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Sunday, January 05, 2014
Introducing "Split Endz", the cartoon with broader appeal!
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Factoid: Brits need more governing than Americans
Food poverty and the need for consumer education
The poorest 10% in the UK have significantly less money than they used to, but could still eat healthily. That's one message in DEFRA's 2012 Food Statistics Pocketbook:
As their income dropped, people in this group spent 26% less than before on carcase (fresh) meat, 25% less on fruit and 15% less on vegetables (p.28).
The Eatwell plate may not be right - some claim dietary starch is a factor leading to obesity and diabetes - and libertarians may object to what they see as nannying by the State. Those objections aside, surely there is room for more public education on how to use limited financial resources to best effect?
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. 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.
As their income dropped, people in this group spent 26% less than before on carcase (fresh) meat, 25% less on fruit and 15% less on vegetables (p.28).
The Eatwell plate may not be right - some claim dietary starch is a factor leading to obesity and diabetes - and libertarians may object to what they see as nannying by the State. Those objections aside, surely there is room for more public education on how to use limited financial resources to best effect?
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. 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.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
Vote for John Ward!
At last, a party political manifesto I could get behind:
- Mutualise the NHS and all social weal services
- Replace Whitehall with mutualised administration
- Disallow all additional Sir Humphrey pension emoluments after 2006
- Stop immigration dead now
- Start retraining our over-educated, under-equipped workforce
- Stop building boxes and start growing food
- Leave the EU, let Scotland bugger off if it wants to
- Stop all rises and bonuses at taxpayer-owned banks
- Make any form of bank bailin illegal
- Purge the police force of crooks
- Stop non-taxpayers from owning media titles
- Sanitise Westminster’s money-lobbying forever
- Come down hard on multinational tax avoidance
- Introduce compulsory uniformed Social Service for every child without exception from age 12-14
- Put respect for others at the centre of education.
From sad to glad
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Coming to the South Hams last week, we passed Dartington Primary School again. This time it had some marquees up and I wondered what the event was; it turns out that owing to alleged design faults, the cutting-edge eco-architecture is leaking rainwater into the school buildings, so that they have had to be supplemented with temporary structures.
Rather than laugh at the Greens, let's just see this as merely a teething problem. I thought back in 2009 that the school was forward-looking and I could imagine the children enjoying the light-welcoming environment. The Mail article linked above says they're enjoying the enforced change in routine, too.
Natural light is not only helping the school run on a "carbon-neutral" basis, it's good for preventing seasonal depression (SAD), an issue raised in the Mail yesterday ("Workers who see no natural light all winter").
Energy is getting expensive already, and eventually fossil fuels will become scarce (will the next generation see the end of gas?). Other resources may last hundreds of years yet, but unless you're hoping the human race will die out soon, it makes sense to prepare for the long term.
And there are further reasons to consider localism and resilience: the world may not always be so interconnected and relatively peaceful and co-operative. Totnes ( only two miles away) bought into the "transition town" movement early.
There's been some attempt to do the same for Birmingham, but it seems largely to have fizzled out.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. 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.
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
Awakening
MotionElements Stock Footage
In a recent post, the billionaire Hugo Salinas Price considers how much time we spend in a world of illusions. What happens when the communal fictions break down?
When the money supply has broken free from limitation (such as precious metals - he advocates a return to silver-based currency), it will multiply until the dream breaks - and with it will go many of the other social constructs that keep us relatively safe and well-fed.
"... the National Debt of the US is entirely imaginary. It cannot and will not ever be repaid, and will grow numerically up to the point at which reality finally dissolves the bewitched imagination which holds the population in thrall...
"The storm will force the men and women of the world, who have lived so unquestioningly in their highly imaginary world, to wake up and find, to their astonishment dismay and anger, that they have lost their jobs, that they have no savings and that their pension funds are gone or have been confiscated. Their indignation will be forgotten as sheer terror sets in. The Department of Homeland Security has been given a supply of more than one billion hollow-point bullets for good reason."
We are connected to each other across the world and in abstract and technology-dependent ways that make the whole system increasingly liable to disruption. We have become detached from the resources and skills that would help us survive in our immediate environment.
This is why one of Charles Hugh Smith's major themes is the need to avoid debt and conventional forms of investment in the future (such as a college degree), and instead build up local connections and a wide stock of useful social and practical skills.
Sadly, I'm not sure how easily this (undoubtedly wise) scheme can be adopted by the urban masses, especially in overcrowded countries like the United Kingdom, whose ratio of arable land to population is one-fifth that of the USA's.
CHS is based in Hawaii, a fertile Pacific archipelago 2,500 miles west of mainland USA and almost 4,000 miles east of Japan. The majority of its food is imported, but official attention has now turned to the need for greater food security - see this 2012 Hawaii State planning document (pdf). Good luck, CHS - though you'll need it a bit less than we do.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. 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.
In a recent post, the billionaire Hugo Salinas Price considers how much time we spend in a world of illusions. What happens when the communal fictions break down?
When the money supply has broken free from limitation (such as precious metals - he advocates a return to silver-based currency), it will multiply until the dream breaks - and with it will go many of the other social constructs that keep us relatively safe and well-fed.
"... the National Debt of the US is entirely imaginary. It cannot and will not ever be repaid, and will grow numerically up to the point at which reality finally dissolves the bewitched imagination which holds the population in thrall...
"The storm will force the men and women of the world, who have lived so unquestioningly in their highly imaginary world, to wake up and find, to their astonishment dismay and anger, that they have lost their jobs, that they have no savings and that their pension funds are gone or have been confiscated. Their indignation will be forgotten as sheer terror sets in. The Department of Homeland Security has been given a supply of more than one billion hollow-point bullets for good reason."
We are connected to each other across the world and in abstract and technology-dependent ways that make the whole system increasingly liable to disruption. We have become detached from the resources and skills that would help us survive in our immediate environment.
This is why one of Charles Hugh Smith's major themes is the need to avoid debt and conventional forms of investment in the future (such as a college degree), and instead build up local connections and a wide stock of useful social and practical skills.
Sadly, I'm not sure how easily this (undoubtedly wise) scheme can be adopted by the urban masses, especially in overcrowded countries like the United Kingdom, whose ratio of arable land to population is one-fifth that of the USA's.
CHS is based in Hawaii, a fertile Pacific archipelago 2,500 miles west of mainland USA and almost 4,000 miles east of Japan. The majority of its food is imported, but official attention has now turned to the need for greater food security - see this 2012 Hawaii State planning document (pdf). Good luck, CHS - though you'll need it a bit less than we do.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. 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.
Know your place
For whatever a man imagines that he cannot do, he imagines it necessarily, and by that very imagination he is so disposed that in truth he cannot do what he imagines he cannot do.
For so long as he imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long is he determined not to do it: and consequently, so long it is impossible to him that he should do it.
However, if we pay attention to these things, which depend solely on opinion, we shall be able to conceive that a man should under-estimate himself.
Benedict Spinoza – Ethics
I’ve played around with this quote for years because it gets right to the heart of a key aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy.
By imagination, he means dubious notions and images we absorb from the outside world without having examined them effectively – or even without having examined them at all.
He wrote long before modern ideas of psychological conditioning, but here he is effectively saying that our abilities as well as our thinking can be conditioned by the outside world.
If we absorb the notion that we can’t do something without taking the trouble to analyse why not, then we simply can’t do it and that’s that. Not a particularly remarkable conclusion for our times, but remarkable enough for his I suspect.
Many of us do underestimate ourselves and I suspect we should always try to notice the fact and analyse why it may be so. Was the underestimate fed to us by external circumstances?
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. 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.
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