Goodness, another one to join Fluffy in either the “thick as a brick” or “out and out liar” categories of politician.
For our readers in England:
Recently promoted Dominic Rabb told “Question Time” that there were more beds than ever in the NHS.
He said there was “more money than ever”, adding: “We’ve got more beds, more doctors, more flu vaccines available than ever before.”
The trouble is that he too, was either ill-informed, or lying. As the Mirror’s report says, NHSE’s own figures show that there are 17,000 fewer beds than in 2010.
Why is the UK so badly served by liars and fools? Are they trying to compete with Donald Trump?
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
Raab is without doubt the nastiest Tory ever. His views on race/eugenics wouldn’t be out of place in Auschwitz.
If you’re not white & English then Raab believes you’re inferior – a sub-human.
He’s a c***. Nothing more or less than that. A c***.
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And, moreover, he’s a liar!
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Dominic Rabb – totally deluded
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You have to ask yourself, if he really though, in today’s information age, that he’d get away with out and out lying about the figures.
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Because they are very rarely taken to task by the M.S.M. They are very well aware of this fact, and anyway, once the headline is out there that is what sticks in peoples minds, whether we like it or not. And just wait until the date of the second Scottish Independence is announced. To paraphrase, almost, the “worlds greatest entertainer”, “You ain’t seen nothing yet folks”.
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Yes, this one will be desperate.
They will HAVE to hang on to Scotland. They are hugely diminished by leaving the EU. Marginalised. If they lose Scotland too…
They will do ANYTHING to save face on that.
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Just to point out that we do indeed have better than him and luckily they are held to account by a plucky independent media…megalolz to the latter!!!
Someone on twitter on composing a piece about Raab laughed at predictive text changing the first name to ‘Demonic’. Suits a large cabal in Tory party too.
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Sometimes predictive text knows a thing or two!!
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A small quibble with Ms. B.H. Brexit’s Twitter comment. Being CAUGHT in a lie by someone who posts directly contradictory videos of what a lying politician actually said on two separate occasions is not at all the same thing as that politician ADMITTING that he lied. If we were to apply this irrational criterion on what constitutes admission of a lie to our Mr. Trump for example, we would discover that he “admits” to something like 20 to 30 lies daily. SAD!
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Ah, quite so.
It’s all rather complicated, isn’t it?
Anyway… talking of President Pinhead, how many applications has Washington had from Norwegians this morning 🙂 ?
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LOL…….Interesting Tris that you should ask that. It seems that Trumpy’s invitation has been met with a notable lack of interest among Norwegians. Probably something about Norway leading the US in almost every category of life. Norway leads the US in per capita GDP, has national health care, higher life expectancy, and lower infant mortality. Norway is also rated as having more political freedom and press freedom for that matter, not to mention being high on the “happiness” scale. (In fairness, European social democrats tend to be the ones who fabricate things like the happiness scale, and they seldom factor into the equation the cost/benefit ratio of having armies on every continent, naval fleets on every ocean, and the most nuclear weapons in the world….LOL.) Nevertheless, Norway seems strangely happy not having nuclear weapons and are saying “no thank you” to Trumpy. 😉
By some amazing coincidence, an article went up on “The Atlantic” yesterday about Norwegian immigration that gives a very lively and entertaining overview from an historical perspective. There was a time in the nineteenth century when the Civil War was over in America, the Homestead Act had been passed, the transcontinental railroad had been built, and the fertile prairies of the northern Midwest beckoned to the peasants of Europe, at a time when Norway and other countries MIGHT have seemed like “****hole” places to them. (They were also accustomed to the bitter cold and driving snow they would find in the horrific winters on the northern Great Plains.) There are still Norwegian and Swedish communities in the upper Midwest, where…….at least in the pre- radio and television pre-WWII era……the Swedish and Norwegian languages were widely spoken.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/trump-shithole-norway/550382/
In school, we had to read “Giants in the Earth,” a novel by Norwegian-American author Ole Edvart Rolvaag. A story of a Norwegian immigrant family struggling to make a new life in the Dakota Territory of the 1870’s. A fairly grim account it seemed to me of immigrants trying to endure the isolation and fit in with a new culture in a new land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giants_in_the_Earth_(novel)
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Ah, well, it’s a shame there hasn’t been a rush. President Trump will be disappointed, I’m sure.
Norway is an amazing place. A friend of mine recently did his masters in Sweden and made a visit there.
Even by Swedish standards (which leave the rest of us breathless) Norway was amazing. One of the things he noticed was how clean it was and how few petrol or diesel cars there were in Oslo.
The other thing he noticed was how expensive everything was!
It was not always thus. In harder times Norway was a hard place to eek out a living.
They were blessed with oil, rather like Scotland was. There the similarity ends.
They made megabucks out of their oil, they improved their infrastructure and they invested in a variety of funds. One of them was a fund to pay pensions for the future. Their retirement pensions are funded. The other was simply to make money.
Now, it oil was suddenly only 1 krone a barrel, they would still be fabulously wealthy. The interest from their oil fund pays far more than the income from oil even at 557 Nkr. a barrel.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/19/investing/norway-pension-fund-trillion-dollars/index.html
Of course that doesn’t sound too much, but their population is around 5 million., so that’s about $200,000 each man woman and child.
Scotland? Well, not so much unfortunately. The Scottish or UK oil fund stands at exactly £0… which translates to $0, €0 and, for that matter 0Kr.
UK debt per person in contrast, is approximately £15,000 per person, man woman and child.
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Tris……Very interesting information. People I know have great things to say about Norway, albeit with some grumbling about sky high prices and 30% of salaries which go to taxes. I have a friend whose wife is Norwegian, and she sings its praises. Just for fun, I do point out to her that a country with only 5 million people, and with very little religious, racial or cultural diversity in its population spread over a country no larger than the size of a large American state would almost have to work at having any real social problems. (Always a fun discussion!)
I had previously read that Norway is given high marks for how it has handled its oil money. But I had no idea that we’re talking about no less than ONE TRILLION dollars. For FIVE MILLION people! COOL!
Then when I looked into what they do with the earnings on that investment, I realized that those are five million of the most TRUSTING people on the face of the earth. What is the direct annual cash dividend distributed from that mountain of cash to the people of Norway? ZERO…….ZIP……ZILCH…….NADA……NOTHING!
Did I say trusting! The people of Norway trust the bureaucrats in Oslo to spend the average annual return of 5.9% on $1 Trillion (4% after management costs and inflation) on governmental services, which they trust the bureaucrats to spend wisely! The rest is sort of a retirement savings account “for future Norwegians.”
So how has Norway accumulated that mountain of money? Because they don’t freekin’ SPEND any of it! 😉
Of course that’s all very prudent and wise. And it works for the Norwegians. But if the population is less trusting………maybe more or less ungovernable (like Americans)…….what do you have? ALASKA!!!!!!
The Alaska Permanent Fund was established in 1976, when big oil was discovered in the far North. (The Government Pension Fund of Norway was established in 1990.) The Alaska fund is only about $50 Billion now, but then there are only about 740,000 Alaskans. The original idea was that the earnings from the fund would largely pay for government services. So there is neither a sales tax nor a state income tax in Alaska. BUT the annual earnings of the Permanent Fund are actually distributed to individual Alaskans.
This is an article from a couple of years ago titled “The Stingiest State in the Union.” I think the budget crunch has since eased somewhat by a legislatively mandated cut in the dividend checks to about a thousand dollars or so, but the people are not happy with the cut. The Norwegian system on the other hand would likely spark a revolution. 😉
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/alaska-budget-crisis/402775/
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Interesting Danny.
Of course one of the things the Norwegians have done is to ensure that pensions will be paid. In the UK, first we were warned that Scotland couldnt afford pensions (neglecting to point out that that was becasue the UK had spent all the money on pretending that they were important).
And now they tell us that despite us staying in the Uk and them putting up the retirement age, there won’t be enough money to cover pensions for people who are living longer. So first off, I think that that’s a pretty good way to deal with an abundance of money.
Because there are few things more frightening than thinking that your old age is going to be spent in penury… and that that old age may last 25-30 years!
I don;t imagine everything is perfect in Norway, but I hear that the health service is excellent, the roads are fabulous, the education is good (and free), and all other public services run like a well oiled machine.
If they handed out all that money to the Norwegians, they would have to pay even bigger taxes for the first class public services they get, and some of them of course would waste it on drink and cigarettes and McDonalds. LOL
It seems that, although prices are very high there, so are salaries. And by and large I think that Norway has had pretty trustworthy governments.
I mean you’d NEVER trust the morons in London with that kind of money. But in Oslo, it seems ok.
Alaska will be happy to know that the price of oil is rising, and at the moment is around $70 , so the state income should be getting a bit better now.
🙂 And look on the bright side Alaskans… Sister Sarah is no longer the governor. 🙂
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Tris…..Having top notch public services and a fully funded retirement system is quite an accomplishment. The government in Washington (and Alaska) sounds a lot more like the government in London than like the government in Oslo! 🙂
In Oslo, the fund has $1 Trillion dollars to provide for five million people. In the USA, the Social Security Trust Fund stands at $2.8 Trillion to provide for a population of 315 million people. It was always a tax and pay as you go system, and I have some doubt that the Social Security Trust Fund actually exists….except as a bookkeeping entry at the Department of the Treasury.
No one even pretends that it’s fully funded in any sense of the word, it’s just a matter of when it runs out of money. The current estimate is that it’ll last until 2034. At that point, the Trust Fund balance would be exhausted and the system will only be able to pay in premiums what it receives in current Social Security taxes……..which would require a 20% cut in benefits by present estimates.
The politicians will kick the can down the road as long as they can, and then cut benefits, raise the Social Security tax, raise the retirement age, or some combination of the three. The last “crisis” was in 1983, when they phased in over several years an increase in the retirement age from 65 to 67 for new beneficiaries. Looks like that fix will last for about 50 years, and then they’ll have to do something again. Maybe they’ll raise the tax which has been the same for 28 years. Or maybe it’ll be an increase in the retirement age to 70. Or maybe we can get a loan from Norway…….LOL.
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LOL, Danny. The US sounds very similar in these ,matters to the UK.
Maybe you guys could start emigrating to Norway?
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PS: And Oh Yes! Things have to be better now in Alaska with Sister Sarah to longer running things. Can you imagine having that dingbat running the $50 Billion Alaska Oil Fund? 😉
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I heard (probably from you) that she took to the bottle.
So letting her near 50 billion sound bloody dangerous to me.,
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PS Tris…….we must also have a kind thought for all the American ambassadors who I’ve heard are being summoned to the foreign ministries of many countries, to be asked to explain the “****hole country” standards and whether or not their country is on the list. 😉
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How embarrassing.
I heard that one ambassador has resigned. (El Salvador?)
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Tris……it was the Ambassador to Panama who resigned. A thankless job these days it seems. 😉
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Ah, yes. Thanks, Danny!
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On the subject of the oil income… even when the price of oil plummeted this last time, the Norwegians were still drawing down a healthy income stream from it, in line with the fall in the headline price. However, what we were given in Scotland disappeared – it fell 99%, something like that. I have yet to hear a proper explanation of that one. Giving it all back to in subsidies to the oil companies and their shareholders? Their pals in the City? Who knows?
It was always pretty naked exploitation and expropriation when it came to Scotland’s oil, of course, but now They seem to have added a simply criminal element of fraud to it. How on Earth did They get us into a position where They have arranged things in such a way that we pretty much have to pay for our oil to be taken away, so that we can be told we’re too poor and too stupid and too dependent on it to possibly “survive on our own”?
Oh, and with the megaquids the oil companies are getting from the Westminster regime in subsidies, they’re not about to blow the gaff on any other little behind-the-scenes arrangements there may be in place to help prevent us uppity Jocks from getting, well, uppitier, are they?
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I think that’s more or less it.
We paid the oil companies to take our oil; the oil companies paid the Norwegians to take their oil.
Norwegians are clearly better at business than the Brits.
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