by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The UK Government – or is it just a few Labor MPs? - proposes an Armed Forces Day and a law making it illegal to discriminate against members of HM Forces in uniform.
While I concur and totally agree that service men and -women should not be discriminated against or harassed when wearing uniform in public and also that they should wear their uniform in public (why should they not?) I am not entirely sure as to a day celebrating the military.
I mean if we want to do that then why don't we also bring back the “Empire Day” as well. Come to think about it; why don't we just get the Empire back. It has become obvious that those former colonies just cannot do and are doomed without us, their once colonial masters. We should, I think, start with the wayward America. Did we ever sign a peace deal with them? The next country to be brought back into the Empire and the fold and under British rule is Rhodesia. We can see where independence has got it.
Yes, folks, I am being sarcastic and facetious.
I do think that, while there is nothing whatsoever to be said against giving our military personnel in or out of uniform the respect that most of them deserve for the job that they are doing, the theaters of operation in which they risk their lives, though, for one, are more than questionable.
Both Iraq and Afghanistan are places where our forces – as well the those of the USA – have no right to be. Both are illegal wars but aside from that Britain's previous involvement in Afghanistan some centuries back should have taught us that Afghanistan is best lest alone.
Seeing that, when British soldiers fell victims to the particular sniper who now accounts for a significant number of casualties amongst the British Forces in Iraq and the local population seeing him go down laughed, it is time to get out of that country as well. Not that we should have ever been there in the first place but, alas, Britain had to follow the US like a dog follows his master. The people there see the British as much as the Americans as occupiers and have no love for them.
The fight against terrorism is as fictional as is Alice in Wonderland, maybe more so even and to follow the Americans like a dog, or slave, follows his master is not a good idea. Who and what are we really fighting for?
But, I digressed a little, as seems to be a tendency of mine.
We were really talking here about the British Labor – now there is a joke – government (dictatorship more like) suggesting a National Armed Forces Day, Home-Coming Parades for our Boys, and all that jazz. While I certainly am not against another Bank Holiday and nor against a day that would honor our men and women in uniform, but whether it should be done in such a way is questionable to the extreme.
While I am very much for our Military in its right setting I am against a standing army for starters and especially against this militarization of British society. Is this intended as a way of desensitizing us to seeing (uniformed) military personnel on our streets so that, if something is being done against the liberties of the people the people do not notice until it is too late?
I rest my case...
May questions and no real answers...
© M Smith (Veshengro), May 2008
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Britons wasting £10 Billion worth of food a year, research says
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
We’ve already heard lots about the food crisis that is threatening global development, and we have had plenty of debate about how eating no meat, a little meat, fake meat and even the plain old potato might help ease global hunger, stop global warming, and generally make life easier for all of us. But let’s forget about what we do eat for a moment – a new report coming out of the UK shows the staggering costs of what we don’t eat:
The British people are throwing away £10 billion worth of food that could be eaten each year, £2bn more than estimates have previously suggested, a government-funded programme to cut waste has revealed.
And that folks, is ten billion Pounds Sterling as in British billion and not US billion. In other words the calculation that someone made of this being equal to US$20 billion is off as the US has a different billion to the UK, so at least I have always understood that. Apparently the US billion is a thousand million and the other billion a million million.
The average household, ranging from a single older person to a group of students, is throwing out £420 of such food each year and the sum rises to £610 for the average family with children.
About £6bn of the wasted annual food budget is food that is bought but never touched - including 13m unopened yoghurt pots, 5,500 chickens and 440,000 ready meals dumped in home rubbish bins each day. The rest is food prepared or cooked for meals but never eaten because people have misjudged how much was needed and don't eat the leftovers.
Well, I guess I must be one of the odd ones out, as very little gets thrown out; at least not into the trash can. The important thing is to make sure that one;'s food is in date and rotate supplies, be those cans or other stuff.
Leftovers, if perfectly good, goes in the frigde and is used next day. Cans the contents of which has only been used half, say, also can be saved in that one uses food saver containers and, again, keeps the stuff in the fridge till the next day.
The problem is though that most people cannot cook from scratch anymore, at least not in this country, that is to say in Britain, and either entirely rely on ready to do meals or such. And even if they cook from scratch they just cannot think of what to do with leftovers. Children turn their noses up at something cooked from leftovers but there is nothing wrong with it and if the person doing the cooking has imagination and flair in cooking and often all that is needed is just a little then nice meals can be made from such leftovers.
The complete £10bn consists of food that could have been eaten, not including peeling and bones, the researchers say. Tackling the waste could mean a huge reduction in CO2 emissions, equivalent to taking one in five cars off the road.
The figures have been compiled by WRAP, the Waste and Resources Action Programme, which previously made the £8bn estimate and has warned we are throwing away a third of the food we buy, enough to fill Wembley stadium with food waste eight times over in a year.
Food waste has a significant environmental impact, and that not only from having to go somewhere. The research confirms that it is an issue for us all, whether as consumers, retailers, local or central government. This will, I believe, spark, and so it should, a major debate about the way food is packaged, sold, stored at home, cooked and then collected when it is thrown out.
While I have just mentioned the way food is packaged the food packaging here as waste, is and was not even the issue, but could also be mentioned when it comes to waste per se. That, however, could be another story all together.
What is most shocking here the most is the cost of our food waste at a time of rising food bills, and generally a tighter pull on our purse strings. It highlights that this is an economic and social issue as well as how much we understand the value of our food.
Consumers' wastefulness is costing them three times over. Not only do they pay hard-earned money for food they do not eat, there is also the cost of dealing with the waste this creates, and they pay for that through their council taxes and such. Then there are climate change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin.
In addition to that there is the ethical bit, so to speak. We waste tons and tons of food daily while there are 1,000s upon 1,000s in this country and elsewhere in the developed world – I do not even want to mention the poor in the developing world, the are I still call Third World – who go hungry. I must say that I, like probably many of my generation, was raised with the adage of not wasting food, whether on the plate or elsewhere. Being of Romani-Gypsy stock may have something to do with that too as food was not always plenty.
When it comes to food waste though and it having to be dumped it is time to start thinking seriously about municipal composting programs like those in Mexico, Seattle and San Francisco, and on an individual level we can all take responsibility by biting off only what we can chew - check out some of the helpful tips on everything from portion sizing to storage to using left overs at Love Food Hate Waste, the campaign that commissioned the original report.
© M Smith (Veshengro), May 2008
We’ve already heard lots about the food crisis that is threatening global development, and we have had plenty of debate about how eating no meat, a little meat, fake meat and even the plain old potato might help ease global hunger, stop global warming, and generally make life easier for all of us. But let’s forget about what we do eat for a moment – a new report coming out of the UK shows the staggering costs of what we don’t eat:
The British people are throwing away £10 billion worth of food that could be eaten each year, £2bn more than estimates have previously suggested, a government-funded programme to cut waste has revealed.
And that folks, is ten billion Pounds Sterling as in British billion and not US billion. In other words the calculation that someone made of this being equal to US$20 billion is off as the US has a different billion to the UK, so at least I have always understood that. Apparently the US billion is a thousand million and the other billion a million million.
The average household, ranging from a single older person to a group of students, is throwing out £420 of such food each year and the sum rises to £610 for the average family with children.
About £6bn of the wasted annual food budget is food that is bought but never touched - including 13m unopened yoghurt pots, 5,500 chickens and 440,000 ready meals dumped in home rubbish bins each day. The rest is food prepared or cooked for meals but never eaten because people have misjudged how much was needed and don't eat the leftovers.
Well, I guess I must be one of the odd ones out, as very little gets thrown out; at least not into the trash can. The important thing is to make sure that one;'s food is in date and rotate supplies, be those cans or other stuff.
Leftovers, if perfectly good, goes in the frigde and is used next day. Cans the contents of which has only been used half, say, also can be saved in that one uses food saver containers and, again, keeps the stuff in the fridge till the next day.
The problem is though that most people cannot cook from scratch anymore, at least not in this country, that is to say in Britain, and either entirely rely on ready to do meals or such. And even if they cook from scratch they just cannot think of what to do with leftovers. Children turn their noses up at something cooked from leftovers but there is nothing wrong with it and if the person doing the cooking has imagination and flair in cooking and often all that is needed is just a little then nice meals can be made from such leftovers.
The complete £10bn consists of food that could have been eaten, not including peeling and bones, the researchers say. Tackling the waste could mean a huge reduction in CO2 emissions, equivalent to taking one in five cars off the road.
The figures have been compiled by WRAP, the Waste and Resources Action Programme, which previously made the £8bn estimate and has warned we are throwing away a third of the food we buy, enough to fill Wembley stadium with food waste eight times over in a year.
Food waste has a significant environmental impact, and that not only from having to go somewhere. The research confirms that it is an issue for us all, whether as consumers, retailers, local or central government. This will, I believe, spark, and so it should, a major debate about the way food is packaged, sold, stored at home, cooked and then collected when it is thrown out.
While I have just mentioned the way food is packaged the food packaging here as waste, is and was not even the issue, but could also be mentioned when it comes to waste per se. That, however, could be another story all together.
What is most shocking here the most is the cost of our food waste at a time of rising food bills, and generally a tighter pull on our purse strings. It highlights that this is an economic and social issue as well as how much we understand the value of our food.
Consumers' wastefulness is costing them three times over. Not only do they pay hard-earned money for food they do not eat, there is also the cost of dealing with the waste this creates, and they pay for that through their council taxes and such. Then there are climate change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin.
In addition to that there is the ethical bit, so to speak. We waste tons and tons of food daily while there are 1,000s upon 1,000s in this country and elsewhere in the developed world – I do not even want to mention the poor in the developing world, the are I still call Third World – who go hungry. I must say that I, like probably many of my generation, was raised with the adage of not wasting food, whether on the plate or elsewhere. Being of Romani-Gypsy stock may have something to do with that too as food was not always plenty.
When it comes to food waste though and it having to be dumped it is time to start thinking seriously about municipal composting programs like those in Mexico, Seattle and San Francisco, and on an individual level we can all take responsibility by biting off only what we can chew - check out some of the helpful tips on everything from portion sizing to storage to using left overs at Love Food Hate Waste, the campaign that commissioned the original report.
© M Smith (Veshengro), May 2008
Bluetooth: A Danger to Privacy
Bluetooth leaves you open to intercept by anyone
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
If you are concerned about your civil liberties and privacy then it may come as a shock to you to discover that you may have, unwittingly, been allowing your phone to signal your every move to the great wide world, including your communications.
Bluetooth, which is, as most will know, a wireless link built into many mobile telephones, makes our movements trackable by anyone equipped with a PC and an appropriate receiver. And this means ANYONE, not just the security services and the police, if that would not already be bad enough. Anyone, as the word says, can listen in and track where you are if they have the right equipment.
Vassilis Kostakos at the University of Bath in the UK placed four Bluetooth receivers in the city's centre. Over four months, his team tracked 10,000 Bluetooth phones and was able to "capture and analyse people's encounters" in pubs, streets and shops.
Bluetooth is now more of a privacy threat than the more frequently publicised RFID chips, Kostakos says. "If people are worried, they should turn off the Bluetooth function on their mobile phones."
Not everything, as we can, yet again see, that is supposedly good for us, is so.
“Oh, but without my 'Bluetooth' I cannot make phone calls on the move”, I hear some complain. “Can we not just make those things safer?”
Well, we probably could and could add encryption, if you, the consumer, is willing to pay the high costs then.
What is wrong with safely stopping your car, motorbike or your bicycle, to take or make that call? Also, no call is that important that it cannot wait until you get to a safe location where to return the call or make a call.
If you are concerned about your privacy, as said, turn the Bluetooth function off. While it may be something that can and does make life easier it also, yet again, is something that can be used to invade our privacy and to spy on us.
© M Smith (Veshengro), May 2008
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
If you are concerned about your civil liberties and privacy then it may come as a shock to you to discover that you may have, unwittingly, been allowing your phone to signal your every move to the great wide world, including your communications.
Bluetooth, which is, as most will know, a wireless link built into many mobile telephones, makes our movements trackable by anyone equipped with a PC and an appropriate receiver. And this means ANYONE, not just the security services and the police, if that would not already be bad enough. Anyone, as the word says, can listen in and track where you are if they have the right equipment.
Vassilis Kostakos at the University of Bath in the UK placed four Bluetooth receivers in the city's centre. Over four months, his team tracked 10,000 Bluetooth phones and was able to "capture and analyse people's encounters" in pubs, streets and shops.
Bluetooth is now more of a privacy threat than the more frequently publicised RFID chips, Kostakos says. "If people are worried, they should turn off the Bluetooth function on their mobile phones."
Not everything, as we can, yet again see, that is supposedly good for us, is so.
“Oh, but without my 'Bluetooth' I cannot make phone calls on the move”, I hear some complain. “Can we not just make those things safer?”
Well, we probably could and could add encryption, if you, the consumer, is willing to pay the high costs then.
What is wrong with safely stopping your car, motorbike or your bicycle, to take or make that call? Also, no call is that important that it cannot wait until you get to a safe location where to return the call or make a call.
If you are concerned about your privacy, as said, turn the Bluetooth function off. While it may be something that can and does make life easier it also, yet again, is something that can be used to invade our privacy and to spy on us.
© M Smith (Veshengro), May 2008
Terrorist Attack on Yeshiva in Jerusalem
While, I am sure, we all condemn, as we indeed must, the terrorist attack and murder of the rabbinical students at the Yeshiva in Jerusalem the other day one must, nevertheless, wonder how it can be that the government of the United States of America and and that of the United Kingdom ONLY every condemn attacks by Palestinians on Jews but never, it would appear, the other way round.
Those two countries, with Germany in addition, only ever come out in the defense of the Zionist state of Israel and its citizens and nothing is said of 100s, including children, being murdered by IDF actions against the civilian population of Gaza, for example. Nor are the targeted assassinations of Hamas officials, who, after all, won the election in Gaza, with even the observers from Western nations stating that the elections were fair, open and free, and often, during those assassinations innocent bystanders are killed or even the wrong people all together, again, often including children.
But, no condemnation from the states that immediately are very vociferous when it is Jews that are killed. Nothing is ever said against the Jewish terror, and terror it is, against the Palestinians of Gaza and elsewhere, and the blockade of Gaza, with people being forced to live off aid, having no electricity, etc.
Is it any wonder that the rest hates the West, and with West we here, obviously, predominately mean the USA and Great Britain? It certainly is not.
As in my previous article I call upon the readers of this journal to join me, and others I hope, in a boycott of Israeli companies, products and produce.
© Michael Smith (Veshengro), March 2008
Those two countries, with Germany in addition, only ever come out in the defense of the Zionist state of Israel and its citizens and nothing is said of 100s, including children, being murdered by IDF actions against the civilian population of Gaza, for example. Nor are the targeted assassinations of Hamas officials, who, after all, won the election in Gaza, with even the observers from Western nations stating that the elections were fair, open and free, and often, during those assassinations innocent bystanders are killed or even the wrong people all together, again, often including children.
But, no condemnation from the states that immediately are very vociferous when it is Jews that are killed. Nothing is ever said against the Jewish terror, and terror it is, against the Palestinians of Gaza and elsewhere, and the blockade of Gaza, with people being forced to live off aid, having no electricity, etc.
Is it any wonder that the rest hates the West, and with West we here, obviously, predominately mean the USA and Great Britain? It certainly is not.
As in my previous article I call upon the readers of this journal to join me, and others I hope, in a boycott of Israeli companies, products and produce.
© Michael Smith (Veshengro), March 2008
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