One man, one vote: have you met him?

On the news today: our main political parties are hopelessly in debt.

I have absolutely no sympathy. They have only themselves to blame for spending beyond their means. And their Big Spending is totally indefensible: at its least corrupt, it’s heavy advertising. If they can’t run a party, they certainly shouldn’t put themselves forward to run a country.

Now all commentators seem to think the long-suffering taxpayer will have to bail them out, on the bogus excuse of “necessary for democracy”. Pure humbug, of course: it’s based on the monstrously false premise that our current system has some merit worth preserving.

So what do we have? A government elected on just over 30% of those who voted, and less than 20% of those eligible to vote?

Nope, it’s worse than that. What we really have is a Prime Minister elected by twentysomethingthousand voters in a small area of NorthEast England, and a bunch of craven yes-men. The other 99.8% of voters get no chance to vote either for or against the all-powerful Liar. Yeah, right.

But it’s even worse. The Liar has an ultra-safe constituency, packed with voters who would have no hesitation in electing Lucifer himself if he appeared as a labour party candidate. Both main parties have substantial numbers of such constituencies. So all that matters is a modest subset of areas where the electorate is more divided. And even then, it’s a minority of key swing voters within those areas: the rest of us can go to ****. So that’s a tail that wags the dog of both main parties! No wonder they sing from the same hymn sheet.

Wait a minute! Who holds the tail that wags the dogs? A few people within the mainstream media. Most journalists follow the herd, so it only takes one or two to set an agenda. The people who dictate both Blair’s and Cameron’s agendas are a mediocracy (government of the media, leading at best to mediocrity), comprising probably fewer people whose voices count than their numbers of MPs.

But it’s worse. The Liar may have his position rubber-stamped by a few thousand voters in North East England. But in practice, in order to be an MP, you have to live and work in London. So that systematically excludes anyone who cares enough about a non-London (or commuter) area to want to live there. We don’t have representatives, we have abominable yes-men, and they’re all London-centric.

The only party funding reform we need is a law requiring parties to spend within their means, like the rest of us. Spare us the massive advertising crap. And if (ha!) any of the present debts were incurred under false pretences or corrupt promises, personally charge those responsible!

Bottom line: they have no money, because nobody wants them. Deservedly so.

fsck!

Since the old desktop box is definitely dead, I just got around to sticking its memory into its replacement.  So now I have my biggest ever desktop, with a full gig.

It works.  But somehow, the hardware change upset linux’s (ACPI) hibernated state.  That’s a full power-down with save-state-to-disc, not the kind of semi-suspend that’ll wake on things like keyboard or LAN.  Not only did it not do a rapid boot to the same state I had before; it went and fscked everything!

WTF???

Anyway, it all works fine now:-)