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A disused public urinal in Norwich
has been given a Grade 2 listed building status. The ten sided concrete
building, which will never be used, has had £27,000 spent on it's
refurbishment just in case somebody in the future would like to admire it.
Meanwhile 'cross legged' late night revellers will continue
to pee in shop doorways, having searched for a public toilet, which is open and useable.
Prostitutes should be allowed to operate, in
private hotels. A society that talks about allowing them to offer their services
by walking alone on the roads of industrial estates, is not only an uncaring
society but in time will be a society which is uncared for. Bernard Shaw said of
prostitution, 'it is the end product of a system of underpaying, undervaluing
and overworking women'.
'Living off a prostitutes earnings' should not be an
offence if that income is used for the benefit of the prostitute i.e. provision
of an income and accommodation. This accommodation should be licensed to an
active or ex - prostitute and have a proviso that the girls or fellas would have a
monthly medical check.
Unfortunately most of our elected representatives prefer to
either leave it to the criminal element or ignore the subject altogether: hoping
that the 2000yr old plus profession will go away.
Update: our politicians have now decided that two girls and a housekeeper can
set up a supportive business. Sounds a bit 'half cock' as usual.
Children in run-down housing are
suffering from serious and prolonged illness made worse by the conditions in
which they live, according to a report recently produced by the charity shelter.
More people ring the Shelterline service with health problems than for any other
reason after homelessness itself and threatened eviction.
Over 6,000 homeless and badly-housed people have called the line with health
problems in the first three years of a campaign mounted by Shelter with support
from Bradford & Bingley plc. Official statistics show that 750,000 children
in England live in poor housing. Shelter has found that many are suffering in
damp, mouldy and overcrowded homes which are linked to problems ranging from
skin disorders to chronic asthma and chest infections. In addition, Shelter
estimated that about 100.000 children become homeless every year, many being
forced into temporary accommodation that can be even worse. Families of four or
more can be crammed into one room.
'Kim' and her one-year-old son live in a local authority housing block. They
both have persistent coughs and colds caused by the damp in their flat. The
walls and windows are black with mould, which grows back every time they try to
treat it. The damp and mould are making Kim's son's asthma worse. "I even
sent the council a letter from my doctor," says Kim, "but they won't
rehouse us - and we've got nowhere else to go."
Shelterline has helped over 98,000 people in its first three years, taking a
total of 170,000 calls. Of the 6.015 callers who had health problems, half had
nowhere to stay that night. The English House Condition Survey carried out in
1996 defined poor housing as that which is either unfit, in substantial
disrepair or requires essential modernisation. The survey found that tenants in
private rented homes are the most likely to live in such accommodation.
Anyone with a housing problem can call Shelterline for advice
at any time on 0808 800 4444.
Most of Britain's Homes could be heated from heat collecting pipe work buried in
their gardens or beneath their access roads, it was revealed by Gareth Ellis of the National Energy
Foundation, who is helping to form a new trade organisation for the Ground Source Heat Pump
industry in the UK.
Having wind-mill type structures in our country-side is
not only ridiculous, but is polluting
our 'country-side' with their alien, noisy intrusions. It was
thought many years ago, that the pylons which carry electricity across our
countryside would themselves be temporary structures - until we could afford to
bury the cables; they are still with us.
All power stations produce heat, to turn water to steam. This is then used to drive a steam turbine
electricity generator.
Gardens have heat, both from the earths molten core and
from solar energy. The deeper
you drill into the earth the hotter it gets, as miners working in deep mines
will verify. Why not therefore, drill holes or lay pipes where electricity is needed,
and use the refrigerator principle to extract heat and produce the electricity
needed. This is the principle of the Heat Pump. The small amount of
electricity needed to pump the gas around the tube could be provided by solar
energy, a wind generator or from the heat of incinerating waste (re-cycling centres).
This in turn would reduce the number of nuclear power stations needed.
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Traffic congestion in Norwich is caused by commuters coming into the city centre. This is understandable because government policy is to build housing estates, more housing estates and more housing estates. Possibly, they should consider building 'vertical housing estates'. Plenty of space up there!! Our answer to commuters.
Police in Britain are to be handed
more power to snoop on e-mails, mobile phone records and text messages than
anywhere else in Europe.
Privacy campaigners say it will make Britain 'the most spied
on country in Europe'.
Security services will be able to track when e-mails and
texts are sent, who sends them, who receives them and log the origin and
destination of all calls.
Telephone companies and Internet Service Providers will be
compelled to keep records of all messages and calls for up to seven years.
Satellite technology will be used to track mobile phones,
making it possible to monitor peoples movements constantly by locating where the
calls were made.
The powers are contained in two laws passed last year and in
2000, and are intended to help police combat terrorism and paedophiles.
To date they have not been enforced because of European Union
data protection laws - now eased by the MEP's. It means all that is required for
an e-mail or phone tap to be authorised is a warrant from a senior police
officer.
'We are effectively opening up the tapping of telephones and
e-mails of every single British Citizen,' said Mark Littlewood from civil rights
group Liberty.
'In terms of tapping and other forms of surveillance, we will
become the most spied-on country in the European Union.' - It must be nice
for our 'extreme' administrators not to have to be inconvenienced by a written
constitution or a list of our rights
The prohibitions against usury, so
often ignored or side-stepped by Christians, are taken seriously by Islam.
Muslims are enjoined to avoid all forms of interest payments, to use money only
as a means of exchange, and to employ savings usefully, not merely to hoard
money.
Out of this grew the Islamic banking system, based on
profit-sharing and equity investment instead of on-lending at interest. A
lecture given at Southwark Cathedral, London by Rashid Mengers
of the Institute for Islamic Banking demonstrates that this system opens up
questions about the assumptions Christians often make about money making money
out of money. In the Islamic system, a depositor's money is used by the bank to
invest in an enterprise. The entrepreneur, the bank and the depositor all share
in the profits. Special provision is made for loans such as those to Muslim
students who find the ordinary interest-carrying student loans conflict with
their faith.
Christians often forget that for centuries they too were
forbidden to charge interest, though Jews could charge it to non-Jews. When
Henry the Eighth's parliament in 1545 permitted interest up to ten per cent, a
silent revolution took place, masked by the greater turmoil of the reformation.
Perhaps now is the time to look again at the prohibitions in
Leviticus, Exodus and Deuteronomy. Maybe Islamic banking has something to say to
us, too.
It wasn't long after the Second World War that America had a huge recession. The value of the Dollar dropped like a brick and so to did the European gold reserves which were valued in dollars. This caused the French to start their campaign for a European currency whose value would be determined by the industry and financial expertise of the European people.
Why do people in the UK have to provide identification of themselves with
passports, pension books, driving licences, home made Id's and birth
certificates etc, when a simple national ID card for adults would suffice? I had
one in the RAF and I miss it.
We need ID cards to separate the adults, from
children and teenagers. Putting the onus on club owners, cigarette suppliers and
the police, to guesstimate the age of people is a 'sit on the fence' English
answer to the problem. We also need ID cards, at banks when drawing out large
sums of money, when calling at strange peoples doors and when collecting social
security payments. They would also be useful when cashing lottery tickets -
ensuring that no crooks have got into the system, by checking that no large sums
are consistently going to one person. We would also be able to travel around
Europe more easily, should our identity be questioned..
Worrying about the information stored on it seem to me
irreverent, what don't they know?
There are many thousands of people in this country,
e.g. the police, the armed forces, government employees, employees in large
companies etc with their own ID cards. This convenience should be given to rest
of us.
The French have the No.1 health service in the world, the English 18th. A bit odd, as they only live 4,800 metres off our coast and our government hasn't taken the slightest interest. The Japanese are an island nation but they love learning from others, particularly when it makes them richer and more efficient - strange people? Immediately after the second world war they sent hundreds of salesmen/engineers all over the world including the UK to find out how we did it, went home and did it better.
There are miles of space upwards. Why therefore can't we live in high quality high-rise flats in our cities? (convenient for the City, but above the noise). Present policy of using green fields for building houses, will in time destroy our country and create a concrete jungle.. Even prisons are built horizontally??
To get the truth it's better to listen to live broadcasts on radio or
television and form ones own conclusions. What are newspapers? They are
basically half a dozen people sat around a table deciding what is best for their
newspaper.
A pedestrian standing at the side
of the road in the UK can easily observe that over 60% of cars have illegally
fitted exhaust pipes i.e. emitting fumes at the rear, left hand side of the car.
This causes people to have respiratory problems. Some of these exhaust pipes
actually point at the pedestrians on the pavement. Recently in Norwich buses
have been introduced with similarly fitted exhaust pipes.
In the knowledge that the government is responsible for this lackadaisical
attitude to our health, should pedestrians inform them that enforced smoking is
not one of their policies? Small children in prams are particularly susceptible
to heavy diesel fumes which remain close to the ground.
In a few years time oil will be so expensive that cars and buses will have to go electric. A forward thinking council or government recognising that this is inevitable, should be informing and if necessary subsidising the Waste Recycling centres to provide a cheap source of electricity from its incinerators by converting heat into electricity.
Drugs should be legalised.
Only a relatively small number of people in this country are
addicted to heroin. However, this small percentage passes on
their addiction to the next generation by selling a portion of their drugs to
their friends who have no supplier. This partially pays for their next supply of
drugs, generates a new addict and increases the customer base for suppliers.
Addicts inform us that the criminal distribution service, can
supply any drug within 40 minutes - that tells people with a brain that the
criminals have taken over the supply of drugs.- so, why not give to those who are
addicted today the free drugs that they need and put the criminal distribution
service out of business. These free drugs would be supplied only to those who
want to give up their addiction and the drugs would only be given by
prescription. This would cut off their need to affect innocents.
At the same time local
politicians should be investigating the reason why these peoples' lives are so
boring or stressed that they need to liven up their living space with drugs. Possibly within
an area that has large drug use there are no affordable facilities or space for
them to enjoy and express themselves.
Once this radical decision is taken 70% of the crime at the
bottom end of our society will vanish, and pressure will be taken off the police
and customs services.
The alternative of prescribing 'methadone' to addicts seems
sensible, but it itself is addictive and more often than not, addicts deprived
for one reason or another of their Methodone use an illegal source of Heroin to
alleviate their withdrawal symptoms.
Short extract from a Guardian
Newspaper article.
There is no arm of British healthcare which has been so perverted by politics as
the treatment of drug users. In the early days of American prohibition, this was
the politics of racism - spics and niggers smoked marijuana, chinks smoked
opium, and they would all get what was coming to them.
In the 60s, within the UK it was the politics of reaction - hippies smoked everything and attacked the establishment, so the establishment attacked them back. 2008, the politicians selected by the electorate are still too immature to solve the problem..
Milestones in the phoney war
Until 1971, any GP was free to prescribe heroin to users, and there were fewer than 500 addicts countrywide
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• 1968 three doctors wishing to increase their income caught over-prescribing. |
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• 1971 Passage of misuse of drugs act which outlawed heroin. |
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• 1995 Dr John Marks forced to stop supplying clean heroin to addicts, despite high success rates. |
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• 1997 Tony Blair appoints drug tsar Keith Hallawell to rid us of illegal drugs suppliers - joke. |
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• 2001 the number of addicts is estimated to be up to 500,000 and rising. |
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Why are neurotics and curtain twitchers running our country? Having a one party government full of these nutters enables minorities who are mainly supported by profit taking pressure groups such as ‘stop smoking with our patch’ companies, to wield more power than they should have.
Take the case of the neurotic who believes that being in the presence of a smoker will give them cancer. Evidence much better than the scientists have, says, that pensioners are living longer, but these pensioners have been subjected most of their lives to heavy smoke laden rooms, have lived for years breathing in the smog from thousands of chimneys belching smoke from coal burning fires, mixed with the highly toxic exhaust fumes from cars, buses, lorries, and have, many of them smoked themselves; scientifically they should be dead, what happened.
Simple logic says that any person born with weak or defective DNA which subsequently is unable to replicate healthy cells will inevitably generate cancer cells irrespective of whether or not they breath in the smoke from a cigarette or from our fume filled streets. Obviously if one of these people smokes it will be blamed on the cigarette not on the highly toxic exhaust fumes emitted from traffic exhaust pipes at the higher smoking rate of five hundred emissions per minute, per car: which is known to kill in an enclosed space; and certainly not on the heavier gas (stays close to the ground) from diesels which is the main cause of children getting asthma.
Many smokers smoke to reduce stress, a condition which is a killer, but many non-smokers say ‘We don’t like you smoking so we’ll increase the price of cigarettes until the cost makes you stressed again’ – nice people - meanwhile many of these non-smokers having taken promotion to positions that they cannot handle, require their companies to pay for stress relief courses, increasing their companies overheads and subsequently, their prices.
Obviously a minority of people are badly affected by any type of smoke, be it coming in from passing exhaust pipes or cigarettes: this can easily be solved by requiring ventilation outlets to be in the ceilings of enclosed public places, instead of in windows and walls where the smoke has to be drawn across the room.