PEOPLE NOW EAT RUBBISH FOOD INSTEAD OF COOKING

Leaving a comment on another blog about home cooking and yummy recipes by someone who really enjoys cooking this morning, got me raving on about how hardly anyone bothers to cook proper food for their families anymore. I thought I would turn it into a post for my blog as it is something that makes me very cross. So here it is.

Hi – again. I’ve just woken up – late, overslept, my boy is LATE for school. And just I’ve tottered up to turn the computer on because I’m so overexcited at the huge (6000) number of my blog views yesterday thanks to alphinventions and already over 2000 today.

I still don’t quite know what this really means though, as I have a feeling all these people haven’t really actually read my blog at all. If they had, I would be amazed.

Anyway. As your blog with my comment was the first thing I came across I thought would reply to your reply to my first comment just to help wake me up. Anyway, there’s something about you blog – I don’t know quite what- that grabs my interest.

I think it must be that your approach to food. It sounds odd. Unfortunately it is odd. BUT only because the vast majority of people (particularly here in the UK) are such nerds about food and most are quite incapable of cooking anything. This is why we substitute this almost total lack of cooking with looking at other people like Jamie Oliver cooking for us on television as a substitute for actually doing it ourselves.

How pathetic is that !

It came as a shock to me to realise I could use the word odd to describe your enthusiasm for cooking good food because such enthusiasm is so unbelievably rare and that is quite ridiculous when you think about it.

We all have to eat. That means someone has to cook it. Here in the UK we are collectively all so lazy and very, very stupid, that most of us seem to buy ready made meals in supermarkets for instant microwave re-heating and trudge off to greasy take-away food places that produce the most filthy, overpriced rubbish you could imagine.

It is common to find the poorest of families describing how they NEVER cook and eat nothing but takeaways and supermarket microwave ready garbage.

So a family of four might typically spend £6 each or £24 in total for each evening meal on this sort of nasty rubbish. This adds up to £168 a week. It costs just a third of this to eat the best of home cooked food if you bother to do it yourself.

The myth of not having enough time to cook is completely exploded if you calculate the amount of time spent queuing for takeaways etc.

As the enjoyment of eating good food takes precedence over every other aspect of life ( I mean without food every animal, including us, gets hungry and loses complete interest in everything else – sex, sleep, making money, working, rocketscience and philosophy even), this widespread disinterest and contempt of cooking is a ridiculous, bizarre nonsense.

I cook proper food for me and my boy too – every day. It has never occurred to me to do otherwise. And every time I have standard takeaway rubbish (like on motorway journeys) I generally feel yucky and bilious afterwards ! Sometimes, just to emphasise the point, I throw up because what I ate was contaminated with vomit inducing bacteria from the poor hygiene; you can just imagine what goes on, can’t you ! .

In fact this reminds me of the very first time I had a McDonalds hamburger. It was twenty five years ago in London. My wife had just given birth to my second daughter in the Whittington Hospital in Highgate. I was left in sole charge of our other daughter who was just two and a half years old.

As my wife and newborn had to stay in hospital for a few days life at home was a bit chaotic. It always is when you are suddenly left alone for the first time to look after a toddler of two and a half. You can have absolutely no idea of what they can get up to and how much time they consume if it has never happened to you.

So cooking became somewhat disorganised and in our rush to get back to the hospital one day I thought, ‘sod it’ we will get a hamburger on the way. I mean, it’s a treat for a kid, right ?

That’s what I said to my little daughter, just like I had been brainwashed to do by the whole fast food industry relentlessly brainwashing the entire population from the moment we are all born and right through to the bitter end of our lives.

You probably find people on their death beds being brought takeaway meals from the likes of McDonalds as special treats by the visiting family members who can’t think of anything better !

So, we both had our first ever McDonalds hamburger on our way to visit Mum and the brand new sister in hospital !

Guess what ?

Just as we arrived and said hello to a rather exhausted looking Mum and rather yellow coloured, cross looking newborn baby, both my two and a half year old daughter and I threw up all over the place. It caused a bit of consternation, as you might imagine.

But, boy oh boy, did we both feel better afterwards- having disposed of the disgusting, poisonous and very contaminated food we had just eaten. It was a positive relief just to be hungry again instead of feeling really, really ill.

Oddly, hamburgers have not featured greatly in our lives in the twenty five years since. In fact, I don’t even have to eat a McDonalds hamburger to feel ill. Every time I see that awful McDonalds logo I feel instantly bilious as it comprehensively completely puts me off the idea of eating any food at all !

‘Nuff said. I could ramble on and on for hours about food. I used to own a restaurant once too. That was an interesting story,

Anyway, I got so carried away rambling on I thought I would turn this into a blog post for my blog.

Good on you for the cooking thing, and keep up the good work. We cooks are a dying breed and we need people like you to stop home cooking becoming completely extinct. It already nearly is in the UK, I think.

EXTRAORDINARY WEBSITE ALPHAINVENTIONS.COM BOOSTS BLOG VIEWS EXPONENTIALLY

I can’t quite figure out what is going on but alphainventions.com does the most extra-ordinary things to your blog hit rate. It just goes through the roof. Try it and see for yourself. It’s free ! 

 

BUT, will someone please explain to me how it works what it does and what goes on and does it really do good things for blogs in the end or is it just smoke and mirrors. IT NEEDS EXPLAINING !!!

 

BLOG READER BOOSTER

LEGALISED THEFT ON EPIC SCALE BY BANKS

 

 

 

Manufacturing money and forcing people to borrow

 

Just a little thought I have to get off my chest. It keeps nagging away at me.

 

You’ll be noticing how house prices have been sinking like a stone recently as the banks hold onto all the money and refuse to lend it out to anyone – particularly for mortgages as well as businesses and even each other ?

 

Well then, you might also remember how everyone used to complain how house prices were becoming ever more ridiculously expensive as they climbed up from two or three times an annual salary to many, many times an annual salary.

 

The ordinary little flat I bought in Bristol in 1971 for three times my annual salary as a junior newspaper reporter was selling for fifteen times the current annual salary of exactly the same kind of job just over a year ago. The same thing happened all over the property market.

 

Why do you suppose there was this vast change in value ? Think about it carefully for a moment. In 1971 I had to work for just three years for my entire annual earnings to buy a home. A year ago, doing the same job, I would have to work for fifteen years for my complete annual earnings to buy the same home. As we all know, this grotesque distortion in house values caused lots and lots of problems as it progressively destabilised the whole housing market for all of us.

 

Now, within just a few weeks of the banks creating this Worldwide financial crisis, property prices in the UK and other parts of the World are plummeting as the supply of money everywhere withers and shrinks to almost nothing as the banks simply stop lending to anyone.

 

This is an extreme state of affairs. It is caused only by banks very suddenly refusing to lend any money because they are fearful the unstable economic circumstances they actually created will mean they won’t get their loans paid back because all the borrowers are busy going bust as a recession roars in from just over the visible horizon. This is the opposite of the banks previously conjuring up too much new money into existence and ramming it down people’s unwilling throats.

 

Thank you very much all you ‘Masters of the Universe’. Obviously you lot weren’t really as clever as you liked everyone else to think. Perhaps after all, you were just really  greedy, rapacious conmen, disguising your dishonesty in a complete fiction of incomprehensible jargon and meaningless garbage which even  most of you lot couldn’t understand – never mind the ordinary members of the public.

 

Now we are paying the price as people lose their jobs and their homes as thousands and thousands of people are catapulted by the banks into extreme poverty.

 

So what then, was the reason for all this distortion as house prices rose remorselessly to unrealistic, dizzying heights ?

 

Everyone complained about it but no one seemed to know why it was happening. People tried to think of why it might be happening. They blamed it on a ‘housing shortage’, on ‘too many immigrants coming into the country’, on ‘families disintegrating and more people living on their own as society broke apart at the seams in an orgy of self destruction’, and so on.

 

But the real reason was quite simply that banks were creating too much money and they had to lend it somewhere. They discovered one of the best and most profitable  places to force loans down nearly everybody’s throat was by means of increasingly large mortgages as people were forced to compete with each to offer higher and higher prices for houses just because banks wanted to lend larger and larger sums of money – so they could make more money for themselves ! They quite simply ran out of places to lend money and dreamed up a whole new bottomless pit of possibility for more lending.

 

This meant that when anyone bought a house, they could only do it by making sure they offered more money than anyone else. The banks were always happy to keep on increasing the size of mortgages because they knew they had a complete stranglehold on each borrower.

 

It was one of the safest and most profitable ways of lending huge amounts of money over a long period of time. Much better, the banks thought, than all this tedious hard work of lending money to businesses over short periods of time. Businesses  were much more risky and often went bust; then there was no one to pay loans back to the bank. 

 

Individual householders were easier to pursue and were permanently chained to the banks until they either paid off their loans or died. A much better wheeze, thought the banks.

 

So, there we have it. Banks can create unlimited amounts of money if they can find somewhere to lend it. This is fine if the lending is sensibly organised and not rapacious and dishonest, or dangerously stupid because it wrecks economies and destroys people’s lives.

 

But the banks didn’t think of that. They were too immersed in their own greed to care less about what they were doing. As long as they could get away with it anything goes; that was fine by them.

 

Never mind the damage done to so many other people – or even whole nations. The whole country of Iceland has been made bankrupt and flung into instant poverty and even starvation by the nasty behaviour of the banks ! But the banks are OK, so that’s alright then ?

 

The ‘Masters of the Universe’ will just keep their heads down low for a bit until the recession blows over, then they will start again; effectively engaging once more in a form of legalised theft on an absolutely epic scale.

 

 

If bankers have the legal means of simply conjuring new money into existence, which they do, then there ought to be sensible law to control them and stop the gargantuan amounts of grasping dishonesty we have seen displayed by these dishonest little worms in Modern Times.

 

Now over to you Prime Minister !

BANKS BECOMING INCREASINGLY INSANE

I overheard this conversation in one of those ‘chatrooms’ on the internet today and I found it priceless. A little cameo of just how mad the banks are becoming now. It’s no wonder they are busy destroying the Worldwide economy – they have completely taken leave of their senses !

0845/0870 calls from banks

Has anyone else received any? I started getting calls from 0845 3312320 on Tuesday purporting to be from LloydsTSB – an automated message that asks you to ring the number and leave your personal details before you can speak to anyone, which of course I didn’t, thinking it was a scam.

After much hassle and about 20 more of these bloody calls I find out they are indeed from Lloyds and am pretty pissed off. In these days of mass fraud how irresponsible is it for banks to be cold calling and asking for your personal details? Am also doubly annoyed because I’ve had endless problems with fraud in the past five years or so, including my ID and cards being stolen, cloned etc, all of which the bank knows about.

Anyone seen any articles about this kind of thing as I’ll be pitching to the money pages if it’s not been done to death.

……..Yep I regularly get them from HSBC too, even though I switched banks a year ago
 

……..Natwest is doing something similar. My bank and other companies have rung me before now and been astonished when I insist on ringing them back before giving any personal info.

……..I did an article about this for the Telegraph – my husband received an automated call from Lloyds when they stopped his card when we were in Morocco. Actually the article was more about cards being stopped when you are on holiday, but that was in there.

……….Lloyds stopped my card after my tenants paid money INTO my account. Their excuse was that it was an unknown transaction – all £750 of it.

…………Lloyds are quite heavy handed about stopping cards. They stopped Alex’s because of “suspicious payments” – it was £30 for our regular Friday night take aways.

……………Whaat?!

…….I know, I thought I’d heard everything. It was a Saturday too, so I couldnt’ even go into a branch. Luckily I was with a friend and she lent me some money so I didn’t have to pay for my bus fare, bagel and coffee with my credit card. I then spent a frustrating hour trying to explain to Lloyds that freezing someone’s account because a couple of hundred quid had been paid into it was not in any way, shape or form helping to safeguard against fraud. And then they ring you up and ask you tell all to machine. Ha!

Aren’t the banks simply a delight to do business with these days !

Or perhaps they are just run by half wits who are so obsessed with their own culture of rapacious greed and vicious treatment of customers, they don’t understand how destructive and immoral they really are.

They seem to be so arrogant they actually think they can do absolutely anything they please with a total disregard of honesty and law.

THE GREAT BANKING SCAM

Makes us all impoverished and enslaved to the banks

 

How’s this for a little gem of information then ?

“I’m afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that banks can and  do create money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.”

 

Reginald Mckenna, past chairman of the Board of the Midlands Bank of England came up with this nasty little truth some long time before today’s credit crunch; and boy oh boy.  Just how right he was.

 

Because the banks can destroy money even faster than they create it in the first place – and that is exactly what they have just done over the entire World economy in just a few weeks recently.

 

That is why people are being made homeless and losing their jobs all over the World; why the whole fabric of society in Iceland is disintegrating and it’s citizens queuing in doleful lines for food handouts to stop previously middle class professional  families starving; people everywhere losing their savings and why we’re all going to have a lousy Christmas this year even if we don’t lose our job; because the entire World economy is going bust. This is because the sheer incompetence and greed of banks has paralysed the supply of money and is rapidly shrinking the total amount available for all of us to spend. 

 

Without the ability of all us to spend, businesses  go bust on an epic scale, putting more and more people out of work. This further reduces the amount of money which people would normally be spending at an ever faster and faster rate. A spiral of wanton destruction destroying millions of lives just because the banks are both incompetent and breathtakingly greedy.

 

They are so dishonest they cannot even trust each other. That is why they don’t want to lend to each other and why they now cannot find enough money to lend to businesses or anyone else. 

 

The financial system relies entirely on banks lending to each other and if they don’t, there is no financial system and there is no money at all. With no money business and trade simply cannot function, so ultimately no one  will have a job if the process is taken to its logical conclusion.

 

So, at a stroke, they are completely destroying the World economy as they close down ever increasing numbers of businesses and turn out hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people, out of their homes and onto the streets.

 

Quite simply, the banks have destroyed everyone’s trust in money  and set about the process of destroying money itself and the only means of World trade.

 

Decades of building up wealth have vanished in an instant because greasy, immoral, devious thugs have somehow wormed their way into the banking system to wreak havoc with it as they made continuous increments towards ever increasing risks and constantly pushing at the boundaries of honesty and probity. 

 

That famous phrase ‘The Big Bang’ seems to spring effortlessly to mind. This was the phrase  used to describe the ’deregulation’ of banks. For ‘deregulation’ read ‘ be as dishonest as you can get away with’. It certainly turned out to be quite a bang, didn’t it ? The whole World economy is now going up in smoke.

 

There is no honesty or probity in banking anymore; just raw, savage, heartless greed. Banks are liars and thieves. There is no honour amongst liars and thieves. That is why the banks know they cannot trust each other and so it is why they are now so reluctant to lend to each other.

 

As about 95% of all the money in circulation is apparently created by banks during their process of taking deposits and then making loans, this means they are just as capable of destroying 95% of all the money in circulation if they continue to be as greedy and stupid as they have been in the recent past.

 

This is how the great banking scam works.

 

There is something called a fractional reserve ratio. It is a neat little conjuring trick, conjured out of thin air by the bankers getting together in a huddle with the government in the past to persuade it to pass a law saying banks could lend many times the amount of money actually deposited as savings.

 

A fractional reserve ratio of 9:1 allows  banks to create and lend £100 000 from a deposit of only £1 111.12p – an actual multiple of nearly one hundred times the original sum as the money is lent and re-lent at a diminishing amount of nine times the deposit sum each time; gradually diminishing to ever smaller sums before aggregating at about one hundred times the original sum. At 6% interest this provides the bank with £6 000 annual interest income which is roughly six times the original deposit of £1 111.12.

 

At 18:1 it would be twice the amount or £12 000 income for the bank from just £1 111.12p deposited.

 

The need for deposits from savers is entirely dispensed with when the bank or mortgage company charges a loan ‘arrangement’ fee. This fee simply allows the bank to conjure up the complete amount of your loan or mortgage from thin air without the tedious business of the bank having to be in possession of a single penny in the form of a deposit in the  first place. Effectively, by paying your ‘arrangement fee’ up front, you are simply creating your own loan or mortgage out of absolutely nothing !

 

It seems rather a pity we have to bother with doing it via the bank instead of just creating how ever much money we want to spend ourselves. It really wouldn’t be any different – except there wouldn’t be a nasty, grasping bank to repossess your property if you failed to make the repayments on time !

 

How’s that for a financial conjuring trick then ?

 

Some banks and mortgage companies have recently been rumoured to use fractional reserve ratios of up to 40:1. This would mean that for every £1 111.12p in cash they get their hands on, they can lend £400  000 , earning £24 000  a year in interest at 6%. 

 

But of course the interest rate is often a great deal more. In the case of credit cards it might be 30%, for instance. Hmm. That would make an annual income of £120 000 for the bank from just one single deposit of £1111.12p then. Nice little earner, isn’t it ? 

 

You could say it is just a teeny, weeny bit excessive. 

 

Just for the avoidance of any doubt  whatsoever, that translates into immoral and dishonest, which in turn really translates into a form of theft. You might call it conversion really; whereby the bank dishonestly converts honest savings from customers into entirely dishonest and misrepresented and risky loans which have now put the entire World economy at risk and threaten all with imminent recession and poverty.

 

So, when you pay your mortgage company £1 111.12 as a mortgage ‘arrangement’ fee, they might lend you just £200 000 and then have another £200 000 left over to lend someone else – or possibly pay themselves a large bonus instead, what ho ! Good little wheeze, don’t you  think ?

 

How else do you think all those meaninglessly huge sums of money sprung into existence from nothing – along with all those gigantically huge banker’s bonuses running into billions of pounds ?. 

 

Why, the bankers simply  realised they could conjure up as much money as they liked and spend it how they liked because they had complete control over it and virtually no one else understood how the whole thing worked.

 

Now we are all paying for their dishonesty and misrepresentation as our lives disintegrate around us. It’s about time our Government rounded all the bankers up and shot the lot of them. They are worthless fraudsters.

 

I came across this interesting observation by the Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Georgia, USA,  Robert H. Hemphill  in a film called ‘Money as debt’.  

 

“Individual debts paid off leave individuals with more money. All debts paid off leaves society with no money at all. So there it is, we’re totally dependent on continually renewed bank credit for there to be any money in existence. No loans, no money.

 

“This is what happened in the great depression as the money supply shrank drastically as the supply of loans  dried up.

 

“This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every pound we have in circulation, cash or credit.

 

“If the banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not we starve.

 

“We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible. But there it is”.

 

 

 

 

THIS IS A SERIOUSLY NASTY LABOUR GOVERNMENT

 

 

 

Leftie Mafia close ranks over Baby P

“WHY did Gordon Brown react so violently when asked in the Commons about Baby P’s shocking death?

Was it a guilty conscience?

The unforgivable death of Baby P has revealed Labour’s dirty little secret — the arrogance verging on corruption of entrenched Socialism”.

Not such a secret now, after the hideous catalogue of incompetence leading to what anyone but our modern justice system would regard as murder.

This avoidable tragedy tells us about the way the Left works when, as in Haringey, it has unbridled power.

Baby P’s fate was the culmination of a blinkered authoritarianism in which rigid political correctness supersedes human decency.

Haringey is a bastion of the loony Left.

Its website boasts: “We are committed to eliminating discrimination on the grounds of age, colour, disability, ethnic origin, gender, HIV status, marital status, nationality, national origin, race, religious belief, responsibility for dependants, sexuality, or unrelated criminal conviction.”

Great. But they can’t tell when a baby has a broken back and hours to live.

It swallows £100million a year for a child “protection” programme, and allows TWO of them to die in unimaginable agony.

Hard-faced “welfare” chief Sharon Shoesmith won’t apologise and it takes two days before anyone in Haringey says sorry.

Yet when Shoesmith IS finally kicked out, she could win £200,000 in compensation. That’s blood money. It’s disgusting. 

Nobody in today’s blame-free public services walks away without a bung.

We hire armies of new nursing assistants, classroom assistants and police support officers. to help the professionals.

Yet we won’t sack any of the 20,000 rubbish teachers identified by Whitehall – or the hundreds of thousands of other idiot State employees doing nothing useful except causing lots of harm.

Superbugs kill thousands and strike terror into us all, yet no nurse or orderly has been fired for shoddy hygiene. Just fill in the forms and tick the boxes and it’s a job for life.

Look at Dr Sabah Al Zayyat, still practising after failing to spot Baby P’s ripped fingernails, let alone his bust ribs and broken spine.

The herd of State employees closes ranks, bound by a Mafia-style code of Omerta.

Speak out, like Haringey whistleblower Nevres Kemal, and you are sacked and legally gagged.

Why is such primitive tyranny tolerated?

Public service unions are Labour’s paymasters. That’s why Gordon Brown has put 800,000 more of their members on the state payroll.

It’s why they can retire at 60 on inflation-proof pensions, paid for by millions who can’t afford to retire at all.

It’s why we have hundreds of pointless quangos, costing £70billion a year and run by unaccountable stooges on £200,000 salaries.

Welcome to Labour’s client state, a multi- billion—pound gravy train driven by buck-passing bureaucrats who aren’t fit to look after a baby”.

That’s where all our taxpayer money goes !

 

This is an edited version of an article by TREVOR KAVANAGH Published on 17th Nov 2008 in the Sun newspaper.

THE SILLY SAINSBURY’S SUPERMARKET – AGAIN !

Treating it’s Customers With Complete Contempt – As Usual !

 

Today I bought a couple of pairs of pyjamas from Sainsbury’s for my ten year old boy. That was a bit of a mistake. I never seem to learn my lesson. Sainsbury’s ownbrand TU clothes for kids is a just a byword for tat. It’s just not worth bothering to buy at all as every time I do, things just have to be returned because they’re so useless.

They should alter the brand name to TAT instead of TU. That would be a more honest description of the utter rubbish they sell, and at least we customers would know exactly where we stand and be properly warned of the withering contempt with which Sainsbury’s obviously views it’s customers.

Just about every time I buy a Sainsbury’s TU brand of kids clothes I just have to take them straight back again because they are so incredibly badly made they are completely unwearable.

The pyjamas were Sainsbury’s TU ownbrand BBC Dr. Who pyjamas that come with a ‘sound chip ‘ which gurgles ‘exterminate, exterminate’ in a monotonous electronic voice when you touch it. It is a fairly large thing – about two square inches of soft rubber – sewn into a sort of pocket dangling at the bottom of the top part of the pyjamas just where the top ends at the wearer’s waist.

It is quite bulky and would be really uncomfortable for the child wearing the pyjamas in bed as they would be sleeping on a huge great lumpy thing digging into their waist. It would also come to grief in the wash as hot water, detergent and a washing machine continuously bashing clothes around to clean them is not exactly the best environment to expect electrical or electronic things to survive. Water and electricity are not friends at the best of times.

To be fair to Sainsbury’, there is a label somewhere which says you should remove the sound chip before washing and sleeping. But the problem is, there is no way of removing the sound chip which looks as though it might be intended to be in some sort of open pocket which would actually allow it to be removed.

In actual fact, the pocket has been completely sewn up in a permanently closed position, probably by simple carelessness in the manufacture. So, the only way of removing the chip – which has to be done if anyone expects to be able to sleep in the pyjamas or to wash them – is to hack open the pocket with a pair of scissors.

However carefully this might be done, it is unlikely to be possible to put the flaming sound chip back without it falling out immediately, and the likelihood is that the pocket will be so damaged, it will simply rip apart in the wash and have to be completely hacked off the garment anyway.

Well done Sainsbury’s ! Another victory in the great battle to force us consumers into buying complete rubbish of the lowest possible quality        ( and the highest possible profit to the supermarket).

Guess where the garment was made ? Why, China, of course !

WHY DON’T THE MEDIA EXPOSE SOCIAL WORKER’S WICKEDNESS

 

What I utterly fail to understand about the media being unwilling to take on these stories is that, as far as I understand it,  they can be reported in quite a detailed manner, providing they are anonymised.

I listened very carefully to the judge expounding details of the injunctions relating to a case and it was all about simply not identifying the protagonists. There is no actual ban on telling the story as long as different names are used and there is nothing to directly identify various people.

Now, I know the media are obsessed with producing people’s names. I was taught as a local newspaper reporter the idea was to encourage people to read the paper to look for their names in it. That is what local papers do. While it is also generally important to identify people in any story, when it is impossible to identify them, it doesn’t mean the story is automatically worthless and should be killed.

It is just because of the draconian totalitarian secrecy of the family courts that many of those stories should and could be told in quite significant detail because many are so incredibly shocking.

Until I had my own little brush with the evils of Social Workers and their abuse in the family courts I wouldn’t have been able to believe there was such a widescale abuse of justice going on in this country, the like of which we all normally associate with the worst of totalitarian regimes, like Hitler’s mass extermination programme or Stalin’s Russia, or Romania’s recent dictatorshiop which seemed to particularly specialise in abusing children.

What I learnt from my own experiences of social workers and their representations to the family court is that the half baked opinion of some incredibly ignorant, often inadequate person, most often than not with a psychological problem making them  want to  be a ‘control freak’ and sanctimoniously tell others what to do to the nth degree, is all that removes children from their parents – not the inadequacy of parents.

I experienced exactly that from just about every social worker I dealt with. Take the time to read this thumbnail of my case.

THE EVIL INCOMPETENCE OF SOCIAL WORKERS

My partner is a faultless Mother (apart from the consequences of her mental illness)  and I am a pretty competent type of Father. When my partner started falling ill with schizophrenia and became consequentially wildly erratic, I called social services asking them to fulfill their statutory duty to provide the medical help my partner is legally entitled to and the assistance three very small children were entitled to by virtue of being in danger etc because of psychosis and my partner abducting the children from the family home and living in damaging, very overcrowded circumstances.

Social Services first flatly refuse to do anything at all, then paid a visit with a psychiatrist to where my partner and the children were and tell me they agreed my partner is thoroughly insane but as the children ’seem to be OK at the moment, there is nothing they can do until things get worse and something really bad happens’.

When I take private law action seeking custody my partner immediately tells the court she wishes me to have custody because she recognises the dangers of her illness. This results in an interim order that my baby son resides with me. Bizarrely, the judge makes the first big mistake in the very first hearing by arbitrarily ordering my two step children to reside with their Father, who had expressly said he wanted me to have custody ( and I had agreed) as he would be unable to look after them. This order eventually leads to the breakup of that Father’s family and severe damage to the two step kids of mine over the long period of time the saga goes on for. The Judge was a moron.

So, my baby son was resident with me, and his Mum came too because she always had a good relationship with me and being with me invariably encouraged her to become better from her attacks of psychosis. Social workers now come to my house to make out their report to the court relating to my custody action. They lied in their report, saying ‘I hadn’t bonded with my son and ignored him on their first visit’. My son was asleep during that entire visit so not much bonding was likely to go on. I certainly didn’t ignore him, as I checked him every ten minutes to make sure he hadn’t rolled off the sofa. They also lied in their report saying my house was ‘unsuitable’  and my bedroom, where my son slept with me, was ‘dangerous’. That was incredible nonsense as it was a normal,  recently brand new room in every way.

Their apotheosis of incompetent nastiness came when they told my partner, in front of me, that she should employ a lawyer ‘to fight me for custody of her child, otherwise she may never see him again’. She had only just come out of a period of being sectioned in a secure mental ward. She was better, pretty normal. She instantly had a breakdown as a result of what that idiot social worker said and abducted my son, fleeing to her aged Mother’s one bedroom council pensioner accommodation 200 miles away in North Wales.

The police, sent by me to retrieve my son under the terms of the interim court order he reside with me, were told to get lost by social services and instructed to inform me I would have to go back to court if I wanted to retrieve my son. Their contradiction of the existing court order was an illegal contempt of court as they did not have or even bother to state any reason for this.

When I got to court a few weeks later, social services were in court and had brought my partner with them and produced a legal team. Social services had now taken it upon themselves to manipulate my highly suggestible partner, taking over her until now passive by our mutual agreement, case and persuade her to fight me for custody and somehow made my partner believe we were a couple splitting up and living apart. This was not the case and had never been the case. My partner and I had always ‘got on well’, excepting the difficulties psychosis sometimes produced.

Social services then proceeded to advise the court my son would be better off staying with his mum 200 miles from me on the grounds ‘it would be disruptive’ for him to return to his London home with me as he had now been away for about four weeks.

The judge said plainly that it was clearly quite unsafe for mum to look after the two year old child as she had a recent history of severe mental illness and dangerous behaviour and an obvious inability to look after a child or even herself. Social services insisted that was their advice. My lawyers hadn’t thought of the need for me to have an opposing witness. In fairness, were were completely ambushed by social services, but with hindsight I now realise my lawyers should have seen it coming and employed my own social worker witness.

The judge made a huge song and dance about it, and said she was being forced by social services to do something that was not appropriate. The judge then said she would only agree to placing the child with mum if social services visited mum every day and made sure mum attended her doctor on a weekly basis etc, etc. The judge made a point of saying that I was a good father and that I should be able to have completely unrestricted access to my son for two days a week and that social services should pay my expenses travelling 200 miles to see my son two days a week.

Social services did not pay my expenses and restricted my access to my son for two hours on each of the two days I visited him. They insisted I was supervised and I was not allowed to be alone with my son or take him with me overnight as explicitly ordered by the judge. This was on the entirely imaginary grounds that I was somehow ‘violent’ towards social services staff. There had been absolutely no incident of me being anything other than well mannered and polite at all times to social services and there had been no incident of anything remotely resembling violence. Being brought up in an exceptionally well mannered family and attending a private school which was positively obsessed with good manners and politeness, random violence is just not on my agenda.

Predictably, even social services had to eventually agree mum was far too dangerous to look after a two year old and my son was removed from mum after a few months. Instead of returning him to me, they put him in foster care where he was viciously abused, being constantly poked by the foster parents with a walking stick. This produced numerous identical round bruises all over my son’s torso and he still remembers it all now at the age of ten – over seven years later. 

Social services then told me, in front of my solicitor, that they were considering putting my son up for adoption and they explicitly threatened me that ‘if I didn’t co-operative with them my son would be adopted.

At this point I would remind you that at no time had anyone suggested I was an inadequate parent in any way whatever. Social services had not made any suggestion like this themselves. But you will notice a continuum of spiteful, arrogant disregard of law, any shred of competence, human rights or any sense of human decency whatever from social services so far.

I took social services to court and won custody of my son, but still had to suffer their menacing presence for another year of weekly visits as though I had been accused of inadequate parenting of some kind, which I never had been. They even forced me to go to parenting classes !

Their last effort at spiteful destructiveness was to announce  (at one of their care plan meetings) to my partner in front of me that I had had an affair, a relationship, with another woman while my partner had been living away from me. This resided entirely in their imaginations and was completely untrue and they had no meaningful reason to say something like that at all. They’re just plain weird, nasty people.

Unfortunately, the whole debacle had only made my son’s mother even more mentally ill through the stress of social services completely wrecking her family and being the agent for her losing her two older children to a their father who she knew neither wanted them or was capable of looking after them properly. And so it turned out to be the case.

Our previously close knit family had been completely blown apart by the activities of social services and the two elder children lost, becoming severely emotionally damaged by virtue of living with their father. 

Although my partner continued to live with me for quite a long time after our son was returned to me,  she descended into alchoholism and eventually abandoned her son and me as a product of her illness. Despite this we have always maintained a good and very friendly relationship and still do to this day.

Meanwhile all our lives have been comprehensively wrecked in a manner which has been entirely orchestrated by the activities of Social Services.

This sort of behaviour by social services seems to happen time and time again in virtually all cases they deal with. I have heard endless stories of social services being worse than useless, spiteful,  destructive and nasty. The damage they cause children and the  parents of those children is breathtaking.

ROGUE ECONOMICS – ARE BANKS LIARS AND THIEVES ?

ARE THE BANKS DECEIVING EVERYONE – INCLUDING POLITICIANS ?

Probably. But how are they getting away with it ?

We are told that bank or mortgage lenders a or b have posted huge losses of billions here and billions there because of ‘bad’ mortgages that borrowers cannot repay.

As a result World banking has seized up and the World economy is grinding to a halt everywhere with huge inflation and increasing poverty.

The gigantic figures for losses that the mortgage lenders talk about do not seem to make the slightest sense because they appear to be much larger that could ever be conceivably possible.

Mortgage lenders talk of huge losses, particularly on the sub-prime market as people cannot repay housing loans and houses are re-possessed.

But as most houses repossessed are sold and mostly repay the mortgage loans in full, there are absolutely no losses for the mortgage lenders with those housing loans that were completely recovered without loss to the banks.

While there are some repossessed properties that do produce varying degrees of loss for the lender, they are a relatively small number of repossessions and cannot possibly add up to the silly figures of billions that the banks claim.

For example, if an average mortgage loan is £200 000 and there is a total loss of that loan to the bank because the property is repossessed, then the approximate total annual repossessions here in the UK of about 40 0000 properties, assuming that each repossession represented a total loss of the entire value of the average loan, would be 40k x £200 000 = £8 000 million or £8 billion in total ONLY !!!

This figure can be approximately multiplied up for the USA’s bigger population by a factor of, say six, to produce a maximum loss figure of £48 billion which is so much smaller than the losses being claimed by the banks it is laughable.

Combine these two total loss figures of both the UK and the USA and it adds up to a total of £56 billion, not the many, many hundreds of millions all the banks are claiming.

It also must be pointed out that the above calculation assumes that every repossession represents a complete and total loss of the entire loan for the lender. Obviously this cannot be the case because most repossessed properties are sold and repay the lender in full. Very few repossessions end up in any loss and even fewer end up with total loss. That figure must be a microscopic one.

This would make the real, actual loss figures for the banks infinitely less than this maximum possible figure of about £56 billion. This makes their claims for hundreds of million in losses incomprehensible.

So, can someone tell me what on earth the banks are talking about when they say they are losing billions ? Can it be they are making up fairy tale figures based perhaps on what incomes and profits they imagined they might earn at some vague point in the future.

In other words the whole thing seems to have been hyped up as a figment of the fevered imagination of bankers utterly obsessed with their own greed.

How are the huge figures for losses posted by banks calculated ? And why would any particular lender suddenly and dramatically ‘go bust’ overnight owing hundreds of millions.

I just don’t get it. The figures don’t add up. They seem to be living in some fantasy land.

Can some kind economist explain this to me – and all the other millions of very puzzled members of the population who really do not understand all this gibberish talked by the banks and politicians ?

Have a look at the book Rogue Economics by  Loretta Napoleoni

BLOGGING MADE DIFFICULT

Why is the Internet so unbelievably and unnecessarily aggravating – not to mention monumentally time wasting ?

 

I find using computers and the internet extraordinary; everything seems to be made deliberately difficult.

It seems finding out how to blog is rather like trying to unlock a combination lock with guesswork. Everything is guesswork to a greater or lesser degree. So, although it is intrinsically simple, it is made immensely complicated – and therefore horribly time consuming.

The reality is an experienced person could stand over the shoulder of a new beginner and say “do this, this and this because……”

It would take a very short time – an hour or two at most – to learn how to do all the relevant things, instead of spending half a lifetime trying to guess.

This tutorial could be converted into a written form which could be quite brief. It would be a godsend to people ! I have yet to see anything remotely like it.

That is why I have only the foggiest idea of how to get the readers in to my blog.

I have absorbed (over a vast period of time on the internet) the fact that:

a)  You have to post frequently
b)  link to other sites/blogs

Posting frequently I can understand. Linking, no. First of all what exactly is linking ? Is it the contents of your blogroll – the thing of adding other blogs to your sidebar ? If so there is a bit of a limit to how many you can add. Also it is rather random – just hoping that particular blog will be interested in you. It may or may not be.

Or does linking really mean picking on every available word in your blog text and turning it into a highlighted hyperlink to some random site ? If so, I cannot understand the validity of that.

When I first came across this as a reader, I thought the fact a word in the text you were reading was highlighted as a hyperlink meant it had some particular relevance to what I was reading.

I became increasingly irritated as these links led me randomly around the internet to read things that simply held no interest and unfocussed my mind until it became a bit like fermenting porridge and about as useful. The time wasting has been of epic proportions. I have had enough of it. life’s too short to waste on computer nerdiness.

The other thing I fail to understand is how blogs which are unremarkable have attracted large numbers of readers and in some cases have over-excited book publishers into wanting to publish books ?

I still remain mystified ?

Knife Crime – Knives Not Needed To Kill

That Twit Gordon Brown announced today that teenagers caught carrying knives will automatically be taken to court and prosecuted.

Somehow he is so thick he imagines this will stop teenagers harming each other and occasionally stabbing each other to death.

When I was growing up and was a boy scout, we all carried large sheath knives or Bowie knives as part and parcel of being a scout. When I was a sailor in the Royal Navy we Seamen were issued with official Royal Navy Seaman’s knives as part of the uniform. We wore them tied on a white lanyard around our waists.

Just about every schoolboy in those days carried some sort of penknife. It was what boys did. Everyone expected it. But we didn’t use these knives to stab other people with. It would never have occurred to us.

No one else worried these knives would ever be used as an offensive weapon because there wasn’t the culture of violence that we are surrounded with today. So we were a great deal less violent than today’s teenagers.

The big difference between then and now is we were not brought up being force fed a diet of extreme violence day in and day out. Violence and aggression were not rammed in our faces everywhere we looked. We did not spend all our spare time playing silly computer games revolving exclusively around the idea of destroying other people with the maximum amount of aggression and violence.

Society as a whole seems to be so dim as to be unable to realise that human brains are influenced only by what is put into them. Feed them a nihilistic diet of violent aggression all the time to the virtual exclusion of anything else, and that will determine their own behaviour.

Simple really.

As you don’t need knives to maim and kill other people, the teenage violence will simply continue without knives being needed at all.

What we need is to change our extremely unpleasant culture – completely !

THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT IS A THIEF

 

Talking about bailiffs, I have just had a visit from one of these idiots trying to recover a parking fine.

 

This is the first time he has called about this parking fine, originally for the standard £40. The note he left says his fee for calling just this once is £595.34p.

 

I happen to know the fee is a complete fiction and a blatant attempt at fraudulently extorting money from me, and entirely illegal. 

 

The last time I actually saw a bailiff I told him to p**s  off because I wasn’t going to tell him who I was – whether I was actually his intended target or not. 

 

I snarled at him he was a parasite. He seemed to come over all hurt and aggrieved, almost tearful, and said ‘You don’t have to get personal. I’m only doing my job.’ 

I replied no decent human being would doing that job; ie going around extorting money from perfectly ordinary law abiding people this  authoritarian Labour  Government brands as criminals for simply using their cars.

 

Then reason I know the fee is illegal is because I  have learnt about it at the CONSUMER ACTION GROUP forums – very useful. Do have a look. There is bound to be something it can help everyone with.

 

 

As a currently unemployed full time single parent my only income is about £100 per week of state benefits. Parking fines of £40 for completely ludicrous circumstances, rapidly escalating by hundreds of pounds is a monstrous act of extortion by the government. It is time we all did something about it.

 

What about everyone simply refusing to pay any parking fines at all. That would sort the thieves out because there would just be absolutely nothing they could do about it except change the law.

 

This government is rapidly making Britain into a totalitarian state – just like those wacky dictatorships like Burma etc.

 

MORTGAGE LENDERS DESTROYING OUR LIVES

My nine year old son and I are currently going through the repossession process yet again. We will shortly be homeless this time.

 

My son’s Mother became ill when he was a baby and was unable to look after him or even be with us. The building society were about as obstructively unhelpful as you could imagine and insisted on re-possession even though I had another mortgage already arranged to repay them with. Their legal executive was actually abusive just prior to the court hearing, spitting venomously ‘ We will get you thrown out of your house at this hearing regardless of what you say’.

 

In fact the court stayed repossession as the new mortgage was going to be in place within a day or two. But nothwithstanding that, the building society had completely ignored that and were obviously expecting the court to do so as well. They were simply intent on maximising aggression. It was appalling !

 

That was my first repossession experience in about 1999.

 

The second was last year. It is a long story, but the essence of it was I was completely misled by the building society when I had told them I was trying to struggle back into work as a single parent and somehow manage to look after my son as well.

 

The building society told me not to worry about paying the mortgage for the time being (half was being paid by the state anyway as I was an unemployed single parent) and then they immediately sent penalty charge notices and began the re-possession process, ignoring the fact they had said I did not have to worry about the mortgage for the time being.

 

Again, their behaviour was outstandingly aggressive and obstructive and there was absolutely no consideration of my  (extreme) circumstances whatsoever. They forced me to cancel vital, life saving surgery I was scheduled for and then, later, when recovering from surgery, they forced me to physically appear in court in a state of virtual collapse from what had been very recent (still in recovery period ) major surgery.

 

I was precisely seven minutes late for the hearing (the recent major abdominal surgery had made it almost impossible to walk)  and it (along with several other cases) had already been dealt with, repossession being granted by the court for several other people’s properties in separate cases, all within that seven minutes.

 

I managed to reverse that weeks later and was subsequently given a six month stay by the court, provided I cashed in a pension to extract cash to pay off the arrears  of only about £3000 to date.

 

When the pension company took  a long time to process their documentation, I asked the court for an extension of the 28 days they had given me to come up with the money. The court said, not to worry, no need to make that application as we will be seeing you at the end of the first three months anyway for a ‘review’.

 

At this three month review the judge said I had broken the court order giving me 28 days to pay the arrears and although he acknowledged that  it had not been my fault, it being entirely the fault of the slow processing by the pension company, he was ordering repossession then and there and not giving the remaining three months of the six month period granted me. I had, in fact already paid off the arrears by this point. This was an abuse of process by the court, and quite wrong.

 

So there was a repossession order granted when the arrears had been completely paid off and no arrears were actually outstanding at that point. That judge also sanctimoniously told me that he was of the opinion it was not possible to earn a living as a freelance public relations consultant or journalist (both of which I have spent my entire life doing) and he would therefore be obliged to order repossession as he could see no prospect of the mortgage being paid by virtue of me earning a living. This despite me showing a document offering me work.

 

How wacky is that. The judge had every legal excuse he might need to be lenient and helpful towards me, but instead he acted out the unbelievable aggression of the lender. 

 

I was finally sent an eviction notice giving me two weeks to vacate the property or the bailiffs would attend and throw me out at the end of that two week period.

 

I still had about £100 000 thousand equity in the house and the annual arrears would only be £6000. So the building society could have waited almost indefinitely for me to sort myself out without any risk to them getting all their mortgage repaid.

 

Meanwhile I had found another mortgage. I was a ‘sub-prime’ customer, which means that regular building societies can pretend they cannot lend to you as you are deemed ‘high risk’. 

 

But, lo and behold, a lender which just happens to be a subsidiary owned by the same ordinary high street lender is willing to lend you a mortgage  incurring vast expense in the manner of ‘financial churning’ and terms on the new mortgage which almost guarantee you will be repossessed again and lose tens of thousand of pounds in penalty fees and possibly all the remaining equity in the house as it is like to be auctioned off for less than market value.

 

In the process of obtaining these mortgages I have experienced blatant deviousness from brokers. The most obvious being they knew perfectly well I was on state benefits and without a proper income and yet they advised which figure to pretend was my income etc and they knew the contents of the mortgage application were a fiction as I had no choice but to follow their blatantly dishonest instruction in order to obtain a mortgage. 

 

They had frequently made it plain that they arranged many falsified applications from desperate people like myself. They also always made false representation to me  that I was eligible for  a particular mortgage they would ‘definitely’ be able to get me at what was quoted as a reasonable rate of interest and then the interest always, without fail in every case, mysterious went up as they changed all the goal posts once I was completely ensnared in their clutches.

 

Of course, I would not have been desperate if the original mortgage company had been reasonable, and they could easily be so as I had  a couple of hundred thousand pounds in equity at the beginning of this process. 

 

The bottom line is that all this is a process which magicks all that equity away from me and into the hands of the mortgage lenders.

 

They are entirely dishonest.

 

If the original lender in 1999 had shown leniency owing to the extreme circumstances of my being a left a single parent after my partner became massively ill, I might now have increased that original mortgage by about £36 000 up to £136 000 from £100 000. But that house is currently worth about £900 000, which would leave me equity of over three quarters of a million pounds.

 

However, my current equity is actually about £60 000, making my total loss of nearly seven hundred thousand pounds, all of which has passed into the hands of various lenders by means of this process they have all connived at agreeing to organise between themselves.

 

My nine year old son and I now face eviction and homelessness. I will lose all that remaining £60 000 of equity, leaving me penniless after being effectively conned out out of my £900 000 house over a period of time.

 

After thirty five  years of owning my own house I am now unlikely to be able to ever buy another house because of the various strictures lenders impose.

 

I have twice recently seen the Council of Mortgage Lenders tell the media their members bend over backwards to help people in difficulties pay their mortgage and it is rare for people to be evicted if they contact their lender early and enter into negotiations.

 

This is a complete fiction (or more properly a lie), verified by my experience. All the lenders have a standard procedural framework for repossessing after just a few months of arrears and it can only be avoided if you come up with the money within that time frame and no longer.

 

Struggling Single Dad