!
*******s!
*******s!
*******s!
****.
So which paper would you like me to have taken it from, eh? I saw it in the Metro (freesheet you get at bus and train stations) on Thursday (I think, or possibly early Friday – the paper got passed on) and when I looked it up I found the Guardian had also covered it…
Still, at least it wasn’t the Guardian that did it – which must come as a disappointment to you.
snafuI have thought for some time that word racist should be expunged from daily use so inappropriately is it applied and so liberally is it used.
Charlie, do you think it was inappropriately used in the case of William Henwood and his tweets about Lenny Henry? Be very careful.
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