Archive for September, 2008

Times are hard….. money is scarce….. the ozone has been depleted by all the CFC’s released into our Atmosphere! As such i know most of us are cutting back our expenditure and doing our best to be as green as possible.

Thats why my entire family, including myself, are taking this opportunity to fly to Portugal. When the going gets tough smart people take an opportune break, leaving every body else to deal with the crisis!

Yes i’m afraid while the rest of England is forcast for rain i will be here

Some of us just have to make this sacrifice I’m afraid, if everything was “A ok” what would I have to Blog about?

No, I’m afraid in the interest of making the lives of future generations more interesting I.E “The great Acid Rain Crisis of 2040″ some of us most continue to aggressively consume everything in sight.

“We’ve got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?”

— Lee Iacocca, CEO/Chairman, Chrysler Corporation, 1979-1992

I would like to start by pointing out that “The Bank of England” is not a public institution as its name might suggest. So what role did they play in the nationalisation of Northern Rock and more recently Bradford and Bingley?

All the articles I have read regarding these transactions usually make the assumption/give the impression, that The Bank of England is a government run agency. In fact even though it is our central bank it is in fact a private company with private shareholders and is not subject to regulation by the British parliament.

Of course every country in Europe works in the same way America’s Federal Reserve despite its official bearing is still a private company.

So being a private company, why would they have anything to do with the nationalisation of these other banks?

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.” – President James A. Garfield (1831-1881)

The Bank of England control the supply of money in our country and this is because it is considered that if the government controlled this supply they would use it for political advantage and cause greater problems than are present at the moment.

Surely this is a Conservative policy…. I agree totally about limiting the government’s power and control over our lives however is giving this control to a group of private individuals, out to make profit, a better solution?

There are many sites and conspiracy nuts out there ready to tell you all about how these bankers are a “government within a government” and need to be stopped, so I won’t say anymore on that side of thing. Back to the point I am still tenuously pursuing….

When the government needed the money to nationalise Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley they, not having the power to print this money themselves, have borrowed it off the Bank of England. This borrowing of money is not free despite the fact that it is that governments currency you can be sure that a healthy rate of interest will be due.

We as tax payers will be paying this back to the Bank of England for quite some time. So when we pay taxes we are really paying this debt. In America it is calculated that all of the income tax collected goes to paying the “interest only” on the national debt.

So we nationalised lots of bad debt, which means that if these debts turn to defaults we the public lose out and in the meantime we get to pay the interest on the loans we took out to buy these failed institutions. Is anyone happy with that scenario?

So then why did we bail out these institutions? Is it because they were the foundation of our financial institutions? Was it to save the anguish of the people who held deposits with those companies?

With an election coming up it’s easier for Mr Brown to dump these costs on the future, using methods nobody really understands and clouded with misleading terms like “The Bank of England”. After all if you just lost deposits at your bank due to Mr Brown’s faith in deregulation and “Free Market Economics” would he get your vote?

Why is America a republic and not a democracy? A republic defends its minorities from its majorities where a democracy is basically majority rule. It’s hard for me to point to a better example than creationism in schools.

http://tinyurl.com/3fln38

The above link is to an article chronicling a debate between students and teachers in Carolina. Most of the people at this debate apparently decide it will be a good thing to teach creationism to their kids in school.

I believe that anything that isn’t solid fact shouldn’t be taught to our children in school. Perhaps in another area parents will want to teach their kids Scientology in school or Islam and these very same Creationists would breathe a sigh of relief at the laws that separate school from religion.

Creationists seem to have some major problem with Darwin and evolution they also tend to lump it together with Atheism as if they are one and the same philosophy.

“It’s really a disgrace for the state school board to impose evolution on our students without teaching creationism,” county school board member Jimmy Hobbs said at Tuesday’s meeting. “The law says we can’t have Bibles in schools, but we can have evolution, of the atheists.”

I’m afraid to say that evolution and Atheism are not the same thing and should not be bundled together. Arguably, most Atheists would believe in evolution, however it’s not the Atheists belief structure.

I think Creationist/Religious people naturally assume that everyone has some sort of belief structure and even for Atheists this might be considered to be generally true. I have seen debates where Atheists get into this argument of disputing evolution with Creationists however this is really falling into a trap. As an Atheist I only believe in things that are testable and true, if a Creationist somehow managed to prove evolution false I would congratulate him for improving my understanding of something. So what? Maybe evolution has a place close to my heart because it’s really the only rational explanation of our origins, but it wouldn’t make me change beliefs if it turned out not to be true.

Atheism is so linked with our education system that it’s impossible to extricate it because it follows the same rules. I think one of the fundamental mistakes that have been made is trying to get religious people to understand Atheist beliefs it terms of another religion. Religious people need belief to participate Atheists need proof. To teach something in church people need belief but to teach something in school we need proof.

We are not saying that the Atheist God is better! We don’t have one. If your beliefs go against something that is fundamentally and testably true…. I WILL NOT DEBATE THIS WITH YOU… to do so demeans us both.

Doing a little bit of idle web browsing I got caught up in an interesting (slightly vain) line of pursuit, searching for my own name. In everyday life I have never come across anyone with my exact name before however it would seem that David Mills is a rather common name (Not that I thought it was rare).

The “White pages” have gone to the trouble of producing a statistical graph of America based on your name at http://names.whitepages.com/ it seems that my name is actually very popular. Surely one of my namesakes was a superstar?

As to David Mills’ who have their own web sites it seems the top of the pile is this interesting fellow…..

His website consists wholly of an attempt to flog his book on Atheism. I am an Atheist myself however I have never considered this as an occupation as well….. till now (hmm easy money? You get to float around in Zero G?). I’m sure his arguments are all on the same level with Richard Dawkins however I really couldn’t take this web site seriously as it seems like it was designed using elements of Power Point (in some places there is even clip art! OMFG <= Bad Pun?). Check him out at http://davidmills.net

I was, understandably, feeling a little dubious about the quality of internet based David Mills results until I found..

As a guitarist myself i automatically had respect for this man even though he appears to be missing the curly wirey bit at the top (this might have been a blessing for previous search results!) However my respect dropped as i learned that he has a degree in jazz…. jazz being one of those things i have never managed to get my head around (Free style jazz should be played to extract information from terrorists!) Show him some love at – http://www.davidmillsmusic.com

Then i came across the show stopper there was no way i was ever going to rival the next individual..

A “professional toast master” thats an amazing job! Aapparently, this guy comes to your wedding to make sure that all the toasting gets done spot on(I always over do it!). Thats just what i want at my wedding ,a complete stranger, who i have paid to come and talk to about how great i am. In fact one of my mates is going to get married soonish and has asked me to be his best man….. maybe i could hire this guy and substitute him with me when it comes to speech time! That would seem quite ligit to me hmm i wonder what he charges….. http://www.toastmasterdavidmills.co.uk/

And finaly an honor mention to the cyber squatting bastard at http://www.davemills.com who has not only robbed my ideal domain name but has also failed to do anything productive with it since 15/04/07 except maybe upload a picture of his cat. At the moment our sources are trying to verify the cats name however information is thin on the ground.

I personally don’t hold out much hope for this poor cat! If its owner shows it the same amount of love and attention as his web site, it will have long ago turned feral and resorted to hunting the rats that roam its tragic inhabitation, sometimes managing to gain occasional sustenance from discarded beer cans and KFC buckets thrown recklessly aside.

Some might say I am “stretching the bounds of imagination” with this scenario and I should maybe “stop being such a sore loser” however I feel fully justified that my artistic license is well within established limits.

P.S

I’d like to thank George Bush, Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, O J Simpson, Karl Rove, Pinocchio and many others, without your prior fabrications the established limits of imagination and artistic license would be greatly reduced.