Author Archives: grumpy

Distorting Law – Stella Creasy

The whole #MeToo ‘movement’ has attracted the attention of female politicians in a number of countries as a useful bandwagon to gain visibility which may promote their position in the pecking order of governing elites. However, as cited elsewhere in a contemporaneous post, several of the resultant initiatives are beginning to threaten the fundament order of law.

UK MP Stella Creasy has dragooned Ministers to instigate a Law Commission review as to whether misogyny should be considered a hate crime. Misogyny is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as being “Dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women”.

Set aside that Creasy wishes to expose men who merely dislike women to the possibility of a prison sentence, it also exposes the inherent bias in a significant number of those of a feminist disposition. There is no ‘goose’ and ‘gander’ here – men are the enemy.

Grumpy would point Creasy and her colleagues to another word in the OED – ‘misandry’, defined in the same source as a mirror of misogyny; “Dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men”. This seems to have resonance with the approach of certain high profile females in the public eye.

The biased thinking of Creasy and her fellow travellers is that women should be free to act in a manner which, if emulated by a man, could send him to jail if directed to one of their own, whereas they wish a free hand to do exactly the same. Grumpy would contend that this displays Creasey’s own ingrained prejudice against men, and she thus is awarded the Harridan of the Week award from Grumpy.

Disgrace of Indian doctors in the NHS

Jeremy Hunt, who has conspicuously failed to deliver any of his albeit unsustainable promises during his tenure as Health Minister, has presided over a continuing disgrace perpetrated by governments of both parties over several years.

Linked to the wider assertions from both left wingers and commercial organisations (who wish to exploit cheaper overseas labour) that the UK will come to a halt unless the borders are flung open, the NHS continues to be reliant on foreign doctors to function, with Indian doctors making up by far the largest percentage.

This approach (driven – oddly – by MP’s seeking ‘multicultural’ credibility on the one hand and by companies seeking a profit on the other) is excused on the basis that there is a shortfall of home grown medics; this is indeed true, but this is entirely by governmental design. Governments have for years restricted and then capped the places available in English medical schools (only raising that cap by 1,500 in the last 3 years) to save money, in spite of having a surfeit of qualified applicants for domestic training places.

The simple explanation is that it is cheaper to spend a reported (August 2017) £100m to recruit doctors from Poland, Lithuania, Greece and above all India, rather than expand medical training in the UK.

This is hypocritical, appalling illogical, but above all disgracefully and unconscionably immoral. Does India have an excess of doctors? No, absolutely the reverse, India has one of the highest rates of infant mortality of any developed country and one of the lowest ratios of doctors to population. The fact is that the UK’s failure to address medical training here has directly resulted in loss of life in in a country where 600m people have no direct access to structured healthcare.

Labour MP Tulip Siddiq (a typical, privately educated, privileged champagne socialist if ever there was one) even said it was ‘disgraceful’ that the UK should try and increase the domestic supply at the expense of immigrant doctors, as proposed by Theresa May. No, Tulip (really ?), the disgrace is the government denying willing and qualified UK citizens the opportunity of become doctors whilst simultaneously poaching them from a country with a chronic shortage of same. It’s not moral.

British politicians of both major parties should hang their heads in shame that their collective unwillingness to address the fundamental funding issues of the NHS results in effectively exporting ill-health to India by raiding their vital scarce indigenous medical skills.

F1 and grid girls

Nice butt …

F1’s managing director, in response to one of the many packs of baying feminist harridans, announced the end of motor racing’s Formula 1 ‘grid girls’ in May 18, saying

“While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula One Grands Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.”

The is unadulterated piffle. ‘Societal norms’, far from shunning women in skimpy clothes, have resulted in a whole billion dollar industry based around selfies in underwear, ‘flaunting ample assets’ (see the ‘Daily Mail’), and carefully orchestrated ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ being depicted in social media and family newspapers.

Grunpy, who has oft voiced his frustration at this sort of nonsensical capitulation exhibited by F1, was pleased to see that the premier world motorbike race competition, MotoGP, decided to keep its ‘Paddock girls’, who hold up umbrellas over the riders on the grid, grace the winning ceremonies, and add charm to the otherwise oily rag proceedings.

Grunpy cannot help but feel that F1 was targeted because, as it has wide recognition as a sport, it hence brings maximum publicity to the self-seeking agendas of the objectors. Probably none of them have ever heard of MotoGP, and if they had, they would realise it wouldn’t get much PR coverage.

See an objection on moral grounds, and then look to see where the self-interest is, seems to be a good rule when assessing the objectivity and integrity of complainants who are not directly involved.

Brexit lies get more extreme

The Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply ( www.cips.org ), a supposedly global body upholding high standards of excellence, issued a press statement on 26/09/2018 which stated

“One in ten UK businesses believe they would likely go bankrupt if goods were delayed by just 10 – 30 minutes at customs as a result of Brexit, according to new research from the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS)”

This statement exemplifies the extreme lengths to which pro-remain organisations will go to promulgate information which is at best grossly misleading, or (likely in this case) to publish deliberate untruths aka lies. For clarity, CIPS made no qualification to the ‘UK businesses’ set, i.e. the reader is to assume ALL UK businesses.

What are we to make of the ‘headline here?’ There are 3.93m companies in the Companies House database. The estimates of those which are dormant vary, but even a conservative estimate would indicate that there are 1.8m incorporated businesses and some 420k partnerships actively trading.

The failure of 1 in 10 businesses would be at least 180k failures in trading incorporated entities. But wait, 76% of all businesses have a single owner operator, and so that 1.8m headline figure needs to be drastically re-cast.

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (DBIS) points out that 99% of all SME’s employ less than 50 people, and only 7,000 of all businesses have more than 250 employees.

What CIPS would have the reader believer is that 180,000 business are not only critically dependent on their business with the EU, but that they have supply chains which are so sophisticated and systemically dependent on the supply chain that even a 10 minute customs delay might bankrupt them. Given that the vast majority of those businesses statistically employ less than 50 people (or probably just one person) this is simply not credible.

The rest of the press release descends into statistical idiocy. 500,000 businesses will stockpile goods, and 900,000 will find it difficult to find supplies and skills. Given the percentage of businesses which DBIS state have a single owner, this is patently nonsense.

The CIPS figures, even with cursory examination, don’t add up, and at best they fail at all levels of statistical presentation.

Either (a) the figures for ‘UK businesses’ as a whole have been extrapolated from a sample set of 1310 organisations surveyed, in which case the survey has been subject to extreme ‘selection bias’ from a non-representative sample OR (b) the actual set of businesses referred to should have been properly qualified to state that it was restricted to companies with supply chain managers with materially critical import / export processes, and the extrapolation was for similarly structured organisations.
If (a) is true, then the press release is simply patent nonsense on every measure.
If the extrapolation was done on the basis of (b), the failure to qualify the description of ‘UK businesses’ is a serious and juvenile error.

It’s hard to not conclude that CIPS has deliberately provided unqualified figures to make a pro-remain point. Grumpy (who cares not if he is in or out of the EU) does object to distorted data being presented to grab a headline and contribute to the ‘fake news’ surrounding Brexit.

Chairman Tim Richardson should be embarrassed by such tosh, and the writer demoted to some position where s/he has no public voice.

Food banks ‘Fake News’

Not anorexic …

Grumpy has opined before on how certain institutions with otherwise entirely laudable objectives (and which do contribute to society) nevertheless resort to hyperbole, and intentionally misleading and often disingenuous statements to promote their political messages. ( http://grumpy.eastover.org.uk/numbers-that-dont-add-up/ ) One of the common ways this is done is to conflate topics (often easily done with the ‘flexibility’ of the English language) to deliberately leave an impression with the reader which is removed from reality.

Grumpy’s eye was caught by a headline on the website of US based CNN, ‘holiday hunger is haunting British Families’, driven by the statement that ‘31% of children in Coventry live in poverty’ from a UK Community Trust. It goes on to say that ‘millions of parents … face stress over whether they will be able to provide food for their families’. One can forgive a US reader getting the impression that that vast swathes of UK citizens are on the point of starvation. Poverty = poor; the authors know exactly what they are doing in this conflation.

The data stems from data issued in a leaflet by the ‘Coventry Partnership’, which also stated that 18.5% of residents of the City are living in circumstances of multiple deprivation. Oddly, it also says that over 24% of Coventry children are obese, and that this is increasing – giving the image of a third of the population being anorexic whilst one quarter are wobbling about as flesh mountains. [Incidentally, the picture at the top of the page is of a family who use a food bank because they are unable to otherwise feed themselves. However, at the risk of being cruel (but Grumpy at least deleted the word ‘porky’ from this post), neither of the two women depicted have any obvious signs of food deprivation, so the food bank clearly provides copious calories.]

This piece of lexical sleight of hand comes from a favourite trick of the many agencies vying for more government monies, which is to conflate relative poverty (which is what the 31% was based on) with being poor; it is not. One can construct a scenario where people ‘living in poverty’ by this definition all drive BMW 520 cars.

The same article has links to another current bandwagon on which Grumpy has previously written (http://grumpy.eastover.org.uk/news-round-up-july-2018/ ) is about ‘period poverty’ i.e the cost of feminine sanitary products. The Salvation Army food bank stated that with Tampons costing £3.14 for 20 at Tesco, and women using 11,000 tampons in their lifetime, they would have to work 38 days to afford this.

This is using a 1950’s advertising trick of quoting usage by lifetime to maximise a quoted cost and by the hour / day if it is wished to minimise it (“only 50p per day”). However, setting aside that tired cliche, it is clear that based on reputable figures (e.g. from the Office of National Statistics) this is more inflation. Do the math.

No-one can doubt that a considerable number of people have a relatively miserable life from a material perspective (which doesn’t mean that they do not find value and happiness in life nevertheless). However, Grumpy is of the view that the constant inflation of statistics and disingenuous conflation of topics by various agencies to deliberately obfuscate reality and promulgate false impressions to gain political and general visibility is not necessary; if the truth were known, it probably hardens the heart of the more fortunate towards charity.

News round up July 2018

May fails the vacuum cleaner test big time : Grumpy posed the question [ See http://grumpy.eastover.org.uk/eu-vacuum-test/ ]as to whether after an exit agreement with the EU it would be possible to make a vacuum cleaner in the UK with a 1 kw motor complying with US regulations and export it to the US. The answer seems to be a resounding ‘no’, since EU regulation will apply to goods.It is little short of pitiful to see Johnson, Gove, and others on TV trying to convince the UK populace that black is white, up is down, and that 2+2=5. It’s the sheer arrogance of these failed politicians after they have been humbled and humiliated by May, that they cannot admit to having had their wimpish butts comprehensively kicked at Chequers.

Period fantasy – put a sock in it: MP Danielle Rowley announced to the House of Commons that she was having a period and had spent £25 that week on sanitary products. Now, if these were Tampons, the supermarket cost is about £2 for 20, so that would imply using 2.2 every waking hour. As a male, Grumpy is ignorant on these usage rates, but simple observation would dictate that either she needs to see a doctor or that she was using hyperbole. Why? She was publicising the latest feminine band wagon of ‘period poverty’, pushing (at its extreme) to free universal sanitary product provision. Without analysing the merits or otherwise of this movement, the element that has baffled grumpy is the picture painted of women going to school and work with socks in their panties (as claimed by this movement) because they can’t afford a 10p tampon. Where do they get all these socks from, given that they (if like Ms Rowley) they would have to use 36 per day ? Or do they traipse home from work on the tube with 25 soiled socks in a bag awaiting washing for the next day ? A mystery.

4D boobs : The Daily Mail reported that a new “4D augmented reality” system had been developed to allow women to see what they might look like after cosmetic breast surgery. The accompanying photo showed a woman looking at a representation of herself on a flat 2D screen. This is the sort of drivel written by junior members of staff who did a course in Media Studies at a small town Technical College. Setting aside the fact that only a 2D system was shown, we humans can only spatially experience three dimensions, and there is no physical humanly detectable manifestation of four dimensions – pure fantasy marketing hype. [For simplicity, I’m ignoring the relativistic notion of Minkowski Space with time as the 4th dimension, which we are all part of, or the 11 dimensions of Calabi-Yau structures of string theory.]

Female quota harridans again : Feminist activists have been apoplectic that the Bank of England chose the only man on a shortlist of 5 as a new members of the monetary policy committee. This was presumably either because (a) a woman should have been chosen regardless of merit – the quota argument – or (b) that the selection board was biased against women. Setting aside the first as being morally dubious, the second is an outrageous slur on the selection board. In fact, the Chair was Clare Lombardelli and the female majority on the board was completed by a previous MPC member, Kate Barker; both have impeccable credentials and experience, and they presumably chose the best candidate. MP Rachel Reeves said this was “truly staggering”, and so she gets the Grumpy Harridan of the Week Award.

Execution first, trial afterwards; the #MeToo baying mob

Once again, the lunatic harridan fringe of #MeToo has sought to undermine a basic foundation of due process in England. This was because Jeremy Corbyn had failed to take action against a male MP who had been accused of wife beating. Notice the word ‘accused’ – an allegation, as yet unproved by due process.

However, the hysterical Labour harpies screamed “The allegations against the man are horrific. There is no way he should be an MP and the party cannot just sit on its hands and do nothing.” In old movies, the Wild West state of law in those days was characterised with the cliche “we’ll give him a fair trial, and then we”ll hang him”, but these female tyrants have updated this to “we’ll hang him, and then investigate to see if he was guilty”

Sitting in the middle of this pack of hyenas was the odious and despicable hypocrite, Harriet Harman. She is a lawyer by training, but in matters concerned with ‘Womyn’ (sic) she is happy to put the edict from the Digest of Justinian – “Proof lies on him who asserts, not on him who denies” – to one side.

It’s too tedious to list the full panoply of Harman’s hypocrisies, including her abandonment of the concept of due process for males, her disgraceful action on FOI requests (especially as she was fraudulently pocketing tax payers money), repeated law breaking at the wheel of a motor vehicle, and dishonesty or incompetence with expenses. Grumpy can only earnestly hope that any vestige of influence she may have on British life is eroded or extinguished as soon as possible.

The Philippines Rodrigo Duterte has received global opprobrium for sanctioning the extra-judicial execution at the hands of the police and the community where they suspect an individual might have had involvement with drugs. Grumpy sees Harman in the same light; those accused or suspected of any impropriety against women loose their livelihoods and reputations at the hands of an ugly, baying mob, made worse by the acquiescence of males in authority too cowed and too terrified to ensure basic justice.

TV play rejected as “too fantastic”

Writer : “I’ve got a script for a new play which combines, political intrigue, sex and threats to world stability – it’s a real corker”

Producer : “Ok, run it past me…”

Writer : “Well, there is this sexy heroine called Kim K with an incredibly enormous butt who in spite of having no discernible talents except physical assets, teams up with son in law of POTUS to revise prison reform in the country even though neither have been elected or have any political experience.”

Producer : Hmmmm… go on

Writer : “Well, POTUS is under investigation for colluding with a foreign power, and being sued by a porn star who alleged that he slept with her whilst his wife was pregnant. He also has threatened nuclear Armageddon on another country, and, oh yes, appointed his daughter into various positions.

Producer : You’re going to tell me there’s more …

Writer : This is just the tip of it. The FBI (who illegally spied in him) and the Department of Justice are corrupt, and he appointed a climate change denier to be in charge of environmental protection, and …

Producer : Whoooaah ! I know it’s fiction, but there has to be some level of credibility in the underlying story. This is way too over the top, sorry, no rational viewer would take it seriously. Sorry, no go.