End Of The World As We Know It

We do like a good old the-end-is-nigh story and we are sure to be hearing a lot more of our demise as we get closer to December 21 this year which is the date the ancient Mayan calendar stops and the war Deity Bolon Yokte is timed to descend upon us with great vengeance and furious anger.
Scary stuff but he could be hard pressed to find anybody left down here when he arrives because there is a stack of other things poised to wipe us out first.
Things like super volcanoes whose eruption is not just larger than normal but its scientific name is 'supermassive' and according to the Geological Society of London, 'would devastate an area the size of North America' and 'deteriorate the climate to such an extent that the very fabric of civilization would be threatened'.
One such super volcano sits beneath Yellowstone National park and the U.S. Geological Survey reassure us that such a supermassive explosion occurs about every 600,000 years. Less reassuringly they go on to say that it's been about 620,000 years since the last one.
If a super volcano doesn't do for us, it could be an asteroid. NASA catalogues all Near Earth Objects that are at least 1 kilometer wide as the impact of such an object would be expected to produce catastrophic effects for life on earth and so far 7,954 NEOs have been discovered with 1,215 classified as potentially hazardous and 992 of them greater than the catastrophic 1km in size.
In 1989 we came within 6 hours of devastation when the 300 meter wide asteroid 4581 Asclepius (1989 FC) missed the Earth by 700,000 kilometers, passing through the exact position where the Earth was only 6 hours before.
Throw in the long threatened global pandemic from mutating avian flu, the creeping devastation of Global Warming or even the Large Hadron Collider which is not running at full power but has already created tiny black holes and the scientists are are set to ramp up the power, and we have done well to reach this far.
My money for the end of life as we know it would be on the LHC warping space time so our world collapses into a gravitational singularity where not even light can escape and all matter is crushed to infinite density.
Sleep tight and don't let the chicken wielding Mayan Deity bite.

Awe-Inspiring

There is something quite awe inspiring about astronomy. Standing there beneath all those billions of stars can give you a great perspective on matters.
It is the distances and sheer size of everything up there that always makes me pause and i have spent hours this week staring up at the dazzling spectacle of Jupiter and Venus side by side in the night sky.
We seem to take for granted the night sky without actually stopping to consider that there is this thing in the sky tonight, approximately 400 million miles away, and we can see it beside something else approximately 26 million miles away.
That's staggering but then the second thing that strikes me is that what i am looking at at this moment out of my window as i type this, can be seen by every other single person on the planet. All 7 billion of us can turn up our faces and see the same moon that I am looking at right now and was seen by every human that has ever lived.
The very first cavemen, if they looked up, saw the same stars and planets that we are looking at today in 2012 and there is something beautiful about that thought. Everybody in our history books, famous and infamous, would
have seen those same constellations, stars, planets and nebula's that are above us tonight and everyone from this day until the earth dies in billions of years time will see them also.
You can't help but feel very small and insignificant yet awestruck by it all.

UK & US Special Relationship

British and American relations have come a long way since the days when they wanted to see if our tea floated and we decided to see if their White House would burn. Such are the good relationship we hold together now that we can send them people like Piers Morgan and Dave Cameron they don't retaliate with a declaration of war.
For any Americans wondering who that slimy looking toad with the large forehead was stood next to your President for the last couple of days, that's David Cameron, our Prime Minister.
Obama really piled on the pomp and circumstance for Dave with a 19-gun salute, a ride on the Presidential plane to a basketball game and an over the top speech where the American declared: 'Through the grand sweep of history, through all its twists and turns, there is one constant: the rock-solid alliance behind the US and the UK. The reason is simple. We stand together and we work together and we bleed together and we fall together in good times and bad, because when we feel our nations are secure, the world is a safer and better and more just place.'
Allow me to park to one side the idea of just how much safer and just the World is because of what us Brits and those Americans have been up to lately, and lets ask ourselves just why Obama is being so nice to us? The same man whose first job as President was to return the bust of Winston Churchill to Blighty is suddenly a massive fan of Britain?
I remember the last time the American President and the British Prime Minister got together for a long weekend, it ended up with Iraq having its population reduced by over a million courtesy of cruise missiles and B52 bombers.
It seems that with American Presidents, the grinning usually comes with a pretty steep price tag and with Iran being maneuvered into the gun sights, we could be bleeding and falling together again soon.
Should of just turned up with a box of matches Dave.

An Alternative To Nationalisation

Here we go again. In the past 12 months, we've had significant hikes in our gas, water and electricity bills and now we face above-inflation increases in train fares which are already the most expensive in Europe.
To many on the left, the obvious solution is to renationalise them which is a fair point. I have long argued that such vital utilities like gas, water and electricity are too important to be trusted to private companies who by definition are there to make as much profit as possible with the result being the customers are forced to pay ever rising rates or go without.
The utility companies especially, collude to raise prices together so the two positives on which privatisation is sold to us are made redundant. It doesn't give competition because they all cost the same and it hasn't kept the price down, a glance at your utility bill will painfully show that.
So renationalising seems a no-brainer, only i don't think our current fiscal position will allow for that even if we pay the companies what they paid for them originally but there is an alternative to outright nationalisation. Instead of dismantling privatisation, take it on at it's own game and start up our own utility companies.
The Government toyed with the idea of creating a National Bank when all the other privately owned banks were falling over, so why not a National Gas, Electric and Water company?
When it comes to your utilities, the only considerations you have are price and reliability and the Government wouldn't need to pay shareholders dividends or obscene salaries to the bosses so they could vastly undercut the profit driven companies currently ripping us off. They would have to cut their own prices to compete or face a massive loss of customers to the new Government run utility.
After the most important aspects are up and running, we can begin looking at things like the railways which have been shamefully ripping us off ever since Thatcher gave them the green light to do so back in the 90's or push on with the idea of that National Bank which seems to have been kicked into the long grass.
There is a ready made market just waiting for these things to happen because unless the Government does something, the utility, railway and finance companies will carry on happily fleecing us and why let their shareholders make billions out of us when we can be the ones benefiting from it?

Where's The Risk Register Dave?

15 months ago the Government made an assessment of risks involved in their plans for the NHS shakeup.
When Campaigners such as the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing asked for a copy, the Department of Health refused to show it to them.
Off they went to a legal tribunal to force the DoH to publish their findings with the final decision being that the DoH must release their findings.
Still the DoH refused and made an appeal against the first ruling citing to release the findings would 'set a precedent that would undermine government departments' ability to assess the risks of pursuing particular policies' only to be told after a two day hearing that it must stop keeping the document secret.
Cheers all around and just in time as in a fortnight the House of Commons and House of Lords debate the bill to reform the National Health Service before it gains parliamentary approval which rubber stamps the reforms.
Cheers cut short because the Department of Health have 28 days to decide whether to appeal again or not and they don't seem to be in any rush, saying: 'Once we have been able to examine the judgment we will work with colleagues across government and decide our next steps', but of course the debate is in 12 days!! After that it won't matter what happens because it will already be rubber stamped as an Act of Parliament!!
There will be uproar so you think, how can they debate anything if they only have half the story so the former shadow Health Minister John Healey has urged the Government to 'respect the law and release the risk register in full and let people make up their own minds on the NHS changes'.
It's scarcely believable that MPs and Lords are even considering voting on a bill of this importance when such a pertinent document is being withheld from public scrutiny.
It also seems incomprehensible that the risk assessment could be anything other than hugely awful because were it otherwise, the government would have released it and slapped all of us against the reforms around the face with it.
So the Government seem to be backed into a corner with everyone waiting to see if they will try to drag their heels until after the vote or just flatly refuse to publish it and we are left wondering just what the risk register contains that they are so desperate to not let us see it.
We can just hope that the MP's supposedly acting on our behalf feel the same way.

Nice Name

I never thought for a moment that somebody would come along with a name more likely to induce childish giggling than the former US ambassador to Denmark, Dick Swett, but Dicky has been relegated to second most ludicrous name in the World with the emergence of the man sent by the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe to monitor the Russian elections.

Ladies and gentleman, meet Tiny Kox.

Quackers Bibi

Benjamin Netanyahu has changed tact in his foolhardy race to drop large bombs on the Iranian population.
With support waning for yet another Israeli strike on a neighbour, he has began comparing Iran to ducks.
'If it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, then it's a duck but this duck is a nuclear duck. It's time the world started calling a duck a duck' the comb-over Prime Minister of the Middle Easts biggest duck arsenal said but Bibi has a history of trying to get America to wipe Iran off the map for him.
In 1992 he said that Iran was 3 to 5 years from being having nuclear weapons and that the threat had to be 'uprooted by an international front headed by the US'.
So the renown warmonger and nanny abuser has been peddling the Iran nuclear bomb warning for the past 20 years but even Obama isn't buying it. During the 2011 G-20 summit, French president Nicholas Sarkozy was overheard saying to Obama, 'I cannot bear Netanyahu, he's a liar' to which Obama responded, 'You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day.'
With an election coming up and with influential Americans Christian voters having this strange ritual of only backing prospective leaders that promise to defend another country, Obama can't just tell Bibi to duck off and stop being such a warmonger but the much mooted idea is that the Israeli will launch an attack on Iran some time before the election which Obama will have to support or risk losing his second term.
If it looks like a warmonger, walks like a warmonger, quacks like a warmonger..etc etc

Breaking News...

News coming from the Kremlin is that Vladimir Putin has won the Russian election and to save time and effort, he has been declared the winner of the next elections too.

Just As You Thought It Couldn't Get Worse

It was two and a half years ago that the Conservative Party came to power and the 74% of the public that didn't want the Tories in power comforted themselves that at least as part of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the nasty party that spewed out Margaret Thatcher would have their wings clipped.
Fast forward to today and the Tories have not only bumped up unemployment to 3 million, decimated the Public Sector and tripled student fees, but they have also tried to sell off the forests and are presently deep into plans to sell the NHS to the highest bidder.
None of these things were in the manifesto but just when you think that they couldn't be anymore brazen and breathtakingly shameless, the latest wheeze from the Tories is to privatise the police force.
The home secretary, Theresa May, has said 'front line policing can be protected by using the private sector to transform services provided to the public' and that she hoped the 'business partnership programme would be in place next spring.'
Private companies providing police services for profit? We are expected to swallow a business that makes money from arresting and incarcerating people because giving the private sector free rein to run things in the UK has been such a whopping success already. Now we are going to let them loose on protecting us and let them turn a profit doing it?
So on and on they go, finishing off what Margaret Thatcher started and selling off the country so in the future your ability to receive health care or have your burglary investigated will come down to your ability to pay.
I'm baffled why we are not out on the streets and burning effigies of David Cameron and the rest of the Conservative half-wits.

The Whinging Rich

A group of those who pay the top rate of tax today said: 'Given the current state of the UK economy, we urge the Chancellor to urgently consider scrapping the top rate of tax in his forthcoming budget'.
They have described the 50% tax rate as 'damaging', 'unfair' and 'unjustified' and bleated that it was holding back the UK's recovery.
Obviously those who pay the top rate of tax don't particularly like paying the top rate of tax but the flip side of their argument is that if they don't want to pay to help keep our society going, who do they want to do it?
The fact that they are earning in excess of £150,000 per year to qualify to pay tax at 50% in the first place means that they are still better off then the vast majority of the people who work for them.
If you ask anyone who drives, they will say the huge petrol duties are unfair and if you ask anyone who owns a shop they will say that the VAT rise is damaging to the recovery.
Any public servant who is lucky enough to still be employed and have had their pay frozen for the past 3 years will say that is unjustified as will the disabled who have had their benefits cut, anyone who has recently joined the unemployment line and students who have had their £30 EMA grants snatched away from them.
Those paying the 50p tax rate do not have to choose between heating their house or eating, it does not mean they are having to sell their jewelery to pay the electric bill or face having their houses repossessed because they have fallen behind with their mortgage.
Those who are complaining about having to pay a bit more tax to make up the shortfall should take a long hard look at themselves and compare their situation with the real losers in this government's savage austerity drive.
We didn't hear such concern from the rich when the Government were slashing away at the pensions and benefits of the poorest in the country so they should keep their greedy, obnoxious mouths shut and realise that they are in a hugely privileged position and realise that paying a 50p tax rate is the least they can do to help cut the deficit because if it was up to the rest of us, they would be paying a damn sight more than 50p in the pound.