Leatherhead Matters

UK Government’s Credit Rating May be Relegated

December 5, 2008 · Leave a Comment

From Yesterdays Wall St Journal

The U.K. government insists Britain is well-placed to cope with the financial turmoil. The credit default swap market begs to differ. The cost of insuring U.K. government debt against default has risen to a level that suggests the U.K. is in danger of losing its triple-A rating, based on a Moody’s Investors Service model. That no longer looks so far-fetched.

The sharp rise in U.K. credit default swaps is in contrast to other leading E.U. economies. Even as 10-year

Categories: Bubble · Financial · Gordon Brown · Government · National Debt · News · Recession · Uncategorized
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A Divided Nation With Government Cheerleading the Wrong Side

December 5, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Savers & SpendersToday’ s press neatly summarises the divided nation we now live in. We’ve had a decade of boom, which has encouraged spending & consumption on an unprecedented scale. Now we are finally in transition to more normal times. The transition is going to be painful by way of a severe recession, collapsing businesses, personal bankruptcies & large scale unemployment.

Gordon Brown wants us to believe that he’s like a knight riding his white charger to save us all. However, it’s becoming clearer that he’s making choices about who to support.

He wants the banks to lend more; he’s encouraging record low interest rates via the Bank of England and he plans to increase social welfare. The package which is emerging is clearly designed to:

  1. Ensure those already on welfare don’t have to tighten their belts like the rest of the nation. Sharon Mathews had 7 children by 5 different “guest” fathers. As Mathews demonstrated, under New Labour guest fathers and lots of babies are a way of life in welfare Britain, particularly on sink estates (though I wouldn’t want to suggest that Mathew’s abuse of her children is by any means typical of this group!). Under New Labour, welfare has become a lifestyle choice for thousands of mothers. Multiple child births is a rational choice for many mothers since, it’s their only route to increased (welfare) income. So if Mathews hadn’t been sentenced to prison for child abuse and abduction, she would have continued to receive welfare & neglect her kids in favour of a consumer lifestyle
  2. Assist those who borrowed shed loads of money by, reducing the cost of borrowing & beating up the banks to defer repossessions in cases of repayment default. Prudence went out of the window in the last decade when the traditional mortgage loan of 2.5 to 3.5 times annual earnings increased up to 7 to 9 times (self certified) income. Yes, we can blame the banks but, it takes two to tango. I don’t accept that individuals can absolve themselves of any responsibility when pursuing imprudent personal decisions
  3. Encouraging the profligate to continue spending, rather than save, by cheerleading the reduction of interest rates to unprecedented levels.

But there are many who do not fall into any of the above categories. There are many savers with no or, modest amounts of debt and careful with their money.  Many in this category may be having difficulty in getting by. However, no Government handouts for this group, just punishment for their prudence. In New Labour land prudent savers are being punished by having their savings income diminished to virtually zero.

So, Gordon Brown’s transformation from guardian of prudence to the cheerleader for profligacy is complete.

Categories: Boom & Bust · Bubble · Economy · Gordon Brown · Government · Recession · Society
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Top 10 Global Warming Myths

December 5, 2008 · 8 Comments

MYTH – 1:  Planet earth is currently undergoing global warming

FACT
Accurate and representative temperature measurements from satellites and balloons show that the planet has cooled significantly in the last two or three years, losing in only 18 months 15% of the claimed warming which took over 100 years to appear — that warming was only one degree Fahrenheit (half of one degree Celsius) anyway, and part of this is a systematic error from groundstation readings which are inflated due to the ‘urban heat island effect’ i.e. local heat retention due to urban sprawl, not global warming…and it is these, ‘false high’ ground readings which are then programmed into the disreputable climate models, which live up to the GIGO acronym — garbage in, garbage out.

MYTH – 2:  Even slight temperature rises are disastrous, ice caps will melt, people will die

FACT
In the UK, every mild winter saves 20,000 cold-related deaths, and scaled up over northern Europe mild winters save hundreds of thousands of lives each year, also parts of ice caps are melting yet other parts are thickening but this isn’t reported as much (home experiment: put some water in a jug or bowl, add a layer of ice cubes and mark the level — wait until the ice has melted and look again, the level will have fallen). Data from ice core samples shows that in the past, temperatures have risen by ten times the current rise, and fallen again, in the space of a human lifetime.

MYTH – 3:  Carbon Dioxide levels in our atmosphere at the moment are unprecedented (high).

FACT
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, currently only 350 parts per million have been over 18 times higher in the past at a time when cars, factories and power stations did not exist — levels rise and fall without mankind’s help.

 MYTH  – 4:  Mankind is pumping out carbon dioxide at a prodigious rate.

FACT
96.5% of all carbon dioxide emissions are from natural sources, mankind is responsible for only 3.5%, with 0.6% coming from fuel to move vehicles, and about 1% from fuel to heat buildings. Yet vehicle fuel (petrol) is taxed at 300% while fuel to heat buildings is taxed at 5% even though buildings emit nearly twice as much carbon dioxide!

 MYTH – 5: Carbon dioxide changes in the atmosphere cause temperature changes on the earth.

FACT
A report in the journal ‘Science’ in January of this year showed using information from ice cores with high time resolution that since the last ice age, every time when the temperature and carbon dioxide levels have shifted, the carbon dioxide change happened AFTER the temperature change, so that man-made global warming theory has put effect before cause — this shows that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a futile King Canute exercise! What’s more, both water vapour and methane are far more powerful greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide but they are ignored.

 MYTH – 6:  Reducing car use will cut carbon dioxide levels and save the planet

FACT
The planet does not need saving, but taking this on anyway, removing every car from every road in every country overnight would NOT produce any change in the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere, as can be seen using the numbers from Fact 4, and in any case it is pointless trying to alter climate by changing carbon dioxide levels as the cause and effect is the other way round — it is changes in the activity of the Sun that cause temperature changes on earth, with any temperature rise causing carbon dioxide to de-gas from the oceans.

 MYTH – 7:  The recent wet weather and flooding was caused by mankind through ‘global warming’

FACT
Extreme weather correlates with the cycle of solar activity, not carbon dioxide emissions or political elections, the recent heavy rainfall in winter and spring is a perfect example of this — it occurred at solar maximum at a time when solar maxima are very intense — this pattern may well repeat every 11 years until about 2045.

 MYTH – 8:  The climate change levy, petrol duty, CO2 car tax and workplace parking charges are justifiable environmental taxes.

FACT
As carbon dioxide emissions from cars and factories does not have any measurable impact on climate, these taxes are ‘just another tax’ on enterprise and mobility, and have no real green credentials.

 MYTH – 9:  Scientists on the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issue reports that say ‘global warming’ is real and that we must do something now.

FACT
Scientists draft reports for the IPCC, but the IPCC are bureaucrats appointed by governments, in fact many scientists who contribute to the reports disagree with the ’spin’ that the IPCC and media put on their findings.
The latest report suggests that the next 100 years might see a temperature change of 6 Celsius yet a Lead Author for the IPCC (Dr John Christy UAH/NASA) has pointed out that the scenarios with the fastest warming rates were added to the report at a late stage, at the request of a few governments — in other words the scientists were told what to do by politicians.

 MYTH – 10:  There are only a tiny handful of maverick scientists who dispute that man-made global warming theory is true.

FACT
There are nearly 18,000 signatures from scientists worldwide on a petition called The Oregon Petition which says that there is no evidence for man-made global warming theory nor for any impact from mankind’s activities on climate.
Many scientists believe that the Kyoto agreement is a total waste of time and one of the biggest political scams ever perpetrated on the public.

As H L Mencken said:

the fundamental aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary … the desire to save the world usually fronts a desire to rule it.

See more debunking of global warming at The Great Global Warming Hoax

Categories: Climate Change · Global Cooling · Global Warming
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Wouldn’t It Be Great to Have a Perfect Memory?

December 5, 2008 · Leave a Comment

The years are advancing and the memory cells are not always firing up as they used to. It’s made me think “wouldn’t it be great if we all had perfect memories?” We could all ace our exams, nothing would ever get misplaced  and we would never forget an appointment.

Hmm! Remember the phrase “Be careful what you wish for?”

“No one can imagine what it’s really like,” says Jill Price, 42, “not even the scientists who are studying me.”

The Californian, who has an almost perfect memory, is trying to describe how it feels. She starts with a small demonstration of her ability. “When were you born?” she asks.

She hears the date and says: “Oh, that was a Wednesday. There was a cold snap in Los Angeles two days later, and my mother and I made soup.”

Price can rattle off, without hesitation, what she saw and heard on almost any given date. She remembers many early childhood experiences and most of the days between the ages of 9 and 15. After that, there are virtually no gaps in her memory. “Starting on Feb. 5, 1980, I remember every

She can also date events that were reported in the media, provided she heard about them at the time. When and where did the Concorde crash? When was O.J. Simpson arrested? When did the second Gulf war begin? Price doesn’t even have to stop and think. She can effortlessly recite the dates, numbers and entire stories.

“People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory,” she says. Her lips twist into a thin smile. “But it’s also agonizing.”

In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. “I don’t look back at the past with any distance. It’s more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It’s like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button.”

She’s constantly bombarded with fragments of memories, exposed to an automatic and uncontrollable process that behaves like an infinite loop in a computer. Sometimes there are external triggers, like a certain smell, song or word. But often her memories return by themselves. Beautiful, horrific, important or banal scenes rush across her wildly chaotic “internal monitor,” sometimes displacing the present. “All of this is incredibly exhausting,” says Price.

And so it can happen that Price, as she sits in this restaurant, suddenly feels like a four-year-old girl again, who was supposed to visit the makers of “Sesame Street” at a studio with her kindergarten class. Her father, an agent who represented the creator of the Muppets, had organized the outing. But when the date approached, Jill contracted tonsillitis and was unable to go along.

“In retrospect, I know, of course, that it was not a big deal,” she says, nervously twisting her necklace. “It sounds ridiculous, but when I remember it I experience that same boundless disappointment and rage that I felt back then as a young child.”

Can someone who cannot forget even fall in love? Can they forgive, either others or themselves? Price’s life has had its share of suffering, including family strife, her mother’s cancer and, later, the sudden death of her husband Jim. Because she was hounded by bad memories, grew depressed and feared that she was going crazy, she sat in front of her computer on June 5, 2000 (a Monday) and typed a single word into Google: memory.

That was how Price found James McGaugh, and became part of a scientific case study.

One day Jill Price hopes to learn more about what makes her so different from other people. Perhaps she can also contribute to significant advances in the study of memory.

“At least working with scientists gives some meaning to my condition,” says Price. And then she says something that sounds surprising, coming from a woman whose thoughts loop constantly around in her head. “This is bigger than I am.”

Categories: Psychology
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