Max Mosley backs down and agrees to resign in October

After all his posturing, it looks like the teams association FOTA have won their battle to have Max Mosley removed from the FIA. He will Resign in October, having also agreed to abandon ideas for a financial cap on teams for 2010 and 2011.

The teams have won an important victory and shown their strength to a now weakened FIA . This is the best outcome for the good of the sport in general, now we will at least have one unified championship even if it is running at venues that have to use cardboard cutouts in the stands instead of real fans.

If we could only get Bernie to go back to the proper race tracks that support proper fans, such as Silverstone then we might have a great F1 Championship once more.  

Ron Dennis was reported to have said ” Ha bloody Ha” – not really, I made that bit up.

Last Chance Saloon for F1

With US F1, Campos Racing, Lola and Litespeed GP ready to enter next years Formula 1 championship who needs Ferrari, Renault, BMW, Mclaren etc etc….. Max and Bernie run the risk of devaluing a sport that prides itself on being the pinnacle of motorsport world wide.

The attempt to cap the teams to £40 has already got massive holes in it. In addition to driver pay and engines being excluded from the cap, it is also rumoured that there will be an additional employee waiver to allow a high paid designer for example to be employed.

The loopholes are already massive and I can imagine the playing field becoming more level, just appearing to be on paper for those who don’t look to deeply. This could allow a team to spend double or treble the cap and still remain within the spirit of the cap, whilst the second tier teams who are queueing up to have a go will struggle to make any impression at the back of the grid.

What will happen tomorrow? Will anyone else follow Williams into Bernies open arms?

Doing My Expenses

In recent weeks my moral compass has become somewhat stilted but the example I have been set. I look up to my elders and betters and so look to them to provide me with the moral backbone and a positive example for me to measure my own life by.

I am now sat at my desk completing my expenses for April and I am torn between my old way of thinking whereby I include all legitimate expenses incurred during the course of my working day and my new improved model whereby I look at everything I have spent and shoehorn it into my expense account anyway I possibly can.

By my reckoning, if I drink just to get through the working day then it now becomes an expense, as does that wrap of cocaine I bought last week…… if I need to get ripped to the tits in order to function then I should be recompensed… god damn it! Ok so the porn was technically on my tv at home, but it was research for an article….. maybe even this article so I can count that too! I want to get some decking for the garden…. any suggestions on how I categorise it would be gratefully accepted?

For some reason I don’t feel comfortable asking the tax payer to fund my sexual proclivities, narcotics habits and landscaping arrangements……. not because I am holyier than thou…. I most certainly am not, it is just an inner gut feeling that it just isn’t cricket!

It is sad that we have reached the time where we have to legislate in order to stop the supposed moral cream of the country from taking the piss out of us, the collective tax payer………

 

……you couldn’t make it up!

Is Cyber space filling up?

Recent reports that the internets capacity is fast filling up is causing concern around the world. It is estimated that demand could double in 2009 as more people work from home. This has to be a somewhat flawed arguement however as infrastructure will no doubt expand to allow for this growth. The current network is very different to the phone systems we had only a few years ago and so it is my conjecture that rather than see the internet grind to a halt, it is more likely to continue to expand unabaited. Our usage has indeed grown massively, in fact the internet is today in 2009 over 75 times the size it was in 2002 when measured in exabytes of traffic per month. This is largely due to the way that we use the net however, in has only been in the last few years that video and music could be reliably streamed to the masses. It is interesting to see that in February 2009 there were over 35 million downloads from iplayer, which is 5% of all UK internet traffic.

We will continue to advance in our net usage, and a the infrastructure in expanded the usage will expand to fill it, it will ever be thus.

The rapid evolution of Olympians……

The commentator on Eurosport today sat watching the same 100m mens final that I was watching and stated without so much as a smirk that the evolution of man was breathtaking……… I laughed out loud.

For those of you who missed the race, Usain Bolt from Jamaica, all 6ft 5″ sprinter of him….. galloped down the first 70m so fast that he dropped his hands in a “how easy is this” gesture and coasted over the line, 5 yards ahead of his nearest rival….. and still broke the world record…. with 0 wind assistance. If he had carried on running he would have been close to a sub 9.6 which is not just breattaking, it is also piss taking as evolution just doesn’t happen that fast.

Call me a crazy old cynic if you like, but all this will come out in the wash….. rule number one when cheating is try to look like its difficult and you really tried hard……. grinning and smirking as your supercharged arse flies across the finish line just isn’t the way to avoid questions being asked.

Just because an athlete passes a current drug test, doen’t mean he isn’t ripped to the tits on something good…. just that he isn’t ripped to the tits on something that is currently tested for. In much the same way that a man high on dope will pass a breatherlyzer, the authorities are always one step behind the cheats. It has always been thus, and will continue to be so, as long as the spoils are worth winning.

Mark my words, in a few years time they will be swapping the medals about again……..

A Level Results

Here we are once again, witnessing the 28th consecutive year of school pupils becoming smarter.

Is that really what we are supposed to believe? Whilst I wouldn’t want to decry the undoubted efforts of all our school children, the current methods of measuring their performance is nothing short of ludicrous.

If course work is allowed to represent so much of the final mark and the pupil is given several attempts to improve his or her coursework before it is finally handed in to be graded should we not be more concerned that students are still stupid enough to fail?

I know we live in a world where school kids aren’t allowed to compete with each other. so that there are no losers and the fat kids don’t cry, but surely these kids are going to implode when they hit the big bad world and realise that life is a competition. Some fat kids might actually put down their donuts and trot after the school bully, thus getting some excercise and not dying of a heart attach at 38.

If I was a parent, I would kick my kids arse for anything less than an A using the current marking structure, because anything less than an A equals laziness, nothing more…. oh, perhaps some latent stupidity also, but if the kid can’t copy stuff out of a book, and then make the changes his teacher tells him to then he deserves a life asking if “you want fries with that?”

An article in the Daily telegraph last week stated that in tests, todays kids receiving an A would have been given a C 20 years ago. Did a handful of C’s and B’s do us any harm? No, because they were considered valuable. The theory of giving every kid half a dozen A’s each has rendered the qualification system a laughingstock, and given the universities no way of knowing which kids can actually read and write. So the solution……………. to invent an A* grade……….. starting in September 08, the brightest kids will be working towards an A*, in 10 years time will it be A**** ?

All I can really add is that you couldn’t make it up….. un …. fucking ….. believable.

Dwain Chambers Denied Olympic Run

It is wildly refreshing to see a public body make the correct choice. I was almost stunned into silence by the British Olympic Commitees ruling that Chambers lifetime ban should apply.

I was half expecting a ruling by the European court of wining lapdogs to allow him to disgrace us again just so as not to impinge upon his human rights.

I salute the decision in that it protects us all and sends out a very clear message that cheats will never prosper. That is an important message in this day and age. Just because he put his hands up once caught, it is no reason to allow him to represent our great nation once more. It should be regarded as an honour only bestowed upon the greatest sportsmen of the time. To have allowed him to run would have sullied all that the Olymics holds dear.

Climate change = Taxable commodity

Call me cynical if you will, but surely all the current climate change scaremongering is just an effective way of encouraging Joe public to cough up more tax pounds?

The maths just doesn’t add up like Al Gore would like it to. For example;

Carbon dioxide makes up only 0.04% of the atmosphere, which is 400 parts per million. I will gladly concede that Man is responsible for 4% of this Carbon dioxide production, while nature accounts for the rest.

The UK produces approx 2% of world Carbon dioxide emissions, so for example all our flights account for 6% of 2% of 0.04%, which for those of you without a calculator equals bugger all.

The largest greenhouse gas produced is water vapour……… it has over 28 times the impact of other greenhouse gases such as methane.

In total worldwide man made co2 counts for less than 0.15% of all greenhouse gases.

What has happened is that politicians have created the perfect villian, whereby a semi natural event of our planet warming up ( anyone hear about the Ice Age?) has become an international money raiser.

Yes, I agree it is not good that the planet is warming up….. sea levels rising is a bad thing, people will be displaced etc…. but our politicians might as well decide to make the earth spin the other way round…… as they have as much chance of doing that as they do cooling it down.

It is like the fleas on a dogs back deciding they want to tell the dog where to go………

We need to addapt to the changing climate…… and frankly a few lightless light bulbs, less TV’s on standby and composting your potato peelings isn’t gonna make the dog change direction.

We are just paracites living off the resources on this little lump of damp rock that is spinning through space. In essence we got lucky as this little rock is surrounded by air we can breathe, water we can drink and energy resources we can plunder…. which is exactly what we have done. We will eventually move on. In the centuries to come we will decamp to a new planet as yet undiscovered, rich with the ingredients that we require. We are fortunate that the Earth is within our temperature band at all, that it is close enough to the sun to benefit from its nuclear heat without frying us.

As normal we are being made to pay for something that will not be resolved at all. While the UK is strangled by global warming red tape and business is throttled as a result, the rest of the world, especially the third world, continues to pollute without let up………. frankly it is a joke, like having a no pissing section in a swimming pool!

     

 

Supermarket dominance

Is it just me? It seems to me that the big four supermarkets are beginning to reap the rewards of the anti competitive high street killing practices of the past 20 years. They have decimated the quantity of petrol stations that we have to choose from. If you recall they used to offer petrol that was always 5p per litre less than surrounding stations. These days there is no price difference, very few competitors for them, and bizarrely, the fuel that they sell is not of the same quality as other trusted brands. That was how they were selling it cheap initially, by excluding certain detergents that other fuels contain which keep your engine it good condition and operating as efficiently as it can. Now we are in effect paying non supermarket prices for supermarket fuel….. and strangely queuing up to do so!

Milkmen are almost extinct these days. The supermarkets set out to capture certain markets, milk, fuel, fresh veg, meat etc……. but in order for this plan to work for them, their products needed to last for a week as that is how often Mrs average is prepared to visit an out of town store. Doorstep milk will last for 3 days refrigerated, maybe four, so how come supermarket milk lives for a week or more? Is it magic milk? Maybe it is. This magic milk was initially dirt cheap compared to doorstep deliveries, so the take up was huge. Milkmen couldn’t compete as they were incapable of buying their milk for the price the supermarkets were selling it. As a result we now pay inflated prices equivalent almost to the prices charged by surviving milkmen! Once the competition has been squashed supermarkets have no barrier to stop them raising their prices. Currently this is happening across the board on many products under the guise of global food prices. This is nothing more than a smoke screen to hide their corporate greed.

Soon we will have no butchers, bakers, milkmen, independent petrol stations, florists, or dry cleaners and we will then be at the mercy of the big four.

Is it a coincidence that alongside the rise of long life milk, bread, veg, fruit etc that all lasts substantially longer if bought from a supermarket rather than from a traditional high street trader, that the level of people incapable of digesting these products has also risen. Go to countries that do not have massive supermarket empires domination their food provision and count the level of milk intolerance, bread intolerance etc…… one goes hand in hand with the other.

The supermarket chains are very powerful and very wealthy, they will do what it takes to protect their customers from the truth of what they are doing to our food in order to make it last a week or more. The supermarkets are killing us in the name of profitability and market dominance and our government is looking on and doing nothing.

There has been a massive rise in recent years in products to deal with food allergies and intolerances, one of my favourites is Gluten Free Recipes