Korson Watch

Jeff Korson of the local paper The Tifton Gazette has excelled himself this week in an opinion entitled Comprehending Agendas. The only way he could have made it better would have been to call it Comprehending Conspiracies. Link: http://tiftongazette.com/opinion/x1241063294/Your-Opinion-Comprehending-agendas.
Who is it that Jeff doesn't like?
In order of appearance we have:
# Media including books, magazines, radio, TV and movies.
# Homosexuals
# Degenerates. Great word! Don't hear enough of it these days.
# Promiscuous people.
# Communists
# The Federal Government.
# Global warming supporters
# Unions
# Darwinists (and probably all science)
# Rev Jim Wallis
# Feminists
# Russians
# Finally, anybody who listens to the Federal Government.

So Jeff clearly isn't going to take any nonsense from any of these people. Which leaves the question, what guides his moral compass and leads him to call these people "abomination to God"? It can't be the Bible. I don't recall commandment 11 "Thou shalt loudly reject feminists".

Where Jeff gets his opinions from is Glenn Beck. Who in turn is a hard right, paranoid and delusional nutcase working for a Fox News which is owned by News Corporation which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. As has been shown recently what we knew all along that News Corp. has a disregard for decency, truth and honesty.

Jeff, don't be a "useful idiot" regurgitating Glenn Beck's crazy talk. Start thinking for yourself.

The Iodine Trade

Who would have thought that boring iodine would be in the news? But then a nuclear reactor throws out radioactive iodine-131 and suddenly everyone wants some. Why? Because saturating the thyroid with ordinary iodine prevents the take-up of radioactive iodine. Iodised salt is not much use for this as the iodine concentration is very low. It is only about four tablespoons of potassium iodate per tonne of salt and while this is is great against goitre it is useless against nuclear fallout.
Iodine was accidentally discovered in 1811 by Bernard Courtois, while trying to make gunpowder from seaweed. The antiseptic properties were used to save soldiers in the American civil war. Daguerre used it to make photographs. It was discovered by Chinese in 2700BC that seaweed could cure goitre, and in 1820 it was confirmed that iodine was the active ingredient. It used to be a way of life burning seaweed on the coasts of Ireland, Scotland and Brittany for the minerals needed by the alkali industry for fertilisers and the like. They would harvest the kelp, dry it and burn it, resulting in dense blocks of material ready to be shipped for processing. Gradually other sources were found that could be mined and the industry suffered. Iodine provided a valuable extra revenue that the kelp burners could earn but this was only temporary. When sodium iodate extracted as a by-product of saltpetre from Chile became available it threw thousands of crofters out of work and many were forced to emigrate. Nowadays iodine mainly comes from saltpetre and certain brine deposits.

Opus Energy Dodgy Trading

Opus Energy are in the business of hijacking companies' energy accounts . They will use some spurious reason to claim the contract for energy supply. Then they use every underhand and barely legal method to prevent you from escaping their grubby clutches.

Here is a six step list of how to escape from the misery of Opus Energy.

1) If Opus Energy cold call you and you aren't already signed up, DROP THE CALL IMMEDIATELY. The telephone sales people can not be trusted.
2) When they don't release your account (and they won't), open a formal complaint with Opus Energy and ask for a case number for the OFGEM ombudsman. Opus Energy will deny that they have a complaints procedure and case numbers don't even exist.
3) Contact your local MP and explain how Opus Energy are harming your business by charging excessive rates and trying to destroy your credit rating by sending spurious demands for unpaid bills.
4) Get onto Watchdog and see if that helps. Opus have been on there before so this might get a result.
5) Get onto the Police or Crimewatch if you think that Opus Energy used fraudulent methods to hijack your account.
6) If none of that works, then wind up your company and start a new one....in a new country.

Locking the debt ceiling

JeffK wants the USA government to limit taking on additional debt. He wants the government to stop spending money on these TLAs: EPA, DOE, USDA, DHS, BEA, BLM.

JeffK's article here.

Have you thought it through Jeff?
Without the EPA it would be a free for all to pollute the land.
Without the DOE doing planning, your future energy would be in doubt.
Without the USDA there would be no food standards. Who would stop somebody from adulterating food. Snake oil salesmen would make a comeback.
DHS. OK Jeff, you have a valid one there. While failing to catch terrorists it serves to inconvenience innocent people.
BEA: Somebody needs to monitor the economy.
BLM: Again, this manages the environment by controlling land use. Left to businessmen they would pulp the trees, rip coal from surface mines and what was left turned over to suburban housing.
Even the UN makes a valuable contribution to World peace but Jeff would abandon all these things. Apart from the DHS these are all agencies that make the country a better and safer place.

Why is there a huge debt anyway? Jeff blames it on the government which is sort of true. The government failed to regulate the banks properly. It was the banks playing Las Vegas with the economy and losing and requiring a huge injection of cash to stop the banking system from collapsing. Did any bankers get punished for destroying the economy? No (except for Bernard Madhoff). Put some of them in jail and see if they dare gamble again.

What ways could money be saved instead? Jeff mentions foreign aid and this is a more worthy target. A couple billion to Egypt? Oh dear. That doesn't look so wise now. And why does the USA give billions of dollars to Israel? Surely for that kind of money Obama could ask Israel to stop building on occupied land and make serious peace with the Palestinians? We had such high hopes for Obama. Instead he vetoes a UN resolution that would criticize the Israeli settlements. Also the many billions going down the drain to Iraq after a war that should never have been fought.

There is plenty that can be cut without cutting things that benefit the country.

Alcohol and Firearms

In Georgia, Gov. Perdue signed a bill that allows people to carry concealed handguns in bars. Now what could possibly go wrong when you mix drunk people and guns? Is Roy Wetherington the only person to spot a possible problem with that? Tifton Gazette Opinion

Then and Now - Cirencester

I remember a coach trip to Cirencester in the 1960s. It was an awful long way from London and we parked in the Forum. It was near the source of the Thames so why did we trawl the shops for an hour instead of going to see a muddy spring somewhere? I didn't quite get the point of going all that way for that but I was intrigued by the fact that even the most mundane wall was made of Cotswold stone instead of the bricks that I was used to. And 45 years later I find myself living down the road from Cirencester with an handful of transparencies from that era.
The Romans built the Tetbury road almost completely straight and so it stayed until the 20th century. Then an airfield cut it in two and the Cirencester end had a bypass built. The discarded fragment of the Tetbury road is still straight but doesn't go very far and used to look like this:

From Box-G6

nowadays full of parked cars

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

The building at the end of the Roman road was the Petty Sessional Court and Police Station. By the time that Peter Coleman took the picture it was occupied by Avonprint.

From G2721

Nowadays an estate agent for the wealthy.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

Why did a busy town like Cirencester lose both of its railway stations? A lot of commuters end up having to go to Kemble to catch a London train. Here is the station probably having been closed a few years earlier.

From Box-G6

And here is the station not changed much at all apart from the canopy being missing.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

The Blue School on a bright summer morning.

From Box-G6

Trees are trying to take over. Also we found that the road was really difficult to cross, being infested with many expensive German sports cars.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

The plaque used to look like this

From G2721

But it has been repainted with different text and it is very faded. In Feb 2011 the newspapers said that this building would be converted into flats.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

Tifton

One feature of the the Tifton Gazette is the Rants and Raves section. Messages get posted without any form of identification As all comments are anonymous there are sometimes some rude ones. Take for example this one.

Small town

“You really don’t know how small Tifton, Ga., is until you get out of town. Closeminded town with closeminded people.”

I can assure you that not all the people of Tifton are like this, my wife for one. Fortunately you can rely on people like Roy Wetherington for a broader outlook and common sense.

Signalling

One thing a cyclist needs to know is which way a car is going to go. It would be a great help if all motorists indicated properly. One person who indicated was driving a small dark hatchback T306AES and who at 16:48 on 02 February 2011 blundered from Slad Road onto Merrywalks roundabout in the path of another car that managed to stop.

Instead of being apologetic he stopped, opened the door and used a hand gesture not found in the Highway Code. Then drove off.

Code of Wicked Ethics

A code of bad ethics taken from Eric Lightborn's blog

1. If you are poor, it is always your fault.
2. Asking for and receiving help is always wrong and a weakness.
3. Drive all compassion out of yourself.
4. You and your view are perfect, and cannot be wrong about anything.
5. Greed is holy.

Reasonable people would reject this as a disgraceful and utterly selfish code of ethics. Certainly the bible has a lot to say on the subject.

Just look at the Tea Party's stand on healthcare, workers' rights and the environment and compare them against those ethics. How on earth could they think that God is on their side?

Jeff Korson's Economy

Jeff Korson's latest epic is in the Tifton Gazette.

Jeff says that the Federal Government is making money worthless by printing money and driving inflation up. Also you should keep your money in coins, because the metal will soon be worth more than the face value.

Lets analyse his article.
The concept of "fractional banking" which is trading on the expectation that most of the time people won't need their deposited money. The bank is trading with money it doesn't have. This works as long as people don't take their money out at the same time. A run on the bank will cause it to collapse. The debt/limit was mostly 12 to 1.

Who thought that fractional banking was a good idea? The banks thought so. In fact an exemption given by the SEC to a few firms during Bush administration allowed leveraging up to 30 or 40 to 1.

Jeff thinks that this is a bad idea and for once I'm in complete agreement with him. When everybody leverages their money by 12 times the risk is multiplied. Inevitably several of these companies collapsed in a domino effect.

Jeff would have the whole system collapse and everybody would lose all their money. That is except of course those prudent people who buried hoards of gold and silver. What actually happened is that the government had to step in to save what was left and took on massive debts. The Government ensured that people don't need hoards of gold any more as they can guarantee against bank failure. Jeff would rather not spend tax dollars on saving banks and rely instead on his hoard of nickel rolls.

So why is the Federal Reserve printing money like it is going out of fashion? This is because of the spectre of deflation. Inflation is very low at the moment so it shouldn't be worrying the Tea Party. But when inflation goes negative prices start to go down.
Sounds like a great thing?

What is wrong with deflation? As prices go down people will put off buying things because they know the price will come down soon. As people stop buying things the price goes down faster. Soon the economy comes to a standstill. As they found out in the Great Depression. Didn't think of that, did you Jeff? Quantitive easing devalues our money, but it is better than having our money worth nothing at all.

Metaphor fail

This is my latest letter to The Tifton Gazette. If it gets published I'll put a link in here. I wrote the last letter because I saw deliberate distortion of the facts designed to spread fear in the extreme right of the USA. JeffK was indeed bold enough to spin the problem around and blame the Democrats. The evidence that JeffK supplied only showed that he failed to understand metaphors and that his entire argument fell down. What he wanted was to scaremonger the extreme right into thinking that armed conflict was just around the corner. And I thought that this was dangerous and that it should get stopped before somebody gets hurt. As it turns out it was too late for Gabrielle Giffords.

Letter to Tifton Gazette 08 January 2011:
--//--
[Opinion] Its Only a Metaphor part 2

In the opinion piece of December 22 we read, “For almost the last two years, we have heard accusations of how dangerous the Tea Party groups are, how they incite violence and are haters of groups of people.”. Now we find out just how dangerous. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was a marked woman. A rifle sight marked her location on a USA map among with nineteen other Democrat congressmen. This map was published on Sarah Palin's website. Obviously this was a metaphor as a reasonable person would have understood that debate and lawful democratic process should be followed and not assassination. Unfortunately there are a few followers of Sarah Palin, possibly also autistic who don't understand metaphors and pursued a sustained hate campaign that ended in tragedy. I would advise all people of the USA to stop using metaphors immediately or at the very least, flag them so there can be no misunderstanding. Some people take things too literally.

The law of Holes

The Tifton Gazette is a good place to see what the Tea Party is doing and the opinions page is good practise for picking holes in their arguments. If I can summarise what Randy Thompson of Sycamore says in this link here.
He says that the Federal Government has reached beyond the remit of the constitution. It is time to remove the departments that are not a part of the constitution and by doing so save enormous amounts of money. Many of these departments create regulations that restrict businesses' production and raise costs.
All of this is true. But what are these departments? Things like the Food and Drug Administration. Without these costly regulations manufacturers would be able to make much more profit by selling unfit food, adulterating food and drugs and snake oil merchants would prosper selling their cures for AIDS and cancer.
Transportation too. If the hours that truckers worked weren't regulated then they could continue driving all day and night and save their bosses a lot of money. And there would be none of those vehicle recalls so saving the car companies a lot of money not having to put things right.
The Department of Agriculture does a lot of research into plant health and pest control. They try to prevent diseases from entering the country. They also maintain food standards. It would save the farmers a lot if their mouldy meat could go into burgers uninspected.
It would be much cheaper to extract coal and minerals without environmental controls. Just strip the soil, dig out the stuff and leave the waste in a big heap. Drain the toxic water from the workings into the nearest river and forget about it.
And let the banks and car industries look after themselves. Billions of tax payers' money spent on propping up the banks could have been saved by letting the banks collapse. Millions of people would have lost everything but it would be constitutional. Ironically, it was the lax regulations that Randy wants that lead directly to the banking meltdown so better regulation would have saved billions.

To summarise, many of these departments are there to ensure that the people get a fair deal where it comes to goods, services, prices and standards and protection against hazards like pollution.

If you really want to save money look at the enormous military budget. Not going to war would save a lot. Also look at the aid to Israel. The USA supports Israel regardless of Israel's actions and then Americans wonder why arabs don't like them any more. The USA should put much more pressure on Israel to behave and improve conditions for the Palestinians. If Israel wants to continue building on occupied land then I'd suggest removing the billions of aid that they get each year.