Swine flu

Yesterday I heard a person on the radio explaining that they’d chosen to cycle to work instead of using the London Underground for fear of contracting Swine Flu.  I suspect, but I haven’t the data to prove it, that travelling by cycle in London rather than using the tube exposes this person to higher personal injury risk than the risk of contracting flu.  I hope the fear of flu doesn’t persuade others to begin to alter their lifestyle choices in ways that are similarly counter-productive.

There is a large global industry populated by well-paid experts whose entire career is predicated on events such as the possible Swine Flu epidemic.  They spend their lives planning and rehearsing for such eventualities.  Like the soldier in the far off outpost that spends his life waiting for the enemy attack that never comes, is it possible that the experts tend to oversell the risk, hoping secretly that their time to shine has come?

For the conspiracy theorists amongst us, it’s taken our attention off the parlous state of the world economy, hasn’t it?

Piggy

Ghurkas

HERO

COWARD

GORDON’S GOTTA GO

Euro MP goes viral

Daniel Hannan telling UK PM Gordon Brown what we’d all like to tell him.  This speech has been picked up by multiple news agencies (Not the BBC, funny that .  Why is it, I wonder, that the opposition parties in the UK cannot as effectively communicate to Gordy just how hacked off we are with him?  When do we get an opposition worthy of the title?

GORDON’S GOTTA GO

Libertas.eu

The intent of libertas.eu looks right.  The notion of fielding candidates throughout the EU is innovative and moves Europe towards having supra-national political parties.  Nice to see something new happening on the European political scene.

Recessionistas

Has anyone noticed how many organisations or projects are using the recession as a reason for a course of action?  Phrases such as ‘in these times of recession it is even more important to …’.

This morning’s was a project by local authorities to remove jargon from their communications with the missive that ‘in these times of recession it is even more important that councils communicate clearly with their users’.

No, it has always been important for government to communicate clearly.  As a corollary, the end of recession will not be an excuse for further obfuscation.

So, in these times of recession, can we stop being recessionistas!

Louis CK

This has been appearing as a link on quite a few blogs of people in tech.  It’s funny and a timely reminder about counting blessings and not taking things for granted.

Zeitgeist + addendum

Mmm, food for thought here, although very anti-American, and a review here.  The website.  I can see the argument behind debt and modern slavery, it just doesn’t give me a warm feeling now that the UK is so thoroughly and worringly in the red.  All we can do is start to behave differently.  I sense there is a major aversion to debt developing and this is likely to impact the government’s attempts to reinflate the bubble.

Hopefully housing keeps dropping in value so people, particularly the young, can begin living rather than living to service the mortgage.  A major relaxation of planning law for indiviuals wishing to build their own homes would help to balance supply and demand and stabilise prices at affordable levels.

Mad Hattie and that pension

How close are we to living in a fascist dictatorship?  That a senior member of our government, with aspirations to become PM, could even have thought that using parliament to pass a law to ’sequestrate’ a British citizens legal and rightful pension beggared belief.

Remember, it might seem perfectly right and fair to pick on a wealthy banker today, but it’s the proletariat tomorrow, (OK, so Gordon has already plundered our pensions, doh).  Sir Fred has my full support in keeping his pension.  Good luck to him, he rode the system to his advantage, and I care not a hoot how he spends the loot.  We all have our own lives to live without worrying about how others are enjoying theirs.

Hattie, on the other hand … the UK deserves so much better.

Update:  Apparently Vince Cable suggested at PMQs that RBS should be declared bankrupt.  Right idea, wrong reason.  RBS should be declared bankrupt because it IS BANKRUPT, not to stop 1 person drawing their pension.  Nice to see that this option has now broken cover.  I doubt there will be any further good taxpayer money over bad, it can only be a matter of time before the fatal blow.  If I were an RBS staffer I’d be burnishing that CV just now.

GORDON’S GOTTA GO

0.5% + ‘printing’ money

The deed is done.  RIP UK plc.

Years will pass before the implications of today’s actions become fully known.  A gamble with the UK as the stake.  Taleb speaks about alternative histories in Black Swan (or was it Fooled by Randomness?).  We’ll never know what the alternative history without quantitative easing would have looked like.  Whether it succeeds or fails we will be told that the alternatives would have been far worse and there was little else the Government could have done.

More people in Britain are savers than are borrowers.  0.5% doesn’t provide them with much of a return to spend, does it?  And for borrowers interest rates are decoupled from base rate, so they aren’t likely to benefit either.  Beggars the question, who does benefit from dropping the base rate so low?

This was a great article on spiked recently that speaks of the revolution I mentioned on this blog some weeks ago.

GORDON’S GOTTA GO

Nick Cohen

I’ve recently finished Nick Cohen’s collection of polemic essays entitled “Waiting for the Etonians“.  I’d not knowingly read any of Nick’s work before, but I’ve really enjoyed this compilation.  Apparently Nick regards himself as lying to the left of the political centre, whilst I’d always thought of myself as lying to the right, but I found little to disagree with in his pieces.  Recommended.