Come on Olly

I am a republican. Notice the small ‘r’? I am not a US Republican (as they are the equivalent of a metastasizing tumour), but a ‘republican’, i.e. one who would like to live in a republic. As I am British, that means I would like Britain to be a republic. I read at the weekend that the Queen was unwell and had to cancel a trip to my hometown. I hope the old lady bounces back. I think she has performed a marvellous service linking different eras of the UK, not to mention been an excellent queen. By ‘excellent queen’, I mean keeping out of the limelight in terms of scandal or whatnot, and waving when she is told to. Not drunkenly falling out of the Rolls-Royce or flashing her pants, that is a quite a skill for a famous woman to have. The Queen is dignified, for someone that is wheeled about and told what to do by her advisors.

However the rest of the Royal family are a bunch of conniving, rude, selfish, cretinous, idiots that have ever sucked oxygen. They are feted as actually being better than us commoners when they live in the biggest bubble of unreality that exists with the possible exception of the circumference of Donald Trump’s head. I would love the Royal Family to be brought down to earth however I doubt they realise its existence. The finances of the Royal Family are largely a mystery. There is no transparency or accountability. Why don’t the National Audit Office audit them? Why is the Royal Family exempt from Freedom of Information requests? Prince Charles lobbies extensively on a number of subjects and issues yet we are not allowed to know what, how and when, and to what effect. Up until 1998 (but still technically now as well) advocating the replacement of the monarchy with a peaceful republic is a criminal offence and could send me to prison for life.

Monarchist routinely claim, and this is the main reason espoused, that the royal family is worth keeping because of “tourism”. Well, let me debunk that particular argument. Tourists go to see buildings and castles because they are interesting within a historic context and look pretty spiffy as well. They do not go to see people. If they did, they would be sorely disappointed about 98% of the time as tourists virtually never see the royal family. According to visitbritain.com, the top tourist attraction in the UK, Chester zoo is higher up the list for people to visit above Buckingham palace. There is a compelling argument for a family of Orangutans to replace our existing royalty if we are basing it on how popular the tourist attractions are. “But it wouldn’t be the same without the royals living there.” People still go to see the Taj Mahal, don’t they?

I just think we should get with the whole 21^st century program and become a Republic. 

Cereal Killer

I had Frosties for breakfast today. I haven’t actually eaten cereal in years, ever since I read a great article about it (which I have managed to dig up here). The article tells the history of processed breakfast cereals right back to the nineteenth century in the corn belt of the Mid-west of America. In the article it goes on about how what was once a great idea, became gradually a bad idea (for consumers) and basically a wonderful marketing phenomena (which was good for shareholders and company executives). It was a presidential nutritional advisor that actually made the argument that breakfast cereals should be treated the same as sugar and alcohol, due to the empty calories that all three foodstuffs offered. Now, I am loathe to befuddle correlation with causation, but the two most obese countries in the world are COINCIDENTALLY the two countries where sugary cereal sales are the highest. There are bound to be other factors, natch.

What it boils down to is that fact that some damn fine advertising guys have been on the case for decades. I ate cereal when I was a kid. Everyone did. They probably still do. Why? Because parents bought them as they were hoodwinked into believing that all cereals were healthy. Why would the colourful cereal boxes lie? Well, they don’t exactly lie, but the fact that the cereal companies fought tooth and nail to prevent a traffic light system on their boxes is highly informative. Portion size, daily amounts, the difference between type of milk that should be used all muddy the water and prevent first time analysis in the supermarket aisle. Also, kids screamed for cereal. All the TV adverts showed wonderfully inventive cartoon characters doing funny things. They don’t so much now, but when I was a kid there used to be toys in the boxes too. Or coupons to collect where you sent them off with a few stamps and you would get a Tony the Tiger bike sticker set after a month!

So anyway, I had some Frosties this morning. My normal bowl, which I use for normal stuff, has a capacity for 2.5 times the recommended daily allowance of 30g of Frosties. So I filled it up. With milk. And the calories contained were more than a bacon sandwich which I thought I wanted more but naturally declined as I thought it would be more calorific. Now, I am not saying that all cereals are created the same, but even things like all bran are damn high in salt, and special K is damn high in sugar. Ironically, all of the vitamins that they say are contained all occur naturally in corn and wheat, but the process of creating the cereal strips them out so they have to be artificially added back in.

 I don’t think I will be feeding my son sugary cereal when he is old enough.

Edit: shit, I gave him some sugary muesli for breakfast this morning. Oh well, if it was good enough for me... 

Mad George 2: Beyond Moodydome

So the credit agency Moody’s has downgraded the UK’s credit rating from AAA to AA1 due to medium term sluggish growth, the projected continuation of the austerity measures into the next parliament, and the fragility of the UK’s balance sheet. All this sounds like very frightening stuff, doesn’t it? The shit has really hit the fan. We are all fucked. Already I can hear baying mobs of people roaming the streets clad in leather pants wielding machetes and taking off the heads of all the people who are wearing a different shade of leather pants. A thunderdome has been erected just by Leicester Square and squads of former telephone hygienists who are now cage fighters are oiling up and sharpening their sharpened slate tipped sticks. Babies are eating pools of feculence on the flinty rubble of destroyed buildings.

Hmm. My imagination might be running a little bit Tahrir Square on that one. Fact is, the US and France have been downgraded (the US is lower than the UK, France is now the same) and their cost of borrowing hasn’t changed one iota. Fact is, neither will the UK’s. The problem with the international credit agencies (Standard & Poor, Fitch, and the aforementioned Moodys) is that for decades they were highly sought after purveyors of information without people realising that they were completely full of shit and whose data means nothing at all in an emperor’s new clothes type scenario. With everything coasting along nicely all they did was rubber stamp things. When the shit hit the fan they didn’t move quickly enough or even give any warnings like, you know, they were being paid to do. Enron was rosy until they were found out. Freddit Mae were coasting along fine flinging out toxic sub-prime debt packages until Warren Buffett said something on TV then the credit agencies made a statement whilst putting their trousers back on hurriedly. There are other numerous criticisms of them but the point is that the credit agencies don’t really matter.

Unless, of course, your name is George Osborne, erstwhile Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, who has staked his entire Chancellorship on the UK maintaining its cherished triple A credit rating. If it got downgraded, then George Osborne would be pretty embarrassed. Well, it turns out, that triple A status doesn’t really matter now that it has been downgraded according to Curious George. 

They Workfare for you

The government’s highly divisive ‘Workfare’ scheme was been given the bum’s rush by the Courts on Appeal yesterday. The court reckon that the government will have to pay back all the people it took off income support and JSA because they didn’t particularly want to “slaves” and work 40 odd hours a week for nothing. Nada. Zip. Except, it wasn’t for nothing. It was for the JSA. So they were getting that, but the issue was that this didn’t constitute the minimum wage. But then they weren’t WORKING working, just working in a scheme. It’s all a bit confusing as to what the reality of the situation is.

If the companies involved were sacking or laying off their normal salaried staff in favour of getting people to work for them for free then that is wrong and they should have their wrists slapped or possibly cut. If they were genuinely offering a chance to keep the people on the scheme out of bed and contributing in a work environment then that is a good thing. I have been unemployed and had to take out JSA when I left university – they didn’t have this scheme then but as long as I wasn’t out of pocket or travelling for miles then I would have done it. Mind you, the fortnightly interviews down the job centre were pretty horrific so maybe not. The point is that you lose the work mindset pretty quickly. I even get it when I’m on holiday for more than a few weeks. My mind goes sludgy and I can’t wake up even for delicious pancakes for breakfast. But that is just me.

Although I am generally in favour of the scheme, I can’t help but think about the situation in the US where prisoners are forced to work for pennies to build and manufacture things and they genuinely are an alternative cheap workforce that are deliberately put to tender against other companies and almost always win. As long as there is safeguards in place to prevent abuse then I don’t see what the fuss is.