Something Wrong Here

Around a third of the total Indian population lives below the international poverty line according to the World Bank and the UN say that a third of malnourished children worldwide are found In India. The 2011 Global Hunger Index (GHI) report placed India amongst only three countries where the GHI went up. Thankfully, Britain gives India £280million a year in Aid.

In April, India announced they had developed the long range intercontinental Agni-V ballistic missile able to carry a nuclear warhead It has cost more than £307m to develop.

In today's news, India has announced that it is stepping up its space program with the launch of a new satellite, a proposed mission to Mars and ten space missions by November 2013, bringing its total budget to $1.3 billion.

Something is very, very, very wrong with this picture.

At Home With Frasier, Niles & Daphne

I do like my box-sets but over the last few years i do seem to have worked my way through pretty much all the television shows that i could spend a whole weekend with.
After Buffy, Angel, Red Dwarf, Blackadder, Quantum Leap, 'Allo 'Allo, MASH, Father Ted, Due South, Fawlty Towers and Just Good Friends, there was just not anything else left on the shelf of the buy and exchange shop that i wanted to watch for hours on end. Then Frasier caught my eye.
I never really got into Cheers and was a latecomer to Frasier, must have been around about the third or fourth series that i began to watch it so being able to see the first few series that are completely new to me was quite a bonus.
It does have that mid-nineties feel to it and Kelsey Grammer plays his role very well but to me the star of the show is Niles played by David Hyde Pierce. What a great character, completely dwarfs Frasier.
Although Daphne often mentions that she is from Manchester, that accent sure isn't but i guess to an American ear it sounds English so that is close enough.
What i like about watching programmes that have since stopped is finding out what actors have done since and apart from Jane Leeves turning up on Have I Got News For You a few years ago when her Frasier career was coming to an end, i haven't seen any of them in anything else since.
What i do like about American series over the British is that a series comprises of 22 or 24 episodes while a British series is generally 6 episodes. Apparently the reason is that a British sitcom or drama is written by one or two people while the Americans have a team of writers on their shows so in the entire four series of Blackadder you get 24 shows which equals one series of Frasier.           
David Hyde Pierce therefore joins James Marsters (Spike), Scott Bakula (Sam Beckett), Alan Alda (Hawkeye) and Paul Gross (Benton) in my list of actors that I thought deserved to go on and do more things but sadly faded out of sight after the end credits of the last show of the DVD box set.

If I Was American

On Tuesday, November 6, 2012, the American public will vote to elect a new President. As i am not American, i can't vote but I am British and we have a long history of telling other countries what to do so i'm going to pretend that i have a vote and look at who i would cast it for if i was American.
I elect Montana as my pretend place of birth, it looks breathtakingly beautiful and it is close to Canada so it shouldn't be too hot in the summer and it snows in the Winter, lots, and i love snow.
So here i am sat on the porch in one of those creaky swinging chairs, wearing a pair of Wrangler jeans, a check lumberjack shirt and ten gallon hat and drinking Jack Daniels from the bottle while watching the elk and moose wandering across the plains and i'm thinking 'Dang, i gotsa vote but whos i gonna vote fer'. 
As Montana is in the top 8 of the least populated states, my nearest neighbour is miles away and it's Saturday so the family is off watching the Montana Grizzlies play anyway so i turn on the Internet for advice.     
After a bit of Googling i come across a blog, Falling On A Bruise, that has a run-down of all the American parties on offer but i see that it's run by a Limey woman and quickly leave. Doggarn Brits, got nothing to do with them but what you expect from a country that doesn't allow their citizens to own guns. If they spent less time trying to tell other countries what to do and spent more time shooting things maybe their Health Service wouldn't need so many death panels. And they can't even spell right, what's with all those extra U's in their words?
Anyway, this election is out of the Republicans or the Democrats but wait a cotton pickin' minute, there are other parties that i could vote for. 
The Constitution Party, Green Party and Libertarian Party all field enough candidates and appear on enough state ballots in the US of A to gain the 270 electoral votes needed so rather than just two parties, it is actually a five party race so why don't we ever hear about those other three?
The Constitution Party came third in 2008 with 199,134 votes while the Greens got 161,603 votes which is about 0.15% and 0.12% of the vote which in a country of 311 million is very poor if they fielded that many candidates.
Maybe they need some rich backers like the Dems and Reps have to run some adverts to make people aware they are around and an alternative to the big 2 who dominate the scene.
I've decided anyway, it's the Socialist Party USA i'm voting for. That will show that Limey varmint at that Bruise blog.
Oh dammit, Piers Morgan is on CNN. Randy, where's mamma's gun, i got me some shootin' to do.

Lesson Learned By America?

What you have to remember while Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu turns up at the UN with a cartoon bomb drawn by a 4 year old, is that there is no evidence that Iran has, or is planning, to build nuclear weapons.
That fact seems to have been purposely overlooked as Israel press America to act and it seems to be working as a poll shows that 84% of Americans believe that Iran already has a nuclear weapons program and 71% think they already have the weapons. If Obama wanted to sell another war to his citizens than he wouldn't have too much of a problem but it seems that Obama is not as keen as Israel to take on the Iranians.
He has foiled Israel's push for an attack on Iran and refuses to agree to Netanyahu's 'red lines' which would lead to military action because he believes that there is 'still time and space for diplomacy'.
If there were evidence, there would be no question that Israel would come to the UN armed with more than a cartoon bomb picture and a red marker but it seems that America is holding back, possibly because they had their fingers burned a decade ago in the same region when they made they went to war quoting the Iraq  WMD program as justification only to find out Saddam was right all along at the cost of  thousands of American dead soldiers, a million dead Iraqi citizens, a bill of over $3 trillion and Americas tarnished reputation.
Hopefully, America, if not Israel, have learned the lessons of the past and are paying attention to the long list of 'no evidence' reports that the IAEA and there own Intelligence are continually providing.
In 2003 an IAEA report states that it found no evidence of activities related to a nuclear weapons program and in 2007 the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate reached the same conclusion a month before yet another IAEA report repeated their no evidence charge. 
In 2008 the IAEA said that all the past undeclared nuclear activities had been resolved and they had no evidence of any diversion of nuclear material for non-peaceful uses while in 2009 The U.S. State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research noted that the U.S. intelligence community has no evidence that Iran has yet made the decision to produce highly enriched uranium. A view confirmed in February this year by American intelligence analysts who believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.
There doesn't seem to be much love between Obama and Netanyahu, in 2011 Nicolas Sarkozy was overheard calling the Israeli Premier 'a liar' and Obama replying ‘You are sick of him, but I have to deal with him every day.’
When Nertanyahu requested a private meeting with the American President when he was the country this week for his UN speech, Obama refused and the US UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, was not even in attendance at the UN to hear Netanyahu make his case for attacking Iran, preferring to attend a lunch which should send a very strong signal to the Israeli Premier when even your only real ally ignores you, you are on shaky ground. 
If Netanyahu really believe that Iran is building a nuclear missile and has the evidence then he should present it otherwise Sarkozy is right and he is just plain lying and we know from previous experience that Israel have little conscience when it comes to taking innocent lives, ask the families of any of the 7000 Palestinians killed this century by Israel. 
We can only hope that the recent dismissal of Israeli noise shows a sense that the Obama administration is distancing itself from Israel because it wants nothing to do with a potential attack on Iran and that leaves Israel, already viewed as the greatest threat to World peace ahead of the Iran and the other bogeymen North Korea, sorely isolated and no amount of nursery school level drawings of cartoon bombs will change that.

Americans Won't Get This Post

It always make me smile that the Germans have no word for Schadenfreude or the French have no way of saying rendezvous but i didn't know that the English have words that don't exist in the American vocabulary.
Brilliant, we can talk about them now and they won't know.
No more faffing about with all that daft political correctness crap just to avoid a kerfuffle, if they cant suss out what we are saying then in future then they can bloody well naff off somewhere else. Effing cheek of it.
The Not One-Off Britishisms blog has a list of words and phrases that are relatively unknown in America which we use over here such as cock-up, dodgy and shite which funnily enough were all words used frequently on British blogs during the George W Bush era.     
I would be a proper arse not to take the opportunity to have a laugh at the yankees expense and they would be proper gobsmacked if they knew, they get their knickers in a twist over most things anyway, the plums.  
I have my fingers crossed that there are no Americans amongst us, it wouldn't be clever to bad mouth people directly before opening the comments section where i'm sure someone would want to have a quiet word with me and i'm not keen on that. Nope, don't fancy that at all.
Anyway, good on our mate at the NOOBS blog for doing such a spot on job of making a short-list of the words and phrases that us Brits can use to insult Americans while we pretend to get on with them. 
Have a look at the barmy way they do the date and have knackered the language by dropping the letter u, its a vowel for crying out loud!"   
Hang on, the NOOBS blog says these are all phrases and words that are now being used in America which means they will understand bits of it.
Oh bugger and bollocks.

X-37B Theories

Those Americans Government types are up to something sneaky again, sending a space plane into the sky but not having the common decency to tell us why.    
The US Air Force will only confirm that they will once again launch its mysterious X-37B space plane back into orbit for a third time, but what it will do there remains a mystery, the Air Force only saying that it's job is to 'assure access to space for Department of Defence and other government payloads' which isn't really giving anything away.
In the absence of an explanation, the conspiracy theorists have made up their own and they think that it is either engaging in sneaky surveillance missions or this is a step to weaponising space.
NBC said that 'The satellite can see through night and through bad weather, which means that it can also zoom in to any country with great detail, like a Google Earth on serious Cold War steroids' China though think something much more sinister is afoot.
China's state-run Xinhua news agency said 'Industry analysts said the spacecraft could be a precursor to an orbiting weapon, capable of dropping bombs or disabling enemy satellites as it circles the globe'.
Whatever it is doing, whether it is gathering information on us all, working out how to drop nuclear bombs from a great height, is up there to knock out everyone else's satellites or is a new kind of reusable spacecraft, America isn't telling but it has China spooked which may well be the whole point, psyching-out the opposition.
Or is it there and armed to the teeth with lasers because an alien invasion is imminent but that's my own theory.

Simple Solution To Stop Floods

Due to the amount of rain Britain has seen recently, the river banks are overflowing again and towns are flooding the same as they did in the early summer and have done every year recently.
Thanks to Global warming or the shifting jet stream or whatever reason we can come up with, the fact is that Britain is seeing more rain than is usual and therefore more pictures of poor villagers with their living rooms full of water.
The response is to strengthen river banks with flood defences which comprises of making the banks higher and higher but that doesn't go down particularly well because they are not aesthetically pleasing, massive lumps of concrete along the rivers banks may work but they look ugly.
Why not, i have often wondered, instead of building up the river bank, why not just dredge the rivers to make them deeper?      
Not viable say the Environmental Agency because they would have to dredge a few meters down and 'It must be repeated after every extreme flood, as the river silts up again'.
I accept that to dredge every river would be time consuming and expensive but surely they could dredge the ones that flood time and time again because that has to be better than the poor people who get flooded every time it rains enough.
With the extreme weather and floods becoming more the norm, villages along the rivers will become deserted as people move away as the cost of insurance goes through the roof, there are already people with no house contents insurance as they cannot afford it who lose everything to the flood waters.
Then there is the cost of the mopping up operation which runs into tens of millions each time so making the rivers deeper so they hold more water seems an obvious solution to me but then that could explain why I'm not employed at the Environment Agency.

The Magna Carta

It's nice to see that David Cameron knows about the Manga Carta because i doubt if 99% of Brits know but we assume it was something very important, which it was if you were a noble but for the vast majority of the country it wasn't much use at all.    
The story goes that King John of England was forced to sign The Magna Carta so he and whoever followed him onto the throne could no longer ride roughshod over their subjects.
In reality, The Magna Carta provided plenty of personal rights and freedoms if you were wealthy because it was the landowners and Barons who wrote the Magna Carta and forced King John to sign it because they were outraged that he kept putting up their rent.
Not so much motivated by a sense of great injustice at King John’s acts of cruelty and murder against his subjects, more because he was trying to squeeze more money out of them.
The Magna Carta wasn't even an original piece, it was copied from the Charter of Liberties that Henry I signed in 1100 promising to respect certain rights of the Church and the Barons.
Far from being the basis of all English law, of the original 61 clauses, only 3 remain which are the freedom of the Church of England, the continued ancient liberties of the City of London and that no freeman shall be denied Justice or Right.
There's nothing in the charter to corresponding to a right of a citizen and Oliver Cromwell dismissed it as the 'Magna Farta' and said that it 'tied one sort of people to be slaves to another; Clergy and Gentry have got their freedom, but the common people still are, and have been left servants to work for them.'
Politician's like to portray the idea that signing of the Magna Carta was when the common man gained his rights but actually, the only beneficiaries were the English nobility and the Church of England, the rest of us continued to toil in the fields under the control of the Barons who treated the common folk with much more disdain than King John ever treated the nobility. 
So next time a politician quotes the Magna Carta in order to push through some unpopular law, unless it is regarding the ancient liberties of London, the freedom of the Church or the justice of a freeman, the probability is very high that he or she is bluffing because everything else has been swept to one side, deemed as not important, by those same people.     

Cameron At The United Nations

Dave Cameron: I have to speak at the UN today, what you got for me?
Speechwriter: Well, i scribble a few lines about about World peace and ridding the World of poverty. Any good?
Dave Cameron: Not that load of nosh again. Look, Libya seems to have been forgotten and i'm really unpopular after all those cuts and flogging off the NHS and all that, and i need to find a way to go to war with someone without actually sounding like i want to go to war with someone. Humanitarian intervention, that sort of thing.   
Speechwriter: Syria or Iran?
Cameron: What you got on Syria?
Speechwriter: How about something along the lines of 'The blood of these young children in Syria is a terrible stain on the reputation of this United Nations. And in particular, a stain on those who have failed to stand up to these atrocities and in some cases aided and abetted Assad's reign of terror'.
Cameron: Yes, i like it. Makes me look a big tough guy and that's the most important thing.
Speechwriter: Of course the real stain is people like us, the USA and Israel who instead of working though the UN to do what is possible to negotiate a solution in Syria, have been taking sides and fanning the flames of war.
Cameron: Duh, of course but we won't tell them that.
Speechwriter:  Or that we twist enough arms at the UN to legitimise the regime changes that us and the yanks want.
Cameron: Damn straight. Now type that up and let me have a copy. I'm off to find a disabled person to abuse for scrounging benefits and not getting a job.

How To Use E-Cigarettes

Day 12 and still no cigarettes so for me the e-cigarette is working but oh it was close because without a few minor adjustments to how you use them, the e-cigarettes are a bit poor and i was ready to throw them away on the second day until an old hand at the vaping game told me the proper way to use e-cigarettes, and it isn't how the manufacturers tell you.  
When you first get your e-cigarette kit you get the three main components which are the battery, the atomiser which is the bit that does the burning and an empty cartridge which is just there to show you where the cartridges go.
Also contained are the full cartridges which slot onto the atomiser and contain the nicotine soaked fibres which the atomiser burns and releases the fumes which you inhale.
Each cartridge lasts the equivalent of 5 cigarettes apparently and then it is back online to buy more or you can buy nicotine liquid that you drip onto the fibres and off you go again.
That's how they are supposed to work but a new cartridge will get you 5 or 6 good draws and then you are back to filling up the cartridge again which is what i was doing until i was shown the 'oither' way.
Grab that empty cartridge and instead of dripping the nicotine fluid into the cartridge, drip 2-3 drops straight into the atomiser, put the empty cartridge back on and inhale.
You not only get a much better 'draw', but it lasts a lot longer than the cartridge and you don't need to pay for the ready filled cartridges.
Hopefully, if you are not getting the full affect of the e-cigarette and are wondering if you are doing something wrong and has typed in 'How to use e-cigarettes', which is exactly what i did and didn't stumble across any sites that advised 'direct dripping', they may come across this post and find a way to keep going on the 'giving up smoking using e-cigarettes' route that i am presently on and would probably have given up on if i had to rely on the cartridges.