What Has Europe Ever Done For Us?

I admit that with the economic turmoil in the European Union at the moment, this isn't the best time for us pro-Europeans to be pushing
for closer integration with Europe but with the likes of UKIP dominating the agenda, we have to make sure that the positive isn't drowned
out by the xenophobic, negative froth coming from the likes of Nigel Farage and his ilk. 
So what exactly has the EU done for us in Britain you may ask.
Well how about the obvious, being part of the world’s largest single market with an audience of 500 million which enables not just free trade in terms of the absence of customs duties or tariffs but a  common set of rules so that business does not have to comply with 27 different sets of regulations.
Another great move was the working time directive that set a maximum number of working hours, guaranteed breaks, gave temporary workers the same basic conditions of work as full-time colleagues and gave workers the right to take parental leave after the birth or adoption of a child.
Then there is the freedom to travel, live, work, study and retire anywhere in the EU, a benefit that 1.6 million Brits have taken advantage of and live outside of the UK in the EU. Working abroad has been facilitated through the mutual recognition of qualifications, enabling professionals to work in another EU Member State without having to sit further examinations. In addition to being able to live where they choose in the EU, pensioners can receive their UK state pension wherever they live in the EU.
They introduced an EU wide tariff for mobile phone calls and texts ending exorbitant costs for using your phone outside of your own country and British shoppers are now free to shop in any Member State without being charged customs or excise duties on goods for their personal use when they return home.
Cheap and air travel across the EU came about due to legislation with EU members rights protected if a flight is cancelled or who are denied boarding and the 2008 law requiring fares quoted by airlines to be all inclusive without hidden charges being added when you come to pay. 
We have the EU Health Insurance Card which enables all EU citizens to receive emergency health care on the same terms as the citizens of the EU country they are visiting while the beaches in Britain are safer due to EU Measures that set a standard for water pollution.
The European Arrest Warrant (EAW) has been very important in bringing criminals to justice across Member State borders, the UK issued 220 EAWs in 2009
The University mobility scheme ERASMUS, enables students and staff to study or work at another higher education institution in the EU benefiting over 7,000 British students annually and academic research projects receiving over €5 billion in research grants from the EU.
Another recipient of EU cash are the deprived regions of Europe with such areas in Britain allocated a total of €15.5billion from the European Structural Funds for 2000 - 2006.
Thanks to the EU, its citizens are protected from employment discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, religion or belief, disability or age. Another EU directive set a minimal size cage for battery hens.
Most importantly, and the greatest reason for staying within the EU is the seat at the top table when it comes to World politics. It is arrogant to believe that Britain will hold much sway on a stage dominated by the powerhouses of America, Europe, China, Russia and the BRIC countries because we won't.
By being in the EU we are speaking as a representative of 500 million people, only China would have a larger population. ON our own, a nations of 60 million would not have much of a voice. 
The world is changing, sure the European project isn't perfect, but come out of it would not only damage us economically but politically as well and we would regret marginalising ourselves for quitting an ultimately powerful and prosperous bloc.
Removing ourselves from the EU, the UK would have zero influence and Britain would become that small island off the Coast of the Superpower withering to a painful and self-inflicted demise and why would we want to become that?

China & Japan Troubles Look Ominous

The sun is timed to blink out in approximately 5 billion years but it is unlikely that humans will still be around then to see it, the smart money is on us wiping ourselves out long before then and the prominent species being hedgehogs or worms who will be staring at the massive yellow ball going out.
There are many potential flash points in the World and a handful of countries doing there level best to make sure that they are top dog or take out the rest of us trying.
Israel and Iran, India and Pakistan, America along with Britain and anyone with a natural resource we want and there is the one that keeps bubbling away, China and Japan who are having a barney over a row of small islands in the East China Sea.
In the latest development, Japan says a Chinese frigate locked weapon-targeting radar on one of its navy ships, a warning as Japan send more naval ships into the surrounding waters and flies warplanes over the disputed Diaoyu Islands and is trying its best to involve the US on its behalf in this dispute citing the US-Japan Defence Treaty.
Rather than cooling down, things seems to be in danger of escalating and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to realise that it won't take much more provocation or an accident to push the stand off into something much more serious.
China are repeating the tactics of last year when they took control of the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea from the Philippines by sending their warships to the shoal and daring the Philippines to shift them or back down.
The Philippines blinked first that time but Japan seems to be made of sterner stuff and are ignoring the threats of 'serious consequences' being made by China who have got themselves into a situation where they don't want to be seen to back down but risk a possible conflict with their neighbour and the global superpower they are looking to oust if they don't.     
The stale-mate we have at the moment can't continue indefinitely but neither side look like backing down and the increasing military presence from both sides are beginning to bump up against each other in such a small area so that an 'accident' seems to be a matter of when and not if.
Out of all the tinderbox situations around the globe, this is the one that looks as though it could turn the nastiest.

Sochi 2014

It's exactly a year until the start of the Sochi Winter Olympics and although you would be hard pushed to find a place in Russia that has no snow in the wintertime, it looks as though that is exactly what they have done because Sochi is today snow free.
Admittedly that could be considered a bit of a drawback in a two week spectacular that depends on the stuff but the Sochi organisers are promising there will be enough snow during the Olympics even if they have to make it themselves.
“We can guarantee that the snow will be there” the Organisers have promised and one method they have tried out was to stockpile snow from this winter on mountain ice sheets for use next year.
They have also splashed out on 430 snow-making devices to keep the slopes supplied with fresh snow.
The Vancouver Winter Olympic organisers faced a similar problem in 2010 when a lack of snow meant they had to fill up trucks with snow from places where they had a lot of the white stuff and transport it into the city.
The Winter Olympics are great to watch, but only because we seem to enjoy seeing people fall over and the Winter Olympics has no shortage of slips and falls which end in a big cloud of snow.
Being from a country where the place comes to a halt at he first sign of snow, we are notoriously bad at sports that require being able to slide down the side of a mountain very fast but as this Winter Olympics is being held in a place that might not have any snow it might prove to be a plus for us.
I am also looking forward to Gerard Depardieu representing his new country in the luge.

Victory For Fairness

The votes have been counted and the winner of the Gay Marriage debate is the 21st Century who defeated the 19th Century view by 400 to 175.
It does seem incredible that in 2013 there are still those who consider it a God given right to treat less fairly one set of people over others and once again it is the religious leading the bigotry.   
A victory for commonsense, fairness and equality and marriage is now between two people who love each other which is as it should be.

Atheist Church Is The Wrong Idea

It's a strange kind of Church that preaches that when we die that's it, but there is a new breed of church springing up that isn't all about misbehave and there's a fallen angel waiting to poke you up the jacksy with a trident, this is the Atheist Church.
Atheism, i always thought, was considering the theists theory that God created us from a pile of dust and the rib of the first man and dismissing it as poppycock and then just ignoring it so to try and compete with it by copying it, albeit with an alternative message, doesn't make much sense to me.
Atheism shouldn't be trying to compete with religion, religion should just be ignored and not replaced by anything because there is no need.
The idea of a Church of Atheism is at best mocking religion and at worst an attempt to spread the word that there is no God in the same way that the Church try to spread the word that there is a God.
Both seem to want to drill into their congregations a message, there is even a Manifesto for Atheists, listing 10 virtues for the faithless.  
There is the danger that Atheism of this kind could developing into a cult with its own code of ethics, values, rules and belief system that tells Atheists how they should act or what they should believe.
Atheism should be less about trying to take on and compete with religion and more about just ignoring it or rather that's my idea of it.
You can't say to someone don't believe what they are saying but listen to me instead and I'll tell you what to believe, that's just wrong and we moan like nobodies business that the religio's try to shove their religion down our throats but this particular idea is almost shoving atheism down people's throats.
Religion is doing a fine job of eating itself, with each generation the grip gets a little looser, but let's not set up something to replace it with.
We should just leave religion to go away and not put anything in its place, not even Atheism because we don’t need anything in that particular space.

Another Lying Politician

I think Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne is going to need a bit more than an appearance on Oprah Winfrey to get any sympathy after being charged with persuading his then wife, Vicky Pryce, to take speeding points on his behalf so that he could avoid a driving ban.
The politician has spent the last three years describing the allegations against him as 'untrue' 'wild' and 'incorrect' backed down as he took the dock, stating that actually, he did get his wife to take the points for him after all.
After saying that he hoped the Crown Prosecution Service would find he had no case to answer and wishing to 'draw a line under the matter', it turned out that the investigation wasn't dropped and the evidence wasn't lost as he presumably hoped so with just a matter of presenting the evidence to the court, Huhne entered a guilty plea at the last minute to gain a lighter sentence as he now gets 10% off his sentence.
As we saw with the expenses scandal, our politicians will lie and cheat and consider us wrong for questioning them and once again someone who feels qualified to make laws for the rest of us to obey is revealed as believing they don't apply them personally.
Only yesterday, the day before his court appearance, he said 'I'm innocent of these charges and I intend to fight this in the courts and I'm confident that a jury will agree' which makes it even more shocking that 24 hours later he was saying 'Having taken responsibility for something which happened 10 years ago, the only proper course of action for me is to resign my Eastleigh seat in Parliament'.
Integrity and honesty not big for the British members of Parliament it seems and i hope that when the judge comes to hand down the sentence, he takes into account the wasting of the police and courts time.

Austerity Isn't Working

I'm not an Economist, i would be the first to put my hand up and admit i know nothing about how financial matters work but even i, with as much knowledge on the economy that would fit on a postage stamp can see that austerity isn't working.
All i have heard since the credit crunch as it was known in 2008 is that we need austerity to generate economic growth, but five years on we are heading for a triple dip recession so it has clearly failed.
Budgets have been cut, 750,000 public service jobs are for the chop, pay has been frozen, pensions have been shaken up and public services have been shut down but austerity has failed to create jobs or the anticipated economic growth and the AAA credit rating is in danger and we don't seem to have made a dent in the debt but still the government refuses to change course, they have even suggested that the austere measures have not been deep enough.
Albert Einstein's described insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results so maybe our leaders are insane because they seem to be doing the same thing over and over again and wondering why the economy isn't budging.
It is hard to keep the inner cynic in me in thinking that this is exactly where the Conservative Party want us to be because while the economy is in the doldrums, they can bring in a whole raft of privatisations under the guise of lightening the burden on the economy.
Even Thatcher didn't dare tinker with the NHS and she was the privatiser in chief but Cameron and the rest of the Bullingdon toffs have already began dismantling it and selling it off to the highest bidder citing the economic benefits to the country.
As long as they put it down to economic reasons, it looks as if we will swallow it and we have another two years of these guys yet unless the Lib Dems do the decent thing and pull the plug on the coalition.
The Dems will be decimated at the next election, this could be their final brave act of falling on their sword and saving the country from more austerity that seems to be piling on the pain for absolutely no reward but our Government is not changing direction and I have to wonder why not. 

It Sucks Here Romanians So Stay There

The curbs on Romanians and Bulgarians living and working in the UK are lifted next year and the Government have swung into
action by planning a negative ad campaign aimed at deterring an influx of immigrants from the two East-European states.
The gist of the campaign is that it rains all the time and we have no jobs so go somewhere else instead which seems a bit of a turnaround because in the GREAT Campaign announced by the Government five months ago, sent to the Romanian and Bulgarian embassies, we were inviting 'the world to take a fresh look at everything Britain has to offer' and 'We want to send out a clear message that Britain is one of the very best places in the world to visit, live, work, study, invest and do business'.
Now another arm of Government is trying to trash our own image by highlighting all the worst things about Britain hoping the Bulgarians forgo the delights of a single room bed and breakfast in windswept Bognor and stay in Sofia instead.    
Obviously Eastenders is not shown in Romania or Bulgaria, that would put across a great negative view of Britain as would a massive billboard at the French ports with Gideon Osborne's smirking face.
In reply to the British telling Romanians they are not welcome to our green and pleasant land, the Romanians have hit back with a series of ads saying why British people should move to Romania instead.
'The solution was to turn this false problem on its head and invite the British to invade us instead' said Mihai Gongu, Creative Director at GMP Advertising who created the campaign obviously unaware that Britain doesn't need an invite to invade anywhere, just having a natural resource we want seems to have done it for the last couple of hundred years.
The posters to go with the campaign includes zingers such as "Half of our women look like Kate. The other half, like her sister"Our draft beer is less expensive than your bottled water', 'we serve more food groups than pie, sausage, fish and chips', 'We speak better English than anywhere you've been in France' and 'we offer more choice than just two political parties'.
GMP Advertising said the campaign is meant to be friendly in nature: "We were amused, and most importantly we felt inspired. We tried our hand at British humour and, like with all things in the beginning, we probably didn't get everything right'.
Apart from the British humour bit and not getting anything right i would say it was a good attempt but there is probably a reason why Abu Hamza could count the number of Romanian comedians doing well in the UK on his right hand.  
The amount of Romanians and Bulgarians who are expected to land on our shores has been put at 250,000 but with the Government just taking us into a triple dip recession the next Government ad campaign will be aimed at trying to keep keep people here in the first place.

PS...just looked out the window and it's raining. Again.

Another Great Idea Rejected

Britain has a problem with its nuclear waste because the only place in the country that was willing to to dig a big hole and bury it have suddenly decided, actually, they don't want it there.
So here we are stuck with tonnes and tonnes of the glowing stuff but nowhere to store it, until i came up with a great idea, dump it all into a volcano. Problem solved now the only problem is where to hang all the Environmental awards that will be winging  there way to me.   
Or so i thought before the volcano geophysicists came along and ruined it all.
Apparently the problem is that in order to melt the uranium waste a required heat of  5,189˚F is needed and the hottest volcano we have is only a piddly 2,400˚F.
Another problem would be that the fuel rods wouldn't sink due to the thickness of the lava being continually pushed upwards and if the volcano ever erupted, ash, gas and radioactive fuel rods would be spewed for miles around along with radioactive lava which is apparently not a good thing.  
As my other idea of sticking it in a big box and posting it to Australia was rejected on moral grounds, it's back to the drawing board.

Any Reason For A Clooney Picture

George Clooney was enjoying a meal with some friends in a Berlin restaurant and was a bit concerned that the group were being a bit too lively and talkative so as way of apology to the nearby eaters, the actor paid the bill for the nearby table’s dinners.

You never see him in the gossip columns or bad-mouthing anyone and he cares about the environment and the feelings of other people.  It is an added bonus that he is so god-damned handsome. All around nice guy.