Olympics

 

A lorry has arrived in London carrying barbed wire and wooden posts......turns out its the Irish Olympic fencing team.

 

Sorry.

A bloody nuisance

or two

Everything seems to be conspiring against this scribe.

My left shoulder is still buggered (I don’t know why). I know I should visit the doctor, but finding I was struck of the register and having to re-register, they don’t fill me with ease. More a sense of foreboding.

Secondly I’ve tried to help my eldest daughter, her husband, and infant with their home move. Needless to say the solicitors and an estate agent completely fucked that up. There is light at the end of the tunnel. However knowing our luck it will be an approaching train.

Thirdly, my trusted mower broke down and I stupidly trusted a so called expert firm to repair it. I even told them what the repair needed was. They had the offending machine for four weeks to carry out the repair. I could have done that repair in four hours if I’d the tools.

You can imagine how long the grass grew in that time. I mowed it today. All today.

Fourthly. I took my car in about four months ago to have the juddering, under braking fixed. After forking out a huge sum for the front disks and pads to be renewed, guess what? They’re bloody juddering again FFS? Last time they tried to blame me for overzealous braking. What will they try to blame me with this time?

Fifthly. I went to the garage yesterday afternoon to get a beer. I was driven out by a swarm of wasps. Bastards. However the end was nigh for those buggers. After twilight and having suitably dressed myself in protective clothing, I had great delight in eradicating those evil creatures from this earth. Sue me if you like, Greenpeace.

Hopefully this week will be better.

Blonds

 

Nuf said.

* No locks were damaged in the making of this movie *

Newspaper

I was visiting my daughter and son-in-law the other night
when I asked if I could borrow a newspaper.

'This is the 21st century, old man,' he said.
'We don't waste money on newspapers.
Here, you can borrow my iPad,

I can tell you, that bloody fly never knew what hit it.

Smokers Forum

Nothing2Declare has just started a Forum for smokers to talk about smoking issues. Especially cross border shopping.

Can be found HERE

Life on Mars?

Beautiful and incredible images from the latest batch of photographs sent back from the Mars Lander. Do not scroll down to pic four if you are of a nervous disposition

 

 

Water

 

Bloggers think

and MSM journalists don’t.

A Professor Muller has just released non peer reviewed papers on the BEST surface temperature project the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (Best) project, led by Prof Richard Muller, has published its final results.

I’m not going to write about that little piece of trickery as others more qualified than me are already ripping his methodology apart. Anyway I digress.

A journalist, who Blogs at the Daily Telegraph has supposedly read the paper says we should read it and believe it because Professor Muller is an “expert”. The journo, a Mr Tom Chivers, reckons we should take the paper as read. Below is his line of reasoning.

The trouble is, there's no avoiding it. As a non-climate scientist, I have to accept certain things on authority, as I do with all expert knowledge. This is an argument from authority, but we all do it, and it's vital: if I had cancer, I'd accept the authority of the oncologist and the body of knowledge of the oncology community, rather than try to guide my own treatment with information I'd found on the internet.

He’s trying to make the point that an expert should always be trusted. Why? Have they never been wrong.

After all for hundreds of years the reasoning was that the Earth was flat, and the Sun orbited the Earth. That was the expert belief at the time. Consensus by experts should only be proven by repeated testing of the theory.

Let me give you a case in point.

Helicobacter pylori (Stomach Ulcer to you and me) was for many years believed by the medical profession to be caused by stress and spicy foods. The believed consensus at the time. (They were the experts or so they thought).

However.

Helicobacter pylori was rediscovered in 1982 by two Australian scientists, Robin Warren and Barry J. Marshall as a causative factor for ulcers.^[28] In their original paper, Warren and Marshall contended that most gastric ulcers and gastritis were caused by colonization with this bacterium, not by stress or spicy food as had been assumed before.^[29]

The H. pylori hypothesis was poorly received,

It took a further fifteen years before the consensus was finally overturned. And finally.

In 2005, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Dr. Marshall and his long-time collaborator Dr. Warren "for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease."

Now I have some knowledge of this illness. Last year I suffered from various symptoms such as upset stomach, burning sensation in the stomach, lack of appetite, and occasional vomiting. When I visited my doctor he initially dismissed these symptoms as a minor stomach upset. However I had researched my symptoms and they were far more indicative of something more than a minor stomach upset. I refused to accept his diagnosis and he reluctantly agreed for blood tests to be undergone.

A week later I was diagnosed with an infection of Helicobacter pylori. If I hadn’t questioned the expert, who knows what would have happened? I might be blogging from a hospital bed. Or God forbid, dead. (Mind you Mrs FE would probably have welcomed my demise). 

Moral of the story Tom: Even experts can be wrong. Don’t blindly believe everything you’re told by press release. Question it to an inch of it’s life. That’s what makes a great journalist rather than a mediocre one.

A thankyou

A number of UK banks have banded together to express their gratitude to the British people for helping them out in their time of need.

They have commissioned a limited edition commemorative pencil sharpener which will be offered to selected customers in gratitude for the billions of pounds profit they got out of us last year. It's designed to remind us of the friendly and, even intimate relationship the banks have built up with the British public.

 

 

 

 

 

How the EU works.

 

Now you may have read this before, but I thought I’d reproduce it anyway.

Helga is the proprietor of a bar.

She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar.  To solve this problem she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.

Helga keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers' loans).

Word gets around about Helga's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Helga's bar.

Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in town.
By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands Helga gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer - the most consumed beverages.

Consequently, Helga's gross sales volumes and paper profits increase massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognises that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Helga's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.
He is rewarded with a six figure bonus.

At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS. These "securities" are then bundled and traded on international securities markets.
Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold to them as "AA Secured Bonds" are really debts of unemployed alcoholics.
Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.
The traders all receive a six figure bonus.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Helga's bar. He so informs Helga.
Helga then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons but, being unemployed alcoholics, they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since Helga cannot fulfil her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Helga's 11 employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBOND prices drop by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank's liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Helga's bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms' pension funds in the BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations; her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the government.
They all receive a six figure bonus.

The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who've never been in Helga's bar.

And there we have it in it’s simplified form.