Xmas Present

A splendid volume of "Words In Air" is now in my hands. Edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia it contains the entire correspondence of two great American poets - Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

At just over 800 pages long, this hard back edition is thoughtfully annotated and brings together three decades of correspondence that reveals the innermost secrets of the authors. Namely, they suffer from procrastination, uncertainty, and inner doubt just as much as the rest of us.

Both of them are flawed; she was an alcoholic, he suffered from well publicised bipolar breakdowns. Yet out of these events came poetry of immense power; the detail in Lowell's work grips you. The lime and cool earth of Uncle Devereux is real, I can feel and smell the softness of the lime, the cool gritty feel of freshly dug earth, portents of death and a reflection of his Uncle's state.

Bishop is relentless in critiquing everything she reads, and not afraid to criticise Lowell. In her time, Bishop's work was underestimated and different from Lowell's. The crossing of letters, some of them poetic in their own right, is like watching a long running tennis point where the athleticism of the two players makes it impossible to turn away.

I'll post a full review when I get through the book, so that will be mid January I hope. In the meantime I'll be back online buying copies of Lord Weary's Castle, EB's complete poems and rereading Life Studies to fill in the blanks when they discuss each others works.

World Peace & Fraud

Peace in the Middle East. Will this ever happen? After 5,000 or so years of continual fighting, where all sides claim that the other is the problem, can we just stop? Now please?

I know it's not that simple; I'm not so naive to believe that if everybody sat down in a circle and held hands we'd all bond deeply and love each other forever. What's happening is tit-for-tat Old Testament style eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth bombastic nonsense. In the middle of the current round of escalating tub thumping, commonly known as war, innocent people getting killed and maimed for simply being born in the wrong place.

Is it right to use these people as collateral to prove a point? Is it right that America and Iran continue to fund the two sides who are constantly at each others throats? Is it right that, ultimately, it's the least able who end up paying the highest price of losing loved ones? Is it right that people, like you and me, living in Gaza struggle to get bread and water while those in power continue to push their agendas but don't give up on their luxuries?

All of this makes me want to weep as I realise that humans are unable to treat each other with dignity or respect. I fear this will never change; we will continue to breed the habits of fear, distrust, and greed.

In the meantime, back in the Uncivilized Developed World, we're going to see more fraudsters outed over the next twelve months. During the last downturn icons like the late Robert Maxwell revealed that they had no money, it was all a scam and they were relying on the revolving credit machine to keep their empires afloat. Today we have Bob Madoff in an allegedly similar position. By the end of the week we should know the extent of Mr Madoff's personal fortune but it's going to be many months before the true extent of the losses are made public.

So we await the next fraudulent installment of greed to hit the streets. Will it be the buy-to-let schemes that promised investors millions if they stumped up no money, borrowed 100% of the investment on an interest only basis and rented it out? Will there be other quasi-pyramid schemes unveiled as empty shells with no money left?

Feeling 90s

In keeping a track of the miserable state of my investments I've realised that UK plc is now giving up on 15 years of stock market gains. This is an impressive achievement. There was a time when I felt, a little smugly, that I'd invested wisely and put aside enough money each month to ensure a comfortable retirement.

In the later part of 2007 I read Nassim Taleb's "Black Swan" and began to fret about what I'd actual exposed myself to. His premise is that the perceived wisdom of investing monthly in stock markets that always rise is a fallacy. In the end it's all going to end in tears.

For those of you thinking about or coming up to retirement, it probably will be a painful recognition that there's no other choice but to keep on working. Unfortunately that means I need to consider other plans that will allow me to stop working for money earlier.

Before you get too downhearted, spare a thought for the people living in Iceland. They're really going backwards up the creek, fully kitted out with barbed wire canoe and a sieve to bale out the water. Latest predictions are their economy will contract by 10% next year. That's a truly worrying statistic; imagine the rest of the world's economy contracting by that much.

Here in the UK, our darling Chancellor finally admitted that we're going into a recession. You really don't get many prizes for stating the bleeding obvious.

While our Prime Minister made the greatest political gaffe seen in some time; in a unique moment of hubris he described how he had "saved the world". Terrible choice of words, it's going to haunt him between now and the next general election. We'll see it played over again so many times he's going to want to cry into his truly well funded state retirement.

Simply barking

Started writing this post before heading off on hols but never had the enthusiasm to finish it. Decided to whirl away and see where this takes me; there's no agenda here, just what they call in writing books "stream of consciousness". One great thing about the internet these days is that browsers come replete with spell checkers. This is good for someone like me who can't remember how to write words out properly anymore, or take the time to bother looking them up to check for both spelling and meaning. It does mean that writers become lazier and perhaps don't take the time that's needed to vet their work.

One blog I particularly like is Editorial Anonymous; sharp, witty and sometimes plain honest, it tells the story of one editor's fight with the would-be hoards of writers out there, all who have the one-good-story story in their fight for publication. The one I've highlighted quite tickles me; it tells the story of human nature. We all want to say we're connected to someone important. That our father's second cousin twice removed who hitched a ride to NY on a tramp steamer is now the 2IC (second in charge) of a major hotel chain. Translated, that might mean they're responsible for the night shift in a youth hostel and as there are only two staff members they are technically correct in that statement. So we claim to be connected to people. I've met Mick Jones from The Clash and he's a lovely bloke. It's unlikely that we'll meet again and I don't think I did much to change his life.

This week I'm feeling supremely happy. Over the last twelve months I've felt totally crap. As in can't get out of bed, can't sleep properly at night, struggle to stay awake at work, no energy and just general malaise. Two weeks ago I stopped eating bread and drinking beer. I still enjoy wine but I've totally cut all yeast based foods from my diet. The results are astonishing to me. I'm full of energy. Tonight I've cycled 22km to get home from work and am just bursting with happiness to the point that this blog may roll on and on. I can't believe how much of a difference it makes being and feeling fit and healthy. Long may it roll on. Next I'll be filling out list of things to do and actually doing them.

Where's my shorts?

Short selling. The practice of selling a security that you don't own, borrowing it to cover your position, and then hoping to either buy it back for less than you paid or, in the best situation, the company goes bust, you return the shares you borrowed and trouser the sale of shares that never were yours.

Even in the good times of a bull run, this is a morally dodgy practice. I agree that it helps drive out issues with a company, it allows the investment industry to focus on the underlying performance of the shares rather than holding them in the hope they'll be ok. Yet I can't help but feel that the ability to sell something you don't own and make a profit of it is wrong.

Of course, borrowing from an argument the good Robert Peston at the BBC used, there's the interesting moral dilemma that those encouraging the practice were the ones doing the most bleating when the practice started to hurt their businesses.

In the current turbulence, the short sellers returned with a vengeance, intent on driving down stocks and making money. But there's more to it than that. Ordinary share holders want to sell out of their positions. They've seen companies like Bear Stearns and Lehman go bust and people have lost all their money. In the UK, other banks nationalised and the savers who were given shares in them have lost all the money they were given. Perhaps none of the "value" was real but these people felt rich, they felt like they had some money put aside for a rainy day. Now most of them have nothing. As the market fall, others feel it might be best to get some real money out while they can.

Don't blame the shorts for the trouble the banks are in, they're just doing what the markets allow them to do. If you're looking for culprits in this bonfire of the insanities, you should like to the men in sharp suits.

Feeling lucky?

I'm contemplating what might happen if I won a major prize in a lottery draw in the next week or so. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, it's £2 million GBP. At the moment, that's about USD 3.5 million or about EUR 1 million.

The first worry is, would the prize fund be able to send the money to me? After that, would I be able to get the money out of my bank in time to spread around the risk? But thinking about that makes me realise that in the UK there are only eight banks I could safely deposit my money in, and that the maximum guarantee is £50,000 per bank holding company. So that rules out one of RBS and NatWest.

So I'd probably need to find a few European banks that I could open accounts with and slosh some money over to them. Perhaps an Irish bank would be alright as they're fully covered for the next two years.

Then what? I'm sitting long cash when the world's banking system is going to the dogs. Perhaps I could just withdraw £1,000 per day from each of these accounts and stuff it in a safe spot in the house. After all, no one would know it's there.

If I've done all of this, I'll have plenty of money and it won't run out. But what happens if the banking system breaks down completely? What use will there be for money? Will it be possible to take these crisply printed pieces of paper with their sophisticated fraud prevention and use them for anything?

What if the financially worst happens? We'll still be here the day after but will it be like those Armageddon films of the 80's like Mad Max where the world goes to pot and it's everyone for themselves?

This keeps me up at night. I think I'll build a chicken coup in the backyard.

Hey Darling, where's the money gone?

Mr Darling, what a great name to call the man in nominally in control of the UK's purse strings. Darling what are you good at? This might be the question you ask of him.

The man's clearly under old Gord's thumb. Doesn't seem to be able to make a decision for himself and when the big announcement came today that we, the undersigned tax payer of Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom, are going to foot an unspecified bail out of the banking sector, there stood Gord making sure he was in the limelight for this one. Our beloved Darling was just a passenger; he couldn't even get the agreement hammered out in time for the market to digest it. This all seems quite amateur. But then the guy's a lawyer by training, so he's clearly not used to the idea of doing a proper job properly. Day after day of dithering and today we're delivered a document that dithers about handing out money to the banks. There are no specifics in the document. Merely a statement that says the Government will hand over £50 billion or so of my money to some wunch of bankers in return for which they want to say how the banks are run and who gets paid what.

This will work, but only because people want to believe it. Because we need the confidence to ensure that we're not back to bartering chickens and livestock. If you want to look at the origins of money, read this article from Exeter University.

Back to reality, we're going through a period of "deleveraging". To the average person on the street, this simply means that the banks are going to pay back lots of the money they've borrowed. Only it's happening slowly. And it's quite painful. Eventually the banks will return sufficient money to their depositors and shareholders and shrink down the size of their overall debt. This process will take about ten, that's right 10 ten, years to achieve. In the meantime, you and I, the taxpayer, will be footing the bill to prop these banks up.

The problem with Mr Darling's proposals, apart from the mere detail of how they will be implemented, is that it's going to be very hard for the banks to make much money out of the system. This is good and it means that we're not going to be making money like we used to. More to the point, we're not going to be making UP money like we used to. The Government is going to print it for us, not the banks.

Then there's the question of Tier 1 capital. What does this mean? For those of us lucky enough to own a house, it's quite similar. If you "own" a house, you probably took a mortgage from the bank. So technically it's yours the day you make your final repayment. If you're living in that house you know that there's always money going out, utilities, rates, refurbishments and whatever else you spend on keeping your house in order, so it costs money to own it. Tier 1 capital is similar; it's the basic investment a bank makes to keep it going. So if you continue to add more money to your mortgage, the net amount of money you get back will be diminished and if you take too much, you'll owe money to your lender. This is just the same for Tier 1 capital. This money allows the banks to fund their daily operations and needs to be readily at hand to cater for the lumps and bumps in the process. Spend too much of this and you run out of money, then you go bust.

Right now, us ordinary folk on the street can just hold our breath and hope that Mr Darling's not lost our money down the back of the sofa.

No confidence

While this combination of tsunamis, cyclones, hurricanes and other man made disasters hover over our financial markets it's easy to feel that tomorrow we'll be back to hunting and gathering to make a living.

At least, that's the view from here in the UK as our febrile government continue to cluelessly dick about while the country's economy goes into meltdown. There's a rotten core in the ruling party which leaks information like a dripping tap. Only the tap's now gushing forth half-baked plans and grand statements that offer no substance about how to solve this crisis.

The BBC's workaholic financial editor, Mr Robert Peston, is doing a great job of grabbing hold of the data and blogging to the world. It's like he has inserted an intravenous drip that's fed by the inner workings of this government. While his scoops are the result of hard work, one starts to wonder how much the public interest is served by what he tells us. We could do with a let up in the rate and morbidness of these publications; perhaps Mr Peston could wait for the Government to make a decision before he tells us what it's going to be? At least this way Gordon's boys might think a bit and decide they actually need to do something as opposed to the current sound bites of crap flowing Downing Street.

With the Brown government on the ropes in the opinion polls, the national debt approaching 60% of GDP and not offering any clear way out of this mess, perhaps Parliament will have the gumption to call for a confidence vote. There's a constitutional precedent for this, set in 1782 when the Brits took a beating at Yorktown in the first American war. The wording was that Parliament "can no longer repose confidence in the present ministers". Words that are still apt today.

We, the citizens of the United Kingdom, should not look to our Parliamentary leaders for a solution to this crisis. The solutions will come from others. From the opposition political parties, from the leaders of the business communities, including our financial institutions, and from ordinary people who need a change from the leaden footed fools in charge.

There can no longer be confidence in the ability of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and his Chancellor to solve the economic nightmares we are living. After all, serious times demand serious people to make serious decisions.

Fallacy of Borrowing

I thought I'd knock this out before George Osborne's speech this week at the UK's Tory Party conference beats me to it.

Back at the beginning of our human existence someone figured that they were better at making well balanced spears with a good sharp flint on the end of them. In fact, they probably realised that instead of spending all the time traipsing around hunting for food, and getting the odd kicking when it went wrong, that it was easier and safer to stick around the home to boot. In exchange for their craft, they would be rewarded with food for contributing to the success of the hunt.

Buoyed by the thought of being a craftsmen, it's not hard to take the next logical step of offering your services as a pointy stick maker to a larger group, or perhaps groups, in return for a share of the spoils. This really smart idea removed the associated risk of a life threatening maiming.

Then some other really, really bright spark invented money and started to use an artifact as a store of value. This meant that they could buy weapons from the pointy stick makers and sell them to the hunters. Of course they needed to live properly themselves, so they decided that buying a stick would cost them one money unit and selling a pointy stick would cost two money units. Hey presto, we've invented the world of finance.

Then the really, really, really big wheeze was invented. Lending. "I'll give you three units of money today if you pay me back four units of money next month."

Suddenly the human need to get more kicks in and about twenty thousand years later we've borrowed so many units of money that there's little chance of us paying it back. Some banks were so clever in the way they invented money that suddenly they found they had no money at all. Their computer systems said they had boat loads of the stuff, but when the lid was lifted the cupboard was most definitely bare.

These bright banking people had borrowed so much money that they didn't realise none of it existed! How clever is that?

Here in the UK, our government has binged on borrowing over the last few years. Initially everything was going well. The previous Tories had managed to run up a few bob owed to pretty much everyone going, then the economy picked up and Labour decided they'd start spending all the tax money that came in. Then the economy started to slow, Labour borrowed money to spend it on civil service jobs and suddenly the national debt is making us look like the Titanic. When the wheels come off with Government spending this time, it's going to take generations to pay it back.

Now we're in a situation where everyone's having to spend more money to keep the economy going. That means most likely they'll need to borrow more.

I think of my late father-in-law. He saved frugally to pay cash for his own house and borrowed very little. In the early 1900's policeman and civil servants were not allowed to borrow money. Banks did lend money, but only to those people they felt could afford it.

We can't afford to borrow more money. To say that we can is just foolish.

Newton's laws

Sir Isaac Newton was a brilliant scientist who's publication of the law of gravity and the three laws of motion in 1687 changed the face of science. According to a poll of scientists, Newton is consider more influential than Einstein. This may be attributed to the fact that Einstein's physics is understood by few people whereas Newton's legacy continues into the present day and his mathematical genius forms much of the curriculum used to train modern engineers.

When you also consider that the work was published in Latin, the title being "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica", you begin to understand that students in that era were expected not to understand just their specialty but to also be competent in a broad range of disciplines. Understanding Latin, Philosophy, mathematics, and other subjects such as theology and astronomy meant that Newton was able to apply this broad range of understanding to his own work.

Compare that to the education of children today. In some ways, the curriculum attempts to give children broad access to a number of subjects. There's opportunities to learn about history, geography, science, maths and English. Equally, design technology, IT, physical education and languages are made available to your everyday secondary student in the United Kingdom.

For all this advancement, we're not producing intellectual giants who rearrange the world as we know it. That's not to say that children today are born with lower intelligence than those of Newton's time. Yet we don't seem to be able to leverage the heights that our intelligence are capable of. In the UK our children are assessed until they are sick of it. They don't seem to learn much, apart from knowing how to pass exams. There's a feeling that they're not getting the opportunity to delve into who they are from a secure platform.

Our society in the UK needs to take a long look at what we want the next generations, deliberate plural, to achieve. After all, without the creative thinking and ability to shape how we interact with the world the prospects for the UK and the planet as a whole are quite grim.

Did you eat all your dinner tonight?

This UK government, to use the term loosely, continues to astonish me. We're wasting food we're told and it's all our fault that there's none left for the poorer nations. Yet good old Gordon's off to Japan getting stuck into a 48 dish dinner that I'm pretty sure that about 42% of the prepared contents ended up in the bin.

I'm beginning to really dislike the way this horrible man appears to push us to become Scottish Protestants. Be prudent, be responsible, work hard, record your achievements, and educate your children. If it were the 1800's I'd expect to see him waving the, allegedly, holy book in his hand to boot. Repent of your sins and repair your immoral ways, you evil children of Eve, he might admonish. Mankind (deliberate emphasis on the sex) you are wicked and you shall taste the fires of hell should you continue to ignore the commands of the lord you bow down to.

I often wonder if Gordon would be happiest with us kowtowing before him, acknowledging just how great and powerful he is. After all he has single handedly delivered the UK such an enormous list of improvements that we must all consider ourselves so lucky that this man was delivered unto us. Nick Clegg, honorable leader of the Liberal Democrats, understands the problem. When Gordon's on the back foot about an issue or doesn't like the question presented to him, he reads out a list of, primarily, his achievement, though this is normally preceded by "Under this Labour government, we have delivered...". As Mr Clegg spoke out to the Speaker in one PM's question time "He's doing it again, he's confusing reading out a list with answering the question."

Dear Mr Speaker, can you please ask our honorable PM to answer the question next time? Unfortunately it's very difficult to heckle from the galleries, now that they've installed the perspex partition to keep our MP's safe from terrorists.

Back at the food ranch, it's becoming clear that one of the simpler ways to ease the burden on food production is to eat less of it. Perhaps our know-it-all Government can order us to weigh in once a month, figure out each persons BMI and determine just how fat we all are. Then they can set another of their famous "targets" for us to lose 20% of the national body-weight just by not eating. There could be ration coupons that limit you to a certain number of calories per day and ensure that you eat the correct portions of each part of the food circle. There would need to be consideration for pregnant or nursing women, children and the elderly. This of course would mean a public consultation on the matter, the formation of a Quango to ensure that the right level of dietary intake is set for various categories of people, active professional sports players would be in their own category, excluding darts and snooker players, and then of course the Parliamentary debating of the matter before final ratification.

Along the way, Gordon could do another of those Labour wheezes where he announces several rounds of funding, each time implying that this is new funding bestowed upon the people. All of this, of course, will include the pet "prudence" phrase and say how terribly important (hands out in front like he's hugging another fat person) it is that this vital work succeeds and helps make Britain the best place to live. Wrapped up in a sinecure of "proper British diets for proper British people".

User Acceptance Testing

Those of you familiar with the Information Technology (IT) industry will be familiar with the term User Acceptance Testing, or UAT Testing as people lovingly refer to it. I'm not sure why there's the need to double up on the testing, but hey why say one TLA when you can stick another word on the end to make it sound like you know what you're doing?

Today I've sat in a meeting discussing how you can meet a clients needs by getting them the data they want. The noises from the other side of the table were all of the "ah-but-no" kind. Ah, well we could do that and it's a good idea; but it means that we won't be able to complete the BIG project work we need to do and therefore, no, we won't do it because it could compromise the end deliverable. Then you get a whole bunch of techno-babble that indicates they really don't understand what they're saying at all. I'm sure there's a Dilbert cartoon out there describing this very phenomenon.

So in the life of any project, after you've waded through the joy of figuring out what the user really wants and then fight endlessly with IT to get some useful scrap of functionality onto your desktop you get into UAT and start to execute well laid out plans with rigidly documented test cases to ensure you've fully tested the application and ensured that nothing goes wrong at delivery.

The problem with this approach is that it fails to cater for the "do stuff" test conditions. There's a distinct lack of imagination about how a person interacting with the system might choose seemingly random and meaningless key strokes, enter all sorts of weird search data and generally play about with the system the way a two year old randomly pounds the keyboard on your machine. This is the testing approach I favour most. By all means, it's great to run through a documented set of scripts that ensure you didn't cock anything up with the latest release. But if you have a complicated interface you should really put it through its paces by coming up with all sorts of weird combinations that lie outside the documented tests. You will be surprised by how many weird errors pop up in systems that don't have many users; especially when the developers were under pressure to get the end product out the door.

As they say, if engineers built buildings the way computer programmers wrote code, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

Unfortunately in the world of IT, the scum of mediocrity floating on top of the pond is choking the undergrowth to death.

Saving money

Growing up in the post-war thrift era, the mentality was to save money. "Economising", as a noun it's used to cover up a growing number of evils, and as a verb is the act whereby poor or middle class people save a little every month until they're too old to enjoy living a lot. After this life of penury, they're also not expected to spend too much lest their layabout offspring miss out on the chance to really enjoy living off what mum and dad managed to save.

We live in a state that Rousseau would recognise now, although the poor of the third estate probably had fewer worries in his time. We're overrun with being merchandised and we don't realise that we're not just bound with chains but we're voluntarily pulling a freight train worth of debt, worry and stress behind us with them. If you've been to Uni you'll be thousands of pounds in debt. If you'd graduated in the last three years and managed to get a decent job you've probably taken out a mortgage of 125% of the value of your home. Then there's the mandatory credit card debt to fund the lifestyle that the grey suited market men think you should have. You can have it all they say, just spend it on the never-never because you're house will always go up in value.

Well according to Elliott and Atkinson "The Gods that Failed" (Random House, 2008), these last few years we've seen unrestrained growth in the debt market in the West because our New Olympians demand that economies must grow. We've seen record levels of wealth created in economies of the East, Malaysia, Russia, China and India. Thailand did everything the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded and their economy is screwed. The others did their own thing and are hugely wealthy and powerful. Their conclusion is that we're in big trouble, unless a miracle saves us.

Bankers created a new class of toxic waste known as "Collateral Debt Obligations" (CDOs) that smeared this instrument of doom across the planet and the regulatory bodies stood by and watched it happen. They made millions in bonuses and commissions from doing this, the clever little boys that they are.

Now times are tough, they're bleating to the governments to bail them out of their misery and help keep their yachts moored in Caribbean resorts.

Next time you're wondering why the supermarket bill looks big and your struggling to pay the mortgage, spare a thought for this group of hard working money changers, collectively known as a wunch of bankers.

Things a girl needs to understand about moving in with a boy

There are fundamentals that girls need to know before they decide to co-habit with most boys. Ideally they should share a mixed sex flat. This will allow a girl to get an objective understanding before taking the plunge. This will allow them to see the true habits of boys when they feel they are the alpha males in a house.

The primary issue is that boys struggle with personal hygiene issues. They particularly struggle to understand why toilet seats should be lowered after use, why it's rude to dribble all over the rim and not clean it up and they show little concern when the occasional drop or seven hits the bathroom floor. This is a very nasty habit, especially when the bathroom floor is carpeted.

Boys also think that clean washing is any article of clothing worn for less than three hours. This includes underpants they put on after sex in order to go to the loo to avoid frightening their flat mates. They'll happily pick them up off the floor in the morning and wear them to work.

These "clean" items do not need to be taken neatly folded from a standard storage space, such as a chest of drawers or a cupboard shelf. No, for a boy items of clothing can come straight from the washing line or the pile of clothes you've left lying around for the last week in the vain hope that your boy might just figure out he should fold them up and put them away.

Items left on the floor for up to one month are considered clean if they pass the three hour usage test. At some point, particularly in the case of jeans, items of clothing will appear close to the dirty laundry basket. It is important to establish at this time if the clothes are in fact ready to wash because being too keen to get the clothes washed leads to disputes about the environmental impact of using the washing machine too hastily.

Items are considered used if they are work clothes that were worn all day. These are normally lobbed in the broad direction of the dirty laundry basket. Causal shirts are considered used if they are worn twice over the weekend. These are usually left on the floor to indicate that they are not yet ready to wash.

Sporting apparel is a different matter. Summer is normally ok as washing occurs on a regular basis. In the winter, socks, shorts and jumpers are considered usable for up to four weeks. Normally these items are left in a bag that lies unopened in the corner of the room during the week. If the boy is particularly fussy, sporting clothes will see the inside of a washing machine once a month. Like a good French cheese, sports gear will stink once it reaches its wash-by date. If your room starts to smell like the London Underground, it's time to get that sports bag into the laundry.

Laundry is not considered to be a man's task. Real men don't do this. If you wish to avoid problems with your future man, you need to train him well as soon as you can. Next time we can talk about how to ensure you house standards are maintained.

Go forth and fill the earth

The famous line in Genesis uttered by god to Adam and Eve revealed to humanity that women are supposed to breed until they drop to ensure that we fulfill god's natural law.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. ²⁸ And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." ²⁹

This quote is taken Genesis, Chapter 1 using http://www.bibleontheweb.com/Bible.asp .

Being brought up as a Catholic I'm quite familiar with this text and recently wondered how it fits with the population crisis we see today. There are three places on this earth that contain the bulk of the 7 billion or so people who exist today. China and India are two of them and South America is the third and the one most affected by the bilious religious nonsense introduced by St Augustine based on this quote.

If your not familiar with Catholicism, there's a doctrine known as "Propagation of the Faith" whereby the primary purpose of sex is to produce children. Contraception is forbidden, the only approved method is known as the "rhythm" method, designed by Dr Billings.

And everyone knows that this method doesn't work.

Where does this live humanity? Hanging on the edge of existence.

Browsing through a Google search using the terms "Go forth and multiply" I found the prescient article by Aaron Hiller. Written in 1984, he cites research of the day showing that the Earth's population would hit 6.9 billion by the year 2000. Not far off the mark and quite scary when you think about how many human children were born in the intervening 24 years.

In this articles there's a reference to the fact that contraceptive practices were well known, with the Babylonian Talmud even providing details of how to prevent unwanted pregnancies from occurring. It shows that 5,000 years ago people were concerned with the effects of too many mouths to feed.

The effect of religion on the state is quite marked and Hiller's article highlights the pernicious nature of letting religious edicts entering the legal structures of a society. There's the pointed reference to the non-fiction section starting at 200.0 in your local library. Western religious history is difficult to absorb when you are presented with atrocities against humanity page after page.

What else is interesting is the delegation of notable intellectuals who, in 1964, attempted to persuade Pope Paul VI that the Roman Catholic position on sex and procreation were creating untold misery for millions and billions of people. They were rejected out of hand as it was not god who had revealed this unpalatable truth.

There is an out for the Roman Catholics in this situation. There's little dispute that we've filled the letter of god's requirements. The two food revolutions in the last 10o years allowed the number of humans on the planet to multiply from 1,000,000 to 7,000,000 and it continues to rise. There are very few places left untouched by human hand.

Saint Augustine appears on Wikipedia, but you need to dig more into what he achieved in his time to fully appreciate the impact his thinking has on our world today.

We have dominion over all creatures and are now contributing in a major way to the destruction of the only home we own. It's time the Roman Catholic church woke up to its responsibilities.

If you are a Philippine farmer, here's what you'd eat in a week.

The Guardian, the UK's mainstream bastion of the liberal left, is doing a great series on the current food crisis.

I'm impressed by the quality of the articles that it delivers. The Telegraph, the right wing equivalent, has its own Earth page at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/index.jhtml . Unfortunately there's a picture of bonnie Prince Charlie wanting to save the rain forests of Brazil. A nobler goal no doubt, but it doesn't compare to the information provided by the Guardian.

Go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/28/food.philippines to check out the story. They follow a local farmer who now spends double on his food bill compared to twelve months ago. At the moment it's about 90 - 100 Philippine Pesos a day. That's about USD2.27 or about GBP1.17 or EUR 1.48 on a good day. Mostly it seems he spends about half that, around 50 Pesos a day. The family diet consists mainly of rice and vegetables with the odd bit of chicken if they're lucky.

To find out what it's worth in your currency, try the fantastic converter at http://coinmill.com/PHP_calculator.html.

Our food bills are about £20 pounds a day, sometimes higher. Part of the cost is in the service provided to deliver it to your cupboard but I'm sure that most people living in big city's don't know how food is produced and couldn't say what it costs.

Moving onto the food summit in Rome we've witnessed another sniveling display of country's promoting and protecting their own agendas without consideration for others. I'm not disappointed by this, it's expected that this grand stages produce any great changes.

What I want is for someone to start talking rationally and logically about how 6.7 billion people extricate themselves from our own mess.

Any takers?

70's retro feeling

As a kid in the 70's I was consistently told three things by my parents.

1. Petrol was very expensive and would run out before I grew up.
   
2. The population of China would one day exceed 1 billion people.
3. The left over food on your plate was enough to feed a starving family for a week.

Today Jonathon Shaw, the UK Labour Government's food minister, repeated this third mantra and upon reading it I felt a sudden urge to find him and impose a series of paper-cuts upon his person.

His argument was that children should eat all the food on their plate to ensure that they learn to value it. This is because the cost of food will remain high for years to come and we need to learn to stop wasting "about £10 billion worth of food every year". So says this mighty minion of our nanny state.

These statements strike me as absurd. Surely if we're wasting that much money on food each year we should just stop spending the money and consequently eat less?

I'm sure there are thousands of people out there approaching middle age like me unable to walk away from a plate of food because of this screwed up logic. We diet and binge and diet again.

If the developed nations are eating too much food, judging by the size of some people squashed against me on public transport there are quite a lot of them, and the NHS is overwhelmed with patients who have eating disorders then surely this is the simplest solution to the problem. Or maybe I'm just naive?

I'm off to find out exactly what Filipino farmers do eat for a week and stick to something close to it. I'm sure that it involves rice, a food that is becoming more expensive every day, and vegetables. I'll post some recipes along with calorie count, cost and total wasted.

I'm hoping this will be the start of a movement to reduce our food foot print in the developed world.