Unethical Arms Industry

David Cameron spent the best part of last week visiting Middle Eastern countries accompanied by members of the British arms industry and after taking a roasting for his tasteless trip, came out in defence saying Britain had 'nothing to be ashamed of' for selling weapons to Arab leaders.
The PR companies employed by the British arms industry have since been out in force painting a picture of honest British arms companies providing British jobs and propping up our economy while selling arms to grateful democracies in need of self-defence.
Honest arms companies? The largest UK arms supplier BAE Systems admitted two criminal charges of bribery and corruption in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and was fined £286m.
Providing British jobs? Arms exports are subsidised by the government by around £900 million per year and according to the MoD, 49,000 jobs are sustained by military exports which amounts to 0.2% of the UK workforce. That works out to UK taxpayers paying over £19,000 per person in this industry. Think of any other private industry where it costs us almost a billion pounds just to run it?
Propping up the economy is the third argument. The MoD's own economists have concluded that the economic benefits of arms exports are insignificant and that the 'balance of argument about defence exports should depend mainly on non-economic consideration'.
Grateful democracies? Democracies like Libya, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, UAE and Yemen. None of them democracies, all very grateful though.
That just leaves self defence. The main players in the arms trade are often those using weapons for aggression and repression and most of the countries involved in violently putting down demonstrations over the last month have used British bought arms against their own citizens.
Indonesia, Israel, China and Morocco have all been excellent customers of the British arms exporters, not the civilians of West Papua, Palestine, Tibet or Western Sahara who have been so easily bombed and terrorised by the first four.
Let's not forget to mention that we export arms to 19 of the 20 countries identified as "countries of concern" for abusing human rights including Saudi Arabia, Israel, Colombia, China, Russia, Pakistan, Jordan and Turkey. All certified human rights abusers and all somehow avoid falling into the laughable ethical foreign policy that we will not sell arms to nations involved in internal oppression, external aggression, or regional tensions. We love and want them doing all three because if they didn't, we wouldn't have a market to sell to.
We can be proud that the next time we watch the news and a group of demonstrators have been cut down by a spray of bullets or watch with horror as another tyrant bombs his own people that our current Prime Minister and the one before that and the one before that went some way to making that happen and that should bring a lump to the throat, a tear to the eye and an overwhelming feeling of shame every time.

No More Patents Pending

Clever bunch us humans. From the first time a stone age cave dweller saw a log floating past and climbed upon it, we have came up with new and better ways to move ourselves around the planet.
The first of anything is always a source of controversy but the timeline of transport on Wikipedia lists the dates for the firsts: ship, ancient Egypt BC, car 1769, submarine 1775, hot air balloon 1783, train, 1822, airship 1852, bicycle 1861, motorcycle, 1885, aeroplane 1903, helicopter, 1907, jet plane 1939, hovercraft 1956.
The record shows there was a frantic 130 years or so when the inventors had brainstorm after brainstorm and then apart from the hovercraft (the jet plane wasn't really a 'new' type of transport), everything ground to a halt for the past 100 years with the only passenger transport being bigger and better versions of what we already had.
Possibly, everything that could be invented for transport, has been invented and we reached the end of how we can physically move ourselves around in 1956.
There have been people tinkering with jet packs and the idea of teleportation is not just a fantasy of Star Trek fans as the Chinese and American Governments have been researching it for years.
One of the main reasons i can think of that we haven't continually progressed as expected is not through lack of eureka moments from inventors or because we have reached the limit of known physics, it is because inventing new modes of transport is dangerous.
For every one of the above mode of transports listed, lots and lots of people ended up a mangled mess before lessons were learnt and each generation was made a little better and a little safer until we reached the stage we are at now.
Take the aeroplane as an example. Generation after generation tried and failed to create a flying machine and the Wright brothers were fortunate enough to have centuries of previous failed attempts by others to hone their own machine.
Imagine if the car had not been invented and someone suddenly came up with the idea today of a small, metal box that carried gallons of highly inflammable liquid and can travel at over 100 mph. The idea would be drowned at birth by the Health and Safety officials.
Not that i am suggesting i want to see hundreds of people risking their lives just to perfect a new mode of transport so i can get from A to B quicker, just suggesting that the leaps and bounds of the late 18th to the early 20th Centuries will never be repeated due to the Health and Safety regulations preventing it which is a good thing. Isn't it?

Drink Latte & Be Healthy

I am always on the look out for something decent to watch on the television to while away those long winter evenings. Preferably it would have vampires and various monsters and undead things running around and scaring people and Tru Blood is shaping up nicely except in one aspect.
It ticks lots of boxes and the actor who plays Bill the main vampire, is not short in the looks department but the problem is, i can't understand what they are saying for most of the show!
I have to really listen to make out the words through the Louisiana accent and then parts of it bypass me and i have to make up what i thought they just said.
Apart from not being able to follow the dialogue properly, it is a good show and it was a remark by Sookie to her grandmother when they were talking about a Starbucks opening up in their town that had me Googling to see if it was true.
Sookie's grandmother said that she didn't understand why people liked drinking coffee with too much milk in it. Sookie replied that studies showed all the milky coffee being drunk now was decreasing calcium deficiency in the USA. I think that's what they said, it may have been a discussion about Bill Gates but that's what i heard.
Anyway, that is indeed true according to dietitian Carolyn O'Neil, author of The Dish on Eating Healthy and Being Fabulous! Her research found that a Latte provides 40% of the 1,000 milligrams of calcium recommended each day and a Venti provides 50%. Two of those a day and you are sorted but the even better news is that a latte also provides 25% daily value of protein and 35% daily value of vitamin D.
I will be filing this under 'Bad things that are good for you' along with caffeine prevents the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's, chocolate helps control blood pressure, cigarettes shortens reaction time and improves short term memory and drinking beer reduces the risk of kidney stones.
They don't have posters for that at the doctors surgery.

Letter To Gaddafi

Dear Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi

Please stop the killing of innocent civilians. We need your oil and you are making us look really bad. We told everyone you were a decent chap now!!

Love Tony,
Gordon
Barack
Hugo
Silvio
Vladimir
Nikolas

P.S. Tony say's if you survive the revolution, the oil exploration deal is still on right?

Britain - Over There Somewhere

Prince Andrew, the Grand Old Duke of York, said in that infamous cable that 'The Americans don't understand geography' while Sarah Palin has got North Korea confused with South Korea, called Africa a country and thought she could see Russia from her Alaskan home. Even American Ambrose Bierce said "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" and he died in the early 20th Century before Americans were taught a lot more geography.
As we have invited your President Barack Obama over to our green and pleasant land to stay with the Queen in May on a State Visit, and as you haven't had a war against us in your lifetime, find a map showing Great Britain just in case you are wondering where your President is in May. Confusingly we are also called the United Kingdom, Britain, GB, UK or just England which amusingly annoys the hell out of the other 3 countries in Great Britain.
Quite a lot of you Americans hail from one of the countries of Great Britain and a simple test should prove what part is in your DNA. If you are drinking tea while reading this, your ancestry is English.
If you are drinking a spirit, you hail from Scotland and if you are drinking lager then your grandparents were Irish. If you are stroking a sheep then your relatives moved over from the valleys.
The last time your President came over we lined the streets to greet him. Greeted him with eggs and banners decrying him as a war criminal i grant you, but it was a good turn out nonetheless. I do expect your present ruler to be treated better, we wouldn't have trusted the last one with a knife and fork so he is in safe hands while over here being entertained by The Queen and Prince Philip. Well the Queen anyway, Prince Phillip has a bit of a history with non-white non-British people.

Barclays Swindling Us All

I never really swallowed the line about if we keep hitting the banks they will just go abroad and take all their money with them. My answer was we should double our efforts and wave them goodbye from the quayside because they are obviously not very good at their jobs as the £200bn bail out painfully shows.
Turns out that they were taking all their money abroad anyway with a letter from Barclays admitting that it paid just £113m in corporation tax in 2009 while totting up a record £11.6bn of profits.
The HM Revenue & Customs website shows corporation tax is 28% and 28% of £11,600,000,000,000 isn't £113,000,000.
The Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who requested Barclays reveal the tax paid by the bank, described the figure as 1% of its 2009 profits and called it shocking.
When asked what tax Barclays paid by the Treasury select committee of MPs last month, the Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond said £2 Billion, knowing full well that most of that was tax paid by employees under the PAYE system.
Chuka Umanna may be shocked but he can't be surprised because Barclays is the latest in a round of high profile tax avoidance stories recently.
Last year Vodaphone's £6bn tax bill was settled by HM Revenue & Customs £4.8bn light and Boots the Chemist moved its headquarters to Switzerland and now pay just 3% in tax. Top shop owner, Phillip Green, awarded himself a huge dividend payout, £1.2 billion, in 2005 which went through various offshore accounts and tax dodges to his wife's Monaco bank account. And Green was appointed last year by David Cameron to advise the government on how to slash public spending!!
Barclays has been involved in controversy before, supporting the apartheid government in South Africa, a revelation that saw it's shares drop after a student boycott. It helps funds President Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe, was fined $298m for violating international money laundering rules and holds £7.3 billion in shares in arms manufacturers.
With that track record it isn't going to care about swindling the UK out of billions of pounds of tax while we all face severe cuts.
While they are taking bail out money from the tax payer and only pay 1% in Tax, i think its imperative that they do all sod off and let some other mug of a country pay for their mistakes and then receive a kick in the teeth and 1% as a thank you.

Twitter & Facebook

This blog has now caught up with everybody else and is available on Twitter and Facebook. Apparently it is not the full, grown up Facebook as i'm not allowed but it's a page which means nothing to me.
Don't know what the advantages are to being on Twitter and Facebook (page, not the real one remember) but i was told they are the places to be and as a places to be kind of person, i asked someone else to make it happen and here we are with a blog, an RSS feed with my posts on, a twitter page with my posts on and a facebook page with my posts on.
Anyway, they are over there on the right so you can click on them and read exactly what you can read here anyway but who am i to argue with technology.

Bieber Fever

Come with me back to the early 1980s. It's Thursday evening and sat on the sofa's in living rooms all across the land are legions of young girls, just entering their teens, waiting excitedly as the Top of the Pops presenter counts down through the charts and people like Human League, Bucks Fizz and Shakin' Stevens until finally millions of teenage hearts leap and the face of Simon Le Bon fills our TV screens.
Fast forward 25 years and Simon Le Bon is still squeezing into those tight trousers but he has long been replaced as the face that teenage girls scream at and now it is the turn of a 16 year old Canadian with silly hair.
They are calling it Bieber fever and he has already written an autobiography, had worldwide hits and has a movie under his belt when other young boys his age are more concerned with completing Bioshock 2.
I have seen and read a few interviews and he has come across as a nice enough boy and he avoided the Miley Cyrus career suicide move of coming across as a spoilt, pretentious little snot. If ever a teenager needed to be left on a desert island somewhere and forgotten it was her.
What Bieber has got going for him is the way he has not been spewed out by the Cowell production line or coached in the sickly sweet Disney template, he is a product of the new media and was actually 'discovered' by music executives.
The career of a teenage heart-throb is short lived and i expect his posters will be replaced by someone else on bedroom walls around the world this time next year but i refuse to join in the sneering by my fellow adults.
He seems nice enough and although his songs are not my cup of tea, he isn't doing anybody any harm so we should leave him alone and remember that our generation produced people like Phil Collins, Shane MacGowan and George Michael so we have nothing to sneer about. Okay, maybe we can sneer at the silly haircut and his liking of wearing bow ties.

Mass Ejections

Although coronal mass ejections sounds like one of those films that should come in brown paper bags and be carried by shifty looking men in raincoats, it's actually the latest thing that is going to end life on earth or more likely make our televisions flicker a bit.
Not just one but three solar flare eruptions are set to reach Earth from tomorrow and scientists are watching closely as the third was an x-flare, which the man with all the pens in his top pocket said was the most intense sort.
To make matters worse, scientists will have around half an hour's notice that the wave of charged particles is about to directly hit the Earth's magnetic shield.

Here comes the science bit: When the ejection is directed towards the Earth and reaches it as an interplanetary CME (ICME), the shock wave of the traveling mass of Solar Energetic Particles causes a geomagnetic storm that may disrupt the Earth's magnetosphere, compressing it on the day side and extending the night-side magnetic tail. When the magnetosphere reconnects on the nightside, it releases power on the order of terawatt scale, which is directed back toward the Earth's upper atmosphere.
This process can cause particularly strong auroras in large regions around Earth's magnetic poles.
Coronal mass ejections, along with solar flares of other origin, can disrupt radio transmissions and cause damage to satellites and electrical transmission line facilities, resulting in potentially massive and long-lasting power outages.
Humans in space or at high altitudes, for example, in airplanes, risk exposure to intense radiation.

So if your radio starts crackling or your lights flicker tonight and tomorrow, it's because of a coronal mass ejection. If you hear heavy breathing coming from that mac wearing neighbour it is probably another type of ejection we really shouldn't go into.

A Different Type Of Protest In Bahrain

One thing i have noticed about the protests in the Middle East recently is the lack of American and Israeli flags being burned in the streets.
Usually when a protest erupts in Middle Eastern streets, it is boom time for whoever has the licence to supply the star and stripes in those countries. I take that to mean that the protesters are acting out of their own interests to remove dodgy leaders running their countries rather than being angry at being at the beck and call of the West.
There was a moment during the Egyptian protest when a protester held up a tear gas canister to the camera and pointed out the 'Made in America' stamp on the side of it but America cannot be blamed for supplying the riot gear to Bahrain, because Britain beat them to it.
The batons, riot shields and tear gas being fired at the protesters has all been supplied by good old Blighty which has led to MP's calling for an end to the export of riot control equipment to Bahrain.
Bahrain's record on human rights has been praised as one of the most progressive in the Middle East by human rights groups and the UN, although it was starting from a very low level where brutal suppression of demonstrations were usual, so the protests are not so much against a corrupt and heavy handed leadership, its mainly the majority Shia population who are sidelined by the ruling Sunni's.
America has its 5th Fleet and the UK Navy ships stationed in Bahrain so the King of Bahrain won't be receiving a phone call from Obama or Cameron suggesting he steps down anytime soon. Also in the mix is Saudi Arabia who give support, military and logistical, to Bahrain mostly because it is in its own interests to suppress any Shia uprisng less they make things uncomfortable for the Saudi Arabian leadership in their own country.
If Iran, a Shia country, begins sniffing around then things could take a very different turn to how they went in Egypt and Tunisia and if America is seen to be backing the King and the security forces killing protesters, the flag suppliers had better start stocking up.