UK News media "among most corrupt in the world"

Transparency.org's 2013 interactive Global Corruption Barometer lists only 4 countries (out of 107) where the media are perceived to be among the most corrupt institutions: Egypt, Australia, New Zealand - and the UK.

Less surprisingly, political parties in about half of the 107 countries are also perceived to be corrupt. And that includes the UK.

Here, it's getting worse. When I first looked at Tranparency's surveys in 2008, the UK's overall perceived-corruption score had dropped from 8.4 the year before, to 7.7 (10 represented squeaky clean). The scoring is slightly different now - out of 100 - but for 2012 the British figure is 74, which I assume translates to 7.4 under the old system (the US scores 73).

Admittedly, these surveys are about the perception of corruption, and news-fed democracies may perhaps tend to be more cynical nations. But perceptions matter, and this decline in public trust, also shown in dwindling electoral turnouts, threatens the legitimacy and stability of our system of government.

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Interest rates will trigger the meltdown - Hugo Salinas Price

In King World News (2 August) Hugo Salinas Price alerts us to the threat of interest rate rises, which he describes as "fatal" and leading to worldwide "massive bankruptcies".

I'd known that derivatives are a huge market; what I hadn't realised was that the overwhelming majority of the contracts are related to interest rates.

The graph below is a visualisation of data from this Wikipedia article on the derivatives market:

Theoretically all the bets net off against each other, but we've seen what happens when a counterparty defaults (Lehman etc). Now consider that the annual GDP of the USA is only 3% of the notional value of interest rate contracts alone.

Frightening.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Trees in the mist

Ronald Reagan is widely quoted as having said trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.

Not true of course, but not entirely without foundation either. Trees and other vegetation, particularly conifers, emit terpenes, aromatic chemicals whose generic name is derived from turpentine. The delightful aroma of pine resin in conifer woodlands comes from chemicals such as α-pinene and β-pinene.

Yet according to the National Physical Laboratory :-

• In addition to anthropogenic emissions, the earth’s natural vegetation releases huge amounts of organic compounds into the air.
• An estimated 1300 Tg C of terpenes a year are emitted, 10 times more than anthropogenic emissions.

 As far as climate is concerned, the NPL has this to say:-

• Terpene emissions are expected to rise sharply as global temperatures rise.
• As carbon dioxide levels increase, the earth will warm and higher levels of terpenes will be emitted.
• This will increase cloud formation, which will increase the optical thickness of clouds resulting in an increase in the reflection of sunlight back into space.
• Terpenes constitute a significant potential for feedback mechanisms in the climate.
• Terpenes also mediate the generation of ozone in the lower atmosphere.

 Dramatic stuff - even somewhat over-dramatic. Yet all this does not imply Reagan was correct because terpenes are not pollutants. They may be involved in the photochemical reactions which give that attractive haze over distant forests, but haze isn’t smog and doesn’t have the same effect on lungs and mucous membranes.

Without oxides of nitrogen from, for example vehicle exhaust emissions, tree terpenes alone would not cause the notorious photochemical smog which first appeared in Los Angeles in the 1940s and subsequently other large, sunny cities.

To my mind, this is why electric vehicles such as trams make sense in large cities, especially those where photochemical smogs are a problem. The issue isn’t CO2 emissions as many now seem to suppose, but old-fashioned air pollution such as oxides of nitrogen, unburned fuel and particulates. Sunlight just adds to the problem but that was there long before we decided to whizz around in metal boxes.

Electric vehicles are not pollution-free modes of transport of course. They are effectively powered by whatever is used to recharge their batteries, but any polluting effects are moved away from the city to the power station and subject to simpler and more stringent regulation.

Reagan pointed the finger at trees, climate alarmists point to CO2 and as so often a fog of dramatic misdirection hits the headlines.

Anthropogenic fog?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

World Tweet Like A Celeb Day!

Why wait to become famous to act like it? Let's make August 1st Tweet Like A Celeb Day and load up the Internet with our garbage.

Rules:

1. Tell everybody what you're doing, as often as possible - but only the unimportant stuff
2. Retweet everyone else's rubbish
3. No libel, insults etc

I have an extra rule, employed by the famous: to be a Twitter winner, you need at least as many followers as the number you follow. So I will only follow those who follow me, plus anybody who retweets my stuff.

Good luck!

UPDATE (2 Aug 2013)

Well, that was a damp squib! Mind you, I can't blame anybody, for I got bored talking about myself in very short order - how on earth do celebs manage it? So tiring.

On the plus side, at least one Twitter follower has delisted me, but I can't be bothered to find out who.

Who reads tweets anyhow? If you follow a lot of people then each message soon gets pushed lower down as the list lengthens. You'd have to be online practically all the time. Is this service tailor made for iPhone owners with OCD?

Thanks to Bill Quango and Paddington for their comments.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Win a bottle of wine!

 

The above image is a snapshot of the Windows Media Player graphic accompaniment to the sound track of a BBC radio programme. A bottle of Somerfield red wine goes to the first person to guess the programme.

 

UPDATE (2 Aug 2013):

 

Nobody guessed, yet surely Media Player is a sound fingerprint! The answer is Count Arthur Strong, appearing on Mark Radcliffe's Radio 2 late-night programme in 2005.

 

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Coppola: Gold backing would destroy the US dollar

In a new article for Pieria, Frances Coppola argues that fixed currency systems can't cope with rapid change in the balance of international trade. Reverting to the gold standard would force the US to balance its books, but this would slam on the brakes so hard that a depression would ensue and foreign countries would have to find an alternative to the US dollar.

As matters stand, says Martin Armstrong, "The dollar is setting up to be the ONLY viable currency."

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Dark Snow

Back in February I did a piece  on World Voices about ice melt in Greenland, and linked to a blog by environmental scientist Jason Box. His theory is that the melting is accelerated by particle pollution from burning forests and fossil fuels - a fine layer of this soot settles on the ice and increases absorption of solar radiation.

Since then, the Guardian newspaper has picked up on the story (12 June 2013), and now he's featured in the current (31 July) edition of Rolling Stone magazine (subscription required), in an article by Bill McKibben entitled "The Ice Maverick".

The theory is comprehensible and plausible, whatever the debate about global warming generally. Professor Box is seeking crowdfunding for his research - please see the Dark Snow website here.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.