Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The UNreal world of the BBC

Watching the "where are they now" show confirms that Dragon's Den provides some pretty outrageous promotion for those who appear on the show. TMP remembers the good old days of BBC propriety, when Blue Peter religiously used to cover the name of "Ever Ready" on its distinct blue batteries, using black tape.

It's not as if Peter "as seen on TV" Jones, Theo Profiterole & Co need any freebies - especially as their victims get quite thoroughly mugged for equity in a manner that borders on disgraceful, where they are blatantly using their benefits of celebrity – provided by the BBC licence payer – to leverage the poor mugs off their own businesses. With gullible souls like this eagerly turning up to be brutally insulted and financially raped on TV, it's a mystery how any of these ideas ever make any money.

The BBC has a long history of interfering with and distorting commercial markets since the BBC Acorn micro started out doing some good, but quickly became a terrible distraction that arguably set UK education back a generation, when the rest of the world was getting on with the more versatile and vastly more relevant IBM PC.

TMP respectfully suggests that part of the work of reforming the BBC might include asking the Dragons to hand back half the equity they have stolen, by exploiting the BBC and our licence fees? Better still, let's adopt an interactive format and more liquid market where the entire audience can choose to participate and "buy shares" in the ideas being paraded.

However "good" the TV, the idea that an entrepreneur is required to spill the beans on their business idea in a way that alerts competition must be fundamentally wrong.

And then however attractive the proposition, the Dragons nearly always end up saying they'll invest only if it's a guaranteed monopoly with patents to squash any of the competition (that has just been woken up) - and if the owner hands over half the business in return for a ride with the licence-payer funded publicity machine.


Thursday, July 16, 2009

The Real World (4)

The whole eco-sermon is based on a well prepared and tedious chanted litany of assumptions; acts of faith that are every bit as specious as those which form the basis of any sermon delivered by any wild eyed and rabid preacher, for whom the absence of unimpeachable scientific proof is a small inconvenience that is dealt with by dismissing any doubters as Satan's spawn.

We've known for 100 years that fossil hydrocarbon energy oil was going to run out. We didn't know when we would reach "peak oil", but now we have, and the present distraction is not about climate change, it is about the politics of energy security.

So let us all stop being quite so easily suckered and insist on the truth. It makes little practical difference, since the reality is that we need to explore and develop any and all alternative energy options as fast as possible. However, over many years, one party has had a better track record of creating climates for commercial progress and success in a competitive world than the control freak nannying of Labour's command and control obsession.

If the government was actually serious about carbon emissions for any reason other than an opportunity to herd the sheeple and raise taxes, it wouldn't cost ~3-5 times less to fly 300 miles than go by train.

Talk of storms brought about by fractional global warming needs to tempered by more than just an obsession with CO2. Solar activity is at a 50 year low - and the last time there was this few sunspots happened to coincide with a year (1903) when an unprecedented and massive storm devasted the Great Lakes area of North America. DO we really belive we are more influential than the sun - whose solar wind blasts this planet's atmosphere at an increible but reasonably steady 280.2km /sec.


The Real World (3)

Coming on top of 12 years of stultifying bureacracy that has strangled creative and productive enterprise in the UK, the Auld Fraud Broon's belief that the UK can lead the world in any aspect of science, technology or manufacturing with the millstone of his state around its neck is risible and delusional.

Even those at the top of the legal food chain seem to have had enough:

The most senior judge in England and Wales has criticised the government for passing too many crime laws. Sir Igor Judge made a plea for less legislation in a speech at the Lord Mayor of London's dinner for judges.

So how can we begin to clear the decks of the spurious red tape that has accumulated over many years? The babies are now immiscibly blended in lake of murky bathwater, and perhaps we can learn from the Ottoman Empire, which had also run into terminal constitutional decline as the result of many (hundreds of) years of convoluted and irrelevant law and process, when Kemel Ataturk handily bowled up and "reset" the Turkish constitution, and at a stroke (or two) made it relevant to its time and circumstances.

The Real World (2)

Unemployment at 2.4m contains a disproportionate number of young people and long term unemployed. This is obviously linked to massive costs now associated with employing anyone for any productive purpose.

12 years of misguided Labour effort to "protect" employment has had the opposite effect for all private employers who have to try and provide the wealth that the massively over bloated public sector dissipates with such consummate ease.


The Real World (1)

All talk of climate change that is not preceded by an analysis of population trends is futile.

Alan Johnson, the latest in a long line of fundamentally and dangerously inept Home Sectretaries, is relaxed that the UK population will top 70m by 2028. Given that all birth trends suggest the demographic of this expanded population will be "natural" Labour voters, perhaps that's not too surprising.

Given there are 2.4m officially unemployed and an estimated 3m "off the radar", coupled to an alleged shortage of 3m homes, how about combing all the ills we face concerning resource and infrastructure shortages (not least the expectation we will run out of power before new nuclear facilities are online) and devising a scheme to reduce the UK population by 5m as soon as possible?

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Girding loins

TMP fans wondering why the long pause will shortly be regaled by a new wave of posts on subjects ranging from the BBC's astonishing ability to pay itself a lot of money that its employees frankly cannot justify or deserve in the current media meltdown; plus a look at the absurd immigration policies being espoused by Woollas and Alan Johnson, who is turning out to be yet another disaster of a Home Secretary. Be Patient!