A g-g-g-g-reat f-f-f-f-f-ilm

I was dragged away from my keyboard this evening by my beloved wife as she wanted an escort to go with her to the cinema. “Wait for it to come on television” I moaned, but to deaf ears so 4:15pm saw me seated in the Phoenix Cinema in Finchley, one of the oldest in England, to see her beloved Colin Firth in “The King’s speech”.

I hope Pam doesn’t read this as I have to admit, I am really glad I went. It was an excellent film with Colin Firth portraying the Duke of York (before he became George V1) excellently and Helen Bonham Carter was gorgeous as Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother).

Geoffrey Rush, who played the speech therapist, an Australian, Lionel Logue, was really good, extremely humorous, and their relationship continued until Berties death. Bertie made Logue a Member of the Victorian Order, and later a Commander of the Victorian Order. (Thanks to Wikipedia for general information on Lionel Logue.)

Firth is winning a lot of awards for his part in the film, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he doesn’t win an Oscar for his performance. And isn’t Helen Bonham Carter in a lot of films lately – she is really blossoming out as an actress.

Global Warming explained

This video is for all those, like me, who find the argument for global warming rather complex.

After watching this short video you will begin to understand what it really is all about.

Ampers.

The banks and the government

I have just been watching Bob Diamond of Barclays Bank being grilled by a committee in Parliament and a thought occurred to me. The Government wants to split up the banks into High Street Banks on the one side, and the Investment arms on the other.

I don’t think that it is appropriate for the Government to dictate to private enterprise like this. However, there is a way in which they can “nudge” the banks into doing what they want and this way would be so easy and simple to do.

The Government guarantee peoples savings up to, I believe, £50,000, if saved in a bank in Britain. All the government needs to do is to withdraw the blanket guarantee and renew the guarantee with a small proviso. This is that they will only guarantee savings in a high street bank that doesn’t have an investment arm. Then people could remove their money from certain banks and move it to banks or building societies who don’t have an investment arm, but only if they want their savings guaranteed.

Simples.

Ampers.

Is it Capitalism which is evil?

There are three listed types of business, I am going by figures a decade ago, although now different EU states have added a category and changed the figures. For this exercise we will use the simpler terms as used a decade or so ago.

Companies with up to twenty employees were known as SoHo, companies between 21 and 500 were known as SMEs and Corporates had over 500 employees. This is really only a rough guide but is useful. The figures are a little hazy but SoHo was around 97.5%, SMEs around 1.5% and corporates around 1%. These refer to numbers of companies in the UK.

International conglomerates are a different kettle of fish and are a law to themselves and are no longer capitalist businesses. They really come under the title of Dictatorships and give good honest Capitalism a bad name.

I show a video here about the drug companies in the USA and this adequately describes what I am getting at. It is a shame that this has been presented by Al Jazeera as it meant I had to check all the figures and companies to make sure they were being truthful. They were.

As I mentioned earlier, these huge international businesses are a law of their own and do not respect the laws, either moral or legal, in any country they operate. Recall in the earlier part of the video how they weighed up being dishonest against the fine, and indicated that they thought it was worth disobeying the legal laws of the country as a good business decision if the profits far outweighed any fines or penalties involved.

I call on the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition, and David Cameron personally, to re-examine the reductions in taxes he is offering business in the UK.

If the real reason is to create jobs, then the 97.5% of companies which are in the SoHo sector are the ones more likely to employ people. Do away with all Capital taxes including Capital Gains Taxes, and NHS Employee contributions for the SoHo sector. Add a rider on the NHS contributions, so that these will only be on a net increase of staff; this will prevent them firing a few so as to take on another few and avoid the tax (entrepreneurs are wily creatures).

My plan above will probably be lower in cost to the governments plan, but it will be more directly aimed at the entrepreneurial SoHo sector which are then more likely to grow into SMEs.

People have to differentiate between our capitalist system which provides productive jobs (not with the socialist vision of a huge civil service which do not bring in finance) but with the huge dishonest and criminal section of the International Conglomerate sector.

I hasten to add, not all of this massive corporations are disreputable – I am sure one or two aren’t.

Ampers

Happy New Year

A happy new year to all my readers.

Many of you, in Britain, will face hardships in 2011 so I have included a video below so you can see that although you may struggle in 2011, you could be living in South Africa. So before complaining too much at our financial woes, pay a small thought to what is happening in South Africa.

 

Ampers

Today is Christmas

For the Christian Religion, today is the day of peace, celebrating the Son of God. As a Deist I don’t agree with the religious aspects but I love to listen to King’s College Carols and agree with the sentiments of peace.

Peace means tolerance, I know only too well that this can be difficult, especially when one is thrown into a room with all one’s family and other relatives but we owe it to our host, and the cook, and all those who genuinely want to be friendly to make the most of the day. We also have a responsibility to those who still harp on bitter memories, to help them gain peace, even if only for this occasion.

A merry Christmas to all my readers. I do know that even if this offends our thought police, other religions, including Jewish and Muslims, do not become offended by this, and to them I say, enjoy this forced break and make the most of it. We’ll all be back on the grindstone in January!

See you all on Amazon tomorrow!

Ampers

I am not a health nut but…

Came across this article on the web and it looked interesting

Oregano oil is widely known as a potent germ-killer, anti-inflammatory and pain reliever. Not only is it highly respected within the natural health community, it is also being widely studied within the scientific community for its vast medical uses.

In research done on the oil, it has been found that it could supercede many commonly-used pain killers, such as aspirin and even morphine. Oregano oil also has extremely high levels of free-radical-fighting antioxidants, agents that protect the body from the development of chronic conditions over time.

Oregano oil may also aid in the prevention and treatment of a variety of common infectious ailments including the common flu, psoriasis, eczema, Athlete’s foot, and bacterial infections.

Research on Oregano Oil

Studies have shown its usefulness against the prevention of candida albicans, aspergillus mold, staph infections, vaginal infections, pseudomonas and listeria. Certain studies reveal that it is as powerful a painkiller as the best ones on the market, with the added benefit that it is has little to zero side effects.

A study from the US Dept of Agriculture showed that oregano essential oils presented antimicrobial activities against Salmonella and E.coli. Other research holds the same, stating that oregano oil is such a powerful antimicrobial that it can be used to preserve food. Studies from the Department of Food Science at the University of Tennessee and the University of the Algarve found that similar results for oregano’s antibacterial action on pathogenic germs.

A recent study from the Department of Physiology & Biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center, stated the following in regard to the use of essential oils for preventing infections:

“New, safe antimicrobial agents are needed to prevent and overcome severe bacterial, viral, and fungal infections. Based on our previous experience and that of others, we postulated that herbal essential oils, such as those of origanum (oregano oil)…offer such possibilities.” ^[PDF]

source

In an article from Science Daily, oil of oregano was found to be effective in killing Staphylococcus bacteria. It was also equally as effective in its germ-killing abilities as common prescription antibiotics like streptomycin, penicillin and vancomycin.

Another study published in the journal Experimental and Toxicologic Pathology found that oregano oil could lower the negative effects of induced colitis in rats. This use suggests it may be beneficial to the colon and liver.

You can read the full article on their website.

Ampers

Jews and Muslims

No, this is not a diatribe, or a rant. It is just a list of Nobel Prize winners held by Jews and Muslims.

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is one billion, two hundred million or 20% of the world’s population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1988 – Najib Mahfooz

Peace:
1978 – Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1990 – Elias James Corey
1994 – Yaser Arafat
1999 – Ahmed Zewai

Economics:
(zero)

Physics:
(zero)

Medicine:
1960 – Peter Brian Medawar
1998 – Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7 SEVEN

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is fourteen million or about 0.02% of the world’s population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1910 – Paul Heyse
1927 – Henri Bergson
1958 – Boris Pasternak
1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 – Nelly Sachs
1976 – Saul Bellow
1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 – Elias Canetti
1987 – Joseph Brodsky
1991 – Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:
1911 – Alfred Fried
1911 – Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 – Rene Cassin
1973 – Henry Kissinger
1978 – Menachem Begin
1986 – Elie Wiesel
1994 – Shimon Peres
1994 – Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:
1905 – Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 – Henri Moissan
1907 – Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 – Gabriel Lippmann
1910 – Otto Wallach
1915 – Richard Willstaetter
1918 – Fritz Haber
1921 – Albert Einstein
1922 – Niels Bohr
1925 – James Franck
1925 – Gustav Hertz
1943 – Gustav Stern
1943 – George Charles de Hevesy
1944 – Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 – Felix Bloch
1954 – Max Born
1958 – Igor Tamm
1959 – Emilio Segre
1960 – Donald A. Glaser
1961 – Robert Hofstadter
1961 – Melvin Calvin
1962 – Lev Davidovich Landau
1962 – Max Ferdinand Perutz
1965 – Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 – Julian Schwinger
1969 – Murray Gell-Mann
1971 – Dennis Gabor
1972 – William Howard Stein
1973 – Brian David Josephson
1975 – Benjamin Mottleson
1976 – Burton Richter
1977 – Ilya Prigogine
1978 – Arno Allan Penzias
1978 – Peter L Kapitza
1979 – Stephen Weinberg
1979 – Sheldon Glashow
1979 – Herbert Charles Brown
1980 – Paul Berg
1980 – Walter Gilbert
1981 – Roald Hoffmann
1982 – Aaron Klug
1985 – Albert A. Hauptman
1985 – Jerome Karle
1986 – Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 – Robert Huber
1988 – Leon Lederman
1988 – Melvin Schwartz
1988 – Jack Steinberger
1989 – Sidney Altman
1990 – Jerome Friedman
1992 – Rudolph Marcus
1995 – Martin Perl
2000 – Alan J. Heeger

Economics:
1970 – Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 – Simon Kuznets
1972 – Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 – Leonid Kantorovich
1976 – Milton Friedman
1978 – Herbert A. Simon
1980 – Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 – Franco Modigliani
1987 – Robert M. Solow
1990 – Harry Markowitz
1990 – Merton Miller
1992 – Gary Becker
1993 – Robert Fogel

Medicine:
1908 – Elie Metchnikoff
1908 – Paul Erlich
1914 – Robert Barany
1922 – Otto Meyerhof
1930 – Karl Landsteiner
1931 – Otto Warburg
1936 – Otto Loewi
1944 – Joseph Erlanger
1944 – Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 – Ernst Boris Chain
1946 – Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 – Tadeus Reichstein
1952 – Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 – Hans Krebs
1953 – Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 – Joshua Lederberg
1959 – Arthur Kornberg
1964 – Konrad Bloch
1965 – Francois Jacob
1965 – Andre Lwoff
1967 – George Wald
1968 – Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 – Salvador Luria
1970 – Julius Axelrod
1970 – Sir Bernard Katz
1972 – Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 – Howard Martin Temin
1976 – Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 – Roselyn Sussman Yalow
1978 – Daniel Nathans
1980 – Baruj Benacerraf
1984 – Cesar Milstein
1985 – Michael Stuart Brown
1985 – Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 – Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 – Gertrude Elion
1989 – Harold Varmus
1991 – Erwin Neher
1991 – Bert Sakmann
1993 – Richard J. Roberts
1993 – Phillip Sharp
1994 – Alfred Gilman
1995 – Edward B. Lewis
1996- Lu RoseIacovino
TOTAL: 129!

Enjoy your Christmas

(Photos below)

The weather in Blighty is awful

The economy in Blighty has been destroyed

But do think of our soldiers, dying for our Government in far off lands!

Soldiers still in Iraq

A short break in Afghanistan for our troops

Happy Christmas and a peaceful new year to you all.

Ampers

What is Dropbox?

I have found an interesting website called DropBox in the USA. This is a special service which offers cloud computing. All cloud computing means is your data is on another computer.

The program adds a folder in your Windows Explorer or Linux Nautilus file display folder, and whatever you add into that folder is added to your DropBox cloud account and is immediately visible and shared on each of your computers and/or your smart-phone. However, you have to register (free) each computer/phone on their website but from each computer/phone. Mine, for example, is visible on my Linux machine, my Netbook and my HTC Desire smart-phone.

You can grab a link for any individual file and send it to someone who can view it without a DropBox account.

There is also provision to share folders but this is done a different way. Each person you share it with must have a DropBox account. And once they have clicked on the link to share, that folder is also visible in their DropBox folder. This is very handy for sharing files that need constant updating with your family, friends or office workers. My wife and I share a folder and, as she uses Windows, it is very useful for sharing files.

When you join DropBox you have the opportunity to select 2GB of storage space which is free or, if you want to store all your files on DropBox (they will do your back-ups) it is $9.95 (£6.42) a month for 25GB or double that for 50GB.

The nice point about the free 2GB choice is, you get a bonus of 256MB when you perform five of the six examples of learning how it works. This is a good deal as you get to know how it works by performing these requests.

You also get a bonus when you introduce anyone. 256MB for both you and the new person so everyone gains. I use DropBox so if anyone contacts ampers on gmail before signing on, I will send you a link to use so we both gain a 256MB bonus.

Transport and Telecommuting

Our problem here, in England with our transport is that we were the first to establish the railway, we were the first to establish the underground system and, as these occasions took part well over 100 years ago, they are more than ready for renewal.

The real problem is, we have let too many people into this country, too quickly, and all our public services, such as schools and hospitals are over-stretched. The police are over-stretched because of the rise in crime and apart from dilapidations, our railways are increasing due to the increase in customers needing to get from A to B, mainly for work. In addition, our roads are over-crowded for the same reasons.

We need to do something, and the following plan might help.

Telecommuting has never really caught on because our bosses cannot trust their employees. Although, in so many cases, companies who have embraced telecommuting and hot-desking have more than benefitted by greater productivity of their staff.

Take a company with a thousand employees, a hundred of them being office staff. If seventy-five of them worked from home for four days a week, a company can benefit with the space of fifty desks, calling in 20 staff each day to use one of twenty desks put aside for hot-desking. This could mean letting of part of their building, thus saving on expenses.

The trains would benefit by having fifty more spaces for commuters each day. The roads, locally, by having fifty people less driving to the station each day.

Multiply this my 10,000 businesses throughout the company and we begin to see a seat for every commuter, less cards locally on the roads, and less urban space taken up with offices so therefore, more space for housing.

So we have to nudge companies, and the railways, to embrace telecommuting.

The government could introduce a 100% increase in business tax for all companies with more than 100 office staff in one or more offices within a 50 mile radius who do not introduce telecommuting for at least 75% of their office staff. The money to be loaned to the local transport company to increase their throughput. So the reason for the extra tax is to help the local transport system which will benefit the companies concerned. Naturally if they introduce telecommuting, it wouldn’t be fair to tax them extra as the company concerned is doing enough to ease local transport.

The railways could also have a similar rise if they don’t introduce season tickets on a per day per week basis. So a telecommuter can go into work, one day or two days a week and pay prorate a fifth of a season ticket for each day requested.

This could be done on a two year trial basis, starting from six months in the future, to give business and railways the six months to investigate how they attempt the exercise.

If a company or railway does not do anything, hoping to ride the two years out, then they should be told that those who don’t enter into the spirit of things will pay double taxes for the next twenty years.

I know this seems awfully complex but we need to shock companies into trusting their employees. British employers are considered some of the worse in the world and this has been my experience in my working life. I have always performed better, been paid more and have been happier when working for foreign bosses.

 

Did Enoch really say “Rivers of Blood”?

This has been taken from  the “Working Class Tory” website and you can read the rest of it here.

Interview with a Heff

Triffic interview with the Telegraph’s Simon Heffer in Total Politics magazine. Some highlights:

Enoch [Powell] said nearly 40 years ago, you can’t have a single currency without having a single economic policy and a single finance minister. Enoch was right about that. Enoch was right about monetarism in my view. He said that you only get a period of mass inflation when you have a government that prints money. Enoch was the trade unionists’ friend in the 1960s and 70s. He said there’s no point in blaming the trade unions for inflation because they ask for high pay rises. Those rises can only be funded if there is money in the economy to fund them, and that was down to the government. He was right about that.

Of course, the really contentious issue with Enoch was immigration, or what his detractors call race. Enoch never made a speech about race. All Enoch speeches that people think are about race, like the so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, are about immigration. I know very well that he wasn’t a racist, and so did people like Michael Foot and Tony Benn, both great friends of his. He wasn’t a racist. He wanted to spend the rest of his life in India, and probably would have done so, had it not become independent. He had a love of Indian people, of Indian culture. He didn’t make judgements about people, he was too intelligent. He didn’t make judgements about people because of their race. And what those speeches said was we are a small island, we have a largely indigenous population, and if we start piling in people from a very different culture in small parts of that small island then there are going to be problems. And we have them now.

Enoch argued very strongly against what is now called a multicultural society. He wanted people who came here to integrate. And he argued that if you bring in such large numbers of people that integration is impossible. There is going to be a problem. I am very depressed that every time a Conservative mentions the two words, Enoch Powell, he or she is either removed from any job that he or she might have, sacked as a candidate as that poor man in the Midlands was before the election – Nigel Hastilow – or forced to issue a grovelling apology. Perhaps even all three. You can’t mention the words Enoch Powell without everyone thinking that you are about to open a new version of Auschwitz somewhere.

Flooding the World with Truth

This is an incredible strategy by the Mises institute, when you come to the last paragraph, linger awhile, and read my further comment afterwards.

by Doug French

The email said: “Did you see this article on the Austrian School in The Economist?”

The article in question was from last month, which now seems like years ago. Sure, I probably saw it. About 50 such items hit my inbox every day.

Ten years ago, this article would have been amazing. Today it is a blip on the screen. But someone out there will read it and get curious. He or she will look for more and find Mises.org. Then the change happens, that most important change in the world: the mind begins to grasp the idea of liberty. Here is an event that is more important than anything in the physical world. Repeat that experience millions and billions of times and history will conform.

Our time is coming. Of this I’m convinced. The explosion of the Austrian School into the popular media is so large and so vast that it is impossible to keep up. We’re in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, all over the television, in journals and hundreds of books, and in every other conceivable media outlet.

No, they don’t always get the story right. What matters is that these relentless mentions, this constant spotlight on a body of ideas, are potentially transformative.

This is our moment. Ludwig von Mises fought his entire life for this. Murray Rothbard dreamed of a time like this. The Austrian School, broadly considered, has worked for 500 years to get the word out about free markets, sound money, and the wreckage caused by government intervention.

Government and its apologists worked to suppress the writings of the great defenders of economic freedom throughout the whole 20th century. We were supposed to buy into the government’s plans for our lives and everyone else’s, around the world. We were supposed to pay, obey, and shut up.

It didn’t work. They tried to kill Mises, and then they burned his books. He escaped to Geneva and then to New York and went on to write the greatest treatises ever. They dumped Rothbard in a tiny office at a small Brooklyn college, and he wrote and published and made history anyway. So it has always been: the pen is mightier than the sword.

In our times, a major reason, and perhaps the major reason, for the phenomenal progress is the work of the Mises Institute. This is the infrastructure that gives rise to and supports all the rest.

The Mises Institute was founded by Lew Rockwell in 1982, when the cause of sound money was hopeless and Mises’s works were slipping into obscurity. Our first conference was on the gold standard. Everyone said it was a dumb idea. Nearly 30 years later, the whole world is watching those speeches online.

In these decades, we’ve published hundreds of books on economic freedom – some technical, some popular, some serious, some funny. Since the beginning of the digital age, our audience has expanded to millions. Really, there is no way to fully trace the influence of the Mises Institute, but it is pervasive, ubiquitous, and darn near universal.

The reason is the domain name you see in your browser window. This domain has been supercharged through the most brilliant (and some say crazy) strategy ever imagined: We give away as much as we possibly can. We give away lectures, films, books, journals, articles, and information in every conceivable way we can package it.

Read the rest of the article here

When Mises first started doing this, they gave away a major text book written by Murray Rothchild. I downloaded it and read a couple of paragraphs on my computer and was so amazed at this revalation that I bought the book on Amazon. I phoned the Institute and asked whether they think this is a good idea and was told that since they gave the book away for free, sales in bookshops and on the Mises website have shot up. Canonical gives their software away free (Ubuntu) and also the source code (intellectual rights) and have grown from a staff of three, in five years, to over 350 staff in 28 countries around the world. I could, therefore, easily believe this. Since then Mises give away just about everything and are growing at a phenomenal rate.

The secret is, by giving away the main product, people want ancillary services. With Mises, these are courses of instruction and speakers for conferences and with Canonical it is support contracts and engineers certification. Both organisations realise that by giving the main product away free, they increase their customer base for ancillary services.

Ampers

Is a University education worth it?

I found this interesting article at an “investment” website called The Motley Fool. It is not based on emotive feelings but on cold economic fact. The main article is a lot more interesting than the teaser, also from the article, I print here/

Oversupply looks to have reduced the value of a degree.

The proposed increase in university tuition fees has been in the headlines for the last few weeks, in large part thanks to the violent demonstrations in central London. Then again live TV violence always sells; as the saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads.”

It’s human nature to complain about price rises, at least when it concerns those goods and services which you consume. But tuition fee increases are also posing a question that many prospective students should ask themselves; is a full-time university education worth it?

Many have found to their cost that it wasn’t, particularly those who studied subjects that most employers consider to be less worthy. Many would-be students might benefit from being a little bit more selective in what they study instead of focusing upon tuition fees.

Valuing education

It’s hard to put a price on an education because many of its benefits are non-monetary. Education doesn’t just improve a person’s quality of life; education rewards society if only because it should increase tax revenues and reduce crime rates (the well educated are reckoned to be less likely to commit crimes).

Whilst we can value these non-monetary factors (the courts do it all the time when assessing damages for personal injury), I will ignore them for the rest of this article.

What’s a degree worth?

Go and read the rest of the article

Ampers

U-Turns and the Government

Why do politicians regard making a U-turn a crime?

And why, when a Government changes its mind, do newspapers blazon Government U-Turn across their front papers?

The answer to the former question is, in fact, the latter question (as an answer).

The answer to the latter question is that they want to sell more newspapers.

But, dear reader, I’d like to offer a different interpretation.

In my book, the more U-turns a Government make the better. I see this as an indication that Government knows it can’t always get things right first time and when they are informed of the consequences of their proposed actions they have the ability to take stock and rethink their strategies.

To paraphrase Labours old saying, this is Joined-up Government. Or better still Grown up Government.

So next time you see Government U-turn blazoned across a newspaper’s front page, you should think “Good, they are listening to us”.

Ampers

Julian Assange – 10 questions to ask

Ron Paul, the American Libertarian Senator, asks ten questions about the Julian Assange case and I repeat them here.

1. Do the American people deserve to know the truth regarding the ongoing war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?

2. Could a larger question be: how can an Army Private gain access to so much secret material?

3. Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not our government’s failure to protect classified information?

4. Are we getting our money’s worth from the $80 billion per year we spend on our intelligence agencies?

5. Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths; lying us into war, or WikiLeaks’ revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?

6. If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information, that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the First Amendment and the independence of the internet?

7. Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?

8. Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in the time of a declared war – which is treason – and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death, and corruption?

9. Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it’s wrong?

10. How can the U.S. government charge an Australian citizen with treason for publishing U.S. secret information, that he did not steal?

New police commissioners to cost £130 million to set up

By Tom Whitehead, Home Affairs Editor Daily Telegraph  9:22AM GMT 02 Dec 2010

Theresa May’s police and crime commissioners will cost the taxpayer up to £130 million to set up and run, the Home Office admitted yesterday.

The full article can be read here.

The problem with Government is that they always get (self-)important people to run various set-ups, rather than just plain efficient executives.

First of all, the weakness here is to have an elected official and a chief constable! Why not just have the chief constable elected? Why duplicate, the Sheriff system works well in the USA and is not politicised. It is madness having two positions for what is essentially one job. Secondly, because of a two tier system, it will be politicised which will mean the chief constables will obey the party rather than look after the interests of the voter. Thirdly, we vote out the politicised police leader and put another in, and still have the same chief constable (sheriff) I can just imagine the howls if they did that in the USA!

To my way of thinking, to save time and money, and give more time to make sure this is set up properly, I would invite “sitting” Chief Constables to change their job positions to that as elected Chief Constables. Then we could do this immediately and set the date of the first elections to go ahead in 2015. The present Chief Constables would only have to defend their positions from now.

Politicians just cannot get “top heavy” out of their system, can they?

Ampers.

Follow us in your RSS reader

What, actually, does this mean? I am not talking about ‘repetitive strain injury’ here but a method of website article syndication. One of the many web dictionaries give the definition as follows:

RSS is the acronym for Really Simple Syndication, web feed technology that automatically detects when content on one site is updated, and through subscriber feeds and aggregators distributes it to another website or to a digital signage content player.

In more simple terms, if you need to go into many websites for updates of their articles, such as blogs, newspapers, and any other website that publishes information daily, weekly or somewhere in between, and can never remember to cover them all, all of the time, RSS could be the answer to your prayers.

There are several sites which offer to host your acquisition of articles from all over the internet. I will describe Google Reader simply because this is the one I use so it is easier for me to write about!

Whenever I fire up my Browser, it starts up with several tabs already open. One of which is Google Reader. First of all, I read three newspapers. One for news coverage, one for financial markets coverage and one is a South African newspaper so I know what is going on in my old home. I have several political blogs which are updated as the blogs come in on Google Reader, and also receive comments on my own two blogs. There are others, but this should be enough for you to get the general picture.

However, I can almost see you drawing back in horror and muttering; “How does he get the time to read them all?”

Lets just discuss the news coverage for my example. This newspaper has about fifty articles showing as unread when I log on in the morning. They are presented as one line per story, so I can read all fifty lines in a minute or two. If I click on the line, it opens up a small window with the story title and a short paragraph on what the news is about. If I click on the title it takes me to the story in full on the newspaper’s website.

However, if I am busy, I just read the one line. I leave home for a meeting knowing what is going on in the world. Do I really need to know more? If I have a little more time, I might read just the first paragraph of half a dozen of the fifty one lines, and maybe just one or two full articles. Never more!

One can also star an article and read it later. I star all those that seem interesting but are not time sensitive, and look at them on a Sunday morning.

Quite a few people in Finchley use this method, and click on the orange RSS badge on our newspaper page (on the top right) and receive the Finchley Arrow news as soon as it comes in.

How can you install this?

It’s easy. Go into the browser and type in “Google Reader” in your search box (with the quotes) and then click on the link. To make it even easier, I have added a link here for you.

Once you have set up your account (just follow the instructions) you are there. You can bookmark the page once you are in to jump straight back to it each time you want to use the Reader. Now, whenever you see the orange RSS logo on a website click it and choose Google, and then Google Reader, to begin receiving your news.

If the website doesn’t show an RSS feed, you can copy the URL (web address) and go to your Google Reader page and click it on the add a subscription button on the top left of the page. However, bear in mind that doing it this way doesn’t always work if the website isn’t geared for RSS feeds.

Don’t hesitate to add more subscriptions that interest you, and delete old subscriptions if they are too time consuming or no longer of interest.

There is a lot more to using Google Reader but I am too busy to be bothered with all of the other extras, other than star an item I might read on the following Sunday morning.

Could I live without using RSS feeds? The simple answer is no! Not only does it save me so much time, but whenever anyone talks about what is in the papers that day, I know about it and can discuss the story, after just a couple of minutes of skimming down the Reader page. I know that if you take the trouble of getting into Google Reader you will come to depend on it. And all this is free!

Daniel Hannan’s letter of warning to America

This is an interview by the Hoover Institution with Daniel Hannan in America about his new book “A new road to serfdom (subtitled: A letter of warning to America” Forgetting politics for a minute, this is one of the best interviews I have ever seen. It is quiet, gentlemanly, and friendly. But, a little warning, don’t look at this until you have thirty-five minutes to spare, it is a long interview and you really won’t want to stop. When you have seen this you may well agree with my feelings that it is no wonder that David Cameron has sidelined this extremely intelligent and informed young man to the EU. He would fear him too much if he were in the British Parliament!

He is not of my party but I am always willing to give credit where it is due.

Ampers.

Nigel Farage tells them!

Nigel Farage throws egg into the faces of the bureaucrats in Brussels in an excellent speech but the real joy is to see the despondency in the faces of the other MEPs.

Well done Nigel.

It’s a funny old world, over the last twenty years I have joined UKIP four times and resigned three times. One of the times I resigned was because of Nigel, and the last time I joined was because of Nigel! He is an excellent speaker and his voice has just that amount of harshness to remind people of how angry he is with the EU. However, I would be more happy if there was a rule that only one MEP should be permitted to sit on the Party’s NEC (top table).

Ampers

Students: How dare they!

I am absolutely livid.

How dare these students expect me, as a tax-payer, to contribute towards their education.

Because of my upbringing I had to leave school at under fifteen and work in the wide hard world to earn enough to keep body and soul together. I didn’t have the luxury of adolescence as if I had “put on teenage airs and graces” I would have been fired and on the dole. I have never, in my life, been on the dole.

Why should I subsidise students education?

And the argument that we need better educated people to run companies and run the country won’t wash. Other countries that don’t subsidise education have well-educated people, and these have had to pay for their degrees as they go along. Not have the cushy situation where they don’t pay a penny until they earn over £21,000 a year.

I will be thrilled to see that potential murderer (with the fire extinguisher) go to prison. Buy, will he have a hard time with that baby face. And there is no point going for a degree now as he’d never get a decent job with a prison record. Great!

I would be a lot more sympathetic to their cause if it wasn’t my taxes paying for the education. But it is, and I’m not!

Ampers.

Note: Just noticed a group on TV with a placard saying Liberal Democrats keep your promise. This shows how unintelligent our students really are. They don’t even realise that Liberal Democrats don’t run the country. We really have to have better teachers as the present intake aren’t really good at educating our offspring.

Be frightened, be very frightened

After watching this video you must ask yourself why this wasn’t on the BBC or ITV news but was on Fox News in the USA (and Russian TV)

You need to be frightened, not of the demonstrators, but our masters who tried to hide this from you.

Another question is, should the police be allowed to shoot to kill if they are attacked by these mobs?

Ampers

The Euro and the P.I.G.S.

Gerald Celente formed and directs “The Trends Research Institute”, he is the author of “Trends 2000″ and “Trend Tracking” (Warner Books), and also publishes “The Trends Journal”. He has been a trends forecaster for thirty years now.

Don’t mind the American accent, listen carefully to the words.

Ampers

Understanding the Irish monetary problem

This video gives an interesting insight of the Irish dilemma between 0:37 and 4:10. The whole video is worth watching but if you are short of time, the above start and end times will be the most useful. But you won’t see Nigel Farage.

Andrew

Financial background of Nigel Farage

Two parts of this video are quite interesting.

The first two minutes is where Nigel Farage gives is business background and what really upset him about the EU. The second part which is worth watching is from 9:15 onwards (right at the end).

Ampers

What’s our opinion of Somalians?

Before you reach any conclusions, read this snippit I found in today’s electronic telegraph.

A rap video put together by Somalis living in London raised as much as £150,000 to contribute towards the ransom of Paul and Rachel Chandler.

It is so easy to allow our prejudices to take over when we are angry.

Ampers

Our £4.8 TRILLION debt.

I watched the hour and a half programme, mentioned in the blog below, and have to admit, if I weren’t a pensioner, or if I had brought children into this world, I would have been a lot more horrified and frightened than I am.

On reflection, a lot of people deserve this. I am not referring to voters of any one party as such. I am referring to people who do not take an interest in politics and vote the way their parents voted or their parents before them. These people are really to blame even more than the politicians for the disastrous state the country is now in. My message here is, if you don’t take an interest in politics, you should first blame yourself before you blame others.

The state the country is in is so terrible that it will probably take a dozen generations to repay all the money. 28% of Communist China is the State, 53% of the UK is the State. Bearing in mind that Britain is becoming as oppressive as East Germany was and that, in percentage terms, the State in the UK is twice the size of the State in China, it is no wonder that we are so poor and debt ridden.

The banks cannot be blamed for this.

Yes, the banks cost us dearly, but set against 4.8 trillion pounds, their debt as a drop in the ocean compared with our National Debt. The bank rate is 0.5% per annum, just at this terribly low bank rate, the annual interest on £4.8T is £24 Billion pounds a year, or two billion a month, and that is without repaying any of the capital.

Finally, everybody’s savings are being devalued every day the Bank of England indulge in Quantitative Easing.  QE is just another way of printing more money that we have assets for. This means your pound devalues.

Let’s look at it in simple terms. A small island with fifty people have their own currency. The island has assets worth a million pounds, so the government print out a million pounds of notes and coinage. Then the government decides on Quantitative Easing and prints a further million pounds of notes with no assets to back the currency up with. Where as a note worth £1 was worth £1 we now have a situation that there are £2 million of currency around but only one million pounds worth of assets. So your £1 note in your pocket can only be worth 50p.

So you have been robbed of 50p for every pound you own. The Government has cheated on you and stolen your savings.

It really is as simple as that.

Ampers.

Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story – This is on tonight, Thursday 11th November,

This is on tonight (Thursday 11th November) on Channel 4.

Channel 4′s film explains the full extent of the financial mess this country is in –

With an estimated £4.8 trillion of national debt and counting.

It argues that the recent spending review hasn’t gone far enough, and to put Britain back on track we need to radically rethink the role of the state, stop politicians spending money in our name, and drastically lower taxes to make Britain’s economy grow again.

Well woth a view tonight (11/11/10).

Ampers

A new and useful alternative to body scanners at airports

Sometimes a little humour brightens up the day!

The Israelis are developing an airport security device that eliminates the privacy concerns that come with full-body scanners at the airports.

It’s a booth you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you. They see this as a win-win for everyone, with completely eliminating racial profiling and body scanning.

It also would save the costs of a long and expensive trial.  Justice would be swift. Case closed!

For example, imagine you’re in the Tel-Aviv airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion.

Shortly thereafter an announcement comes over the PA system . . .

“Attention standby passengers — we now have a seat available on flight number XXXX. Shalom!”

Under Britain’s Health and Safety rules, I guess we’d have to have notices warning passengers of the dangers of slipping on the blood on the floor.

Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax

The Poll Tax would have charged everyone the same tax in an area no matter what their wealth was. Where this fell down is the council would decide how much they needed to run the council for the following year, and payments would be spread equally amongst people out of work and multi millionaires. It had to be tweaked drastically before it would be acceptable to the general public, but the Government were determined to bring it in. And, they did.

Under the guise of the Council Tax The council still work out how much they need to run the council for the following year. Only now, instead of dividing the cost amongst the number of people (the poll tax) they divide the amount by the number of properties in the area. (poll tax version two).

This has enabled them to put all the properties into different bands and charge different amounts for each band. This is still not really fair (a couple of pensioners in their nineties and a state pension who inherited their home fifty years ago, in the same band as a Union Leader or BBC Director, earning hundreds of thousands a year, next door. But it is still a lot fairer than the original model).

However, what I would like to know, and I would welcome any comment on this, is Were the Conservative government going to instate the Poll Tax in its original bad format, or were they going to tweak it to make it fairer. What I do not want to see under the comments is “they were going to tweak it” or “they were not going to tweak it” as these comments on their own won’t be worth the electons they are written on. I am asking for answers with some sort of proof of your conclusions. I have searched the Net using Google and cannot find anything on this part of the subject, plenty of other information.

The European Union

Before I get into my article I would like to reassure my readers that I love Europe and nowadays, since I refuse to subject myself to the indignities of flying, have discovered that most European cities are far more beautiful and interesting than our own cities.

The next thing I aim to reassure people is that, with regards to the European undemocratic Parliament, I am not a Euro-sceptic. The term Euro-sceptic suggests that one is not sure. I am sure, I hate it and fear the harm it is doing to these islands. So the correct term for me would be Euro-phobic. And, I am intensely proud of being Euro-phobic.

Preamble

In an earlier life I was a salesman and then sale manager. I then became the sales and marketing manager for a large company running a team of twenty-seven. One of the basic differences between an ordinary salesman and a star player is that the former would sell features, whilst the more successful salesman would sell benefits.

Let me explain: This gizmo has a pretty design, it has seven different buttons along the top that will do this, this, this… This is selling features.

Or, you would say to your customer, if you have one of these in your office it will improve productivity, allow your staff to increase efficiency, and they will admire your decision. This would be selling benefits.

It does no harm to imagine that your customer is very selfish and just wants to know “what is in it for him”. Many of them are! Appeal to his head, by stressing money saved and appeal to his heart by stressing the staff will look up to him.

The anti-EU movement

I think that one of the major reasons why the anti-EU movement has a spectacular non-success is that they continue to sell features to the general public.

The evil EU {feature} Costing x millions a day {feature} Britain losing its sovereignty {feature}.

“Did you know it would be easy to reduce income and corporation tax by 25% without harming any of our other areas of national expenditure?” {benefit}

“We could reduce all the present cuts by a third, and still be able to afford to build new schools, hospitals and increase police and military spending! {benefit}

The above are just a few examples to illustrate the difference of selling benefits to selling features.

The British are not like the French or Germans, we don’t riot in the streets, except when the loony left did in the eighties against the Poll (Community Charge) Tax which, incidentally, would have been a lot fairer than Council Tax if carried out properly! But that’s earmarked for a separate blog.

The entire anti-EU movement needs to reconsider its arguments and perhaps make an effort to recruit a sales director onto their governing boards to advice in this area. Then we will see movement, as all the “concerned citizens” are interested in, is the taxes they pay, the police’s success in their locality, the condition of their local hospital and the choices of schools available in their area.

The UK Independence Party, at election time, should concentrate on the above issues and work their manifesto claims on the UK finances available bearing in mind that the money would no longer be going to the EU. And, there would be no need to spell this out in the manifesto as you would already have said you’d be taking us all out. Features should be out and benefits should be the order of the day.

One of the successful ways of combining features with benefits (it can be done) is to use three powerful words which means you can combine without appearing condescending. the three words are which means that..., for example,  Britain is losing its sovereignty, which means that other EU countries can extradite people in Britain for a crime which breaks their countries laws but is not against the law in Britain, and have done so recently without going to court – just by informing the local police to arrest them and send them to the said EU country.

There is an old saying: “Do the same and you will continue to get the same.”

Flying tonight!

I came across the following today on the Big Brother Watch website and it reminded me of a decision my wife and I took when all this airport security started.

You can see my write-up of an incident at Stansted involving a BBW supporter here. She has had both her hips replaced and when going through airport security she was taken off to a room and made to undress to show her operation scars to prove that she had had the surgery claimed.

We had problems flying soon after 9/11 with pathetic over reactions by Heathrow airport and a passenger who objected (gently) had one very tall checker, towering above him, shouting that if he gave any trouble he would be taken off the queue and locked in a room until the plane had taken off.

That, dear reader, was the last time my wife and I have every flown anywhere. We used to spend our annual holidays alternate years in South Africa, and alternate years to other far away places.

Now we refuse to even go to an airport, let alone fly.

We have discovered Western Europe, and I have found out that cruises, now that I am in my seventies, aren’t as bad as they seemed to be when I was much younger.

To help stretch our money, every other year we have just a four day holiday in Western Europe by Eurostar and are looking forward to these fast journeys from Kings Cross/St Pancras stretching, next year to Holland and the year after to Germany. On alternate years we will take a cruise, there are so many to choose from. And you can get good deals if you leave it to the last week before sailing to purchase. Now that we are retired, we can afford to do this.

Now, what do you think the Government and Airlines would arrange, collectively between them, with regards to treatment of air passenger, if all holiday passengers stopped flying? If the only passengers the airlines got were business passengers? What if these business people started to use video conferencing instead of flying?

A couple of years ago I was at a simultaneous press conference at Cisco in West London, with their Paris office. The video conferencing facilities for the two groups of about twenty journalists was excellent, and executives were talking to us from both offices. It was a truly amazing experience.

In fact, on top of all this, I read about higher costs of aviation kerosene, higher airport and flying taxes and laugh, knowing they don’t and will never apply to me.

Ampers.

Public Service Announcement

The following came to me as editor of our local community newspaper, and although it is not something we publish, I thought it deserved a wide airing

Fear of driving

An increasing number of people are afraid on our roads. MAD- or motorway Anxiety disorder affects millions of drivers- mainly women, but over 12 per cent of the general population admit to ‘extremely anxious’ symptoms when driving.. including excessive sweating, headaches and stomach pains.

The highest levels of anxiety can be found in younger and older female drivers…with not surprisingly, the lowest being in male professional drivers.

There are many causes of driving anxiety, from witnessing or being in an accident, to an unexplained panic attack. The latter can be the most insidious. Pat reports how she had a panic attack on the M24 – a road she knew well. Now the fear it may happen again has stayed with her, so she now avoids driving. She’s in a vicious circle of avoidant behavior which will just make her feel even more incapable- and dangerous on the road.

Lack of practice often undermines a drivers confidence. After recovering from a long term illness, Alf found that his belief in his ability to judge speed and distance was badly affected. Only when he went for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy did he unpack the sense of his own mortality and the fear his illness had left him with.

An independent television production company called Matchlight (whose team have been responsible for productions like Stephen Fry’s series on manic depression and the recent John Humphry’s documentary on education)  are tackling this issue in conjunction with the Automobile Association. In a major new series they are going to be exploring how people lose their confidence, and follow the stories of those battling to get back behind the wheel.  It’s not just going to be about phobias- there are many reasons for being out of practice and losing confidence- being ill, not having been able to afford a car, a spell in prison, having been abroad for a long time are only a few reasons.

If you are one of the many drivers in the country getting more afraid of driving and you would like to talk about taking part, call the development producer Anne Buckland at 0141 332 0319 or e-mail her anne.buckland@matchlight.co.uk before 20^th November 2010.

Personally, I am of the opinion that many drivers need extra training and as Tesco keeps telling me, “every little helps”.

Ampers

Prostitution and Politics…

Ronald Reagan once said…

“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realise that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

The is one of my favourite Reagan quotes…

Ampers

The BBC and the noisy left minority

First of all, I am referring to England and not the whole of the United Kingdom.

Most English constituencies are Conservative but listening to the BBC you would well be under the impression that this was a Socialist dominated country. The only reason Labour actually get in isn’t because of the few strongholds in the North of England, it is because of the massive Labour voters in Scotland and Wales.

And, for the sake of argument, let’s say that Baroness Margaret Thatcher is the most hated doyen of the Left. God, don’t they make a lot of noise about her. Any stranger to our shores might be excused for thinking she is the most hated person in Britain.

But is she?

A recent YouGov poll of 2018 people (most of their polls are only 1024 people, so this was a much more accurate sample) conducted a poll to find who was the most influential woman in the world.

People in the survey included Florence Nightingale, Mother Teresa, Oprah Winfrey and Kate Moss. (Kate came last with less than 1%).

However, the winner, with over 32% of the vote was Lady Margaret Thatcher, higher even than Mother Teresa.

Almost two-thirds said commitment was a vital trait, but hard work, intelligence and independence were also important considerations for this poll.

So, next time you hear some insignificant leftie, such as the Harriets of this world, scream that Thatcher was evil, recall this survey and just quietly go about your business, knowing the truth.

Ampers

John Hurst – tax rebel

The following extract was taken from IanPJ on politics and is well worth the read. I am adding it to my blog as the newspapers may well suppress the information on orders from the Government. After you have read it, and if you want more information, click on the above link.

Council tax, rebellion, and a day in court

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Ian Parker-Joseph

Friday 8th October 2010 – A Friday October morning at the Magistrates` Court in the small Welsh town of Brecon seems an unlikely setting for a case that promises to have a fundamental effect on the entire British legal and tax-collecting system. Amongst the usual run-of-the-mill cases that turn up in a small rural community was one involving Powys Council`s application over the non-payment of Council Tax, issued against John Hurst and his wife Tina.

Before anyone jumps to the wrong conclusion, John Hurst is no free-loader. He is a highly responsible and patriotic citizen, a former police officer with an impressive record. His decision not to pay is based on thorough research indicating that councils have no legal right whatsoever to levy such a tax on its citizens. Believing this to be true, John would have therefore committed an offence by actually paying the tax, as the majority of us already have. Given that ignorance of the law is no defence, it places the overwhelming majority of hitherto respectable British citizens in an invidious situation and the courts in an even worse one.

John, a committed supporter of Lawful Rebellion, arrived at the court with his wife, along with her Mackenzie Friend. The court official took down the details but then returned some time later stating that Tina Hurst’s case was no longer listed. This was an extremely odd development, given that Tina is registered disabled with visual impairment and would have hence qualified for a Council Tax rebate, which had not been awarded and for legal aid should she decide to take the case further. It would appear that suspicions of skulduggery would not be entirely unfounded. The official was challenged over this and shortly afterwards brought out a more senior figure, a pleasant young man, who invited the little party into a private office. There he declared that on checking his information, Tina Hurst was on the list after all!

Much later, the group was invited into Court. John Hurst, representing himself, immediately questioned as to why there were only two magistrates on the bench instead of the required three. The Council`s solicitor stated that he had to agree but that this was not contentious. John immediately retorted that it was and insisted on exercising his legal right to have three magistrates present. The court officials had to concede and the group was asked to leave the Court whilst a third magistrate be found.

Amongst John Hurst’s contentions, was the fact that this court had no jurisdiction to make a firm decision on his case. Therefore, it was welcome when the council solicitor appeared, telling John that the court had decided that the matter should be passed to the Court in Llandrindod Wells for trial on Friday 5th November at ten a.m.

The group re-entered the Court shortly afterwards for the formal decision to be announced, but John consequently and successfully challenged the by now hapless and bewildered clerk of the court over a number of legal and procedural issues.

You can read the full report on IanPJ on Politics website.

 

Ampers.

Ethnic Cleansing

Ian Duncan Smith (or ‘the twins’ as Paul Merton used to refer to him as) said yesterday:

‘Today every working person in Britain is paying almost £700 a year for housing benefit. This is unfair to taxpayers, but also unfair to the people on benefits living in accommodation that they could never afford to maintain if they entered work.

My emphasis. Read the whole article which might open your eyes at the newspaper’s website

Ampers

More on Open Source

This concerns our own British Government. I have highlighted the passage I want to talk about in red below.

UK: Open source gets a place in long-term strategy city councils

by Gijs Hillenius — published on Sep 28, 2010

— filed under: OpenOffice.org and ODF in public authorities, Office Suites, Desktop Environment, OpenOffice, [GL] United Kingdom, [T] Deployments and Migrations, Office/Business

City councils in the United Kingdom are turning to using open source software to reach long-term goals to battle vendor lock-in, increase interoperability and save costs. The national government meanwhile is asking for business cases proving that using open source is cheaper.

Reaching such goals in the short term is hard, discovered the council of the city of Bristol. Its plans to use OpenOffice on its desktop are hampered because of the widespread use of proprietary documents formats by other UK public administrations, Mark Wright, the city councillor responsible for IT, explained last week at seminar on open source in government.

To overcome this interoperability, Bristol is forced to spend 7.3 million GBP (about 8.6 million Euro) on proprietary software licences, according to proposal published by the city.

“The Council is a strong advocate of open data, open standards and  open source solutions. Our ‘Open ICT strategy’ mandates future suppliers of ICT products must comply with open standards and offer open source solutions in line with Government and Council policy. Therefore, the recommended solution must support this position but also address the business critical requirements that need to be met, in particular to exchange information with partners and to integrate with other business systems”, the IT department writes.

According to Computing, an UK IT news site, councillor Wright explained that he thought Bristol would be the first of many city councils moving to open source. “However, we remained the only council to do so, with other councils expecting documents to be created in Microsoft. Microsoft tends to run the closed file format docx. It does have an open source file format, odf, but doesn’t offer much support for this.”

Collaboration

At the same seminar, the council of the city of Birmingham also announced its intention to do more with open source in the long term. According to a report by Computer Weekly, Birmingham started a review of its IT strategy. The city aims to be able to use open source to save costs and to increase collaboration with other organisations.

“Like all authorities, what we are facing at the moment are fairly significant cuts. Any potential cost-reduction business case is receiving serious scrutiny,” Gerry McMullan, business policy manager for the council, was quoted by Computer Weekly. “So we will be looking again at some of the cost aspects of open source.”

Speaking at a different conference, Bill McCluggage, deputy chief information officer for the UK government, last week hinted the government will specify the use of open standards, which should open the way for open source applications. He also called for business cases that show that using open source is cheaper than using proprietary software.

IT Pro, a UK IT news site, quoted McCluggage as saying: “I have not seen a business case that has articulated open source being cheaper than proprietary.”

I am not sure how to take the comments of the UK government’s deputy chief information officer above, highlighted in red. Earlier he talks in favour of Open Source, but to the Press he says something that seems very different.

Bearing in mind that Microsoft licenses are hugely expensive and for most of the civil service covers not only licenses for Windows, but for Microsoft Office as well. We are talking huge bucks here.

The Linux operating system is free, as is Open Office. Admittedly there is the cost of retraining the IT people, but that is a once-off cost en masse, and when people leave, it will be much easier to train new staff individually.

Even if you added the Microsoft licence cost to the support costs, supporting Linux would be much lower than the combined cost.

As for Open Source “Open Office” having a different file structure.Yes, that is so, but Open Office can not only read Microsoft’s new docx files easily, but can save back to Microsoft Office format so Bristol Council’s reason for keeping to Microsoft is disengenerous!

It would make sense if McCluggage was illegally taking a bribe from Microsoft but, as McCluggage works as a senior man for the Government, this could just not possibly be. No way would anyone in the Government take kickbacks, would they?

So it will have to remain a mystery and we tax-payers will have to bite the bullet and continue paying Microsoft their very large license fees. Unless he has been misquoted by the press. It would be nice to have this cleared up.

Ampers.

 

I may despise the EU but…

… I do appreciate their rules on Open Source and Linux software. Here is an extract from their local monthly newsletter on Open Source.

Latest News

| View all News

• EU: Legal experts to discuss laws and procurements on open source

  | 20 October 2010 | EU

• ES: Guidelines to help local administrations procure open source

  | 21 October 2010 | Spain

• ES: Public administrations in Axarquia moving to open source desktops

  | 21 October 2010 | Spain

• FR: ‘Marseille’s desktop plans conflict with procurement rules’

  | 27 October 2010 | France

• PT: ‘Gvt must stop breaking procurement rules and move to open source’

  | 27 October 2010 | Portugal

• EU’s procurement tool supports purchase orders and service catalogues

  | 28 October 2010 | EU

• Malta government starts consultation to increase use of open source

  | 28 October 2010 | Malta

• Russian government to invest in open source desktop

  | 28 October 2010 | Russia

• ES: Andalusia: ‘Open source has helped save millions of Euro’

  | 28 October 2010 | Spain

• DE: Resource centre helps public administrations implement open source

  | 29 October 2010 | Germany

Linda Norgrove

No wonder this Highland girl was a caring loving soul, I have just watched her parents talking for the first time and their position is what I would expect from these hardy islanders. Mature and thoughtful.

I cannot say the same for the uncaring thoughtless Police in Lewis in the Western Isles. When word came though of her death they immediately went to inform the parents.

At three o’clock in the fucking morning!

Most readers know I rarely swear on my blog but there are times when one just needs to vent their real anger at the stupidly of some people.

The early hours of the morning is when sleep is deepest, and being woken up leaves the sleeper vulnerable.

For God’s sake, that’s when you go to arrest villains!

Ampers.

Virgin Mobile don’t get it!

We have moved away from Labour, but not Virgin Mobile. They still think they are part of the nanny state.

They will not allow me to go into certain websites because they think they know better than I do of what is good for me.

I was born in 1939. I am 71 years of age, and they know this as my account on their website reflects my date of birth. However, recently I tried to go into a communication website from their mobile and it wouldn’t let me.

Now if this website was porn they might think they would have a case to stop a seventy-one year old from getting too excited! However, the only thing that truly excites me nowadays is the sexy black shiny bottle of South African Imoya VSOP Brandy!

When I emailed them, they took nearly a week to reply and all that was to say they I should use their secure website as then they would know that the email was from me.

I do understand that in some cases, this could well be a good idea. However, when a seventy-one year old who they know is seventy-one asks them to tweak their website to make sure it now recognises the seventy-one year old is seventy-one, a secure email is not needed. It could be Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler or Tony Blair sending them the email, but it would not matter. After all, it is just an email telling them to get their act together.

I will be writing further about companies acting like the previous government so please, dear reader, if you have had any difficulties with Virgin Mobile or, indeed any other company, please write and let me know.

I have given Virgin the right of reply as I believe this is the proper thing to do. However they have not replied but that could be due to the slowness of a Corporate. So if they reply, I will add it as a comment at a later stage.

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Nothing changes

Will Rogers wrote, in 1924:

“The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other.”

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Nigel, UKIP still has my vote.

Nothing more to say!

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Professor who?

According to an economist who has won a Nobel prize recently, we have no debt crises in this country, and Osborne is using it as a false excude to make his spending cuts.

First of all, most of these prizes are dolled out for political reasons (usually with a small p) so it is best not to take too much notice of what they use as the criteria for their awards. I mention just two awards in Britain that are very political as an example: the Turner Prize and the Booker Prize to illustrate my views! Enough said!

And where could this illustrious professor place his article? In a learned journal? No! In one fo the so called broadsheet newspapers? No. It was in the trashy Daily Mirror that leans over to be a Labour newspaper so much even hardy left-wingers get a little embarrassed reading it.

And, it is a well established fact, that if you get three economists together you will have three opposing views and three totally different opinions.

I could Google this professors name for you I suppose, but quite honestly, I don’t think he is that important.

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A solution to the greedy banks

I came across this paragraph on an Adam Smith Institute blog:

However, given the threats by both HSBC and Barclays to relocate to Hong Kong and New York respectively, it is probable that the risk of losing their valuable tax revenues will prevail over any ideological reasons for compulsory separation.

It has always been my nature to want to counteract any threats, heavily, and immediately, and this enabled me to come up with an idea which could immediately counteract the threat.

Could not the government counter with a ruling that no bank, operating in the UK, may have more than ten branches if their head office is not based here? This would not concern Investment Banks but would be a major blow for High Street banks.

If the two major banks blackmailing the Government still carried out their threats, they would have to sell all their branches before relocating and this would probably mean a double loss. First of all the loss of business, and secondly, the loss of sales of real estate at a time when the economy is certainly not booming.

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Chinless Wonders

I am referring, of course, to the Aristocracy. However, I do not share the contempt of the masses for these people.

First of all, the British Empire was built by these people commanding our ”masses”, and there weren’t so many of them in those days. Then, they commanded the the navy and army which, in the past as now, were highly successful. OK, there have been some “interesting” cases but these were few.

I think a lot of the aristocratic war heroes of the past were created because the younger aristocrats did seem to have a death wish, pursuing dangerous acts which would never now be allowed under “Elf ‘n’ safe tea”.

But in reality, I think the Aristocrats care much more for our country and heritage than the majority of the rest of us. They are also more courageous than many which, in government, means they will be more willing to bite the bullet to get things right.

Alan Johnson, the shadow chancellor was disingenuous when he accused the government of being happy to create misery for others and as such, should be rebuked. He seems to be no better than any of the discredited people on the Labour front bench. Yes, the Conservatives cheered all right. But they were cheering because Osborne was “biting the bullet” and putting things right.

You only have to look at my post below to realise that something drastic needs to be done!

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Jon Snow of Channel Four

This has been taken from Jon’s blog at C4:

Israel spends £9 billion annually on procurement and has a staff of 400 people to do it.
Britain spends £10 billion annually on procurement and has a staff of 23,700 people to do it.

The full blog can be read here.

 

 

SWWLTBO (She who would like to be obeyed)

My better half is an intelligent woman, from a professional middle class family, but after we were married, I noticed that she, like most people, thought the BBC was an honest impartial broadcaster.

No, this doesn’t make her stupid. Unless people question everything they see and hear, one tends to take many things for granted.

It was only when I started pointing out the obvious imbalance of their reporting and their programmes, that she twigged, and can spot bias even faster than I can! (I did say she was intelligent.)

The latest bug-word the BBC and the luvvies of the left have latched onto is “fair”.

We must be fair to the work-shy who have been milking the poor tax-payer for years. We must be fair and pay layabouts to live in nicer areas. The people who produce must pay some of their hard earned money to the work-shy who sit on their backsides all day watching TV and drinking their lager.

My blog below says all there needs to be known about being fair!

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We should all be living in a more fairer society.

Fair means if you put more in, you take more out.
Fair means if you put less in you take less out
Fair means if you work hard you eat well and go out to restaurants
Fair means if you evade work you eat at home only.
Fair means if you earn more you drive a car.
Fair means if you live on state handouts, you walk everywhere or go by bus.
Fair means if you work hard you holiday in the Italian Riviera.
Fair means if you don’t work, you holiday in Skegness.

This is what fair means.

Education, the abc of it.

The country needs better educated people if it is going to progress in the modern age. I agree they should pay their way but I also think we need to encourage them to take the right degree.

I think we should grade courses with an (a), (b) or (c) with the earnings to start paying back being on a sliding scale between 26k, 21k and 16k. Then we can grade all the degrees really useful to the country advancement in the international industrial market as (a); degrees that will help the country internally as (b); degrees that will only help the student as (c).

David Cameron has read the book called “Nudge” as I have – I know he has as he has invited the American author to Downing Street for a discussion. This is a way of nudging Students to go for courses that will help Britain, whilst at the same time not forcing them to follow a specific subscribed route.

Nudge, a book written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, is about Libertarian Paternalism. An unfortunate phrase as it consists of two words not well accepted by society. However when put together, it shows how you can encourage the right choices by how you present them. For example, in supermarkets, they nudge you to buy the more expensive choices by putting those items at face level, as mentioned by Tim Harford in his “The Under Cover Economist”. Agreed, this use doesn’t come under paternalism!

I read these sort of books as I find, as a shopper, it is useful to understand the psychology the companies are using against me. Take Starbucks (far away please) for example, do you need the expensive Lattes or Cappuccinos when all you want is a coffee. I buy the cheaper “Americano”  (double espresso topped up to a full cup with hot water, with a small jug of cold milk) and it is tasty, I get my fix, and save up to two pounds a time!

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