Americans, We Don’t Hate You ... BUT

But we do hate your administration.

The Winter Olympics are great barometer to gauge how the rest of the world currently perceives your country on the world stage.

Vance was booed because he represented all that’s wrong with your potty-mouthed, blaggard of a President and his hard-faced henchpeople like Rubio, Leavitt, Bondi, Noem, Hegsweth, etc. – all causing havoc and division while blasphemously professing to embrace Christian principles.

By all means deport illegals/criminals, but not by rounding up those already following due process or indiscriminatingly targeting innocent people caught up in the melee by dragging them out of their homes, restaurants and cars based on racial profiling or for standing up against this injustice … and even killing them.

ICE should operate by due diligence and quietly go about its business in the background - not by flexing its muscle by invading communities with armed, balaclava-wearing thugs trying to make your whiny draft-dodging Glorious Leader look tough.

Healing will start when you consign Trump to the political dustbin.

Alex Pretti's Death - America's Flashpoint

 

The scales must surely now be falling from Trump supporters’ eyes. I won’t label them all under the banner ‘Republicans’ because that’s the government’s intent – to split us into teams that form allegiances like football sides so that rivalry and winning is all that matters. It can so quickly become personal.

People of all political persuasions worked with Alex Pretti, and knew him for the person he was. It’s time to stop justifying what’s done in a party’s name simply because you’re on their team. And followers of all faiths should be questioning whether responses to recent issues and situations align with their core beliefs.

We are one species and should put aside party politics and instead appoint capable stewards and administrators who can do the best job in the interests of everyone regardless of their beliefs, with a head CEO who can be sacked if they don’t perform.

Love your neighbour.

IS THE BANK OF ENGLAND A ONE TRICK PONY?

 

Can someone explain how increasing interest rates helps to tackle inflation?

A Google search tells me: “Higher interest rates make it more expensive for people to borrow money and encourage people to save”, but how can you save more if your mortgage goes up and the price of goods and services is running away at an alarming rate?

The Bank of England’s website tells me: “If, people on the whole, spend less on goods and services, prices will tend to rise more slowly. That lowers the rate of inflation”.

To me as a layman, this makes no sense - if demand is reduced due to people having less disposable income, companies - who also have their own borrowing costs - will surely increase the price of their products to maintain their income stream. How can we stimulate the manufacturing, agricultural and retail economies if people are being deterred from consuming more?

Apart from borrowing costs, the current energy crisis is pushing up business production costs, which again are passed on to the consumer. A prime example - as borne out by a staggering rise in food inflation – might be dairy, where farmers are seeing their overheads to run their milking machines going through the roof.

The way that the Bank of England responds to all of this needs a serious overhaul, but they only seem to have one item in the tool box.  These are not normal times, and outmoded fixes simply won’t work.

We all know that the root cause of this crisis was sparked by a war leading to a massive shift in the energy market. And then Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng sunk the economy and the pound with their over-zealous ‘reforms’. I don’t even blame them - I blame the dinosaurs running our economic institutions to protect the interests of the elite.

At my most cynical, I’m sure there were machinations behind the scenes to deliberately make Truss and Kwarteng the fall guys to justify bleeding us dry in order to pay for the cost of Covid. The government had always previously cried poor to properly fund the NHS and, actually, pretty much everything else - so where was the money going to come from to regenerate the coffers?

Cue you and me.

They needed to capitalize on a demand that, unlike food and luxuries where people could tighten their belts, was essential to the populace - fuel and energy. I don’t have the answer as to how this feeds back to the government but, in my view, inflation will never come down while we’re being held to ransom by oil and energy producers and the politicians who are in their pockets.

Feel free to enlighten me or contribute in 'Comments' below.

The Day Human Rights Died ... in Plain Sight

I'd hoped never to find myself writing this - and there's lots more to the back story that doesn't need to be revisited - but the injustice meted out to Julian Assange on 10 December 2021 is so clearly politically motivated that we need to amplify the considerable noise we're already making in calling for his release. If we don't, a dangerous precedent will have been set to silence anyone who seeks to hold our governments to account.

Yesterday, the UK's High Court upheld the US's appeal to extradite Assange, effectively surrendering him to the very country whose misdeeds he exposed - the latest ruling in a series of travesties that suggest our legal system has bowed to the relentless pressure the US applied right from the off to get its man.  Had it been anyone else, would the government have spent millions surrounding the Ecuadorian embassy solely on the strength of dubious Swedish allegations?  The overkill had all the marks of bigger fish to fry.

We only need look at the players in Assange's legal journey to start asking questions about dirty deals, complicity, nepotism and compromise:

Keir STARMER - a human rights lawyer no less, and a colleague in the same chambers as Assange's defence team, was head of the Crown Prosecution Service at the time they implored Sweden not to get "cold feet" in pursuing Assange. Now Labour leader, politics was seemingly already at play - was he protecting Tony Blair, who dragged us into the very conflicts that led to Wikileaks publishing the 'Collateral Murder' video?

Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Louise ARBUTHNOT - initially presided over the extradition proceedings until a conflict of interest arose due to her husband's association with British military and intelligence services and further compromised by her son being employed by an anti-data leak company.

District Judge Vanessa BARAITSER - appointed as Arbuthnot's subordinate, and still overseen by her, she rose from obscurity and was soon considered to be taking her orders from above, given her barely disguised bias and hostility towards Assange, often appearing to be reading from pre-prepared statements. The proceedings under her tenure were fraught with obstacles, both physical and communicative, being placed in the way of those seeking to report on developments. More than once she seemed to be in the prosecution's pockets. In the event, she was dismissive of the actual legal basis of the US's indictments, focusing instead on Assange's mental health, thus opening the way for the US to get around this final hurdle by offering assurances about the conditions under which he would be held. It's worth noting that, despite acknowledging the detrimental effect of incarceration on Assange's mental state, she denied his release and sent him straight back to Belmarsh - the UK's supermax facility.

Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett - one of the two High Court appeal judges who yesterday overturned the January decision not to extradite Assange, he has for 40 years been a friend of Sir Alan Duncan who, in 2018 while Minister of State for Europe and the Americas, described Assange as a "miserable little worm" and didn't hide his glee when Assange was eventually expelled, some say illegally, from the Ecuadorian embassy. Intriguingly, in August this year he and Robert Buckland QC advised the Queen in appointing Vanessa Baraitser as a Circuit Judge - reward for a 'job well done'?

Of course, these are only a few factors in Assange's persecution. The US has been involved in all sorts of deals behind the scenes, including granting Ecuador an IMF loan in exchange for withdrawing his asylum, but this is about the transparent abuse of power over a legal system that used to set the standard for the rest of the world.

Yesterday's ruling was an affront on human rights, demonstrating that the US is trying to dampen scrutiny way beyond its domestic reach.

And all this on International Human Rights Day, upheld by Amnesty International and only days after US Secretary Antony Blinken announced, "Media freedom plays an indispensable role in informing the public, holding governments accountable, and telling stories that otherwise would not be told. The U.S. will continue to stand up for the brave and necessary work of journalists around the world."

There are other players in this saga too, both political and institutional - here's my extended Hall of Shame:

HP Pavilion Laptop Review - Noisy Fan and Indifferent Support

In March 2018 we bought what would be our third HP Pavilion laptop from Currys PC World, despite the fact that the previous one, purchased only three years prior, was already developing hard drive problems.

Within only a few weeks it started making a significant whirring noise, which at first we couldn't decide was coming from the hard drive or the fan. Here's the sound, for your delectation:

We took it back to Currys PC World who told us it was too late to exchange and that it would have to go back to the manufacturer for over a week (if we were lucky). My wife's a writer and, as she'd already begun her next novel and also needed to keep engaged with her significant social media base, couldn't afford to be without what was essentially the means to earn her livelihood.

We decided to put up with the noise for the time being, which subesquently became much louder and even more distracting for writing. There followed a hugely frustrating period of trying to find contact numbers for the right people, having conversations about 'fit for purpose' regarding our consumer rights and a complete failure on HP's part to escalate our concerns.

HP Twitter 'Support' (and I use the term loosely) referred us to their regional team, who got in touch to say they didn't provide email support and to call the technical helpdesk or chat support. When I went back to the Twitter team to say that path had got us nowhere, I was told they'd take it up with the regional office again, who should respond within 4 days. When they didn't, there was more back and forth with numerous cut'n'paste repsonses and three more lots of four days waiting, with no contact.

At this point I insisted on talking to someone in Customer Relations but was instead contacted by the technical team, who told me I couldn't talk to CR because they were already aware and had delegated back to them to make the call - only to repeat that we would be without a laptop during repair. Back to the Twitter team who said they couldn't override the decision and to continue to 'work with' our local support team.

I then received a call from the UK and Ireland office, who emailed me for more info and said they looked forward to a reply, which I sent (copying Dion Weisler, HP's CEO) - only to receive a message that the mailbox was unmonitored! Unsurprisingly, nothing from the CEO either. Over four months had passed at this point.

Both my wife and I were by then so incensed with the lack of ownership of the problem that we began venting our dissatisfaction on open Twitter and taking to forums, where we discovered that many people were experiencing the same issue - just Google 'HP fan noise' and it's now a widely recognised design fault, which HP have always denied. We've since exacted some revenge by warning people off buying HP Pavilions. You know what they say: "If someone has a good experience, they might tell a few people - but if they have a bad one, they'll tell everyone". 

Eventually we just bit the bullet until I decided to take a peek inside the laptop for myself, where I discovered it was the vibration against the mounting of the fan that caused the noise - which would stop when you held the working fan in your hand. No attempt to buffer it with rubber or padded tape resolved it.

So there we are. Apart from never buying an HP product again (and we've also had printers), all we can hope for is that we might inflict some pain back on HP by discouraging others from buying their laptops.

AVOID!

Update 11 Dec '20: HP got in touch from their France HQ but, while I got lots of 'Thanks for feedback', 'We'll learn from this' and 'there was clearly miscommunication in the early stages' they did or said nothing by way of amends. In fact they batted the blame back on Currys PC World for not fulfilling their obligations by looking at the laptop instore, which contradicted another part of the conversation where they said it was still on one year warranty to the 3rd party retailer at the time, and also explains why Currys may not have wanted to invalidate that warranty by opening it up. HP did apologise though, even acknowledging we were 'loyal' customers, completely missing the point that they've alienated us.

Your 'Man on the Ground' in London

Q: What do you do if you have important business to conduct in London and can't be there in person?

Q: Who could you trust to represent you without compromising confidentiality?

A: Me

Let me be your stand-in.  Visit Your London Proxy.

Will YOU Be Silenced?

A lot has been written about Julian Assange, so I’m not going into his back story - we've got Google for that.

Suffice it to say, he's either loved or loathed.

But the thing I feel passionately about - and which should unite people on all sides of the debates, political, legal or otherwise - is that he’s being deprived of liberties the rest of us are free to enjoy every day.

We live in an age where social media is fast overtaking main stream media ('MSM') as the ‘Go To’ place to get a sense of the world. It not only connects us to friends and family, wherever they may be, but also gives us a voice to express our thoughts on matters we feel strongly about - and even influence the outcomes.

And being electronic, the Powers That Be can silence anyone almost at the flick of a switch.

Which is exactly what they’ve done to Julian - a prominent spokesperson in these turbulent times. Whether you agree with his views or not, he provides an important balance to help shape your own opinions while we're all trying to distinguish between what is or isn't fake news.

And, if it can happen to him - and you don’t speak up to defend what should be everyone’s right to be heard - then we’ll all sleepwalk into an Orwellian nightmare.

This should matter to you.

Will YOU be silenced?

Mortgage Prisoners - Let Battle Commence!

The banks were saying "You can't afford to pay less"!!!

THIS WAS WRITTEN 31 JULY 2018, before Panorama exposed the Cerburus scandal - but ANYONE who feels they were unfairly put on SVR and denied a better rate should put pressure on the banks and regulators.

* * * *

So, after dragging their heels for years, with the FCA (the cornerstone of 'Fairness' purportedly) having proved themselves utterly toothless, the banks are finally going to be writing to mortgage borrowers stuck on high interest rates (typically SVR) before the end of the year to offer them a better deal ... still in no hurry, then ...
 
I've previously blogged here (with links to earlier posts) about their appalling exploitation of borrowers who were already struggling and more recently I've contributed to the Facebook group 'Mortgage Prisoners UK' - people trapped in unfair deals for any number of reasons.

There are all sorts of excuses the banks have used to try to justify applying higher rates but, given that FCA was usually way behind the ball or at best woolly in its guidance, they got away with it by hiding behind the biggest smokescreen of all - that they couldn't disclose the reasons for their lending decisions because they were "commercially sensitive" - which gave borrowers seeking to complain to the Ombudsman (FOS) no grounds to contest. In the meantime they continued to conveniently misinterpret, ignore or straight out disregard the spirit of the guidance provided and the plight of those they knew they had over a barrel.

Well at last, and largely due to Money Saving Expert's relentless efforts to raise the profile of this issue, we have some sort of tenet admission by the industry that things need to change, but the battle's not even half won. Many of those in the Facebook group - possibly the majority - had their Northern Rock loans taken over by the likes of Landmark / Whistletree, who are likely to slip through the net again because they were companies formed specifically to take over NRAM's loan book, are unregulated and failed to offer new products.  Can you imagine having been a Northern Rock borrower and having the decision about who your new provider would be taken away from you, therefore leaving you exposed to being held to ransom?

And that's still not where it ends - people were put on SVR for many other reasons, including arrears resulting from a change in income.  Suddenly they were a higher risk, so they were put on a higher rate at the next anniversary of their loan - despite the guidance saying that affordability checks shouldn't be applied to existing loans.  And, when they were back in the black, banks like Santander KEPT them on the higher rate for an additional year, to prove they could afford to go back to a lower one!

This is in my view the biggest scandal since PPI mis-selling ... and it's gonna run and run a while yet because nothing has been done to address retrospective complaints made to FOS, who are refusing to re-open those cases because they were ruled on at the time.  Well, if PPI claims could be backdated, and we're receiving clear signals from this most recent announcement that the banks are trying to address their impropriety, affected borrowers should be reimbursed for the difference between what they were asked to pay and any cheaper options that should have been made available to them at the time.

I urge any mortgage prisoners to make as much noise as you can to be compensated for the financial and emotional stress you've been subjected to as a result of this issue.

Thanks also to news organisations who have picked up on this - several of whom who have representatives posting on the Facebook page seeking personal stories to feature in articles. Get yours heard!

Please feel free to comment below - comments are moderated prior to being posted.

The War on Diesel

We own a diesel car - we were encouraged to do so by Government-sponsored incentives like road tax concessions and cheaper fuel at the time, along with being rewarded by the warm fuzzy glow we felt for doing our bit to achieve the lower carbon emission levels Gordon Brown was so keen to meet at the time.

I'm sure a few politicians might also have benefited from being given the nod in their gentleman's club to invest in this sector of the motoring industry before these measures came into force.

Then we started hearing about 'particulates' and 'nitrogen oxides' and now we're being treated like the lepers of the road, with Sadiq Khan (London's Mayor) seeking to penalise us further by extending the Ultra Low Emmission zone (ULEZ) to the North and South Circular (A205) roads - in my view, a completely unworkable scheme that would see me paying over £10 just to drive the mile or so from my home in Putney to Putney High Street, which is just the other side of the A205 but in the same borough.

So now we have a perfectly functional, low mileage and fuel-efficient vehicle (we still burn way less fossil fuel than petrol*) that is being rendered worthless - with no apology or compensation from the Government for their reckless misguidance.
 * maybe that's the problem for the Government - declining tax revenue from volume vs petrol

So, where do we head from here? Back to petrol, and the original issues with emissions, or maybe line a few more pockets of the Old Boy Network now promoting electric? Which brings me to these:

A visual pollutant hitting our streets in droves, I hate them. They have "Folly" written all over them. However, as they profess to deliver 100% renewable energy, I don't loathe them quite as much as the concept of charging your car from your home electricity supply - I simply don't understand how it makes it OK to increase our reliance on fossil fuels - which apparently were dwindling long before this fiasco - simply by burning them before delivering the resultant power to your car by way of a cable in place of the liquid form you used to store in your tank.

And, lastly, I despair at the environmental damage of seeing our car consigned to the scrap heap before its anticipated lifespan. I see enough still useful but outdated consumer products being chucked into skips and municipal dumps, with no thought of who they might be useful to (the poor? charities?), without seeing whole vehicles taking up landfill.

Why do Press Reviewers seem to ignore Indie Writers?

The world of book publishing has been changing for some time. The recession saw the big name houses less willing to take a punt on new authors and instead choosing to stick mainly with established names or prostituting themselves with an onslaught of celebrity bios.

No wonder so many writers went down the indie route. With the advent of Amazon Kindle and 'Print on Demand' tools, they've been able to access a vast audience without having to relinquish a substantial slice of their income to either the publishers themselves or the increasingly irrelevant agents the industry still insists on using as go-betweens.

But the downside of DIY publishing is that the market has become flooded with mediocrity, making it more difficult for real talent to rise to the surface. Quality is being stifled by the sheer weight of titles a potential buyer has to trawl through, often leading to disappointment in the choices they make.

A case in point: British chicklit author Amanda Egan's books all carry 4.5 - 5*star ratings/reviews in Amazon's bookstore - and have often featured in Top 50 filters and even #1 in certain categories - but can sometimes also languish in mid-division amidst a tide of free or have-a-go wannabe titles. This is primarily due to Amazon's woefully inadequate classification system, where amateur erotica sits incongruously next to legitimate romance novels. Amazon don't even have anything as straightforward as a 'chicklit' category when writers upload their books - surely one of the biggest markets out there with heavily promoted women's writers like Jill Mansell, Marian Keyes and Sophie Kinsella.

So to some extent it's understandable that many romance/romcom indies slip under the radar of newspaper and magazine book reviewers - for a while eBooks appeared in their automatically generated Top 20 lists, but these were dropped when they became distorted by freebie downloads and other manipulated promotions.

But I can't help but sense a certain snobbery against writers who don't rise up through the conventional publishing channels - perhaps because only the author and the outlet benefit financially - and readers ares therefore having their choices largely dictated to by media reviewers who perhaps ignore or are not even aware of a wealth of indie talent out there.

Dare I speculate that they, or their employers, are in the publishers' pockets? - or that they perhaps find it easier just to read the books that land on their desks because the publishers have the distribution means and resources to get them there?

I hope that's not the case - and I concede that E L James may be a rare exception - but it's become my mission to raise the indie profile. It begins here.

[PLEASE FEEL FREE TO LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS]

Discuss, Debate - but Please don’t Hate

They say there is more that unites us than divides us.

Let’s start with the fact that we’re all human.  That alone should be enough of a leveller.  We start life with no pre-conceptions of others, and are shaped by our environment, influences and experiences.  All of us are flawed in some way or another and we should therefore be more tolerant of anyone else’s personal shortcomings.

But when it comes to opinions it’s evident we’re becoming increasingly marginalised.

What’s wrong with someone having a different point of view?  It allows us to consider both sides of an argument in our quest to reach a balanced understanding of important issues.  But many of us are too quick to accept anything presented as fact without verifying its validity through reliable and unbiased sources - making us vulnerable to fake news sites or groups with a narrow, militant agenda.

About the only thing that prevented the 2017 Women’s March descending into total farce - because the individual agendas were so jumbled there were actually areas of moral contradiction - was that they were united by a common cause, albeit that the banner of oppression they were rallying under was incongruous with the freedom of speech and right to demonstrate they were clearly being allowed to exercise.

Debate is healthy but it’s getting personal now and we need to be hyper careful when we find ourselves disagreeing with family, friends or anyone else whose views we usually value on other matters.  We should listen with open minds and in a spirit of love and respect or we’ll be playing into the hands of those who are out to divide, corrupt or even destroy us at the core level of human interaction.  No cause is worth alienating those with whom we share blood or a mutual bond.  By all means try to bring them around to understanding your point of view, but don’t reject them for not adopting it.  We will never agree with anyone about everything, so accept that they are as entitled to their opinion on some matters as you are yours.

We often discover that some of the convictions we held in our youth weren’t fully formed and we’ve gone on to take a completely different stance on issues we used to be ignorant or blinkered about.  So recognise our own susceptibility to misguidance before allowing ourselves to become consumed by the arrogance of certainty that everyone should think as we do at any time - time can make a fool of you.   Instead, turn that negativity around and enjoy the warm fuzzies that come with tolerance, compassion and understanding.

None of us know it all.  We need each other because we all have different knowledge, skills and strengths.  We can create a better society by drawing on diversity to find some middle ground in the interests of serving the greater good.  Our leaders should be guardians and effective administrators, working together, not career politicians.  Giving way a little, whether at a government or personal level, needn’t be seen as compromise because everyone pays the same price to move forward instead of fracturing into ever more specific belief systems.  It doesn’t need to get political.  We are stronger united than divided.

Accept it.

Embrace it.

Be it.

Fake News - "Gimme Some Truth"

Recently I've become increasingly concerned that so many of my normally rational and intelligent social media contacts can be sucked in by websites and Facebook pages that post pictures or videos taken out of context to serve some other dodgy agenda.  I encourage them to always check the facts with credible news sources before promulgating false information - but what happens when even those agencies succumb to corruption?

Just "Gimme Some Truth", as Lennon (not to be confused with the Russian Communist leader with a similar sounding name) sang:

VIDEO:

What have I just seen / heard? - Holly Herndon

Image from artist's Facebook page

60 year old bloke (me) and my 20 y.o. son at the Roundhouse, awaiting Radiohead ... a shared passion.

Will there be a support?  Who cares?  Just killing time before the Masters come on.

Enter Holly Herndon.

The crowd stands perplexed as not much happens for some time except for a cacophony of set-up noises.  And then all audial hell breaks loose.  Chest-thumping beats and sound production second to none ... but what was the sound?

A tsunami of electronica and loops, that's for sure, interspersed with squeals akin to a crow/kookaburra hybrid.  And a relentless base rhythm that disappointingly works itself pretty much through the entire set.

Can you dance to it?  Perhaps in an altered state - and my own expertise in this area is an uncoordinated and embarrassing flailing of limbs - but I'm not convinced the Kung-Fu, head-banging antics of the androgynous Colin ("Gender is Over") Self match this musical outfit's aspirations toward the avant-garde.  You're gonna need more than a mouth-held pulsing LED light to cut it.  And Mat Dryhurst?  He has an endearing smile and a talent for moving a cursor around a digital landscape.

From the first minute, my son and I continued to exchange bemused looks to see if either of us were getting it.  Me, wondering if he related to my suggestions of influences from the ethereal (Enya) to the experimental (Laurie Anderson), and him ... well, in truth, begging me to bludgeon his face in so he didn't have to listen to any more.  This from a guy whose eclectic musical tastes are often beyond even my own broad frames of reference.

I remain agnostic as I try to assimilate the assault on my senses - all I'm prepared to commit to at this stage is that I feel I have been daringly challenged.  I just need to decide if it was in a good or bad way.

Ashes to Ashes - Funk to Funky

It was Bowie who led me on the path to my eclectic taste in music, having grown up with standard verse/chorus/bridge songs.  Yes, he did enough of those too but my mind did a flip on hearing the hypnotic opening strains of 'Five Years' on the Ziggy album.  My first thoughts were "This guy can't sing and doesn't even put all of the notes in the right order" and then BAM - lying on the floor with my portable record player, a speaker set on each side of my head - the magic began to flow. *Ashes to ashes, Funk to funky* ... and Station to Station, my friend. May your next stop be Heaven. R.I.P

What gets my Goat? (Work in Progress ...)

Everyone has their own pet hates, so I thought I'd start listing mine here for posterity - I'll keep adding them as they occur but, for a start, these make me GGRRRR!:

Real Estate Agents sign boards that damage property or aren't properly removed:

What blatant disregard for their clients' properties when the monkeys they employ to put up their signs go about nailing boards onto fencing or, even worse, into the mortar of brick walls?  You can't see it in the pic, but this particular example was on a main supporting post and there was a sufficient gap to have used plastic cables. Don't even get me started on bricks ... how best to de-stabilise a wall? - give it a few good whacks with a hammer!

Walk up any high street and look at the frontage of shops - property boards are normally placed above the shop signage.  Now look at how many bits of timber have been left up there, often just painted over with the re-vamp, despite the fact that the agents' signs have long been removed?

So, not only vandals but visual polluters ...

Half-arsed Pooper Scoopers:

I don't know if it's just a London phenomena, but I often see dog poop bags littered in the strangest of places rather than placed in the designated bins.  I can't understand how you can be socially conscious enough to pick up after your dog but cause another environmental eyesore by then leaving the bag and its contents lying in the gutter, wedged in shrubs, hanging off fences ... and even at the very base of the dog waste bin you've taken the bother to walk to.

Guys on noisy little scooters who think they're Hell's Angels:

We've all heard them, boy racers getting off by revving up their little 50cc pathetic excuses for 'motorbikes' in underground car parks to amplify the sound or buzzing along with their annoying ring-ding-dings like agitated mosquitoes.  As a motorcycle purist who's ridden 'real' bikes I may be a bit biased but, seriously, have some dignity instead of drawing attention to your impotence.

Groups of girls who shriek when greeting:

'Nuff said ... we've all seen them (well, heard them first).  Unfortunately it's not just a phenomena left at the school gates.

COMING SOON:

- Sticky labels: Particularly the highly adhesive ones that leave residue or obscure wording on CD covers.

- Car dealership stickers on rear windscreens: Obscure your view, never attractive and you're a mug to give them free advertising long after you've bought the car.

- Speed bumps: Manufacturers spend a fortune on developing a smoother ride and the local council put these monstrosities in to damage your suspension and wheel alignment.

Shut Katie Hopkins Down

Enough is Enough.

Katie Hopkins has had more than her fair share of the limelight and it's time to stop lining her pockets by giving her the media oxygen to spout her obscene views.

She says she stands by everything she says and that she has "integrity", but there's a huge difference between speaking 'honestly' (suggesting she never takes a contrary view just to raise her profile) and insulting or hurting people.  Regardless of your darkest private thoughts, some things are best not said, but she CHOOSES to disregard people's feelings.

Yesterday's appearance on Loose Women was the final straw and provided a perfect example of her twisted logic.

Not only did she fail to apologise to Coleen Nolan and her family for the cruel trolling of Coleen's sister Linda, by making hurtful references to her appearance when she was battling breast cancer, but she felt this was justified because she was defending Linda's CBB nemesis Jim Davidson.

So it's OK to wade in and say unspeakable things about someone on the one hand while claiming virtuous qualities like loyalty on the other.

Except Jim apologised and Katie won't.

We need to make it clear to TV producers and newspaper editors that we see through this controversy magnet and implore them to stop giving her a platform - everyone might have a right to free speech, but this doesn't make our media any less culpable for magnifying the views of a sociopath to attract their own audiences.

SHUT HER DOWN

#ShutHopkinsDown

 * UPDATE BELOW*   -   *UPDATE BELOW*   -   *UPDATE BELOW*

Unsurprisingly, I was attacked on Twitter almost immediately after publishing this for not upholding the principles - indeed, not understanding the concept - of the free speech I claim to embrace.  It's usually defined as: "The right to speak without censorship or restraint by the government" but this has also been expanded by the Offense Principle.

My opinion (to which I am entitled!) is that there is no reason to sink to personal insults or to abandon civility, decency and respect when expressing a view.  The Free Speech lobby want it 'no holds barred' but, I'm sorry, this paves the way for people to go up to a child with a learning difficulty and call them a retard without fear of retribution - or allows hate preachers to publicly poison people's minds or incite murder.  We all want to live in a society like that, right?? 

Someone pointed out that there are bigger problems in the world like ISIS - my point exactly.  People like Katie are at the very root of driving a wedge in society through lack of tolerance and inflaming hate.

(Not) Box Clever

A lesson in how to do business inefficiently ...

This morning Mr Courier delivered this:

Even the cat was 'excited'

(Helped to demonstrate size perspective, anyhow)

We were expecting a couple of deliveries for exchanged Christmas presents (boots for my son in a smaller size, a dress for my wife - also smaller, happily!), but why was this so light?  Opening the box initially revealed nothing except seemingly a lot of giant bubble wrap:

But what lay beneath?

Wait ... all that to send this?:

It was a pack of decorations from Tesco to replace ones that had been sent incorrectly in the first place.  The first lot had arrived with two similar sized products, but in the same sized box - which already had us angered at the time by the environmental wastage (Amazon are also guilty of this).

* * * * *

So, let's also look at the transaction from an economical perspective and you might get some clues as to why Tesco's profits and market share have been on the slide ...

- The item itself cost £7.99, to help you calculate the likely profit margin.

- The postage we paid on the original item was part of a £3.95 minimum (albeit sent with two other items), so this would have been incurred by Tesco themselves for the re-despatch.

- In the event, the goods that arrived were the same as the first lot.  The problem was in the product description, so they've incurred the additional postage cost as a result of someone's original input error.

- Not only have their resource costs doubled as a result of having to re-process this item, but they also had to pay the person in the call centre who arranged for the second despatch and someone else will presumably have to go in and alter the product description - if they can even bother to try to prevent an expensive recurrence.

- They could clearly have saved on packaging costs (but it's the waste and impact on the planet's resources that upsets us the most).

- They told us to keep the item sent to us in error, which is possibly enough on its own to go into negative profit on this transaction.

* * * * *

Now, we could go back to them and repeat the whole fiasco over again but we can make do with the items we've been sent - and we'd rather save another tree from being sacrificed as a result of corporate incompetency.

I'm posting links to this on Twitter, Facebook and to Tesco themselves - possibly BBC Watchdog - and would urge you to take similar action the next time a delivery contains more air than substance.

But at least the cat's happy!

Good People Unite

Interesting to see ‪#‎WhoIsMuhammad‬ trending on Twitter - a man who would smile if mocked (so presumably would have done so at the Charlie Hebdo cartoons), promoted respect for women and education and purportedly tolerated people of all races and creeds - to the extent that, when asked why he stood at the passing of a coffin for a Jew, he replied "Was he not a human being?". Regardless of where you think he stands in terms of salvation, these look like the marks of a good Teacher at the very least - why don't the extreme Islamists get this? Hoping these positive messages might lead to the unity between religions we've seen in France.

The mistake of the peaceful majority in the past was to remain silent - they're not doing so now and we should all promote peace - loudly!

The Old Boy Network seems Alive and Well

I'm getting mightily tired of the massive fines being imposed on banks (most recently for forex manipulation) not finding their way back to the people who were initially disadvantaged down the line.

I thought the financial regulators were altruistically set up to protect investors and strike a fair deal for them when they were wronged.

But instead it seems the banks continue with their dodgy practices and simply see these fines as a cost of doing business - I doubt that the fines represent more than a small fraction of the gains they actually make from malpractice.

And I can't help noticing what a lucrative industry governance has become in its own right - and how many executives (probably the majority of them ex-bankers themselves) are now doing rather nicely in both the States and here in the UK (despite occasionally having to defer the icing on the cake through bonuses).

In my most cynical moments, I'm convinced there's collusion between the City and its watchdogs*.  While hoodwinking the man in the street by creating the impression that everyone's playing by the rules, it's a perfect ruse for the fat cats to carry on pretty much as they did before - same greed, brighter halo.

They're not alone, of course - charity executives are also capitalising on the plight of those further down the food chain and the likes of Tony Blair are doing alright by picking up on both sides of their meddling as well (I wrote about the latter here).

I live in the hope that God ultimately won't help those who help themselves at other people's expense.

It's since been announced that the Government is allocating £100M from the LIBOR manipulation fines to military and emergency service charities.  Charitable donations by stealth from borrowers and investors to people whose pensions have ironically been decimated by the banks' other dodgy dealings. Blood money?

* If more proof is needed, welcome Attorney General Eric Holder of the SEC to the above club - a classic case of "working" with bad banks like JPMorgan Chase.

UPDATE (4 Jan '16): Another one under Blair's wing - David Miliband pockets big bucks from refugee misery.

Dear Cyclist - "It's Behind You!"

This week a Heathrow car rental firm got itself into hot water for warning its hirers that London cyclists are a "hazard" and "it is always the motorist's fault".

I'm not anti-cyclist, and we know that cars and bikes can exist in harmony in places like the Netherlands, but many London cyclists do seem to have a fairly blase attitude towards self-preservation.

I attribute most of my defensive driving skills to the spacial awareness that years of cycling and motorcycling instilled in me and it frustrates me that motorists and cyclists alike are often guilty of not paying nearly as much attention to what's coming up behind them as what's on the road ahead.

Which brings me to a glaring omission from most of the bicycles I see on London's roads - rear view mirrors.

It's true that motorists often neglect to check their blind spots, but at least their vehicles are equipped with the means to monitor potential developments behind them, whereas too many times I've seen cyclists swerve around obstacles like parked cars without so much as cursory glance over their shoulders beforehand.

Is it a vanity thing?  Do they think that, having spent so much on racing lycra and bikes that have specifications far beyond their needs or capabilities, it simply wouldn't be cool to spoil the effect with mirrors that might be seen as a betrayal of their commitment to shave milliseconds off their performance because of the extra wind drag produced?  This is commuting, guys, not the Olympics.

I have a friend who raced at a professional level, so I sought his opinion before writing this in case I incurred the wrath of those who take their riding seriously and are tired of getting beaten up on because they get placed in the same bag as their amateur counterparts.

His reply?  "I would say it comes simply down to people who don't have a clue how to be safe on bikes ... And there's a lot of them around!"

If you're too cool for school, there are mirror options that can be worn in-helmet or on your wrist etc.

For my part, I was proud of my mirrors as a kid cycling in the somewhat less frantic environment of a sleepy Australian town - although in retrospect I'd probably have lost the handlebar tassels ...