JOBS FOR THE GIRLS

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Over the years I have worked on building sites during the summer holidays and one observation I would make is that these dirty places of work were 100% female free zones. In terms of the oily bits of a car, every mechanic I have ever dealt with was a bloke, no oil-stained overalls in a female shape. In a home of five females and yours truly, whenever the sewer pipes backed up, domestic demarcation dictated that I, and only I, got to use the smelly brushes and hose to unblock them. In that regard I’ve seen things that no man should see, (tee hee).

It used to be generally understood that women wouldn’t/didn’t do the horrible jobs but that must surely change now. You see, our Higher
Education Minister has vowed to create women-only professorships in a radical move to address persistent gender inequality at senior levels in universities and third level colleges. As things stand, any State posts that become available in Third Level Education can be applied for by both male and female applicants. So to tackle what she perceives as a bias against women, Mary Mitchell O’Connor will create a complete bias against men. “I want 40% of professors within our institutions to be female by 2024,” she said. May I ask why? If I were studying for a degree at present I would want the best lecturer available talking to me, regardless of age, sex or social standing.

It is understood that, initially, up to 10 posts will be funded, at professorial level, where salary scales start at between about €80,000 and €115,000, but that is just initially. Maybe over time there will be over 100 of these women-only posts coming on stream and no male, super-qualified or not, will be allowed to apply for any of them. Could you imagine the explosive backlash if that announcement had been the other way around? Adverts with “No Women Need Apply” scrawled over them would appear. I remember here in Cork a few years ago when a Polish Shop advertised for staff with the legend, “No Irish Need Apply.” They pasted that up on the shop window and within an hour, a rock took out the advert and the window. It took the owner to come on local radio the next morning to explain that candidates for the job needed to have fluent Polish before the bad feeling lifted slightly. If the ad had said that in the first place they wouldn’t have needed to fork out for a new window but then, they were fluent in Polish but not in English.

When I thought about it through, it seemed reasonable to assume that our third level colleges would simply carry on as usual and continue picking the best candidate for the jobs as they arose. But Mary Mitchell O’Connor obviously anticipated this and so has added the proviso that, “Gender equality will also become a key factor in general funding allocations to each college.” That is using public money to bribe/bully our colleges to hire women professors whether they are any good or not. It is an example of fascism not democracy. We are told that the minister’s announcement comes against a backdrop of growing international focus on gender gaps and equal pay in the work place, fueled by the #MeToo movement that emerged from women speaking out against sexism and harassment in Hollywood. Well, what else is it if a qualified man, possibly next in line for advancement is excluded from applying for advancement because he is sporting a penis? That is just blatant sexism and harassment.

And while I’m on the subject, why are all HR departments ninety per cent populated by females with a strong bias to employ more females all things being equal, (or maybe not)? I note also that women are still not flocking to the building sites or garages around the country despite the upsurge in the economy. On a similar note, there are many ads today that depict men as the inferior sex. I’m thinking of a particularly annoying one for car insurance. It begins with an authoritative female voice saying, “I think we should break up .” What can only be described as a pathetic needy male voice pleads, “But I’ve just had your name tattooed on my….” The authoritative female voice quickly interrupts sounding annoyed and exasperated, “With our car insurer.” Did you ever hear anybody refer to changing their car insurer as, “Breaking up with the old one?” What is this accepted narrative where the male of the species must be depicted as universally stupid? The ad was awkwardly designed in order to make the male role sound subservient, inferior and stupid.

They are planning for gender equality in the Dail too and that is just plain stupid to my mind. You are not entitled to a hundred grand a year just because you are a female and if you are, then I demand a hundred grand a year as well because I am a male, after all, that’s what it says in the constitution about equality for all of our people. It cannot work, can it? I strongly support the idea of gender equality and with two engineers for children I’d like to think my daughter can earn the same as my son. What I would not support would be a job advert that only allowed her to apply and excluded him for not being another daughter instead. That is just plain wrong in my opinion!

ABSOLUTELY STAGGERING

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“A new Department of Defense Inspector General’s report, released last week, has left Americans stunned at the jaw-dropping lack of accountability and oversight. The glaring report revealed the Pentagon couldn’t account for $6.5 trillion dollars worth of Army general fund transactions and data, according to a report by the Fiscal Times.”

Let’s look at the amounts involved for starters. How much is a trillion? Well, it’s a million million. A trillion dollars is a million dollars multiplied by a million. Or if you prefer, a thousand billion. It has 12 zeroes:1,000,000,000,000. Makes your eyes water, doesn’t it? To put it another way, if you stacked one trillion in €100 notes they would rise to an unbelievable 40,000,000 inches in height or 631 miles into the air. The height of the missing funds from the Pentagon, (if stacked in $100 bills), would rise to a staggering 4,231 miles above the earth’s surface. Maybe a lot of the missing money is in outer space?

It begs the question also, if six and a half billion is what they can’t account for, how much can they account for and what did they spend that on? Some 23,000 military and civilian employees, and another 3,000 non-defense support personnel, work in the Pentagon and between them they mislaid a fucking $6.5 trillion dollar fortune. Yet nobody was fired, the place is not in meltdown and in fact it carries on regardless, business as usual and nothing to see here folks. It will cost every single American citizen, man woman and child, $26,000 this year for just the lost monies. That 6,500 billion dollars represents thirty-two and a half times our total un-payable national debt in this country, just think about it.

According to Goggle, “In February 2018, the Pentagon requested $686 billion for FY 2019. On July 26, a military budget bill of $716 billion passed in the House of Representatives. If that’s true, and it may or may not be, how in God’s name can you simply lose nearly ten times the budget amount? The night before 9/11, (Monday 10th Sept. 2001), Donald Rumsfeld went on national TV to tell a stunned nation that the Pentagon could not account for two point three trillion dollars. Google again says the, “Congressional appropriations to the Pentagon from Fiscal Years 2001-2016 have totaled more than $8.5 trillion.” So now in 2018, there’s $6.5 trillion unaccounted for and gone. It’s surreal!

The Pentagon has ensured that the United States has been at war continuously since 1941, funded of course by Pentagon budgets each year. But the nature of warfare has changed since WWII. Back then there were clear enemies and friends, clear objectives and planned outcomes and there was obvious cause, course and consequence. But WWII was the last war the US engaged in legally. By legally I mean, according to their own constitution. A President may propose war but Congress has to ratify it by voting for it. Since 1945, the States has fought illegal wars in Korea, Vietnam, Panama and elsewhere in South America and of course, all over the Middle East. Every one of those were illegal under the much vaunted American Constitution. Odd isn’t it? It’s a bit like operating a Fascist Regime while declaring it to be a Democracy, (“Ah, we voted for a dictator apparently”).

But also because of the changed nature of warfare, the Americans have been engaging in proxy wars. A proxy war is where your, (ahem …. THEIR), security services pick on and infiltrate a target country with a view to overthrowing its Government and installing a friendly pro-American regime. Local militias are set up, trained, armed and paid weekly to destabilize the country from within. The US media then calls this a Democratic Revolution and the US immediately imposes economic sanctions on the targeted country’s legitimate Government to bring its economy to its knees, (See: Venezuela). This provokes even more unrest as the ordinary basics of life become scarce and Western dis-information media outlets call the democratically elected Government a ‘Regime’ and urge the “International Community” to unite against them. The whole ruse has the advantage of costing few, if any, American lives but it is hugely financially costly to operate on the ground. The bribes and backhanders run into millions each week and some of these operations, like Syria for example, can drag on for years.

However, the American President and Government will always deny any involvement in any proxy war operation. Can you see where I’m going with this? A proxy war by its nature must be run in secret and it’s almost prohibitively expensive. It is a need-to-know war and under no circumstances must the great American public ever even get a whiff of the reality of such underhanded subterfuge. But an absolute fortune of money has to made available for the proxies and I’m talking here currently about the many US proxy militias active in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Yemen, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Lebanon, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Sudan, to name but a few. You can be almost certain too that a proxy war is in the making in Iran even as I write. To run so many multiple operations, you can forget throwing billions at it. You’d need trillions instead.

Hey Presto!!

You’d get a whole lot of legitimate Governments overthrown for $6.5 TRILLION dollars!!!!!!!!

TURKEYS VOTING ELECTRONICALLY

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Apparently market research company Censuswide carried out an online survey of 994 Irish adults on behalf of Pure Telecom in June and according to themselves, they found that 40pc of eligible voters who didn’t vote in the last general election in 2016 would “definitely” vote if remote e-voting was an option.

This is of course, bullshit on several levels. Firstly, the devil is in the detail. That so-called 40% are actually forty per cent of those who ‘didn’t’ vote the last time, not 40% of the eligible vote. So these couch potatoes are the ones that couldn’t be bothered getting off their arses to toddle down to their nearby voting booth. I reckon that instead of asking them would they like to vote electronically they should be struck from the register permanently. After all, they obviously don’t give a shit about who gets into power.

But the article goes on to explain that 42% are saying the e-vote should be an option. They are not saying that it should be the only option, that’s an important caveat. Then it says that, “A fifth said they would like to vote using a mobile.” A fifth of what? Is it a fifth of the eligible vote or a fifth of the 42% who want to vote electronically, or a fifth of the popular vote the last time? Mind you it could be just a fifth of the 994 people participating in the survey, (199 people), in which case it’s meaningless. Famously, a polling company can get any answer they want if they phrase the questions a certain way, always remember that.

The danger of e-voting is how open it is to corruption. It is no exaggeration to say that the company/organisation given the license to run the e-voting system could give any really interested/vested party any result they wanted/paid for ………. after the vote has been taken. If two million votes were registered, it would not be a problem to announce that Fine Gael got all but one single one of them because there is no paper trail but there would be the facility for a laughable re-count.

For the uninitiated, there would be a simple back engine for each count centre with a list of the candidates. a live counter would run as votes were being cast for these candidates. A computer timer would decide when the voting ended and what would be left is a small database file, (think Excel), where in theory, you would just run a macro to put the names in descending order of votes cast. This, incidentally, would not happen at the traditional count centers. Instead, the data from all the outlets around the country would fed into the servers of the organizing company or organisation, probably in Dublin. At this point, the operator, (under instruction), could just go in and take a couple of thousand votes from the winning Fianna Fail candidate in the constituency and add those votes to the second-placed Fine Gael candidate and they would change places on the sorted database. The total count would remain unaffected, not that that matters. Equally you could obliterate the Independents leaving their vote in single figures. That would certainly tidy up the Dail. But the point is that the election outcome could be decided before a single vote is cast. You cannot do that with ballot papers.

Then there is research bias, the biggest one of all being the ‘funding bias.’ You will note that this piece of so-called research was carried out by ‘Censuswide’ on behalf of Pure Telecom. To operate an e-voting system the Government would need to contract an, ahem, Telecoms Company, maybe even a “Pure Telecoms Company.” So no surprise then that Pure Telecom should find that people are getting interested again in e-voting. It would be hugely in their interests if that were so.

But I don’t believe a word of it. Those who exercise the franchise, particularly at General Election time, are no fools. They know instinctively that anything electronic is wide open to being corrupted. There can be no electronic accountability because there can’t be. The party in Government can stay in power as long as they like through e-voting because they have the giving of the e-voting contract, (to Pure Telecom?).

Beware the snake oil salesmen.

THE SNOBS

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THE SNOBS

A couple of little items about my home city of Cork caught my eye this morning.

As a boy, my daily journey to school took me into the city centre and even then when I knew little of alcohol, there seemed to pubs everywhere. Today I learn that indeed, Cork had the most bars per capita in the country but has also seen the biggest drop in the number of them with 25% fewer pubs now than in 2005. To put that in perspective, the number of bars in Dublin has remained the same during the period.

Well, I can explain this. On the quayside running from the main bus station to Patrick’s Bridge, there used to be six bars in total. That whole block was flattened years ago for a shopping centre and all six bars disappeared in a single year. Each of these pubs were tiny, as in they could possibly accommodate ten drinkers before becoming full. Three of them at the time were side by side and two of them were early opening bars, (7.30am). Cork pubs have always been small cosy places whereas Dublin pubs by comparison always looked like huge empty converted factories. They were barn sized with massive numbers in attendance daily.

Back in the seventies and eighties, thousands of people around the country moonlighted as barmen, (bar people), and the money was paid under the table. Many students were able to afford to live in Dublin bedsits, working three to four nights a week for cash while attending full time lectures during the day. The pubs were a cash business, (as were the bedsits), making all of this possible and official Ireland turned a blind eye because it could never have stepped into the breech to come up with the necessary money instead. Today though, such under the counter money is impossible and with the ban on bedsits, the crazy rental rates and high taxation, it is a wonder anyone of our youths can afford a third level education.

Another headline this morning announces, “Cork City centre quayside branded ‘TentsVille’ as more homeless pitch tents.” Now I need to explain that Cork is a very class conscious city and our version of the upper class speak with a very plummy, (and amusing) accent not heard anywhere else in the country. The wealthy in Cork have great pride in the city they consider their own, (as in it belongs to them), and several years back in recognition of the number of bridges spanning both channels of the River Lee, they christened Cork the, “Venice of the North.” Nothing could be further from the truth of course but it gives you a flavour of how far up their own arses these people are. So no surprise then that in response to Tentsville, Fine Gael councillor and former Lord Mayor Des Cahill said the makeshift encampment presents a “poor image of the city”. He called for the tents to be classed as litter and torn down.

Tentsville, such as it is, is purely a reaction by the homeless themselves attempting to put some class of a roof over their heads. The same city council ceased building social housing in 2008 and with the growing population since then and the influx of Poles Nigerians and assorted immigrants, something had to give. It isn’t good enough to sit on your pompous ass in the sponsored warmth of City Hall and call the shelters these people are forced to erect as just litter and the homeless themselves an eyesore. Here’s a little about the snooty councillor. The lad looks well-heeled and lives in the prosperous suburb of Ballintemple. One doubts that any of his clan will know homelessness.

So if the lad Des gets his way then the tents will be torn down, the homeless will disperse and in a couple of days time some other outraged middle class group will call on the authorities to move them from their neighbourhood where they will recently have resettled. It is akin to being hunted and persecuted for the crime of poverty.

I often wonder would these well off people like to see starvation on the streets? Would they disdainfully step over the dead bodies on their way to their secure jobs and elevated place in society? Perhaps they’d want those dead bodies classified as ‘litter’ and demand they be swept up. They are the same voices who destroyed the pub trade and got rid of those black economy jobs that so helped the poor but ambitious to climb the ladder.

This country is changing drastically and not for the better either.