Rolling Jubilee

I think i understand the new strategy by the Occupy Wall Street group in their latest venture Rolling Jubilee.
The Rolling Jubilee website describes it like this: 'Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors' so if i owed the bank £100, they would sell this debt to someone for a few pence and the newcomers would then come after me for the £100. What the Occupy people are doing are paying the few pence to become the new debt owners but rather than chase the debts, they are writing them off.
The Rolling Jubilee has already made its first debt purchase, spending $5,000 to acquire $100,000 of debt and sending out letters to the borrowers, telling them the debt is abolished and as the Rolling Jubilee website is showing it has raised $327,397 from donations, it could wipe out over $6 million worth of debt.
I always thought the Occupy movement had great potential but it needed a focus to make it a real threat and although this is a great idea, i'm not even slightly convinced this is the killer idea to change things, that will only come when they make use of their numbers and force a few of the banks and financial houses into collapse which would scare the others into line, along the course of the idea that they have previously of moving accounts into other banks because a drastically dropping share price is the only way they can be frightened and this isn't going to do that.
At least they are doing something and helping countless families and that has to be applauded though and all the time they are in there swinging, they have a chance of happening across the killer idea.  

Who Britain Hasn't Invaded

Back in the day when we believed that ruling over an Empire was a good thing, almost a quarter of the world map atlas was coloured pink, showing the extent of British rule.
Putting to one side the horror and damage we forced upon other nations, Britain did punch way above its weight for a tiny little island off the coast of France but a new book has found that at one time or another, the British have invaded almost 90% of the countries around the globe.
Only 22 countries have not heard the sound of British boots upon their soil, countries such as Guatemala, Tajikistan and the Marshall Islands, as well some we missed a bit closer to home, such as Sweden and Luxembourg.
It may look worse than it actually is because included are countries that the British were found to have achieved some sort of military presence in the territory either through force, the threat of force, negotiation or payment and the book includes incursions by British pirates, privateers or armed explorers, provided they were operating with the approval of their government.
Not that it is anything to be proud of but anyone else would be hard pressed to match our record although America seems to be having a  good go at it.

The countries never invaded by the British:
Andorra, Belarus, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Republic of, Guatemala, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mali, Marshall Islands, Monaco, Mongolia, Paraguay, Sao Tome and Principe, Sweden, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Vatican City.

Cheating Violent Meat Eaters

Meat-eaters cheat, tell lies, forget promises, are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes according to a school textbook available in India.

New Healthway, a book on hygiene and health is aimed at 11 and 12 year-olds and details the benefits of a vegetarian diet and goes on to list some of the characteristics found among non-vegetarians.
 It calls Eskimos lazy, sluggish and short-lived because they live on a diet largely of meat and explains that the
Arabs who helped in constructing the Suez Canal lived on wheat and dates and were superior to the beef-fed Englishmen engaged in the same work.
So what scientific evidence do they present to back this up? God.
'The strongest argument that meat is not essential food is the fact that the Creator of this Universe did not include meat in the original diet for Adam and Eve. He gave them fruits, nuts and vegetables' so there you have it, yet another crackpot religious idea trying to brainwash kids with their man in the clouds nonsense and as usual with crackpot religious ideas, and religious ideas in general, we roll our eyes and ignore it. 

Listening Dave?

The Government spent £75 million convincing us to vote in the Police Commissioners election yesterday and we did, or a few of us did.
Turnout could be described as sluggish, only 14% of us bothered and at one polling station in south Wales no voters turned up at all.
The previous worst ever turnouts was 23% in the 1999 European election but now this has become the worst in British electoral history, In other good news the Tories were took an almighty kicking in Corby, not only losing the seat to labour but dropping their share of the vote by 15%/
Tory top banana David Cameron said: 'Obviously with mid-term results you listen carefully to what people are saying' and with this result the Conservatives are not only being screamed at but there isn't a good deal of hand gesturing going on as well.

And So It Goes On In Gaza

On Thursday, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy in Gaza was killed by an Israeli military helicopter after being shot in the head while playing football with his friends.
In retaliation, Hamas fired rockets into Israel and today the Israel Defence Force launched ‘Operation Pillar of Cloud’ which began with the assassination by missile of the Hamas military commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, as he drove through Gaza City, followed by aerial attacks against targets in Gaza killing at least nine Palestinians, including civilians and three children.
Hamas warned that Israel 'had opened the gates of hell upon themselves' while The IDF Spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai said: 'Were I a Hamas operative, junior or senior, I would now opt to shelter underground'.
And so it goes on and it is only going to get worse and the death toll will rise. So very, very depressing. The poor Palestinians do not deserve to have leaders like Hamas in charge or have to live next door to such a kill happy country like Israel.

UN Slam US Embargo on Cuba Again

Out of the 193 members of the UN Assembly, 188 have today voted to abolish the 52-year trade embargo with Cuba with only Israel and the Pacific nation of Palau voting against and The Marshall Islands and Micronesia abstaining.
This is the 21st year running that the UN has decried the American economic sanctions against the island nation but America justifies continuing the embargo by saying it is waiting for signs of changes in Cuba’s political regime and improvements in the island state’s human rights record.
The US envoy at the UN assembly, Ronald D. Godard, argued the embargo is 'one of the tools in our overall efforts to encourage respect for the human rights and basic freedoms to which the United Nations itself is committed'. Ironic that he chose to talk about the human rights and basic freedoms of a country where the US built a massive detention centre where people have been held without charge for the past ten years.    
The representative of Egypt said that while peoples in his region were fighting for freedom, justice and a genuine democracy, it was troubling that the United States continued to adopt coercive measures to prevent a neighbouring nation from freely deciding its own political and economic system while the Russians condemned it as an 'outdated relic of the Cold War era which had resulted in the worsening of the living conditions of the Cuban people and the Chinese said it violated their fundamental human rights including the rights to food, health and education as well as their right to development.
Even the North Koreans described the embargo as 'a serious violation of the principle of non-interference in sovereign States' and when you have the North Koreans sitting on the higher moral ground than you and your policy is backed only by the most unpopular country on the planet in Israel and an island nation nobody could point to on a map, maybe someone somewhere in the White House should realise that maybe they are doing something wrong here.

Hammering The Fuel Suppliers

A report by the Department of Energy and Fuel have linked thousands of people dieing each year from illnesses linked to fuel poverty.
It found that 2,700 people die each year because of health conditions directly attributable to lower indoor temperatures in homes due to not being able to afford to heat there homes due to the rising cost of fuel.
Today, the Financial Services Authority, is announced it was investigating claims by a whistle blower that Britain's gas market has been 'regularly' manipulated by the big power companies.
They may say 'regularly manipulated' but what it means is that the people who supply our gas has been deliberately distorting the prices and blatantly profiteering on energy bills despite the constant cries of fuel poverty.
MP Caroline Lucas said 'this is corruption on a massive scale and a shameful case of corporates coming together to exploit a public utility' and she is right but i would say that they are complicit in the deaths of those 2700 people who die each year due to the prohibitive price of warming their homes.
Customers should be able to demand demand compensation from the companies ripping us off and then the law should be involved because in their push for bigger and bigger profits, people have died directly because of their actions.
Privatisation, what a bright idea that was. The whole system is designed to make profit for large companies who don't care how people pay their extortionate prices or in this case whether they live or die, as long as they make a profit.
The whole lot of them should be re-nationalised because privatisation doesn't work. It DOESN'T bring greater efficiency, it DOESN'T bring any benefits to the customer, it DOESN'T bring the best prices for the consumer and it DOESN'T bring the best service.
Scarily the Conservatives are still following the failed Margaret Thatcher ideal of privatisation and they have the NHS in their sights.

Two Sugars And Some Tax Please

Starbucks paid just £8.6m in corporation tax in 14 years of trading in Britain and none at all for the past three years, despite sales of £1.2bn in the UK so you would expect Starbucks executive, Troy Alstead, who faced a grilling about the tax the company paid by MPs at the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee to be a bit coy.
Mr Alstead said Starbucks had only made a profit once in the 15 years it has been doing business in the UK, stating 'I assure you we are not making money' he told the committee.
When pressed on why if they losing so much money by being here, why they continue to open new premises the man from Starbucks answered that 'It's very unfortunate. We're not at all pleased about our financial performance here'.
So what can we deduct from this?
Either the people who run Starbucks are the worlds most incompetent businessmen, continuing to invest while losing money year on year or they are lying through their teeth.
A third option is that Starbucks is simply a charity organisation, more concerned with providing us Brits with somewhere warm to sit and a hot drink then making a profit.
I don't think they are a charity and i don't think they are incompetent so it only leaves them lying and avoiding paying tax so a stonkingly huge fine must be in the offing.
If Starbucks threaten to pull out the country, we can all wave them goodbye as there are plenty of other coffee shops where we can get served by a miserable faced student and who are not conning us out of tax revenue.
I just hope that enough people now go elsewhere for their lattes and capuchino's so they really do make a loss and don't have to pretend then they may just feck off anyway.

Big Society Big Con

The Conservatives once had an idea they called the Big Society that worked like this, 'Sorry librarian but we are going to have to make you redundant because the country is running out of money. Sorry'.
'Hey, ex-librarians, you got some free time now so how about you volunteer to come and work at the local library doing the job we deemed worth £15k a year for last year while you look for another job'.
In short, they planned to sack ten of thousands of public servants and then ask for volunteers to run the amenities that they had just sacked all the people from.
Obviously, everyone gave the idea short thrift and we haven't heard it mentioned for a long time but it doesn't mean that the idea of sacking people and then getting people to do the same job for free has gone away.
Defence Secretary Philip Hammond announced this weekend that he is looking to recruit an extra 15,000 army reservists who are ready to train and make themselves available for deployment.
Maybe it is just a coincidence that the Government has cut 20,000 regular army jobs and are wanting to take an extra 15,000 on weekend warriors and pay them £35 a day.
Only the most naive would think it a coincidence at all but don't worry if you are one of the 20,000 ex-servicemen and women now on the dole, you can still get posted to war zones and get shot at for £35 a day instead of the £21k you were getting paid for getting shot at last year.
The Tories Big Society sounds much like a big con to get people to do their old jobs for free or maybe i'm missing something here.

Life On An Ocean Wave

The population of the planet is 7 billion and growing and as more areas become deserts, flood plains or so polluted that it will endanger human life to live there, the space available on the remaining 29% of the globe that isn't water is going to become pretty cramped.
We have a few options such as using the space above our head or the ground beneath our feet but building massive space stations are beyond us and living underground has the obvious problems of lack of sunlight and ventilation so the only option left is to build in the sea.   
We are already building structures in the oceans such as oil rigs, forts and tunnels and there are several man-made islands off the coast of Dubai so we have the technology and we have the sea so why are we not doing it?
The Pacific Ocean is 65 million square miles which is equivalent to nine Russia's. We could build three islands the size of the three largest countries slap bang in the middle of the 30 million square mile Atlantic Ocean and still have over 17 million square miles of Atlantic left for the fish to do there thing.   
A new Britain could be piled up on the other side of Ireland and as the old one holds over 65 million people that would relieve all of the overcrowding we face here in our cities.
The obvious problems would be material and the expense but a bit of levelling of the landscape would provide the material but coming up with the money might be a bit tricky and the last thing the world needs is a new country that is privately owned by a company.
It's a thought though and as more and more people are forced to live on areas that were previously deemed undesirable through lack of space, it might become something that we have to consider because we can't go up or down, only out.