Category: General

I am writing this because the graphs that one finds on Google, in the press, and on television could not only be misinterpreted by those not used to graphs, but can frighten the daylights out of them as a result of what they appear to say about the credit crunch. A graph is nothing more than a pictorial representation of a condition, but how it is presented can seriously affect the interpretation. What I strongly object to it is that these graphs are representing the relationship between the pound, and say the dollar. They don’t show the whole of the graph to the zero baseline, but start it at such a high level that the variations for a single day’s trading are shown out of proportion, giving a frightening effect. A lot of us are frightened enough as it is.

I have been using graphs all my working life. It is a simple tool to enable me to assess problems quickly and easily without recourse to pages of mathematics. It is pointless to draw graphs representing very short periods of time, except in scientific or research projects. It is even worse to draw them truncated, where the baseline is not zero, but some arbitrary position further up the scale, because this changes the whole relationship, unless one can interpret accurately the differential. If one is drawing a graph of expenditure, for example, the time intervals of the baseline should bear some relationship to the rate of expenditure, if one is paid monthly, then monthly. The graphs that I’ve been objecting to are based on a daily change in the value of the pound, when we are either paid weekly or monthly, and as finance is influenced by more than the rate of exchange, to present the variations on a daily basis, is not giving a guide to the trend. This latter presentation is harder to find, even though it is more useful.

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Let us start with three facts. Fact one, two and a half years ago commentators, journalists, even simple men in the street like me, were bleating about the fact that the internal debt would cripple this country, and those in authority ignored us. Fact two, billions in assorted currencies are being spent on the discovery of how the world materialised and also on space travel, which appear to me to be squandering assets that should be used in better ways. Fact three, since the dawn of history the progress of the world, the effects of the humans on it, and changes in nature itself, have been detrimentally modified, century on century at an exponential rate, until we have arrived where we are today with global warming, a breakdown in society, and no idea of what the future holds. What is worse, our masters are more interested in carrying on long debates about whether or not a few pages of information should or should not have been revealed. The Damian Green saga seems to have ousted practically everything from the headlines for days.

We have the scientists, the naturalists, the geologists, etc, but I believe we are not using them as we should, on a worldwide basis, where every country contributes its own historical changes in every field of physical change, endeavour and nature, to a central analytical database, that would enable the causes and effects of these changes to be analysed on a continental basis, so that the prognosis of future changes can be made in time for our descendants to formulate plans to combat, modify or accommodate their lives to take account of these changes. If the attitudes of our current masters throughout the world are anything to go by, it would seem that this is not being treated on a global scale, or even domestically at a level that it should be. There is no doubt it would cost money to set up and maintain, but probably a lot less at the end of the day, than the piecemeal panic measures which would be put into place if it wasn’t. There are so many examples of where these various changes are affecting our lives already, apart from global warming, one of the most serious being the plight of the honeybee which is vital for pollination, and therefore natural maintenance of not only the countryside, but our very food. The list is endless. It seems that today we tinker rather than grasp the nettle.

It is the fact that I have seen such incredible changes in every aspect of the world as a whole over the last 60 years, from the end of WW2, and us as individuals, that I write this. I am fully aware that someone more experienced in all the avenues I have referred to, would be better equipped to make these statements, but I believe it is time that someone did after having seen the debacle of the credit crunch.

This essay was brought about because I met a child of three who had a number of the skills of a five-year-old. It turned out that the child’s grandmother had also been gifted, and early in her school career had found herself in classes two years above her age. This process through giving her serious problems as a child, prompted her to give her views. In the main she discovered that the teaching staff ignored her elevation, and merely reported on her ability related to the rest of the class, with the result that her reports often had ‘could do better’ as a comment, which had the effect of making her feel that she should have done better, when in fact her efforts had been marvellous She also found that because she was ahead of herself, prior to the elevation, she was bored because she had already learned the work that was in the schedule ahead and what was being taught.

To quote her, I think it’s okay to dabble in a school subjects, like reading, maths etc, but through play, not in a formal setting. To me, socialisation and confidence building are the most valuable things a parent can give a child, whether the child is a genius or a dummy, and often the gifted child misses out on the fun things, in my case it was art, as it was deemed much more inferior to Latin. I wasn’t confident enough to argue than 10 years old. Gifted children will thrive on the healthy balanced home environment regardless of whether they are bored in school or not, as they will find ways of amusing themselves either at home or at school. School is a very different place now from when I was there. They play down the competition elements andthere are a lot more social skills taught.’

Today there is an acknowledgement by the government that schools should have at least one teacher competent to guide the gifted children through the learning process. I’m not aware whether this has been implemented across the board, but I suspect it hasn’t.

>Frrom my observation of the boy I felt that he had the facility even at three, of lateral thinking, which enabled him to ask himself questions and find answers, and so progress. The temptation by a parent to teach the child to read, count and possibly use the computer, would be almost irresistible, and it would take a very strong mind to offer the child alternative skills, such as jigsaw puzzles, construction toys of the simplest kind, or just reading books to him or her about aspects of life which are only touched on in the school curriculum, but are written in an interesting manner for children.

Youngsters, excellent at sports, who from an early age are sponsored by their parents, financially and by devoting hours to taking them to and from training, are an extended case, making the gifted child follow in the parents preordained path to success. In the case of sport, there is that mantra, ‘there is no glory in coming second’, and the hardship, the effort, and the loss of a normal life by the child, through a parent’s decision early in life, might indeed be a disaster. The ego of the parents has to be suppressed for the sake of the child.

In my case, and I am not suggesting that I was in any way gifted, the loss of two years education from I was six, by living in Africa, as I have said repeatedly, set me back factually and psychologically, and I did not become aware of my capabilities until I was in my late 20s. This is the converse to the above, and I suspect a condition among a high proportion of school leavers as a result of sociological problems.

If we are going to use statisticians, we should also use common sense when applying those statistics. Politicians and TV presenters give out figures we take on face value that give the appearance of a massive change, because they are out of context. For example, yesterday on the news, they stated sales on the high street had gone down by 0.1%, and that sales on the Internet had gone up by 16%. The drop in sales of 0.1% while an indicator of slowing down is not going to worry the average viewer, but the rise of 16% in one area, given in the same sentence, without stating what the figures were based upon, could lead to a serious misunderstanding. Of course the Internet sales have risen, people are buying Christmas presents, while the figure for the High Street covers everything, so why not say so?

The party leaders are trumpeting, that they are going to reduce taxes to encourage spending, in order to get us out of the Crunch, something totally contrary to basic reasoning, or is it I who am a nutcase? The Web stated the government expects unemployment to reach the 2 million level by Christmas, and 56,000 young people will be unemployed, which is criminal at their stage in life. For starters this means that the cost of unemployment benefit will rise, the spending power of those unemployed will fall, there will be a knock-on effect causing people to hesitate before spending, resulting in more people being laid off, thus generating a cycle.

We get the impression government’s proposed policies are set in stone. Some might actually be legislated, but often they are withdrawn. These repeated switches can happen over a period of time, it is therefore hard for the individual, not only to know what the current situation is, but how to act. For example, the government has decided not to go ahead with a differential tax on gas-guzzlers, but the actual statement influenced some to think twice, who were purchasing new cars, and for domestic reasons wanted a large vehicle,. This is by far from being an isolated case. Government policy swings around like a weathervane in the wind of public opinion.

They are proposing to raise the threshold for inheritance tax to a £million. Brought up in the Home Counties, surrounded by large private estates with huge houses, and staffs, there was a totally unfair tax called Estate Duty. If two legatees were to die within a given period, the estate would have to cough up twice, which could leave the estate in ruin. Today the elderly save so that upon their death, the younger members of the family will benefit, therefore inheritance tax should be set so that average house values, not that of mansions, plus a reasonable amount of personal savings should determine the threshold. I suggest £500,000. This would maintain funds in the legitimate banking sector, and do a lot in these hard times for a family, presupposing they get on, otherwise there could be chaos. The government is dependent on inheritance tax to bolster its finances.

I think it was in Blair’s time that there was all the fuss about people like me living too long, and costing too much in pension costs. It was about this time that a lot of companies changed their pension arrangements to the detriment of their employees. Strangely at exactly the same time they were worried about obesity causing deaths among young people, and introduced school meals that didn’t work. This seesaw has persisted in a number of guises ever since, and now they’re complaining about the statistical increase in projected life expectancy, and at the same time giving vast figures of the number of people who are going to die through obesity. You can’t have it both ways. Also the guy who took his wife to Switzerland for euthanasia, irrespective of her religious beliefs, was, I believe, handed over to the police on his return home. Where has logic gone?

The other day I came across something I had written on Tuesday the 19th December 2006, entitled Crazy Mathematics, under Serious Stuff, with a forecast of the problems that would lead up to the credit crunch. I’m not stupid enough to think I’m original in my ideas and thoughts, even less do I think what I write in my blog is going to have any effect on those whom I am criticising. I believe that if I think it, thousands of other thoughtful people will be thinking of it too, but the problem really is that we have not got a concerted voice, and we don’t cross communicate enough. All some of us do, is what I do, I bleat repeatedly on deaf ears, instead of having the charisma to be able to say what I want to say on television, and so reach not only a vast proportion of the electorate, but the very people I am criticising. I have discovered that if people in authority don’t like the letters of complaint many think nothing of not acknowledging them, even if they are sent by recorded delivery.

There are so many things that we all know that are wrong, today. For example why are, what I assume to be foreign nationals, standing or sitting on our streets begging? In another blog I wrote of a husband-and-wife team of English beggars, in the 30s, in Balham, who actually owned a terrace of houses, in a lower middle-class district of London. Why are there foreigners at traffic lights on the outer city roads trying to sell us local newspapers, and at times interfering with the flow of traffic?

One example of a problem which I consider needs urgent reassessment, is the government housing programme. The surfaces of brown field sites will generally be hardened and in consequence the run-off at times of heavy rain will be considerable. This should be remedied or utilised. Today a high proportion of people are too busy to garden, they pave over their front gardens, to create parking space for the two or three cars, while at the same time saving work, and what their back gardens are like is anybody’s guess. Just because the design of the large blocks of flats in the 50s and 60s were a disaster, causing us to overstate the anti-social and deleterious environmental aspects, doesn’t mean that in this day and age, there are not a lot of people who would benefit from being able to purchase or better still rent a flat, rather than have the responsibility of a house with all that entails. Why, is the government proposing to build on green-field sites when there are still acres of paved areas unused? My reasoning is that it is considerably cheaper to plough up a green-field site, rather than have all the problems of dealing with the sewage and surface water drainage, hard surfaces and cables of a brown site, and government quietly forgets the long-term effects and costs of the loss in fields, trees and hedgerows that are so necessary to the maintenance of our environment. I would just draw your attention to one particular, there was panic recently when it was discovered that there were viruses and insects which were seriously affecting honey bee culture in England, and the worry was more to do with the failure of the fertilisation of commercial growing products, as it was the bees. Honey bees need flowering natural plants to survive, not those brought on in plastic tunnels. I believe green-field sites should be almost sacrosanct.

I could go on listing my personal worries and objections, but until it becomes the voice of the people, where we have a central, neutral agency that would receive and can correlate, analyse, and broadcast the worries of those of us who are right to be concerned, and then pass on the more serious, more general deficiencies to Parliament, or some other representative organisation that has teeth, we will get other disasters like the credit crunch, and the imminent disaster of ID cards. Writing to the newspapers and even in blogs is to some extent a pointless occupation unless one has a name which is recognized.

Sophistication is a two edged sword, on the one hand it has made our lives easier, and on the other it has complicated communication, information and misinformation, to such an extent that we are up to our knees in lies, half-truths, and manipulation. At one end we learn that we can communicate through music with the child in the womb, allegedly to the benefit of the child. At the other end, as a result of high-speed communication, and again manipulation, we find that we are no longer as secure as we had been given to believe. So how has this happened, and is it advancement or regression? The cause is a gigantic change in how some of us view honesty, how flexible the concept is, and if in fact, if we have any responsibility to others, or only to ourselves. Trust has gone out the window, and we are now, to our psychological disadvantage, almost totally sceptical of most information and communications, written or verbal. Today, possibly due to political manipulation, we constantly have change for the sake of change for some unknown advantage, causing disruption, cost and disillusion.
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In the 20s and 30s life was nowhere near as soft as it is today, but one advantage was that we had trust, we trusted each other, we trusted those who served us in every field of our existence, and we trusted the prospects of our future. Communication was relatively slow, basic, and simple. It was all we needed, because we were not having to look over our shoulder, and suing or getting sued was not on our horizon. We didn’t have a plethora of advertisers bombarding us with exaggeration and implied half-truths. There was no need for the level of insurance that is offered today, quality was at a high level, products were reliable and repairable. Crime was negligible and the only insurance we generally took out, was a weekly contribution to the Hospital Savings Association, in order to pay the doctor. Today, without deep research, you haven’t a clue who you are insured with for anything. You make a claim, it is rejected because of the small print, so you decide to avoid that insurer, and years later you make another claim and discover that the company you are with, at some point was bought up by the company you eschewed, and that claim is denied in the small print also. This, unfortunately is the pattern in so many of our relationships and communications, even with government departments. The customer is no longer always right.

Today we have reached a level of communication fraud, either electronic, or postal
that is totally based on the easy access of personal information. There are few of us who can say we have never been duped. We get letters, apparently official, informing us of some crisis in our lives, or a vague opportunity, that demands instant attention, and involves cost. The demand holds sufficient personal information as to appear official and legal, and the unwary are sucked in to replying to some accommodation address, owned by someone on another continent, and they lose their money. Some politicians, with incredible influence, are not averse to lying to us, or making promises based on half-truths, sufficient to achieve their personal or political ends. Our homes in a high proportion of cases are barricaded, and the elderly are vulnerable to attack. The products we buy have a designed life in many cases, because we now live in a throwaway society, and it is not only the products we throwaway. This in turn asks another question, where do we go from here, up or down?

It is all right for a nonentity like me to speak his mind, there is a small audience, and in addition, you may not think it, but I’m careful in what I say and whom it can affect. The megaphone politics across the pond, damages more than it improves the thoughts of the electorate. It’s a barrage of short bursts of rhetoric, for political effect rather than to serve any other serious purpose. How much damage it will do in the long run will only be discovered when a new president has been in office for a while.

George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, accused the PM of planning a spending splurge that will saddle two generations with debts. As far as I understand,. Osborne made no attempt to show the basis of these statements, and did nothing more than give some of us the impression that he was fighting the next election. The majority of us have been cut off at the knees by the sudden change in our fortunes, savings being taken from us, and the future, especially for the worst off, looking bleaker than it has for a long time. Anyone who has read my blog will know that I have little respect for the sagacity, the management capabilities, and the unbiased interest of a large proportion of our senior politicians. In this particular case, Osborne has done nothing but increase the depth of worry by adding more imponderables to the equation, which is already overloaded with worry, doubts and changes in circumstance.

It is the responsibility of the opposition to oversee the conduct of the government and if necessary draw attention to any shortcomings, mismanagement, or irregularities. Westminster as a whole is the main controller of our destiny, and in these days of central government has an overpowering influence on our lives. This responsibility does not solely rest with the government in power, because ours is a democratic government. When the credit crunch started I pointed out that not only was the government responsible for not having policed the extravagances of the stock exchanges, it was also that of the opposition. Osborne, when he came to the conclusions that he is now professing, and trying to obtain Brownie points by making bald statements on television, should have set out carefully and in detail, his conclusions and the basis upon which he had arrived at them, and presented them to the government as a criticism of their policies. If, in fact, he has already done it, and the government rejected it, then I would have thought he would have taken every opportunity to say so. In his speech, I don’t believe there was any such reference, instead he has added to our worries, and increased doubts, without allowing us to have sufficient information that we can decide for ourselves what is the truth of the matter.

High speed communication is responsible for things termed sound-bites, which I believe serve no useful purpose, give only a part of the problem or the solution, and are generally tossed off when a microphone is thrust forward, or there is a political axe to grind. Those responsible for the running of our country should think long and hard before they make statements concerning matters that are at the root of our existence. I have found time and again there has been an awful lot that we should have known about and we never heard, or read. It seems silence is selective.

For me, the cat is now out of the bag. I know it’s a silly phrase, but I have never really had time for celebrity worship, and have spent all my life totally unaware of their lifestyle until the silly business of Jonathan Ross’s indiscretion, minor in my view, which has been aired on the front pages of our press, and the headlines of the Internet news, for almost a week, when much more serious things were taking place in the world. The cat, as I call it, is the obscene salaries, not even just one off payments, the celebrities are clearly getting.

The average tradesman, who is an expert in his field, probably earns about £20,000 a year, based on 200 working days, at 100 hundred pounds a day. professionals, with university degrees, start somewhere in the region of 30 to 40 thousand, and for most of them, their top limit will be about 150, 000, if they are very good and very lucky. So when I hear that an alleged comedian, whose humour is relatively basic, at times, by my standards, almost gutter, is going to be given somewhere in the region of a hundred thousand pounds for one appearance, I know the world has gone mad. As to his alleged ‘salary’ of 6 million a year, an average doctor or surgeon would only earn half of that in his lifetime.

For some time I have been yammering on, on the blog, about the drop in the quality of what is offered on television, and the incredible number of repeats. The poor imports from America, the poor level and repetitious nature of the new, home-grown, material, which is often just a rehash of classical stories that we have heard and seen before, a prime example is the number of versions of Pride And Prejudice. Jonathan Ross can not be the only person receiving crazy pay, there must be hundreds of them, and we, the bemused public, are actually paying these salaries ourselves, in the advertising revenues extracted from the cost of products, our taxes helping to boost the BBC, and our licence fees. It had to come from somewhere. The question that always comes to my mind when I hear about people with their millions, is how the devil you can actually spend what’s left of 6 million after tax, on a yearly basis, and I bet, if you’re a millionaire, you can afford the best accountancy brains to keep as much as possible of the sick millions. On the basis of 6 million a year, some of the offshore banks must be groaning under the weight of celebrities’ savings, because surely they couldn’t spend it all. I just wonder if Mr Ross is 5,980,000 times as happy as I am?

I rest my case

We are all worried about something these days, but I have found one or two specifics strange enough to be worrying.

It seems that to some extent we are joined at the hip with America and what happens there affects what happens here. The credit crunch has born this theory out. Therefore when you read that Obama, who could one day have serious influence in the world’s politics, is able at a time of colossal financial down turn, to spend an estimated $6 million on what is nothing more than one half hour’s political advertising across the US, and is part of over $150 million+ spent on electioneering, one can wonder whether he has anything worth selling. If he had, surely it would sell itself, with only a little persuasion. The USA really worries me, they have already marched us into two wars without sufficient planning, and, as a nation, they certainly don’t really warm to the Brits..

We are constantly hearing how the government is making a total mess of budgeting, meeting its financial obligations in such areas as the Child Support Agency, legislating and then changing its mind, and failures in information technology, causing a wide ranging number of problems. We are now discovering that they have totally miscalculated the finances necessary to carry forward their theories on university training. Their solution is going to cause a wide amount of disruption over the next four years, irrespective of how it is handled. The grant system up to now, I am told by some students, is a shambles, with student debt rising. If they suddenly in midstream, start changing the rules, no one will know where they are. When on the one hand they are talking in trillions, and as the budget shortfall is alleged to be about 2 million, my own logic would suggest that no changes are made by cutbacks, but proposals be made for the future, so that individuals, can at least budget accurately, even if the government can’t.

I am going to write from hindsight, and I hope with logical foresight. We are forever hearing about saving energy, road accidents, and the cost to the environment of driving of every sort. What I find incredible is that now we can find money in trillions not even billions, in spite of the fact that this has occurred because of blatant criminality and the lack of respect for others. Looking to the future, before we are out of the so-called down turn, I believe we should be seriously examining a total rethink of transport. I suspect that there will be a number of civil servants who will be relatively unemployed, in the logistics and engineering fields, through the downturn, and these people should be marshalled in such a way that information can be exchanged from every part of the land, correlated, new theories evolved, fed back into the areas to find the weaknesses, and finally produce a plan that may take years to implement, in stages, but will get us back to where we were before we lost all our railways. We must not continue with this one-man one-car business, the mummy run, and vast lorries hammering roads that were never designed for them. It is since I have been retired that I have discovered the relief of travelling by public transport, but once you’ have actually found the flaming thing, the problem is either you want to go where there is no route, or the service is so poor you are forced back on to the road as a driver..

In 1914 Germany went to war for its own aggrandisement, thousands died time and again and the overall death toll was in millions. That was a war to end all wars, but it wasn’t, and the next time the death toll was obscenely high, the largest proportion of which were civilians. Yesterday when the Paras returned from Afghanistan to their loved ones and the grieving widows and orphans, we had the Minister speaking on television, trying to justify the war in Afghanistan which the Russians couldn’t win, on a basis I believe to be fraudulent, in that he was suggesting that our troops were there to prevent terrorism in our country. The tragic death of a young aid worker merely because she was alleged to be promoting Christianity, was just as fraudulent, and underlined the fact that terrorism is more to do with excitement, money and criminality, than ideals. In Afghanistan heroin is the problem.

When I make statements I believe in setting out the limits of my experience. I served as a home guard with the Grenadiers in Westminster blockhouses, in 1940, during the Blitz and then at 18 served as a sailor on Atlantic convoys, and I also served as a night-time, part-time policeman in Belfast at the height of the troubles in the 1970s. In retrospect I look upon the whole of those periods as a waste of the lives of the young people who were killed, and the rest of us who were standing guard on nothing, fighting shadows, and having very little to show for it in the long run, because within a short time the status quo is re-established, as Germany was back to being a severe power in Europe. Concerning terrorism in Northern Ireland, we are still having burnings, Molotov cocktails, kneecappings, murder, and all the other miserable aspects of terrorism, still, after 39 years.

Wars and acts of terrorism stem from the egos of a very few. In the case of terrorism there is a sham justification put forward, but there is also a strong underlying element of pure criminality, murder, gang warfare, theft and money laundering. The unfortunate aspect of this is that the young are allowed to be drawn in, not for any altruistic reason, but the relatively safe, exciting adrenalin rush that they will get when they face up the police, while stoning and throwing Molotov cocktails at ambulances and fire tenders, in the certain knowledge that they can’t to be taken to book because of their age. One ruse of the terrorist is to use these children and their parents as a cloak from behind which they can shoot.

If you add up the man-hours of patrolling, guarding, personal searching in offices and shops, the disruption of life from bombing and the use of fake bombs, the emotional and the physical damage to the innocents, and the families of the dead, and add into that the cost of repairing the bomb damage, there is no way you can justify terrorism, because at the end of it all there is little or no change. We, in Northern Ireland, know that if you think you have won through, It is only a mirage..