Posted by Ben @ August 16th, 2011 10:18 pm. Filed under: Abolish This!,Anything I Want Is A Human Right,Anything I Want Should Be Legal,Are You Kidding? We Can't Afford That!,Clearly You've Thought This Through,Hanging's Too Good For 'Em!,It Says So In The Daily Mail,Join the Fight Against Nebulous Bad-Sounding Things!,Nobody Else Deserves Free Money!,Really REALLY Bad Ideas,Stop Spending My Money On Things I Don't Understand.,These Kids Today With Their Modern Haircuts And Hippetty-Hop Music,Unworkable Ideas,What Have Other People Ever Done For Me?,Work Around My Delusions Dammit!,Xenophobia — Tags: Alan Young, David Moss, mark predeth, Peter Stephen Andrews —
Time for a short collection of lunacy. Where shall we begin? Oh yes, with the person who wants to be able to bludgeon unwanted house guests to death with a roaring oar:
by Alan YoungThe law regarding self-defence should be altered to make explicit that a householder is entitled to use any and all measures against an unlawful intruder within their home without fear of prosecution or any requirement to demonstrate proportionality or ‘reasonableness’ of response.
I am inexplicably reminded of a bit from Terry Pratchett’s “Hogfather” (I’ll quote from the TV version, here):
Lord Downey: You nailed Sir George’s dog to the ceiling.
Teatime: I couldn’t have it barking while I was working, sir.
Lord Downey: Some people would have drugged it.
Teatime: Oh! But I definitely fulfilled the contract. I checked Sir George’s breathing with a mirror, as instructed.
Lord Downey: Apparently his head was several feet from his body at that point.
Teatime: That was all right, wasn’t it, sir?
Lord Downey: It lacked elegance.
Right, what else have we got?
by mark predethWe the undersigned call on the government to restrict immigration to the United kingdom to a fixed numer of 50000 people per year and no more
Why?
by Peter Stephen AndrewsI would like the death penalty brought back. I’m sick of soft sentencing. I’m sick of criminals scoffing in the face of the law, our country and communities!
Wrongful convictions though, eh? Rather difficult to pardon someone you’ve just injected with poison, isn’t it? That is to say nothing of this very valid point.
by David MossThe government needs to stop paying people child associated benefits once they have had two children. Not only do more tax credits have to be paid, more child benefits but also housing benefits, NHS costs for birth and through life, education costs etc etc. Stopping benefits after 2 children will make people think more carefully about having large families and their huge tangible and intangible burden on the state. They will no longer be incentivised to have a lot of children, get more benefits and never work. More worringly this culture is passed onto the children and they adopt the same approach until it becomes totally unsustainable.
“Sorry Susan, but as your father and I just lost our jobs and the government will only pay child support for two of our children I’m afraid you’ll simply have to starve to death.”
Posted by Ben @ August 6th, 2011 8:28 am. Filed under: I Am A Brain!,I Sure Hope There's No Way This Can Be Misinterpreted.,It's Just A Little Request...,Just Crazy Enough To Work,Not actual justice -- just what I wanted. Which is basically the same thing.,Solve My Imaginary Problems!,Thank You For Coming -- It's Been Very Useful,Unworkable Ideas — Tags: Nicholas Payton —
by Nicholas PaytonPut quite simply, making false allegations is a form of harassment. Even if they are never tried for the alleged crimes, the victim’s life can be seriously impacted. It can seriously affect a person’s social life, family life, and career prospects. Sadly people tend to believe rumours, and sometimes even add to them. A trial, and even a conviction based upon false allegations is surely one of the most serious miscarriages of justice.
Of course, we get into the rather sticky legal territory of what to do when someone accuses someone else of making a false accusation only for us to discover that the accusation of false accusation was itself a false accusation.
Posted by Ben @ August 6th, 2011 8:20 am. Filed under: ...Or Else!,Anything I Want Should Be Legal,Clearly You've Thought This Through,Commas,Everyone Stop What You're Doing Because You're Mildly Inconveniencing Me,Lord Knows I Ask Not For Myself,My Other Car Is Another Car,Presumably The Prime Minister Is Not Too Busy,Really REALLY Bad Ideas,That'd Be Nice — Tags: Ben Spiller —
Apparently getting rid of that that twelve-second period of waiting at a crossing when there’s nobody there is absolutely vital:
by Ben SpillerThe Prime Minister should make an announcement saying that there are no cameras on any pelican crossings in the country. Then, tell everyone that if the light is on red, and there is nobody on the crossing, just GO! This would save Billions of pounds to the economy, increase our standard of life and reduce carbon footprint.
What, Ben, is your problem? Is your schedule so important that being held up by a red light for a fistful of seconds is enough to throw your entire day out of whack? Here’s some advice – if you find yourself at Pelican Crossing while there’s a red light and nobody waiting to cross the road, just take a deep breath, count to ten, then… ah, fuck that. Just write another angry note to the Prime Minister. Your inability to cope with minor delays is exactly the reason he got into politics, after all.
Posted by Ben @ August 6th, 2011 8:07 am. Filed under: I'm serious!,Just Crazy Enough To Work,My Other Car Is Another Car,Nanny Knows Best,Oh Yeah? Let's See You Write A Better Petition!,Only joking!,Unreasonable Demands,Unworkable Ideas — Tags: Ian Henderson —
by Ian Henderson2000 people are killed every year on our roads, and another 20,000 are seriously injured. This is a particularly common cause of death and serious disablement for younger people. This petition therefore calls for safety hats to be made compulsory for all car drivers and passengers. Cars are heavy-duty, high-speed machinery, and despite modern innovations such as seat belts and air bags, brain injuries are still a leading cause of death and injury. A study by the University of Adelaide has even shown that a simple bicycle-style helmet would cut brain injuries by 50% and save 1 in 5 crash victims. What are we waiting for?
On balance, this sounds a rather sensible idea. However the logical progression from this is that everybody wears a “safety hat” all the time forever because, I don’t know, someone somewhere might get home from work one night, slip on a bit of carpet and fall over and crack their head open on the radiator. After all, most accidents happen at home, or so an episode of Red Dwarf once told me.
Posted by Andrew @ August 4th, 2011 11:54 pm. Filed under: Democracy? Isn't That The One Where You Do Everything I Say?,Everything MPs Have Is Part Of The Expenses Scandal,Hanging's Too Good For 'Em!,Meta-petitioning,Racism,This was Yesterday's News Ages Ago — Tags: Alan Young, Edward Whitfield, Keith Jones, Robert Sleight, tony —
Christ, let’s see if I can remember the admin password for this site…
by Joseph BlurtonWe, the people, are idiots. Please, for pity’s sake, ignore us more often.
Hello, anyway! It’s all go in epetitionville! The coalition have finally got round to installing the new epetition website, which I can only assume has taken this long thanks to their increasingly bewildering policy of never knowingly reusing a back-end. The e-petition website crashed almost immediately under the pressure of anywhere up to a hundred people flocking to sign as many as eighty petitions, so it’s safe to assume their server-farm has been hit pretty hard by the austerity measures or they took the latest dumb pigeon-versus-broadband stunt a mite too seriously.
To make things more exciting, any petition that gets over 100,000 signatures will be debated in Parliament, unless it isn’t. Also, we’re taking out the bell so you can buzz in as soon as you’ve dismissed the idea out of hand.
Anyway, there’s something of a bumper batch to get through here, so I’m going to leave the ‘rejected’ pile for now and stick my favourites after the fold…