Nigel's Vote UKIP But It's Lib Dems For Tim's

Four weeks left and the political parties busy targeting potential supporters but according to the latest poll from YouGov, they be paying more attention to the first names of voters.
YouGov analysed the voting intentions of 50,000 individuals with the 130 most common first names and found that people called Nigel, Jill or Terry are approximately twice as likely to vote for UKIP as the general population.
The poll shows that the most likely Conservative voters where called Charlotte, Fiona, Pauline while Sharon, Samantha and Clare wouldn't touch David Cameron with somebody else's barge poll as these were least likely to put a cross next to David Cameron's team. 
Labour can depend upon anyone called Michelle, June and Andy while the Lib Dem's should be looking towards Tim, Kathryn and Samantha for support.
I will let people with pens in their top pockets argue other the role of nominative determinism in influencing human behaviour and political preferences but personally if your spouse is called Nigel, Jill or Terry i wouldn't send them to the Chinese takeaway anytime soon, hate to think what additional extra you would get with your sweet and sour chicken once they have finished their Benny Hill style 'Mr Chow Mein' performance while ordering it.

The Climate Change Minister And The Climate Sceptic Group

It has been revealed that the Conservative energy and climate change minister, Matthew Hancock, has taken almost £20,000 in donations from from a key backer of the UK’s leading climate sceptic lobby group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
According to official records, Hancock has accepted five donations over the years from City currency manager Neil Record, who is on the board of the anti-climate change Foundation.
In all Neil Record has donated more than £300,000 to the Conservative party but the energy and climate change minister is the only individual MP that he has backed.
As our elected representative it is only fair that we don't jump to conclusions that man responsible for combating climate change isn't being influenced by the financial inducements being thrown his way.
Just because he was one of 100 Tory MPs who signed an open letter opposed subsides for onshore wind farms in England and has been a vocal critic of wind farms in his constituency and a supporter of fracking doesn't mean he has whored himself out to the highest bidder.
It may just be a huge coincidence that he hates wind farms, loves fracking while accepting large sums of cash from a climate sceptic group.

Happy New Tax Year 2015-16

For some reason unbeknown to me people don’t celebrate the new tax year in the same way they do the new calendar year. Much to my disappointment there are no parties, fireworks or singing of Auld Lang Syne but thanks to Easter being early this year, we do get a bank holiday this 6th April.
The other thing that I think should happen is the making of New Tax Year’s resolutions so this year i plan to ring some changes regarding paying my contribution to HM Revenue & Customs.
Firstly, i intend to do my Tax Return early so to avoid the usual scene in mid-January when i turn up at my Agents office and throw on his desk a shoebox full of receipts and scraps of paper with numbers written on them half hidden by coffee stains and expect him to make sense of it enough to fill out my Tax Return by the 31st January.
Secondly, i will look into a pension just in case my first choice plan of winning the lottery and retiring to a remote island in the Pacific doesn't come to fruition.
Thirdly, i resolve to go through my bank statement and work out just what some of the direct debits are for because i am sure that i am still paying out for phones that have long been recycled into other things.
Fourthly, i must stop thinking of ways to change the subject whenever anyone who knows about tax tries to give me advice on tax matters.
This things i resolve and i promise to...oh what the hell, where's that shoe box? 

Hands Up Who Wants A Toxic Waste Dump

The problem with nuclear technology has always been its waste which stays radioactive and dangerous to humans for hundreds of thousands of years so it has to be stored somewhere safe away from humans.
At the moment the  4.5m cubic metres of accumulated radioactive waste kept in secure containers at sites across Britain but successive governments have been desperate to find somewhere to dump the lot and they have tried bribing the councils to take it but unsurprisingly the local population have refused and the Government return to square one and the problem of what to do with all this growing mountain of toxic waste. 
Finally they have come up with the solution, change the law so Nuclear waste dumps can be imposed on local communities without their support.      
Rushed through in the dying hours of the final Parliament before it was dissolved, the Secretary of State for Energy can now bypass any local planning considerations and designate anywhere it fancies a 'nationally significant infrastructure project' and dump the radioactive waste on it.
Last year the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published a white paper which said ministers would prefer to work with public support, but reserved the right to take more aggressive action on planning if 'at some point in the future such an approach does not look likely to work'.
Zac Goldsmith, one of the few government MPs who broke ranks to vote against the move, criticised the lack of public debate about such a big change, saying: 'Effectively it strips local authorities of the ability to stop waste being dumped in their communities. If there had been a debate, there could have been a different outcome. Most of the MPs who voted probably didn’t know what they were voting for'.
It is almost guaranteed that none of these dumps will be in any of the areas controlled by the cabinet so most will end up in the backyard of poorer areas where there will be little resistance and the promise of new jobs in the communities.
Democracy at work, if you don't get the result you want, change the law to just do it anyway.

Answering Why People Join ISIS

As yet more of our young people are turned back to the UK after trying to get into Syria to help ISIS, the question being asked is 'why are people willing to go help such a horrific killing machine'?  
There have been a few answers but nobody has been willing to give the real answer which is because of religion.
ISIS is doing the things they are doing in the name of their twisted ideological view of religion.
It isn't atheists turning up at Turkish airports with a map of Syria, it is Muslims who have been indoctrinated into the ISIS philosophy by recruiters who take what is already there and ramp it up further.
It isn't just a Muslim problem either, throughout history religionists of all flavours have used the same tactic that they are fighting for their 'God' and this is just the latest.
I am not sure what the solution is or how you can stop young people who are being told since childhood that their God is great from being driven into a fervour by people with bad intentions but that is the reason.
Our only hope is that religion gradually dies out by itself as we evolve and that does seem to be slowly happening but until the World wakes up and realises religion has always just been a man-made construct to control us, there will always be people keen to exploit those who have yet to make that leap.
Less religion is the only answer.

Good Friday Thriller

I wasn't around 2015 years ago but i am pretty certain why didn't happen today in history was the son of God was nailed to a cross and died for us but as it is Good Friday and as the religious only have this holiday left after Christmas was stolen by a fat Laplander in a red suit with flying reindeer, we should let them have this one so i propose we revisit that day and we can thanks to the Bible.
The first bit is well known, long haired gent gets nailed to a cross between two criminals and sings a song about always looking on the Bright Side of Life but there was something else going on that day and we can look at Matthew 27:51-54 to see what that was.

Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. 

Yes, graves opened and reanimated dead bodies left the ground to appear to the residents of the Holy City although it doesn't say how many there was or what they did once they got there.
They may have eaten the residents brains like normal zombies or they may have just wandered around taking in the sights and reminiscing about times before they died but i'd like to think they got together and performed a Thriller style dance act in the main street.
The 'grizzly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom' is certainly more entertaining then the 'They not know what they do' speech which is usually associated with this time of year but they have yet to write this bit into the Jesus films that the vast majority of us will ignore this weekend while we stuff chocolate into our faces and watch the Wizard of Oz instead.

First Past The Post Explained

There are not many countries that use the same 'First Past The Post' system of voting in the Government as the United Kingdom, but it does seem there is some confusion over who exactly we vote for.
There are 650 constituencies in the United Kingdom and on May 7th it is not David Cameron, Ed Milliband or Nick Clegg that we vote for but whoever is representing their party in that area.
For example, in the constituency of Newtown there is Mr Red (Labour), Mr Blue (Conservative) and Mr Yellow (Lib Dems) and you vote for one of these and the person who receives the most votes, Mr Yellow for example, is therefore elected and become the Member of Parliament to represent the people of Newtown in the House of Commons.  
Because Mr Yellow won, that counts as 1 MP for the Lib Dems.
In the neighbouring constituency of Oldtown, the Conservative representative wins and the score is now Lib Dems 1, Conservatives 1 and Labour 0.
This goes on all around the UK and at the end of the night, when all the winners of the constituencies is counted up, the party that has the most MP's is the winner and the new Government.
The First Past The Post name comes from the way that if one party reaches 326 MPs (out of the 650), they cannot be beaten so the post is the magic number of 326 MPs.
If the Conservatives win then they become the Government and because David Cameron is the leader of the Conservatives, he becomes Prime Minister, if Labour win Ed Miliband is the PM and if the Lib Dems triumph then Nick Clegg.
What it all means is that when you vote you are not directly voting for who you want to be Prime Minister but who you want to represent you in the House of Commons and by consequence of that, deciding who become the Prime Minister.
If, as happened in 2010, nobody reaches the 326 then some of the parties can join together and pool their members of Parliament into a coalition party to reach the 326 figure and looking at the latest polls, that could happen again this time around also.
The problem arises when you have a good representative who is great for where you live but happens to be from one Party (eg Lib Dems) but you would prefer the Prime Minister to be from another (eg Conservatives) but that is up to your conscience and the ballot paper what you consider is more important, who runs the country or who is making the decisions in your local area.

Things Getting Hot For Israel

Finally, after 60 years of uninterrupted oppression, Israel is about to be squeezed as the Palestinians secure the long-awaited membership of the International Criminal Court at the United Nations and the chance to see Tel Aviv in the dock for it's actions in the West Bank and Gaza.
ICC spokesman Fadi El Abdallah said that Palestine now gets all the same rights as well as obligations that member countries have and ICC prosecutors have already started a preliminary examination to decide whether or not the legal criteria are met to open investigation into Israels actions and settlement building on occupied land.
A Palestinian spokesman explained that it has: 'decided to pursue an internationalisation approach to achieve the long-overdue inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and to put an end to decades of colonisation, dispossession, forced displacement and massacres, including the 2014 aggression against the Palestinian people in the occupied Gaza Strip'.
Israel are predictably angry that the Palestinians refuse to lay down and take it and Netanyahu has already said that he would not allow Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and officers be dragged to the International Criminal Court in The Hague but while the ICC have no authority to arrest suspects in Israel, it can issue arrest warrants for the arrest of IDF soldiers and officers when they step outside of Israel making it difficult for Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, to travel abroad where they would face arrest.
Israel officials could not face a possible worst time to lose its most ardent backer in the United States with relations between the Obama administration and Israel appear to have cooled down after Netanyahu addressed the US Congress with a speech criticising Washington and his pre-election comment that there would not be a two-state solution while he is Prime Minister which angered the Obama administration further.
It has been a long time coming but Israel is finally being squeezed and things could become, quite rightly, very uncomfortable indeed.

China Take Another Step To New World Order

Despite the best efforts of the Americans, the world order will make shift at midnight as the Chinese launch and the 46 countries who have signed up, launch the rival to the World Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
The US has long used the World Bank as an arm of its foreign policy but that strategy has been made a bit limper as nations looking for a bit to tide them over have a new place to lend from despite Barack Obama's diplomats doing all they can to persuade countries not to join up and kill it at birth and in turn stop doing what they themselves do with the World Bank and use it as an instrument of Chinese foreign policy allowing Beijing to exert more influence regionally.
Amongst those ignoring America and signing up are Australia, South Korea, Indonesia, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Brazil, India, Norway, South Korea, Russia, Spain, Turkey who have have all applied with only Japan are the only major economy along with America which has chosen not to be a founder member but it is still quite a coup for China who will know have greater regional and global influence.
America seems to think it's better to stay out of the club but most of the rest of the world takes a different view but China have the reserve currency in their sights and if that changes, and trading takes place in Yuan's and not US Dollar's, America will truly be on the slide and China the global major player.

Left v Right Explained

As the election gets closer we will hear more and more phrases such as 'left wing' and 'right wing' but as i seem to get asked more and more exactly what they mean, it is obvious that the terms are much bandied about but not so much understood.
The terms range back to the days of pre-revolutionary France when the Royal chamber was split into two with everyone who wanted to keep things as they were sat to the right of the King and everyone who sat to the left of him wanted to change it.
Of course some would think that if if they were within the vicinity of royalty they would choose the side which provided the best angle to throw rotten fruit at them but the Frenchies Royal Chamber is the basic premise of the 'Left' and the 'Right'.
Adapting it to today, the left basically want what is best for the whole of society while the right want what is best for the individual.
The left include environmentalists, pacifists and Guardian readers. The right have royalists, religionists and Daily Mail readers. Where the left put down the stick and wave around carrots, the right swing the stick and make juice from the carrots.
If you are still unsure about your orientation, science has tried to usher to one side or the other by profiling the typical characteristics of those on the left and right.
Psychologists at New York University conducted a review of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants and came up with the following traits regarding political orientation.
If your front room is messy, cluttered, colourful and contains maps or flags, then you are on the left side of the political fence.
If its neat, clean, organised, brightly lit and contains paintings or pictures of buildings you are on the opposite side.
Lefty's have more books, are impulsive, optimistic, more likely to listen to classical music or jazz, enjoy abstract art, like romantic comedies, write in a diary and play musical instruments. They are also more open, inquisitive, excitement-seeking, creative, and travel more.
The right are more likely to be religious, like country music, prefer radio chat shows, are orderly, decisive and more conscientiousness in their duty, and are strict rule followers. They consider the world to be a dangerous place and have a greater fear of death.
Researchers at the University of Nebraska have reported that right-wingers possess a strong 'negativity bias' meaning they are more defencive and reactionary than their left wing cousins.
They also discovered that right wing parents are stricter with their offspring, are more emotionally repressed and are less empathetic but on the flip side are also more polite and strangely own more cleaning supplies than the left so if you ever want a jar opened or your bathroom needs a good clean you would need to ask a right winger.
Finally, if you still unsure if you are left or right or find you have a foot in either camp, their is a quick test to work out your orientation.

Fill in the blanks of these incomplete words: coff__, sk_ll, and _oney.

If you are more likely to vote for the indecisive type with the map of the World on the wall and brightly coloured cushions, you see coffee, skill, and honey.
If you are more inclined to put your cross beside the god bothering candidate with the Dolly Parton CD and sparkling clean bathroom you see coffin, skull, and money.