Rogering the News

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What is the role of a ‘trade’ union?

It’s a legitimate question, because what I see in the imminent postal strike is not a union in action, it is instead a workers collective demanding that they should dictate to their employers the manner in which the employers should run the employers business.

It makes good sense for people working for an employer to organise and be able to prevent exploitation by the employer.

It makes good sense for a union to present a unified single point of contact when negotiating terms and conditions, a benefit that cuts both ways if the union ensures that the workers themselves work in line with agreements reached.

Where it goes wrong is when a union uses its muscle to prevent the management of a business from managing the business in the interests of those who must come first, the shareholders. The people who have put up the risk capital to create or maintain the business.

In the case of the present Postal strike there is a workers collective that doesn’t give a stuff about the users of the Postal services, that doesn’t give a stuff about the shareholders interests, and only concerns itself with bullying the employer into running the company the way the workers collective wants it run.

Run for the benefit of the workers collective leaders who use the labour force just as cynically as the worst employer in order to get what the leaders of the workers collective want, and that comes down to self interest, aided by a workforce who have forgotten their rightful place in a business. People employed to do a job of work.

Discussions and consultation should take place when change is needed, but such consultation should be limited to the best way for the business to move forward, primarily in the interests of the business, NOT primarily in the interest of the labour force who are, when all is said and done, simply a resource.

Someone needs to pick up the Union leaders, the REAL UNION leaders, by the ears (as a second choice) and shake into them the fact that in this matter they should be nothing more than a communications channel between the organised labour force and the business management. And that neither the Union Leaders nor the labour force has any rights regarding how the business is run.

Consultation with the workforce under the present circumstances involving modernisation and positioning the business to match a changing market should be restricted to establish the way that the best shareholder value can be achieved, NOT how the best outcome for the workers can be achieved.

Without an efficient business, and that means constant modernisation to match the competition, there will BE no jobs for the workers to fill as there will be no business.

Without people in a workforce being sensible and understanding their place in a business they will find themselves being replaced by people who do understand the relationship between employer and employee.

As for Postmen, maybe it’s time to adopt a system where people collect their mail from a central point and do away with post doorstep delivery altogether. Maybe assisted by the payment of a surcharge to have mail delivered to the door, five pounds or so per item would probably do it for the moment.

We live in changing times and changing times means just that. Things that once could be afforded increasingly will cease to be. That’s life. Better get used to it.

Rog

There is much kafuffle surrounding recycling, with the realisation that the continued expenditure of energy and raw materials to create useless stuff that does nothing more than contain useful stuff simply can not be right.

That, and the dumping of goods, often containing highly toxic materials into gert holes in the ground is, well, dirty, and finally that message seems to have been forced across La Manche though it took the threat of prosecution from the EU to do so.

So now the British government is tightening the screw with a possibility of 6 differently coloured waste bins to each residence, and the threat of huge fines if the wrong stuff goes into the wrong bin.

Although this does create the most wonderful way of getting even with a neighbour from hell by a midnight raid and a bag of potato peelings to drop into the ‘wrong’ bin, it does miss out on another recycling opportunity, this time the recycling of the out of work.

Put simply, rather than the householder have to put up with a horrid array of plastic bins that look so out of place in decent areas (but add a touch of colour to others) why not have a single bin and use the unemployed to sort the trash in a central area as a part of earning their ‘benefit’ payments?

Regular and more frequent curbside collections, economies of scale, reduction in transport costs from sorting to incineration for some material, and all done at no additional costs, if anything cost savings and a much tidier environment.

Even the partially disabled emerging from the ‘can’t work’ group now that the scandal of the incapacity benefit scam is being unraveled would be able to find employment in some tasks. Seems like a plan to me!

It’s a win win situation. Tidies up the environment in every way, as well as having some worthwhile return for the expenditure of taxes that otherwise are wasted as payments to people to just sit at home doing nothing productive.

Rog

One of the sad consequences of the major British political parties deliberately overlooking The Elephant is that the thing has been voiding its bowels for years and this has attracted rats, in this case the BNP.

To many people the BNP seems to be the only party that represents their views and concerns about some very big issues within Britain, issues that the major parties will not or dare not even admit to.

They WILL not, for fear of loosing precious votes in often marginal seats where if they did speak the unspeakable a sizeable percentage of the electorate would be alienated and the election results would go to their rivals.

They DARE not, from the knowledge that the other two would cynically exploit an opportunity that they could in every way use to present to the people at the root of so much of what is wrong in the UK how user friendly they were to them, and so once again votes would be lost.

And so in slither the BNP.

Superficially reformed, and oh so decent — and yet at heart the same rabid racist bunch running the show and once again in trouble over ‘irregularities’ in publishing their accounts.

(Having seen the list of donations and the donors I’m hardly surprised.)

And now the BNP is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 20^th. Century (yes, I got that right) by being forced to open membership for all British people and not just White Anglo Saxon Protestants — but only as a result of the force of law, not decency alone as should have been the case. But then decency and the BNP would make strange bedfellow.

It’s unfortunate that so many decent people, really decent people against whom the worst that could be leveled would be gullibility, see the BNP as the only path open to them when looking for a party that will speak the unspeakable.

Yet in spite of their Nazi-like racist bile polluting the political scene the BNP do serve at least one purpose.

They force the major parties to varying degrees address The Elephant that is destroying British culture and not just pretend it isn’t there, and this if for no other reason than because every vote that goes to the BNP is a vote lost to them.

As for the BNP supporters who like what the BNP really is and what it really represents, the ignorant and shallow thinkers who live ignorant and shallow lives, those who hate things they don’t even understand, and who don’t even try to learn about the things they hate because they hate them —

The knuckle dragging low brow nonentities for whom the awareness of their own inferiority lets them by association with the BNP create for themselves the illusion of having some relevance in their otherwise pointless lives as society’s drones.

They are actually just the cannon fodder that the BNP central office depends on.

Just as was the case in Nazi Germany.

Rog

Another new word has entered the English language.

Thorbjorning.

It was created by Yoni Brenner, a columnist for the New York Times, and describes awarding someone a prize for something they have not yet done.

The root of the word comes from the name of the Norwegian chairman of the Nobel Prize committee, Thorbjørn Jagland.

Jagland is an Ultra-Left Wing politician, with a history of him having been a close friend of the USSR as well as other questionable regimes past and present.

A less than ‘forthright’ individual with an appalling history including connivance to falsify membership of a political group with which he was associated in a very senior position.

All that, and a great deal more besides, including him having been a past vice president of the Socialist International, in my opinion proves the man has a political history that can only be described as infamous.

But not only in my opinion. Over the last couple of days I’ve had a great deal to do with some people from Norway, and it was from them that I learned so much. Leaks are now coming out that the choice of Barack Hussein wasn’t even quite so unanimous and popular within the five person committee as has been claimed

This decision, as well as many other decisions reached by Nobel Peace Prize committees in the past, really does now legitimise asking if Norway should remain as the country that decides on who the now sadly devalued prize should be awarded to.

When Alfred Nobel wrote his will he thought that a then militaristic Sweden was an inappropriate nation from which the Nobel Peace Prize should be decided. He made this decision based on his belief that Sweden would involve political expedience beyond morality.

Was he right?

Who can say, but looking at recent Peace Prize awards, especially the latest, Norway certainly no longer would seem to be meeting his intention.

Rog

It had to happen, it was only a matter of time. The Dollar is to be dropped as THE petro-currency.

Meetings are now being held involving the Mid East oil states, China, Russia, for South America, Brazil, Japan and, for Europe, France, to finalise the details of establishing a new Global currency for oil deals instead of the US Dollar. You can be sure that the more vociferously it is denied, especially by the US, the more certain it is that it’s well on the way.

The basis of the new currency will be a basket of existing currencies, especially the Euro and, the consequences will be devastating for the US and for Britain.

For Britain because since GB is outside of the Eurozone the British pound will not benefit from the inevitable rise in world trading value of the Euro. Instead it will suffer awfully as a result of a huge rise in the cost of imported materials of all forms without the ‘all in it together’ that comes about from membership of the European Central Bank.

People may rail at the future of Britain in the EU and the demise of Sterling in favour of the Euro, and I can understand the sentiment behind it, but now to fail to take up the least worst option WILL result it catastrophe for GB and catastrophe is NOT too strong a word.

The status of the US$ as a reserve currency has been based on its use as THE petro-currency after the insolvency of the US in the 70’s (yes, really!) and the Devils Deal with the Saudi’s that then took place. That is now changing and as the $ falls to a value based on its value as a currency relevant to the US internal economy, and not its use as the global reserve currency of choice, life for the population of the US life will change.

What makes my skin creep are the likely consequences of the changes to the US standard of living and what then happens within the US, as a result of huge oil price rises, huge increases in import costs, and huge social changes. It could end up being earth shattering.

Literally.

Rog

If a bar of tin is bent it emits a faint sound known as the ‘Tin Cry’ as a result of the shearing of its highly crystalline structure, but now people are crying over tin, specifically the price of the stuff.

The Tin market has been cornered by one group who are buying tin on a huge scale.

Various opinions exist as to why this might be, the thought that it is to corner the supply to the canning industry doesn’t hold water as today there are now so many alternatives that can be used.

The though that it is simply ‘playing the markets’ also doesn’t stand up too well because the relatively limited uses tin has where it is unique as a material could be satisfied many times over from a single large mine, and so the question arises what might be going on.

As a physicist, (well I was once!) I wonder if the almost unique properties certain isotopes of the stuff have as a result of it having what is termed a ‘double magic number’ in nuclear physics. One property being that such materials can be used to create transuranic* elements (that do not occour in nature) and have highly valued characteristics associated with high ‘atomic numbers’ — but relatively very slow rates of atomic decay.

(* Google ‘Transuranium elements’ to get the low down —but only if all the paint that you could watch dry as a less boring alternative has now dried.)

Tin has also been used in the creation of superconducting materials, and there may well have been a breakthrough in that field with the goal of (relatively) high temperature superconducting alloys brought closer to being achievable.

Something’s going on. Maybe it is simply a case of supply and demand and expectations of changes in existing markets, maybe more.

Worth watching tin prices though. It could see a resurgence of tin mining in Cornwall, where there’s still a hell of a lot left in the ground — and if the price proved to be right out tin mining could be the new industry, especially if it produced an export ‘crop’!

Just imagine the howls of protest from the ‘New Cornwall-ians’ as their delightful ‘des res’ suddenly turned out to be in the middle of a once more industrialised region! It would make a cat laugh!

Rog

Let’s look at a sacred cow and see if it should not now be turned into hamburger meat.

There is a declared intent by the Conservative government-in-waiting to raise the State Pension Age to 66 from 2016.

I can well understand the morality for society to provide for those unable to fend for themselves in old age, and it was to meet such a need that pensions were introduced in the first place, but why have a state pension when the state already provides for those unable to work?

If a person can work and earn their keep then surely there is a duty on them to do so.

Just because someone has worked for years they should not expect to stop when they need not stop and have taxpayers fund what amounts to a prolonged holiday for them.

If they are ill, or can not do much in the way of providing for themselves, then it is right that they should be supported, but simply having worked for a number of years or having reached some particular age should certainly not be justification in itself.

Many people have taken risks in their lives. They have speculated and accumulated — or ‘crashed in flames’ — or sometimes both’ Of those who have accumulated and can afford to decide to live off what they have earned, then good luck to them. THEY have provided the means by their own enterprise and effort to live on what they have accumulated or earned.

Of course there will always be some who through no fault of their own have been unable to set aside the wherewithal to provide for themselves in old age but hey! Who ever said life was fair! In any case they won’t be left to starve, and nor should they.

Personally I absolutely believe that so long as there is a social safety net there is then no need for a taxpayer funded state pension, and no justification for totally tax payer funded safety net while those saved by it are capable of doing work to help cover at least some of the costs involved..

Those that can pay for themselves should pay for themselves, those who can’t should work towards offsetting the costs while they are able.

Rog

As part of an English language course a lecturer was giving a class on English grammar and said ‘In English a double negative forms a positive’

He continued ‘In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative, but there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A voice from the back of the lecture theatre was heard to mutter ‘Yeah, right.’

Rog

As a consequence of the last bout of Labour devils brew of profligacy and stupidity the IMF had to bail out the UK. That was in 1976 and I remember it well.

The cost to the UK was huge, or at least the cost to Joe Public was huge as he had to pay, and now once again the IMF are demanding massive changes to the UK finances and once again as a result of gross mismanagement by Labour and once again muggings will have to fork out..

At this point let’s get one thing clear.

The mess that the UK is in is NOT because of the actions of ‘Bankers’, an ethereal group being blamed for everything and comprising of people just doing their jobs, the blame is 100% down to the Government for neglecting to do what they should have done and imposed a credit freeze way back around 2001.

But the two B’s did not. It was ‘beyond their ken’ as well as not in their interest to do so.

But back to the point.

Now the IMF have spelled it out in so many words for Brown and his glove puppet. They have been TOLD that the government must act and act VERY soon. Brown has been TOLD that he must at least raise the state retirement age to above 65, and reform the NHS to include charging at the point of use and that’s just for starters.

They also demand that the whole pension scheme in the UK must be massively reformed, and that means destroyed and rebuilt, a thing that I see as an end to the public Gold Plated Pensions for civil servants and other employees in the public sector— and a state pension scheme that will be means tested.

There will be blood.

Oh yes, there will be blood.

Rog

The recent appalling case of a woman who saw no option left than kill her disabled child and herself as a result of being persecuted by scum for YEARS, and abandoned by the people and organisations who were supposed to be looking after victims of scum, really get through to me.

To then read about police telling another woman that they would not make best speed to help her when she was being persecuted by brats in case it aggravated a bad situation then caused me to have to re-read what I had read, and even check out in other places if the story was kosher.

It was.

Then to read the police tell people that the antics of juvenile delinquents was not their problem, and the ‘problem’ should be dealt with by the local council — that was the last straw and is what is behind this admitted rant against what I see taking place in the country that USED to be such a good and decent place to live.

And USED to be is right ‘cos not only is it no longer, but worse yet the mess the UK is in, and the UK IS in a bigger mess than elsewhere, is 100% down to the idiocy of equality of people across the social continuum. A thing that has been taken as being right and proper without question — and is actually WRONG.

It’s a flawed assumption.

For a variety of reasons ranging from nature to nurture, and usually a combination of both, some people ARE of better character than others.

Such people have higher personal values, are less anti-social, care more about the influence they have on other people, and usually have higher aspirations for themselves and their kids. It’s not an absolute by any means, but it’s the general rule.

Unfortunately such people have been ignored and the attention of the government has focused on the people with lower standards who don’t give a toss about others, who let their kids run literally feral. Maybe it’s because so many Labour MP’s feel kinship with such types, maybe it’s because there’s votes to be had, in my opinion probably both.

Thus far it is these people, the anti social bane of decent people, who have been getting the attention (and tax payers money) while the better people, and I have no qualms about using that phrase, have been left to suffer — and of course, pay the bills.

Now one in five homeowners are experiencing what are described as being serious problems with their neighbour this year according to recent research by Halifax Home Insurance, with the most common problems being excessive noise and rude or intimidating behaviour.

People, the decent people in the UK, face the most atrocious acts by brats, and always there is the ‘can not be named for legal reasons’ when things burst into public view. The question really should be asked ‘why the hell not’?

It’s way past time that spades were once more called spades, and anti-social behaviour was called what it is — criminality. That feral brats were called juvenile delinquents and treated accordingly.

Time that ASBO’s were done away with, and hauling off before a ‘beak’ introduced in their place followed by punishment including not being taken into ‘care’ but sent to resurrected Borstal institutions when found guilty of delinquent behaviour, and parents made to bear the cost of the misbehavior of their spawn.

I accept the problem is not exclusively amongst the lower social orders, but most of it is. Now it’s time to get tough. Time to hoik the families who are not ‘problem families’, let’s call them what they are, CRIMINAL families, out of their comfortable homes paid for or massively subsidised by the tax payer, and put them into industrialised ‘dwelling units’.

Dwelling units made and furnished with building blocks and concrete, and providing the bare essentials of life, strictly supervised, — and above all else away from decent people.

But let’s at least make a start by naming the trouble makers and replacing the softly softly approach with the stick and carrot involving a very large stick and a very small carrot.

Let’s communicate with them in the only language they understand.

The language that they use on better people than themselves.

Rog