I read in the IT last week that Eamon Gilmore, leader of the 'Labour' Party has offered the supreme sacrifice should he achieve high office in the forthcoming elections, he will limit himself to a measly €190,000 Euro salary. Now that's leading by example indeed. The leader of the party of workers paying himself 8 times the industrial wage average and thinking that is a sacrifice? Spin, James Larkin spin in your grave. I emailed the Labour Party website with this message and was sent their latest manifesto without any reference to my comment. I mailed back and said that was not my point but possibly Mr Gilmore regarded his peers to be not the worker like the nurse or the Garda or teacher or lowly civil servant but this breed of (below) pampered overpaid monkeys instead? (She then mailed me and said my mail had been referred onto ( grammar not their strong suit in Labour, never has been) , The General Secretary! YIKES and ODS BODKINS.
WHAT STATE COMPANY CHIEFS GOT IN 2009
€750,000 Padraig McManus (ESB)
€568,000 Declan Collier (Dublin Airport Authority)
€500,000 Donal Connell (An Post)
€414,000 David Gunning (Coillte)
€357,000 Gabriel D'Arcy (Bord na Mona)
€344,000 John Mullins (Bord Gais)
€273,000 Cathal Goan (RTE) ( DG of ARD Germany is on €230K....no matter oh hum)
Between this and the news that the pension and golden goodbye liability for the cabinet of gombeen persons is collectively €55 MILLION................ " cry havoc and let loose the dogs of revolution" I say.
Monday, 6 December 2010
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
The smoking ruins of Ireland
Today, November 24th , the German quality broadsheet Die Zeit had this (http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2010-11/irland-wachstumsmodell-krise) as its leader on the front page.
It says in effect that it is not just a banking and property crisis in Ireland but far worse than that. It says the famous Celtic Tiger is dead or rather it never existed in the first place. Ireland's economic model for growth is based almost entirely on our corporate taxation strategy. This was Ireland's lazy path to growth. At the 'stroke' of CJ Haughey's pen, massive growth was coming in the shape of tax avoiding multinationals. It says Ireland urgently needs a new model because this one is a bust flush. I for one, completely agree. We need to start our own industries and get on with it now. Its a sad day when Ireland on the front page of probably Europe's leading newspaper reduces us to a bunch of corrupt opportunistic clowns.
It says in effect that it is not just a banking and property crisis in Ireland but far worse than that. It says the famous Celtic Tiger is dead or rather it never existed in the first place. Ireland's economic model for growth is based almost entirely on our corporate taxation strategy. This was Ireland's lazy path to growth. At the 'stroke' of CJ Haughey's pen, massive growth was coming in the shape of tax avoiding multinationals. It says Ireland urgently needs a new model because this one is a bust flush. I for one, completely agree. We need to start our own industries and get on with it now. Its a sad day when Ireland on the front page of probably Europe's leading newspaper reduces us to a bunch of corrupt opportunistic clowns.
Friday, 19 November 2010
a history of things in 200 words and some cosmological musings
Quantum fluctuation. Inflation. Expansion. Strong nuclear interaction. Particle-antiparticle annihilation. Deuterium and helium production. Density perturbations. Recombination. Blackbody radiation. Local contraction. Cluster formation. Reionization? Violent relaxation. Virialization. Biased galaxy formation? Turbulent fragmentation. Contraction. Ionization. Compression. Opaque hydrogen. Massive star formation. Deuterium ignition. Hydrogen fusion. Hydrogen depletion. Core contraction. Envelope expansion. Helium fusion. Carbon, oxygen, and silicon fusion. Iron production. Implosion. Supernova explosion. Metals injection. Star formation. Supernova explosions. Star formation. Condensation. Planetesimal accretion. Planetary differentiation. Crust solidification. Volatile gas expulsion. Water condensation. Water dissociation. Ozone production. Ultraviolet absorption. Photosynthetic unicellular organisms. Oxidation. Mutation. Natural selection and evolution. Respiration. Cell differentiation. Sexual reproduction. Fossilization. Land exploration. Dinosaur extinction. Mammal expansion. Glaciation. Homo sapiens manifestation. Animal domestication. Food surplus production. Civilization! Innovation. Exploration. Religion. Warring nations. Empire creation and destruction. Exploration. Colonization. Taxation without representation. Revolution. Constitution. Election. Expansion. Industrialization. Rebellion. Emancipation Proclamation. Invention. Mass production. Urbanization. Immigration. World conflagration. League of Nations. Suffrage extension. Depression. World conflagration. Fission explosions. United Nations. Space exploration. Assassinations. Lunar excursions. Resignation. Computerization. World Trade Organization. Terrorism. Internet expansion. Reunification. Dissolution. World-Wide Web creation. Composition. Extrapolation?
All we all clear on this now?
I am trying to understand The Hubble Constant. This is the number given by scientist's in the 1930s onwards to the observations of astronomer Edwin Hubble made in the 1920s. Hubble discovered that the Milky Way was only one of billions of galaxies. Up until then we had the concept that the MW was the totality of the Universe. Hubble used the Doppler Effect (red shift moving away / blue shift moving towards us) to measure the expansion rate of other galaxies.
If we use the definition of distance accepted by cosmologists then the Hubble constant tells us that for every megaparsec of distance between two galaxies, the apparent speed at which the galaxies move apart from each other is greater by 71 kilometers per second. Since we know that the speed of light is around 300,000 kilometers per second, it is easy to calculate how far away two galaxies must be in order to be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light. The answer we get is that the two galaxies must be separated by around 4,200 megaparsecs (130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers). ( a parsec = 3.214 light years, the distance to Proxima Centauri, or nearest star. A megaparsec = 3.214 million LYs and the big guy, a gigaparsec = 3.124 Billion LYs!!!!!
The Hubble Constant is made of 120 zeros. That's a very big number indeed! I am told that if it was 121 zeros or 119 zeros setting , we would not be here because either the universe would expand to fast or go into reverse and crunch up. This means I have wasted a lifetime being and atheist and there is a deity or supernatural entity that set the dial on the universe in the first place OR there are BILLIONS of universes in a multiverse and some of them had to be set at just the right expansion rate. A Goldilocks universe! I go for the latter explanation!
All we all clear on this now?
I am trying to understand The Hubble Constant. This is the number given by scientist's in the 1930s onwards to the observations of astronomer Edwin Hubble made in the 1920s. Hubble discovered that the Milky Way was only one of billions of galaxies. Up until then we had the concept that the MW was the totality of the Universe. Hubble used the Doppler Effect (red shift moving away / blue shift moving towards us) to measure the expansion rate of other galaxies.
If we use the definition of distance accepted by cosmologists then the Hubble constant tells us that for every megaparsec of distance between two galaxies, the apparent speed at which the galaxies move apart from each other is greater by 71 kilometers per second. Since we know that the speed of light is around 300,000 kilometers per second, it is easy to calculate how far away two galaxies must be in order to be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light. The answer we get is that the two galaxies must be separated by around 4,200 megaparsecs (130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers). ( a parsec = 3.214 light years, the distance to Proxima Centauri, or nearest star. A megaparsec = 3.214 million LYs and the big guy, a gigaparsec = 3.124 Billion LYs!!!!!
The Hubble Constant is made of 120 zeros. That's a very big number indeed! I am told that if it was 121 zeros or 119 zeros setting , we would not be here because either the universe would expand to fast or go into reverse and crunch up. This means I have wasted a lifetime being and atheist and there is a deity or supernatural entity that set the dial on the universe in the first place OR there are BILLIONS of universes in a multiverse and some of them had to be set at just the right expansion rate. A Goldilocks universe! I go for the latter explanation!
Thursday, 18 November 2010
On betrayal
I have recently had a bad experience. A partner of mine for 5 years, someone I trusted and liked, betrayed me by stealing €45,000 euro from my corporate bank account. He could do this because I gave him open access to my accounts as he did some banking and admin for me. He sent bogus invoices to our accountants without my knowledge and helped himself to the funds every month for over 2 years. This man is public school and Oxbridge educated, his need for money must have indeed been severe to betray me like that. Words fail me to describe how much I loathe this person. Go to lawyers you say? Well I did but the guy has no assets whatsoever. No house no nothing, so even if I did spend £50K taking him to court and getting a judgement, I would not be able to collect from him. So, now he hides behind his lawyer basically thumbing his nose at me. He currently works for someone I introduced him to tin the past. Of course this guy does not want to know that he has a cheap low crook working for him so nothing I can do there. Please if anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them! Thanks
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
My country has gone mad
105 middle aged culchies borrowed €140 BILLION from our unregulated banks, smiled on by our ignorant smug stupid governing class, bankrupting the country. We are told things like 'we can't touch their pensions for legal reasons' etc. WE THE PEOPLE MAKE THE LAWS. We elect members of the Dail to make law so why not make laws overturning old laws that do not permit us to get at these people. Fingers Fingleton sitting on his €29 Million pension pot.... no sorry can't be touched. Seanie Fitz's wife 'owns' half his enormous pension....too bad. The 105 culchie property developers (the cute hoor club) now are a bust flush but.......... its ok because they have 105 really really wealthy wives and family. Sorry, can't be touched for legal reasons as usual. No we can't possible enact laws making it a crime to avoid your creditors by signing over your assets to family member, can't and won't be done. We have a culture of corruption in Ireland now unmasked in spades. Let's strip the Haughey family of their ill gotten wealth acquired through CJ's gross corruption. Ban the children of corrupt politicians from all public office (yes that means you Sean Haughey & co). We need the secretaries general of the department of finance and any other department involved, together with their senior staff, the zombie non-regulator Pat Neary ( pension circa €250K P.A.?), The board and staff of the central bank 2001-2007 et alia arrested.
People we need retribution and change and we need it NOW. We need all these gombeen men, cute hoors and strokesmen behind barbed wire in orange jump suits in the Curragh camp. We need to try them for treason against the state against the Irish People. We need to try them before Special Courts manned by judges from other EU jurisdictions. They must have their pensions and privileges stopped and contributed to the state treasury. Sure Bertie (the cutest hoor of all etc) needs his three pensions and the state car for life plus Leinster House privileges and parking, legal reasons you understand.
Post retribution, we need a new political model in Ireland if parliamentary democracy is to survive.
Other than the obvious restructuring moves such as 100 TDs max, 50 of which serve the national interest and not local interests and 50 local constituencies max. Get rid of that €250 million pa club the Seanad but this is not enough by a long shot. We need government of the capable and qualified not a bunch of country solicitors, barristers,local council people, social workers and whoever else had the time to work the rubber chicken circuits to get ahead in their chosen party. I want the minister of health to be a proper large scale health management professional not an obese secondary school teacher whose only quality is smug belligerence. I want a government free of nepotism. Half the Cabinet are the children of politicians. Politics is not a franchise, its not a family business unless we let it be so.
We are a small island nation with few natural resources except our people. Right now we have handed over our economic model to mostly American multinationals. Why? Because jobs would be created at the stroke of a pen (stroke familiar word?) by Mr Haughey. Reduce corporate taxation to a fraction of other EU countries and BINGO the multinats will pile in here and they did. But at what price? During the long boom years the only indigenous Irish industry sector to be successful abroad was the construction industry. The other pan flashes like Elan, Baltimore tech and so on are buried. We have not grown our own industry to create a significant export base. Where is our Nokia or RIM, where is our global clothing brand (which would now be made in China anyway, I grant you). Where are our great food & drink brands (not owned by multinats). Have we created a real digital industry sector? No , despite the huge amount of fibre (used by the multinats) coming in and out of Ireland. Digital Hub ha ha ha, Media Lab ha ha ha.
We need to take in raw materials, be they digital 11001's or bales of wool, add value through design and quality and export the finished article. Instead , we pick up the crumbs left to us and stagger on. I am sick of the over staffed , over paid 'semi-state agencies' (what does that mean anyway? Either they are state funded or they are not and they ARE state funded!) who spend more of their budgets on their own internal costs than the purpose they are established for in the first place. We need a much slimmer state sector and a huge improvement on performance or its chop chop. We have state (forget the semi bullshit) agencies who pay their managements huge salaries. Did you know that the Director General of RTE is more highly renumerated that the DG of ARD Germany a public service broadcaster with 20 times the amount home homes served? The boss of the ESB is paid 3 times more than the Taoiseach? What is this insanity and why are we putting up with it?
We have a healthcare crisis. We have huge levels of gross and morbid obesity, we have massive problems with alcohol abuse . Why can't we enact legislation making it illegal to sell hamburgers in fast food outlets from the meat of more than 3 animals? Bang ..... goodbye MacDonalds. Burger King and all the other providers of serious illness at a stroke. Why not hugely increase tax on alcohol products, forbid the production or import of such horrors as 'alcopops'.
Drugs. Legalize and control them. This destroys the criminal class overnight. No business when you can buy your regulated drugs in a pharmacy and they are taxed which pays for abuse rehabilitation services. Stop the hypocrisy, alcohol and tobacco are drugs, why are they legal?
The Catholic Church must be removed from education and healthcare. This is nothing more than a sinister self serving cult, a hangover from the age of ignorance when this and similar institutions could play on the fears of people at will. If you want subscribe to this cult, do so in your own time and at your own peril. True that funerals will be different and not as much fun but that is a small price to pay for ridding us of these pestiferous priests. Furthermore, we must have legislation where it is forbidden to demand that the uniformed members of this cult sign up for a life of celibacy. This drives them to buggering alter boys (and girls) and to a life of drink and depression, why should we tolerate this nonsense. Consider the capital Ireland has spent since the foundation of the state building great stone and glass palaces to this cult. The length and breadth of the country is strewn with capital that should have been spent on agriculture, fisheries and a zillion other useful investments. Every new housing estate in the country (a mild exaggeration) has its palace of worship standing empty as a cold barn for most of the time.
The Irish Language is force fed to our childern most of whom can't string a sentence together when they have completed 13 years of education. Why do we spend €700 MILLION a year on this madness? What kind of crazy shibboleth is this anyway? Why not ask parents and children if they want an Irish language education and the tiny minority that sign up actually learn Irish through immersion learning, language labs etc. Ah shure that would be trampling on the soul of Padraic Pearse
and his friends even though it is just pouring capital down the drain.
I will be back with cosmological observations and ideas about the influence of Zoroastrianism on early Shi'ia religious doctrine in Iran.
People we need retribution and change and we need it NOW. We need all these gombeen men, cute hoors and strokesmen behind barbed wire in orange jump suits in the Curragh camp. We need to try them for treason against the state against the Irish People. We need to try them before Special Courts manned by judges from other EU jurisdictions. They must have their pensions and privileges stopped and contributed to the state treasury. Sure Bertie (the cutest hoor of all etc) needs his three pensions and the state car for life plus Leinster House privileges and parking, legal reasons you understand.
Post retribution, we need a new political model in Ireland if parliamentary democracy is to survive.
Other than the obvious restructuring moves such as 100 TDs max, 50 of which serve the national interest and not local interests and 50 local constituencies max. Get rid of that €250 million pa club the Seanad but this is not enough by a long shot. We need government of the capable and qualified not a bunch of country solicitors, barristers,local council people, social workers and whoever else had the time to work the rubber chicken circuits to get ahead in their chosen party. I want the minister of health to be a proper large scale health management professional not an obese secondary school teacher whose only quality is smug belligerence. I want a government free of nepotism. Half the Cabinet are the children of politicians. Politics is not a franchise, its not a family business unless we let it be so.
We are a small island nation with few natural resources except our people. Right now we have handed over our economic model to mostly American multinationals. Why? Because jobs would be created at the stroke of a pen (stroke familiar word?) by Mr Haughey. Reduce corporate taxation to a fraction of other EU countries and BINGO the multinats will pile in here and they did. But at what price? During the long boom years the only indigenous Irish industry sector to be successful abroad was the construction industry. The other pan flashes like Elan, Baltimore tech and so on are buried. We have not grown our own industry to create a significant export base. Where is our Nokia or RIM, where is our global clothing brand (which would now be made in China anyway, I grant you). Where are our great food & drink brands (not owned by multinats). Have we created a real digital industry sector? No , despite the huge amount of fibre (used by the multinats) coming in and out of Ireland. Digital Hub ha ha ha, Media Lab ha ha ha.
We need to take in raw materials, be they digital 11001's or bales of wool, add value through design and quality and export the finished article. Instead , we pick up the crumbs left to us and stagger on. I am sick of the over staffed , over paid 'semi-state agencies' (what does that mean anyway? Either they are state funded or they are not and they ARE state funded!) who spend more of their budgets on their own internal costs than the purpose they are established for in the first place. We need a much slimmer state sector and a huge improvement on performance or its chop chop. We have state (forget the semi bullshit) agencies who pay their managements huge salaries. Did you know that the Director General of RTE is more highly renumerated that the DG of ARD Germany a public service broadcaster with 20 times the amount home homes served? The boss of the ESB is paid 3 times more than the Taoiseach? What is this insanity and why are we putting up with it?
We have a healthcare crisis. We have huge levels of gross and morbid obesity, we have massive problems with alcohol abuse . Why can't we enact legislation making it illegal to sell hamburgers in fast food outlets from the meat of more than 3 animals? Bang ..... goodbye MacDonalds. Burger King and all the other providers of serious illness at a stroke. Why not hugely increase tax on alcohol products, forbid the production or import of such horrors as 'alcopops'.
Drugs. Legalize and control them. This destroys the criminal class overnight. No business when you can buy your regulated drugs in a pharmacy and they are taxed which pays for abuse rehabilitation services. Stop the hypocrisy, alcohol and tobacco are drugs, why are they legal?
The Catholic Church must be removed from education and healthcare. This is nothing more than a sinister self serving cult, a hangover from the age of ignorance when this and similar institutions could play on the fears of people at will. If you want subscribe to this cult, do so in your own time and at your own peril. True that funerals will be different and not as much fun but that is a small price to pay for ridding us of these pestiferous priests. Furthermore, we must have legislation where it is forbidden to demand that the uniformed members of this cult sign up for a life of celibacy. This drives them to buggering alter boys (and girls) and to a life of drink and depression, why should we tolerate this nonsense. Consider the capital Ireland has spent since the foundation of the state building great stone and glass palaces to this cult. The length and breadth of the country is strewn with capital that should have been spent on agriculture, fisheries and a zillion other useful investments. Every new housing estate in the country (a mild exaggeration) has its palace of worship standing empty as a cold barn for most of the time.
The Irish Language is force fed to our childern most of whom can't string a sentence together when they have completed 13 years of education. Why do we spend €700 MILLION a year on this madness? What kind of crazy shibboleth is this anyway? Why not ask parents and children if they want an Irish language education and the tiny minority that sign up actually learn Irish through immersion learning, language labs etc. Ah shure that would be trampling on the soul of Padraic Pearse
and his friends even though it is just pouring capital down the drain.
I will be back with cosmological observations and ideas about the influence of Zoroastrianism on early Shi'ia religious doctrine in Iran.
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