The Maths Of National Insurance

The Taxpayers Alliance have issued a report which shows that over a lifetime, an average earning employee will pay £107,045 in National Insurance Contributions (NIC).
NIC goes towards state benefits such as unemployment benefit but mostly it is for your state pension and you have to pay in for 30 years to get the full state pension which is currently £185 per week.
Now i hold my hands up here of my Math's goes wonky but the retirement age is set at 67 and the average life expectancy in the UK is 81 so that's 14 years or 579 weeks of State Pension which amounts to £134,680 so if you blow out the candles on your 81st Birthday, you are receiving more than you paid in.
If you make it to 78 before running down the curtain and joining the invisible then you will receive back everything that you have paid in but go to push up the daises before 78 and it goes into the big pot named Government Coffers to spend on whatever they want.
The VividMaps website shows that 13% of the British population die before reaching retirement age so of the approximate 65 million, which is about 8.45 million people so in conclusion...that's where my brain screams enough and the maths breaks down so i am still unsure whether the Government make out of our National Insurance Contributions or not.

Boris Bigging Up His Record In Government

There are rumour's going around that Boris Johnson may have resigned as Prime Minster but he will remain an MP because as she was not even the choice of her own colleagues, Liz Truss is not expected to last until the next Election and he will be handily placed to step back into the breech once again, pending everyone forgetting just how awful he was the first time.
He hasn't even left yet and he is talking up his record in Government so maybe we should take a bit of a closer look at exactly what he done compared to his 2019 Manifesto promises.
First up is the 20,000 extra police officers to replace the 21,000 his predecessors cut which currently stands at 13,790 so we can't tick that one off  so not a great start.
What the NHS is crying out for is new Hospitals and Boris promised 40 new ones so with only 3 being built, only another 37 to go although he did change the definition of what he meant by 'new' to also mean a refurbishment but even with the new meaning of new, it's still only 22 so maybe just as well he hasn't got anywhere near the extra staff he promised of 50,000 more nurses and 6,000 more GPs as it is 23,753 more nurses and only 738 GP's.
Maybe the Hospital building is taking a back seat while the 300,000 new homes a year are being built but as 242,000 in 2019-20 was the closest it got to that figure, it probably isn't the reason.
One of the main pledges was to 'Get Brexit Done' and on the one hand he has taken us out of the EU but 3 trade deals to replace the 40 we lost and talking about breaking International Law over Northern Ireland, reversal of the foreign workers exit and supply line crisis and the economy taking a 4% hit to GDP makes it sound as though something got done but it certainly wasn't Brexit.
Towards the end of the manifesto was a pledge of no rise in rates of income tax, National Insurance or VAT but we know that wasn't kept as national Insurance went up buy 1.25p for everyone and the promise to keep spending 0.7% of GDP on international aid was quickly dropped as the Government cut it to 0.5% almost before the ink was dry.
As well as pledges, Boris Johnson has made claims about his government's record during the pandemic such as the fastest vaccine roll-out in Europe and very true, we were one of the very first but it was due to the NHS independent of Government who handed over responsibility to them for the roll out so bit of a cheek for Boris to claim he was responsible for it.
All in all, not great and that is without factoring in the law breaking, corruption, the scandals, police fines, the lock down parties, the loss of safe Tory seats, wallpaper-gate, the lies and the lie cover-ups and the plummeting poll ratings so if Boris is hoping all that will be forgotten by 2024, he is even more deluded than that time he asked us to trust him that all the rules had been followed in Downing Street during lock-down.

Mikhail Gorbachev

I always had a bit of a soft spot for Mikhail Gorbachev because it always seemed to me that the whole Soviet Union break up thing was a situation that he began rolling which kind of got away from him and before he realised what was happening, it had snowballed and he had done himself out of a job.
As a Cold War kind in the 80's, i remember the quick turnaround of Soviet Leaders from Brezhnev to Andropov and Chernenko who all seemed scary men in a nation armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles and then along come Gorbachev in 1986 with his Perestroika and Glasnost and meeting with the Western leaders to reduce the Nuclear Arsenals and finally it seemed that the insanity which was Mutually Assured Destruction was a reducing threat.
It was Andropov who realised that the Soviet Defence budget was crippling them and he started the reformations which Gorbachev continued although during later interviews, he admitted that he envisioned a gradual change to a form of Socialism over the course of a decade or two but within a few short years the Soviet Union had broken up and Communism was falling all around Eastern Europe.
It may have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize but as the USSR crumbled, his powers were transferred to Russian President Boris Yeltsin who's political endeavours are best summed up by the story that he once was so drunk while flying to a meeting in Scotland that he couldn't get off the plane.  
Gorbachev never made any secret that events just overtook him and my memory of him will always be in my minds eye, as he cleared his desk that final day in 1991, he looked around him and thought 'How the hell did this happen?'

Green Day - Warning:

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 1 we have Warning: by Green Day

I know what you are thinking, how the Freaking Hell did a Green Day album which wasn't even that big a hit for them beat some of those other classic albums and i'm as shocked as anyone but of the 12 songs on the album, i only skip the one, Jackass, so using that criteria it sits proudly at the top with 91.67% of the album listened to. Hey, blame Math's not me.
What is obvious on this album is that the band stepped back from the angry Punk sound of their earlier offerings and aimed for a more folk-punk sound, citing Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Petula Clark, The Mama's and Papa's and The Kinks as inspirations and those guys are as folky as it gets and that
is most evident on the title song Warning song which is almost directly lifted from the Kinks Picture Book. How Ray Davis failed to sue and buy himself a new yacht to replace the one the taxman took i will never know.
The album includes probably my favourite Green Day Song which is the very un-Green Day like Misery which paints a picture of Virginia, Mr. Whirly, Vinnie and Gina who all come to a grisly end to a happy sounding Mariachi style tune.  
The other acoustic songs are Macy Day's Parade and Hold On but to dispel any sense that they were moving from the punk stage into Corduroy and plaid shirt territory, the album also has the more hard edged usual Green Day sound songs Minority, Deadbeat Holiday, Blood Sex and Booze, Church on Sunday and Castaway.
Guitarist Jason White was bought in to add some more fiddly bits to the music and stayed around ever since and he had certainly bought a new dimension to the band, American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown were classic Green Day but after a brief flirtation with mega-stardom, they seemed to have peaked and after shedding all those extra new fans, have happily shifted into the background again, helped by the next three albums, Uno, Deux, Trois albums being more like their earlier, less commercially accepted, body of work.

There they are then, my top 15 Albums and i agree there are not many modern ones and if you are not a fan of the angry, guitar driven stuff then you probably think they all suck and that's fine, each to their own and all that, but i guess one day i will grow up and embrace safe, radio friendly middle of the road sounds or alternatively, and more likely, i could just say f*** that and carry on until i'm in my old peoples home and having the residents banging on the wall at 2am telling me to TURN THAT BLOODY RACKET DOWN which would complete the circle because that's exactly what my parents shouted at me when i was a kid.

Defying Gravity

Gravity, it is said, is pretty weak. Pick something up off the floor, there you go, you have defied a whole planets worth of gravity but what Gravity has got is that it is constant so put down whatever it was you picked up and jump. You coming back down and failing to hit the ceiling is you NOT defying the Planets worth of Gravity.
With the Artemis rocket due to launch tomorrow morning (8.30am BST), to escape the pull of the Earth if it will burn through six tonnes of fuel per second provided by the two solid rocket booster rockets and then two million litres of liquid hydrogen and 740,000 litres of liquid oxygen before the upper stage rockets fire the Orion capsule into orbit and then the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage Rocket kicks in which will propel it around the Earth and then hopefully onto the Moon.
Many people say 'escape the earth's Gravity' but that isn't actually true, the Earths Gravity extends far out into Space, the International Space Station is is in Low Earth Orbit 248 miles above the Earth but even at that height it is still subjected to 88% of the Gravity down here on the surface, what it is actually doing is falling around the Earth but travelling at such a speed (17,500 mph) that it matches the Earth curving
away from it.
Imagine shooting a cannon ball which will fly along until friction slows it down enough and gravity pulls it towards the Earth and it drops down and hits the ground.
Imagine now using more gunpowder and shooting the ball even faster so it travels further until friction and gravity drag it down to the ground.
So the faster you shoot the cannon ball, the further it goes so now imagine if you could shoot a cannon ball out of the cannon at such a speed that as the ball fell to Earth, the earth curved away so the ball would be falling but the Earth would be curving away at the same rate that the ball was dropping.
With no friction to slow it down in space, the ball would continually be falling and the Earth curving away so the ball would never actually be able to fall to the ground and so it said to be in orbit around the Earth.
So, when you are in orbit, you are in free fall but going so fast that you won't actually fall to the ground which is continually moving away from you at the same speed that you are falling and even more amazing than the science and maths behind our knowledge of all this is who we have to thank for it so Danke Adolf Hitler, without your rocket development program and V2 rocket, at 8.30 tomorrow morning i would be watching Good Morning Britain and not the next step towards the latest Moon Landings.

What Items Use The Most Electricity?

With the news that our electric bills are going to skyrocket, the Government have decided rather than actually do something about the billions being raked in by the utility companies, they will instead offer advice and that advice is for the public to use less electric so thanks guys, reassuring to know you have our backs when the nations huddles around a candle this winter.
Obviously some appliances cost more to run than others and most people will throw on a jumper rather than the heating but i sense many arguments in households over running electricity-burning items but when asked, nobody knows exactly what the most electrical intensive appliances are and say that if they did then they would be more conscious about using them.
Luckily, i happen to have those details from Utilita so here's a guide to how much it costs me in a normal day.

So i get up and the usual routine is take a shower for about 4 mins at 3p a minute and switch on the kettle for that first thing in the morning cuppa (2p for a 3 min boil) or the coffee machine (0.5p for 2 mins gurgling) and then dry my hair (0.1p for 5 mins) straighten my hair (0.25p for 5 minutes) before making some toast (0.003 for 1 minute) and watching a bit of TV for 15 minutes at 1p a minute.
After work it's home to cook tea and put on the oven to cook it (46p an hour) and then spend 15 mins running around with the vacuum cleaner (3p for 15 mins) and maybe tumble drying some clothes (9p for 15 mins) followed by 15 mins of ironing them (5p for 15 mins).
With tea almost done it's pop some beans into the Microwave for 3 mins (0.2p) and then sit down to our evening meal.
After tea the kids go and turn on the X-Box or Playstation for an hour (2p an hour) while the dishwasher gets loaded for its 15 minute job (at 9p for 15 mins).
As the evenings are getting chiller we put on the heating for a while (£1.84 for 2 hours) and while it is quiet i usually grab a drink from the fridge (cost 96p a day) and spend an hour on the computer at 4p an hour answering emails and writing a witty blog post about whatever has been rattling around in my brain that day.
Then it's about 90 minutes of TV watching (90p worth) and then around midnight plugging in my mobile phone to charge for 6 hours (0.6p) before i get up and do it all over again.

Using my basic grasp of maths and a calculator i work out that in a normal day i use approximately £4.86 of electricity or £34 a week or £1769 a year which is quite sobering so to claw some of that back, this post took about 15m so that's 1p of electric used to advise you on how much electric we use so if you found this post useful then cheques to be made out for 1p to Cash. Thank you.

You Don't Say

As President Donald Trump entered the final year of his term in January 2020, the U.S. recorded its first confirmed case of COVID-19 and on his last day America stood not so proudly at the top of the Covid Death League table with 400,000 deaths.
You would assume that as the death toll began to climb one of his aides or close personal friends would have taken him to one side and whispered into his ear: 'You know what Don, i think you should leave this to your Medical Professionals as your skillset lies elsewhere' but instead he suggested ingesting bleach and tried to blame China for his awful and lacklustre response to his own people dying.
He called it the 'China-Virus', witheld funding to the World Health Organisation and began talking about it escaping from a laboratory in Wuhan and when he looked around the other nations for support, they all said 'You're on your own with that one Big Guy' and went with the scientific evidence that it was a disease which had crossed over into humans from Bats.  
The Orange faced loon kept it up until a proper grown up took over and in some parts of America, the sort of people who are unlikely to ever trouble any Brains Trust meetings agreed that it was a Chinese ploy while the actual people who DO trouble the Brans Trusts Meetings conducted tests and analysis and have announced that after exhaustive research, the Covid-19 Virus started life at the Wuhan seafood wholesale market.
The lead Scientist, Angela Rasmussen, said that all their detective work for the origins led to back to the live food food market everytime meaning: 'Putting all this evidence together, there’s really no explanation other than that the virus started spreading in the human population at that market'.
As for the Lab theory, she poo-pooed that as well saying if the virus had escaped from a lab, somebody would have had to get infected in the lab, go to the market and infect people there without having infected anyone along the way which was not possible, as the first cases were in the market.
There you go then, one of the biggest questions in recent times now has an answer which is the answer the experts said all along, who'd have thought them and not the man who believed that global warming was created by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusions 1

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 2 we have Use Your Illusions 1 by Gun's N Roses.

On arriving back home in September 1991 with my copy of Nirvana's Nevermind i thought it would be a long time until anything better would come along to top it but as it turned out, i had to wait a week because Use your Illusions 1 & 2 was released at midnight the following weekend.
I always knew it was going to be good because back then HMV only did the Midnight opening for a few of the very biggest and best and there i was stood outside the record shop on a chilly September night wearing a pair of jeans with rips in the knees and a green flight jacket along with 20 other rather more grubbier looking GnR fans.
To be honest, i assumed that this would easily be my top album but of the 16 songs on it i skip over two and a half, Live and Let Die and The Garden as well as the first 3 minutes or so of November Rain until Slash plugs in his Les Gibson and for me Gun N Roses were all about Slash, the coolest man ever to pluck a guitar string and knock out a guitar riff so sharp it threatens eyeballs whenever it comes on the radio.
It would be easy for me to just bang on about Slash now but the sum of Gun N Roses parts made the complete package of the kind of wild Rock Stars we would all like to think we would be soaking their cornflakes in Jack Daniels, knocking seven bells out of each other while smoking 120 Benson & Hedges and still manage to put on a show before collapsing off stage into their own sick.
What Use Your Illusions 1 had was some very up tempo songs such as Right Next Door To Hell, Double Talkin' Jive and the frantic Garden of Eden but also some rock ballads which still have Slash wailing away which proved that soppy ballad's can still include a kick arse guitar solo like in November Rain and i can always appreciate a hunky man in tight leather trousers taking off his shirt and climbing onto a piano to give us a solo.
Use Your Illusions 2 had some amazing songs (Civil war, You Could Be Mine, Knockin' on Heavens Door) but never landed quite as well as UYI 1 and the double album was the last proper Guns N Roses offering with the original line up although they put out the Spaghetti Incident full of 70s punk songs and named after an infamous Mötley Crüe groupie encounter...ask your parents.
They did implode in acrimony not long after and although Axel Rose continued to plow his own furrow, without Slash it was never going to be the same and anyone who has heard Chinese Democracy will agree but between 1987 and their split in 1995, Guns N Roses were always drunk, mostly high, generally unkempt and smelling strongly of alcohol and their own vomit which is just how rock stars should be.

That's A Big Mass Ejection

A Coronal Mass Ejections sounds like something you would see on a film of the Adult variety but it is a thing and one has been been spent spinning our way courtesy of our Star.
The Sun has been getting a bit frisky this week and has been sending Moderate-Class solar flares our way which resulted in an impressive aurora display and blacked out radio waves in parts of Europe and Africa but Sunspot AR3089 isn't finished with us just yet and has ejected more charged particles our way which are expected to strike our planet on Monday.
The solar flares range from A-class which are the weakest, then B-, C-, and M-class with X-class the strongest and it was an X3 Class which is threatening a direct hit and knocking out power lines, satellites and radio signals.
The Sun began its current cycle of solar activity in 2019, and is expected to reach the peak around 2025 but it is yet to top the biggest flare ever observed which was an X28 in 2003 which dealt the Earth a glancing blow but still had satellite engineers scurrying to redirect their satellites and airliners rerouted and polar routes restricted.
Although annoying to radio station owners, the solar flares are not dangerous in themselves due to our thick atmosphere stopping all of the harmful radiation before it reaches us on the ground but if one did get through and killed us all with radiation, at least we will go out with a beautiful solar light show.

Orwell, Khan, Me and Now Biden

Joe Biden has accused Republicans who aligned with Donald Trump of veering into semi-fascism but Sadiq Khan and i got there years before him because back in 2019 i put Trump and his supporters up against the George Orwell tick list of Fascism and lo and behold, they fitted that glove perfectly although they didn't particularly take it well but my response was 'Hey, it's not our fault if all the racist, xenophobic homophobes are on your side, try not being racist, xenophobic homophobes and you won't get called it'.
The most famous Fascists have to be Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini but it is undeniable that while he was in the White House, Trump scapegoated and demonised groups (Mexicans, the media, Muslims) refered to a glorious past and wished to return to it (Make America Great Again), never allowed any dissent or challenge (62 members of his staff sacked or resigned under pressure), tried to rid his Government of the decisions of previous leaders to create his own (Pretty much everything from Obama) and threatened to used the military on weaker and smaller nations (threatened to destroy North Korea, warned of the end of Iran, discussed sending the military to Venezuela, sent armed troops to the Mexico border).
Understandably, the Republicans, Trump supporters and the American right wing in general object to the word 'fascist' to describe them but it is not easy to find another word especially when’s some Trump supporters are decked out in 'Camp Auschwitz' T-shirts, waving Confederate flags and making 'Sieg Heil!' salutes.
The first time the Fascists came around in the 1930s they had the advantage of nobody knowing just what they were but nobody has that excuse today and you should question why, knowing what we know today, why anyone with at least one working brain-cell would want to be associated with them but obviously working brain-cells are in short supply so i would say Biden is spot-on and America had better hope the semi-fascists don't become fully fledged fascists.