There's half such a thing...

Categorically, there is no such thing as a free lunch…

…particularly if you work in the public sector. Which is being dismantled. On a political rather than an economic basis.

Unless, of course, you’re an MP. When half of it’s free, and the other half is paid for by us. During my last doings with HMRC, people who have had their routine occupational health medicals, workplace assessments, and sense-of-humour-ectomies, I suggested that to cut out the middle man, perhaps I could keep the money and just spend every third weekend cleaning out moats and building floating duck islands.

Do you think they’d see the funny side if I enclosed a cheese and onion doorstep, marked ‘poor hungry MP’ with any future communication?

Subsidising their beer would be bad enough (and it is plenty bad enough), if they enjoyed a couple of pints of attitude adjustment and chilled. But they seem to be aggressive drunks, incapable of mingling without wanting to fight each other.

That’s the essence of team sports. Give them less than nothing on the pitch. Whatever they get away with, we need to be aiming for that plus two, settling for that plus one. No quarter.

Then…

…shake hands, meet up, have a chat and act civilised. Not act. Be civilised, because that’s what we are. Another part of the WWYT reasoning. Why vote for a species (inbred, public-school tennis players) less evolved than your own? We should sack off the entire shebang and hand power to the British Lions rugby squad.

Why Linux?

The list of computer data accumulated by the American government agencies:

• Microsoft, since 11^th September 2007.
• Yahoo, since 12^th March 2008.
• Google, since 14^th January 2009.
• Facebook, since 3^rd June 2009.
• YouTube since 24^th September 2010.
• Skype since 6^th February 2011.
• AOL since 31^st March 2011.
• Apple, since October 2012.

What’s left that’s secure? Well, that’d be Linux. It’s also free, it’s also open source, it also does just about everything anything else can, and also does a shedload more here and there. Faster, more stable, more robust, more secure. They don’t learn, the Yanks, do they? Twelve year old hackers get into their CIA databases for a laugh and a dare, and they still pry and snoop and try to dig their bony, dry and withered government fingers into where they’re not wanted, then hitch up their skirts and do the pantomime dame thing when they come under counter-attack.