Health and Safety Overreaction of the Week

Tonbridge and Malling Council are warning residents about an insect that can cause severe health risks to residents. So severe, they recommend only dealing with the critters after donning several protective measures...

What is the source of this insect terror? What insect is so deadly it almost requires donning a biohazard suit to handle? A moth caterpillar with hairs that can make you itch and might even give you a touch of asthma.

W. T. F. ? ?

We have teenagers put in harms way and being killed on foreign soil and T&M council get in a tizzy about a fucking moth. Someone over there needs to teach the fuckers a lesson in priorities.

End of Blogging for a While

To be honest, I just can't be bothered ranting about all the shit and injustice there is in this country.

I really have had enough of the hypocrisy of those in charge, the injustices meeted out on the disadvantaged in this country while those in power talk about fixing our problems and do the fucking opposite.

Next year I have no doubt it'll be same shit, different government.

I hope to god that at some point the British public wake up, but I'm pretty sure that the masses won't dissapoint me and do absolutely fuck all about it.

What started this off you may ask? Well, I started a blog on how the poor pay more tax (relative to income), higher fuel costs, higher government costs, and how generally people could be empowered by the government getting the fuck out of their lives. But that won't happen, the government needs to control.

I'm now very much in contact with the government harness that they are placing around us. I can see it and feel it, it is in my life every day. To those in the middle classes lucky enough not to encounter it, or to see it as only a minor irritation I say good on you. But you will encounter it eventually, just as the lower classes have.

I may as well rant to myself rather than type it out here. My life is shit and to be honest its going to be depressing reading. I doubt you'd enjoy it. It's not like I'm changing the world by doing this am I? Is anyone able to change things taking any notice? No. So, I ask myself, whats the fucking point in sitting here ranting?

No, there isn't any.

Apart from This: To all the ranters that have a pop at those on benefits and their inability to do anything to improve their situation: You have to be in the shoes of those on benefits to appreciate the depressing banality of life, the soul-sucking pointlessness of attempting to improve your situation, the huge injustice of a barely escapable system clearly designed (despite government spin) to trap you into the benefit culture, before you cast judgement.

Eight years ago I was an I.T. manager earning a quite sizeable wedge of money. Fate, family issues and a pretty piss-poor support system for my disabled son meant I'm now here, at the bottom of the pond looking up. It could happen to any one of you.

Banks: Too big to Fail?

I've been watching the financial results of the various banks this week with an amount of curiosity and some horror. Here's an overview of the various bank results on the BBC website.

Especially the Northern Rock Results. How the fuck can a high street bank, whith (as far as I know) no global presence make nearly 1 billion quids worth of losses? How can they be doing that amount of business with (again, as far as I can tell) nowhere near that amount of assets to back up the business? Isn't that classic insolvency?

When NR went bust, we were told the problem was one of liquidity, not insolvency: that the bank was having a cashflow problem. More and more it seems that the bank was trading insolvently. Maybe not knowingly: it may have believed the value of the assets it had on its books. But as the financial adverts say to inform us the public: "The value may go up and down". It seems the valuations of NR's assets and the security of it's debtors may not have been what was believed before the crash and now even worse, what it was valued at after the crash.

The whole sorry sage of NR and the other banks, lends me to say that I think the banks are too big. When a smallish high street bank is doing billions of pounds worth of business, with spuriously valued assets to back that business up, I say that business model is deeply flawed. Also to be honest, I don't think banks should be doing that amount of business, because if it fails, it puts a deep dent in the rest of the financial system. In effect the bank is too big to fail.

The reason for all the blind panic and the hundreds of billions thrown at the banks in order to prop them up is the fact that the virtual business of financial transactions have replaced traditional real business in generating tax revenues. Thats what the government was preserving when it lashed out billions: it was desperately propping up the whole virtual house of cards that tax revenue in this country is based on.

Look deeper and you see that a large percentage of tax revenue in the UK is based on financial transactions which are themselves based and secured on spuriously valued virtual assets. To me that percentage is still far too overvalued, even after the crash.

If ever a reality check did hit the financial sector, we would, as I've predicted before, be catapulted into third world status. I don't know about you, but I'm more than concerned about this.

Its no way to run a business, a bank and especially no way to run a country.

The successive government's policies that have allowed tax revenue generation to shift from hard, real industry to virtual, financial business in the volumes that they have in recent history, need a radical rethink. The downside is, how to we get back into the global business of hard industry?