They're dead right.

From an article in the Times today shows that even the MOD are overstaffed with civil servants.

The Ministry of Defence is so stuffed with civil servants that they outnumber the combined manpower of the Royal Navy and the RAF.

The statistic, produced by the Conservatives yesterday to attack the Government’s record on defence manpower, followed condemnation by General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, a former Chief of Defence Staff, over imbalances between uniform and non-uniformed personnel.

Liam Fox, the Shadow Defence Secretary, said that 16 per cent of the Civil Service resided in the MoD, and that the number of civilian officials (86,620), was about 12,000 more than the Royal Navy (34,830) and RAF (39,260) put together.

I work for the Royal Fleet auxiliary, and worked ashore for a couple of years in an office helping to manage the re-fitting of ships. My job was to collate the work for each ship's refit in my group, and edit each job specification to weed out cost overruns.

Now as most engineers know, it is not an exact science and you can't plan for every eventuality. Because of this we expected a cost overrun on several jobs.

For instance, if you open up a pump for survey you may find that the wear is far more than predicted, therefore extra cost incurred.

To this end we were allowed a package of extra money, usually between 5% and 15% depending on the age of the ship to be refitted.

Our outfit was comprised of 50% uniformed staff and 50% civil servants.

One part of Office was entirely staffed with civil servants devoted to writing specifications for alterations to the vessel, ie new equipment to replace the obsolete stuff. (Every thing wears out in time and can't be fixed)

What shocked me was the length of these specs. Sometimes 20 pages or more with endless waffle. The number of lines stating the bleeding obvious such as, "The contractor will carry out the following work", beggared belief.

Needless to say, often these specs arrived at my desk only just in time to be sent to the various tenderers, which procluded me from giving them the real once over.

5% or 15% overrun?

Bollocks! Some of these came in at 150%. What made it worse, is that for a lot of the specs, they called in outside contractors to write them.

Just to end it all, (Not me) when I went into the office there were 21 ships. Now we have 16 and the office has expanded their personnel by over 25%. Make sense to you? Me neither.

Here is the Time article

I'll write a post about the shipboard workplace sometime.

Let them drink beer

A well deserving cause.

RAF chiefs are appealing for donations so British troops returning from Afghanistan can enjoy a cold beer on their flight home.

Dutch brewery Grolsch has donated 10,000 cans, enough for all the personnel coming home after six months away from their families. But Wing Cdr Chadwick would like to be able to offer troops a beer on every military flight out of Afghanistan. "It would be nice to do it all year round, not just for the Rip," he said.

Anyone who wants to contribute to the "Beer for the boys" fund can send a cheque, made payable to "SIF Funds, RAF Brize Norton" and with "Beer for the boys" written on the back, to Wing Cdr Chadwick at 216 Squadron, RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire OX18 3LX.

You know it makes sense.

PS Bugger Liam Donaldson and his Ilk

Think on this before the next election . This means all parties.

My MP voted for a smoking ban, that's why I'm now a Libertarian.

A Tangential attack by the new puritans?

Just another good post at Frank Davis.

Regardless of any claims to the contrary, it has always seemed perfectly apparent to me that the war on smoking is above all a moral crusade. The fundamental objection of antismokers to smoking is that it is a vice, a perverse instinct, an unnatural practice, a species of self-abuse. This is where the antismokers start out. This is their underlying conviction.

It is not, however, the main thrust of the case that antismokers actually make against smoking. They do not say, "Smoking is wrong" or "Smoking is bad". Instead they say, "Smoking is bad for you" and "Smoking causes lung cancer". They do not make a direct assault on smoking as something that is immoral in itself, but instead make an indirect attack by pointing to the consequences of smoking, rather than to smoking itself. After all, nobody is going to say that lung cancer is a good thing. And if lung cancer is an evil, and smoking causes lung cancer, then smoking is also necessarily an evil. QED.

Read The rest here.

Growing Polarisation

I've just read this article over at Frank Davis's blog and find it fits my mood about the smoking ban and the bit by bit loss of our freedoms. Especially the end. Do go over there and read it all.

I'm getting isolated. I realised today that I haven't met up with any friends of mine for months.

I used to meet up with my friends in pubs mostly. Either I'd call them, or they'd call me. And we'd meet up for a few drinks. And maybe other friends would show up, invited or by chance. And we'd sit and have a few drinks, and smoke cigarettes and eat peanuts and talk about this and that. It doesn't happen much now.

With the smoking ban, the pubs became unwelcoming places for smokers. They became as sterile as dentists' waiting rooms. Smoke-free is friendliness-free. The bar girls still smile winningly, and they're still as pretty as they ever were, but it's not the same as it was any more.

Read it all here

Is he ill or....... is it an exit strategy?

ESTABLISHMENT 'COLLUDING IN PLIGHT OF SICK MAN BROWN'?

"The Prime Minister of Great Britain is a man too ill to be holding the Office." This was the conclusion last week of a senior civil servant liaising regularly with Gordon Brown. For reasons which will become clear, the person involved will not go public with the evidence for this conclusion. The same applies to a high-ranking Treasury official who told us "In both a physical and mental sense, the Prime Minister is a very sick man, seriously disabled." Three years ago, an Opposition MP told nby "He is on extremely heavy doses of cutting-edge anti-depressants, but so far they have made little difference". And during the last fortnight, another high-ranking government source claimed "He is now on pills which restrict the foods he can eat and what he can drink. He is losing the sight of his good eye quite rapidly. It's a mess, and nobody knows what to do".

You can read it all here. It makes disturbing reading.

If this is true, and is known about in Cabinet circles, then those ministers that do know, should be hounded out of office for allowing a mentally sick man to be left in charge of the country.

However my thoughts are that this could be a way for Brown to leave office in October with his supposed (In his mind) reputation in tact. There would be no need to have a public leadership election, for the very reason that they could state that the general election in May would be close enough.




©2009 Not Born Yesterday and John Ward.

H/T to Anna Raccoon and Old Holborn.

Lest we forget

Just to remember the Men and Women in our armed forces.




Thanks to VOTR for taking me back to my youth with this melody

Maths the easy way

Mmm, Difficult.

Broadband

In a previous post I had decided to change ISP. Here

The particular provider supplied a setup disk. Mmmm, I thought, this will make life easy. Absolute Bollocks. It was a heap of shite. I should have set up the account manually and saved myself the trouble of running up the road, to get £15 of time for my PAYG broadband dongle, in order to log onto the ISP's forum.

The speed of my broadband has been slow of late (350k), due to the cat pissing on the telephone connection to the wireless router, so I decided to make a few changes.

I moved the router into the hall, next to the master socket, thus shortening the telephone line to the router. A dramatic increase was seen immediately (6M).

Next up was to change the router for a newer dual freqency type. Wow, now up to 12M.

I should have done this along time ago.

Ash at it again

Scientists Examine ASH Smoking Claims

On its website, Action on Smoking and Health makes a number of claims regarding smoking, including that the very breath and smell of smokers, even when they are not smoking, can be extremely hazardous to people's health.

E Cigarette Direct asked three respected Professors of Medicine to examine these claims.

ASH's Health Claims | Professor Brad Rodu | Professor Michael Siegel | Professor Carl Phillips

ASH.org's Health Claims

1. 30 minutes of exposure to drifting tobacco smoke can trigger a fatal heart attack.

ASH states that: "...someone else’s smoke can kill you if even if you can barely smell it, and even if you can’t smell it."

2. E Cigarettes pose dangers for both smokers and non-smokers.

According to ASH, electronic cigarettes are dangerous both for smokers and non-smokers.

3. Third hand smoke can pose serious risks for non-smokers.

Proven or not, this claim has been used to:

• ban smokers from hospital waiting rooms
• bar parents from seeing their children - even when the parents smoke outside. (See smokers not just smokers barred http://www.pr-inside.com/smokers-not-just-smoking-barred-at-r1140158.htm)
  

4. Smoker's breath can be harmful to health, especially to children, the elderly and those especially sensitive to many chemicals.

John Banzhaf says:

"We've always known that a smoker's breath stinks. Now we know that it also creates indoor air pollution which can harm children and perhaps some adults."

Scientist's Responses to ASH

Professor Brad Rodu

Brad Rodu is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Louiseville, and holds an endowed chair in Tobacco Harm Reduction Research. He also runs the Tobacco Truth Blog.

Quite simply, these statements are either gross exaggeration or pure fiction.

With respect to exposure to second hand smoke, it is true that it can initiate some subtle changes in blood chemistry and other factors, but it is a specious exaggeration to claim that it causes heart attacks. There is a general consensus that the important risk factors for heart attacks are primary smoking, diet, high cholesterol and triglyceride levels, low physical activity, hypertension and family history. Compared with these, brief exposure to secondhand smoke is insignificant.

The ASH statement about e-cigarettes is wishful thinking. With respect to smokers, there is substantial and compelling scientific research documenting that consuming the ingredients in e-cigarettes (nicotine, propylene glycol, water and flavors) is vastly safer than burning tobacco and inhaling 3000+ toxic by-products. Claiming that e-cigarettes are dangerous for non-smokers is about as credible as claiming that air travel is dangerous for people who never set foot in an airplane.

Third hand smoke is an invention by Harvard University anti-tobacco extremists; it consists of “breathing air today in a room or car where people smoked yesterday.” The Harvard extremists collected “evidence” for the dangers of third hand smoke, which were the survey responses from 1,500 non-scientists from the U.S. who believe that it can harm babies and children. Third hand smoke has as much scientific credibility, and carries about as much risk, as third hand rain.

John Banzhaf’s comments about the harm related to smokers’ breath has no medical rationale, but it is an excellent example of the increasing marginalization of smokers using pseudoscience. Extending Banzhaf’s logic, non-garlic eaters may be able to absorb the possible health benefits of garlic by moving into the vicinity of garlic aficionados.

Also see Professor Brad Rodu's letter to E Cigarette Direct.

Professor Michael Siegel

Formerly a physician who specialised in preventative medicine, Professor Michael Siegel is now a Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department, Boston University School of Public Health. Michael also has 20 years experience in Tobacco Control, primarily in the field of research, and runs the Tobacco Analysis Blog.

1. 30 minutes of exposure to drifting tobacco smoke can trigger a fatal heart attack.

It may be true, on theoretical grounds, that 30 minutes of tobacco smoke exposure could trigger a fatal heart attack, but this would only be the case for individuals with severe pre-existing heart disease. A healthy person is not going to die from a heart attack due to 30 minutes of secondhand smoke. ASH makes no attempt to qualify its statement. Even worse, ASH gets even more specific in its claim, asserting that the risk of a fatal heart attack in a nonsmoker exposed for 30 minutes is the same as that of an active smoker. This latter claim is factually inaccurate.

2. E Cigarettes pose dangers for both smokers and non-smokers.

There is no existing evidence that e-cigarettes pose a risk for nonsmokers. The nicotine exposure from the exhaled vapor produced the the vapor is likely to be extremely small and there is no reason to think that it poses a danger for nonsmokers. But there certainly is no evidence to suggest that it poses a hazard.

3. Third hand smoke can pose serious risks for non-smokers.

While there is evidence that there are detectable levels of tobacco smoke constituents in exhaled tobacco smoke of smokers after they have finished smoking and on surfaces in rooms after smoking has been completed, there is no evidence that the levels are high enough to cause demonstrable harm to most individuals. The only potential side effect is likely an adverse response among individuals who are exquisitely sensitive to tobacco smoke.

4. Smoker's breath can be harmful to health, especially to children, the elderly and those especially sensitive to many chemicals: "We've always known that a smoker's breath stinks. Now we know that it also creates indoor air pollution which can harm children and perhaps some adults."

As above: There is no evidence that the levels of exposure to tobacco smoke constituents are high enough to cause any problem. The only potential problem could be an adverse response among individuals who are exquisitely sensitive to tobacco smoke.

Note - You can also read our interview with Professor Michael Siegel.

Professor Carl Phillips

Carl V Phillips is Associate Professor at the University of Alberta School of Public Health, where he publishes the TobaccoHarmReduction.org website that provides educational and research information. Much of his work focuses on scientific epistemology, and he recently started the epiereview.com project to help improve the quality of public health science publishing.

First, as an overview, all four of these statements are clear examples of a phenomenon that we have documented in several of our studies: Most major anti-tobacco (and now also anti-e-cig) political actors, including those who are (mistakenly) trusted by the public, demonstrate a willingness to make whatever pseudo-scientific claims they think will further their worldly goals, regardless of the whether they are true, apparently unconcerned with the damage that such claims do to people and to science itself. I have written about this.

1,3,4 on the list are out-and-out scientifically false in the sense that there is no evidence to support them. That is, these are epidemiological claims (claims about actual human health effects) but there is absolutely no epidemiological evidence that supports the claim.

If they had made claims about "detectable levels of chemicals that are known to cause...." or something like that, as many others have, it would be a different kind of lie -- an attempt to take advantage of scientific ignorance to be dishonest without actually making an explicitly false statement.

But given that purely speculative epidemiologic claims were stated as if they were facts, this has to be seen as explicit falsehood. Keep in mind that a scientific hypothesis about a phenomenon needs to be supported before it can be claimed as true; simply finding some reason to propose a particular hypothesis (e.g., a particular exposure might be harmful because there are tiny quantities of some chemical) and then declaring it to be true without evidence is not just unethical - it also damages the public's ability to make sense of science.

Again, these people try to take advantage of scientific ignorance to claim whatever strikes them as expedient without regard to the science. Points 3 and 4 are particularly absurd since the "study" that gets cited as the basis for saying "third hand smoke" is harmful was actually an unethical push-poll that manipulated lay people into saying they feared the effects. This obviously offers no useful information at all.

Point 2 is a bit more complicated of a lie.

Since the claim is juxtaposed with discussions of ETS, it is a clear attempt to imply that the spillover from e-cigs is just as bad as people think ETS is. This is obviously false, since ETS is not even as bad as people think ETS is, and e-cig vapor is, beyond much doubt at all, less harmful still.

It is conceivable that e-cig vapor poses some small risk, but this is speculative since there is no epidemiology and not even any chemistry/physiology to support it.

The claim that the trivial amount of nicotine in the vapor would be much of a risk seems ridiculously far-fetched. That said, the headline statement is literally true if we consider the risk to children of certain e-cig products that are contact poison or swallowing risks.

Of course, referring to such risks (which should be reduced through product engineering!) to try to trick readers into thinking that there is a substantial externality from the vapor is clearly a lie.

What do you think?

H/T to "Freedom to choose"