Clogged Drains and Steamed Up Mirrors

Hair and soap can clog up the bath or basin drains. To clear the blockage:

• Pour a cup of boiling water down the drain, followed by 1/2 cup of bicarbonate of soda.
• Leave for a few minutes, then pour in a cup of vinegar and another of boiling water.
•  Put the plug in for half an hour, then flush through with more boiling water.

To prevent your bathroom mirror steaming up, buff a blob of shaving foam onto the mirror.

Source: Good Housekeeping, May 2017

Last Days of Jesus

On Good Friday 2017, Channel 5 broadcast a documentary called the Last Days of Jesus. Based on the political conspiracy theory of historians Simcha Jacobivici and Barrie Wilson, it focused on the period from Jesus's entry into Jerusalem with the waving of palms through to his trial and execution. While three of the gospels accounts suggest a brief period between the two events (though the fourth gospel indicates a longer period), Jacobivici and Wilson are trying to correlate these accounts with other sources from the period. The main points of their theory are that around 6 months separates the Palm  Sunday and Good Friday, and that political issues in Rome and Israel had a significant effect.

Jacobovici and Wilson raised the following questions:

• Why was Jesus not immediately arrested when cleansing the Temple?
• Why did the crowd turn from enthusiastic supporters to calling for his death in just a week?
• Why was Pontius Pilate so eager to release Jesus?

The theory

In AD.31, Tiberius was Roman Emperor, at this time living on the island of Capri. The head of the Praetorian Guard was Sejanus, who effectively reigned in place of Tiberius. S&W suggest that Sejanus had ambitions to become the next Roman Emperor.

Under the will of Herod the Great, Herod Antipas was to succeed him as tetrach (ruler of a quarter) of Galilee and Perea as a client state of Rome, while his elder brother Archelaus became ethnarch of Judea, Idumea and Samaria. An earlier will had named Antipas as successor to all the above territories and Antipas petitioned to Rome to this effect, but Emperor Augustus decreed that the later will should stand. S&W suggest that (1) Antipas was still hoping to become King of the whole area, (2) in return for Antipas' support, on becoming Emperor, Sejanus was willing to reallocate territory to Antipas and (3) that there was tension between Antipas and the priests of the Temple over the power of the Temple priesthood and that Jesus (whose followers included people high up in Antipas' court) in his efforts to cleanse the temple was seen as a useful tool. The theory is that these interlocking events stayed the hands of Pilate and the priests.  

The Jewish feast of Tabernacles is held in the autumn, and the cutting and use of palm branches is still used today. S&W propose that the entry into Jerusalem took place then.

During the next months the political scene changed dramatically. Suddenly, at the end of AD 31, Sejanus was arrested and summarily executed. It is suggested that this news caused Pilate and Antipas to avoid being linked to Sejanus' plotting, and that over time, Jesus' followers dropped away as he did not fulfil the kingly Messiah prophecies by delivering them from the rule of Rome.

Good Friday is linked in the gospels with the Jewish feast of Passover, which follows around 6 months later than Tabernacles.

Sejanus is not referenced in the gospels. Under the practice of damnatio memoriae (where the senate or emperor could have an individual's property seized, his name erased and his statues reworked) Sejanus' name was erased from public records and carved inscriptions. While the gospels were written down some decades later (between 40 and 70 years later), it was still illegal to mention him.

Source: Channel 5 documentary 'Last Days of Jesus' broadcast 14th April 2017.

To Watch YouTube with Country Restriction

Sometimes YouTube videos are marked as unavailable due to a country restriction, but it is still possible to view them by using a simple URL trick, which will open the video in full screen and will hide adverts.

The video you want to watch has the URL:
youtube.com/watch?v=ab12C3dE4g (don't try and watch this as it is a made up example.

Remove the 'watch?' and replace the '=' with another / (highlighted in red above).

The URL now looks like this:

youtube.com/v/ab12C3dE4g

That's all there is to it.

Source: Phil Bradley Internet Q&A in CILIP Update, June 2017

Press Regulation UK

Recently (Jan. 2017) many UK newspapers have carried editorials and opinion columns about section 40, which they claim will end press freedom in this country.

This arises from the Leveson inquiry, which found that the same answer could be applied to two of the most important issues identified.

A: People with limited finances who are libelled or have their privacy illegally invaded by newspapers find it impossibly expensive to take civil actions against those papers. They are effectively deprived of access to justice. (A typical court fee is £10,000 up front, even before you add in lawyers’ fees.)

B: Over the past 60 years there have been several public inquiries and commissions into press misconduct. At each of these it was clear that the press had failed to enforce even its own codes of ethical practice, and recommendations were made for improvements, or for a new regulator independent both of press control and government influence.

But each time, the commercial press, owned by a handful of wealthy men, refused to comply. Making cosmetic changes, and falsely claiming the new arrangements were a big improvement, but carrying on as before. They have done the same with Leveson, rebranding the discredited PCC as “Ipso”, which is largely the same people working to the same model.

The Leveson inquiry stopped short of recommending that papers should be compelled by law to join a “good” new regulator but gave them a final chance to put their own house in order. Leveson proposed a fair, effective and independent new regulator, which could be set up by the press themselves, which would offer a cheap arbitration service to settle legal claims.

"This is the part that is seldom or never mentioned when newspapers talk about section 40. Through this arbitration service a person could have their case against a newspaper dealt with very quickly (in less than a day) and at very low cost (less than £200) without either side having to suffer the vast expense and stress of going to court."

"If a newspaper chose not to join this “good” new regulator, and so deprived claimants of this low-cost system of arbitration – forcing them instead into the expensive courts – then that newspaper should have to pay ALL the costs of the court case, even if they won the case. The idea was that recalcitrant newspapers would be incentivised to create a “good” regulator."

The carrot incentive (which papers are not reporting) was that was that by joining the new regulator, newspapers would have much greater freedom to publish important investigative journalism. "Hitherto, if a paper had an important story about a wealthy and powerful person, they might reluctantly decide not to publish because the threat of being dragged through expensive court actions was too great. A wealthy oligarch would only need to win once to bust the paper. With "the new system, a litigious oligarch would first be offered the new cheap arbitration system. If he took this option, the matter would be settled at a tiny fraction of the time and cost for the newspaper. But if he insisted on going to court (as is his right) he would have to pay his own costs even if he won.

This is why investigative journalists such as Nick Davies (who broke the phone hacking story in the Guardian in the first place) are so keen on the Leveson recommendations, in full.

"This solution was voted into law (as section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act) by big majorities in parliament in March 2013. But a law that has been enacted by parliament still requires the subsequent pressing of a green button by the secretary of state. This is known as “commencement” and is a formality in 99% of cases. This government, under intense lobbying from the corporate press, has so far not commenced the law."

A recent YouGov poll commissioned by Hacked Off found that 93% of Guardian readers with an opinion on the matter agree with the Leveson system or something stronger. In the face of all this, and in the face of an astonishing volume of disinformation and misinformation on this issue, it’s vital that people who care about the standards and practices of the national press make the case for full Leveson. For those people, here is something to click.

**********
Source: Hugh Grant 'Section 40 will curb media abuses and protect the press from litigious oligarchs' in The Guardian, 11 Jan. 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/11/section-40-media-abuses-press-regulation-justice

Internet Domain Names

Q: Is a website address that ends in .accountants a site you can trust or is it a fake?

A: In the early days of the internet there were only a few top level domains (for example: .gov, .ac, .com) but these soon got used up.

New top level domains have now been agreed, so you will see more of them. As well as .accountants you will see .book, .camera, .dental, .golf among many others. For a full list go to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

Any site with these new domain names may be dubious for other reasons, but not because of the domain name.

Source: Phil Bradley in CILIP UPdate, March 2017

Brexit and the Economy

Brexiters and Remainers both fail to grasp the challenges facing Britain by Tom Kibasi

The deal to leave the EU will shape Britain for decades to come. Will we confront our problems? Or attempt to muddle through (where both sides of the Brexit divide are taking us). Britain needs fundamental changes but we must first openly acknowledge our problems.

Remain failed to understand the reality of daily life for many people and communities in modern Britain or that the current economic model is not working for many people. Free movement of labour enables the low skill, low productivity, low wage economic model imposed on much of the country, which (combined with the cultural and identity challenge of large-scale immigration) has created such discontent. It is not progressive to fail to invest in skills in this country, while plundering poor countries of nurses or doctors or carers and then approaching immigration as if people were commodities to be bought up on the open market.

Leave saw Brexit as a magical solution to all of Britain’s problems, along with fake promises on the NHS and immigration, and still argues we can enjoy all the benefits of membership, such as frictionless, tariff-free access to the single market, without any of the burdens. It has never mattered to them that leaving the EU will make it harder to confront Britain’s economic and social problems.

The Chancellor still focuses on top-line numbers, ignoring multiple symptoms of a distressed economy that stretch back for decades. Our national economic policy needs to be pro-growth and pro-economic justice.

Investment drives wealth and prosperity, but as a proportion of the economy has been declining for 25 years, lagging behind comparable countries in the west, and miles behind fast-growing economies in the east. People expect that that business will invest in order to create good quality jobs, but investment needs political stability and unfettered access to the single market of 500 million people, and Brexit undermines both.

Issues

Cheap and plentiful EU workers led firms to add more low cost jobs instead of investing in plant, machinery or new forms of automation to drive up productivity. Some businesses prefer to return more cash to shareholders than to invest. British companies have become net savers rather than borrowers.

Low investment leads to low productivity, and then to low wages. Since the financial crisis, the British economy has stalled, leading to stagnation in living standards for the majority of households.

We have a massive trade deficit. If countries are keen for a free trade deal with Britain (a debatable point) it is because we’re an importer, not an exporter. The import/export difference is now 6%, financed by expanding debt and selling off British assets.

Household inequality is high. The incomes of the richest 10% of households are 11 times those of the poorest 10%; in France and Germany, the difference is seven-fold, and in Denmark it is five-fold. Over time this creates an enormous gap in wealth as well as income.

Our economy is profoundly regionally imbalanced. London is the wealthiest region in Europe and, with the south-east of England, accounts for 40% of national output. All other UK regions lag behind most other regions of northern Europe, and have below average productivity.

These problems are all of long standing, and not temporary weaknesses in an otherwise sound model, showing that fundamental reform of the British economy is needed.

We need to prepare ourselves for a decade of disruption, as changes have the potential to reshape our economy and society – for good or for ill, depending on the quality of our response.

During the referendum campaign, Remain made no attempt to show why and how it might be easier to confront the challenges in partnership with our neighbours than alone, how Britain has shaped the EU, or how we might better influence its future. With better leadership, the EU might have been transformed into a safe harbour in an era of profound challenges from globalisation.

Drivers of change

Exponential improvements in new technologies, accelerating computing power, machine learning and artificial intelligence, automation and the “internet of things” have extraordinary power to utterly reshape how we live and work, to reorganise our social, economic and political institutions and to redistribute power and reward in society. Without deliberate policy, technological change is likely to increase the share of rewards to those who have capital, whilst diminishing the rewards that go to workers for their labour. Moreover, the rewards for the highly skilled will continue to accelerate whilst diminishing for everyone else.

Demographics. The UK population is set to become Europe’s biggest country, with more people than France by 2030, and more than Germany by 2040. At the same time it will age significantly, with a 66% increase in those over the age of 75, bringing huge challenges in housing, health and social care. By 2030, the working age population will grow by just 3%, but those over 65 will increase by one third.

Economic power continues to shift eastwards. By 2030, emerging economies will account for half of global output, up from a quarter today. Nearly 60% of global middle-class consumption will come from Asia, and 17 of the top 50 cities by GDP will be in China. The shape of global institutions is likely to shift considerably.

Human activity is the dominating influence on nature consuming resources at 1.5 times the ability of the earth to replenish them. A radical economic response is needed in the coming decades to mitigate and reverse environmental damage. The transition towards a low-carbon world is crucial to the vision of an economy fit for the future.

Do we embrace greater international co-operation? As capital flows and firms operate across borders, so there will be a greater premium on nation states working together in the future. That positive case for the EU was never really put to voters, and Brexit makes this path significantly harder.

If the fast pace of change means that it will be the ability to respond rapidly and flexibly to change that will matter, then Britain might be better placed to prosper outside the clunky framework of European regulations and institutions.

The IPPR Commission on Economic Justice

The IPPR Commission on Economic Justice brings together leading figures in British public life to address the persistent problems and ensure that Britain is ready for the future challenges, with the goal of rewriting the rules for the post-Brexit economy.

The politics of the future will belong to those leaders who are prepared to face up to our present problems and future challenges and to articulate a new destination for our economy and society.

Tom Kibasi is Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research and Chair of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice

Source: Brexiters and Remainers both fail to grasp the challenges facing Britain by Tom Kibasi, in The Guardian, 11 March 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/11/brexit-kibasi-ippr-article-50-referendum-remain-leave

Credit and Debit Card Safety

We rely so much on our credit and debit cards these days, and there are always fraudsters trying to get hold of our details. Here are some tips.

Expired credit and debit cards. The stripe on the back of your card contains all your important  personal data. Demagnetising your card will help make it unusable. Run a magnet along the magnetic stripe (the dark stripe along the top of the back of the card), then cut up or shred your card, making sure to destroy the chip (the silvery square section shows on the front and back of the card).

Sources: Various

My UK Elections Wish List - April 2017

Initially compiled April 2017 and updated June 2017

Economy

• "Trickle-down wealth" does not happen above a certain level of income. The very rich almost always invest money in various ways (e.g. trust funds, overseas accounts, exploiting tax loopholes, etc.) to keep it within the family. As this money is not spent in the UK, it does not help economic recovery. Tax rates for the wealthy therefore need to be fairly high.
• Minimum wage needs to be revised regularly and be sensible.
• Zero hours contracts may help businesses over less bouyant periods but mean that employees cannot count on any or specific hours being worked in a week/month.
• It does not appear that the banking sector is yet adequately controlled.

Education

• There should be a legal requirement for schools to provide a library, suitable for their pupil age range.
• There should be a legal requirement for school music services to provide music tuition.
• The school curriculum should include citizenship as a compulsory subject. 
• Provide a new 'school leaver certificate' with employer input, that focuses on an adequate level of written and spoken English, arithmetic, creating CVs, social interaction with customers, basic hygiene and nutrition, civic knowledge, etc. (This would help those who lack the ability to pass GCSE and A level's at specific levels, even with several resits - resulting in demoralization).
• Grammar schools do not facilitate social mobility and should be phased out.

Society

• Set a 20mph limit in all towns and urban areas.
• Retain the ban on hunting.
• Require labelling on electrical goods to indicate its environmental impact.
• Require the setting up of recycling units for items currently difficult for the population to dispose of other than in landfill (e.g. some plastics, CDs, DVDs, tetrapacks). All plastic items must indicate the materials they are made of.
• All packaging should be recyclable if at all possible.
• See the Zero Waste Alliance 10 point plan.
• Organise medical waste collection separately (nappies, sanitary products, incontinence products, etc). It may be necessary to make some charge for this.

Health

• There should be more focus on healthy living programmes to address issues (such as obesity, smoking, eating disorders, alcoholism and drug dependency) before they develop.
• Food labelling: the traffic light code should be made compulsory. Ingredients should be in larger print. Low sugar and low salt products should be promoted.
• Move the dietary advice strategy from 'low-fat' to 'low-sugar' (specifically fructose). Food labelling should split the sugar content into glucose and fructose. In 1945 just 25% of our sugar intake was in the foods we consumed; now 75% is already in food. The 'eating fat will make you fat' theory was based on erroneous interpretation of data.
• Bring in legislation that will curb the influence of the food and drinks industry on health policies. By not making salt and sugar reduction compulsory we have not made the progress we might have made. The legislation on advertising of food and drink could also do with a review.
• The above policies will also help to reduce pressure on the NHS, currently attempting to treat many problems due to an ageing population with an unhealthy lifestyle and too little exercise.

Penal Reform

•  In 1994, 75% to 80% of prisoners were under 30, from broken homes, poorly educated and often in for drink, drugs and car related offences.
• If sentenced for drink or drug dependency related offences, they should initially be treated for the dependency in specialist units, before completing sentences in prison. 
• If in for less than 24 months, they should have intensive education in basic hygiene, civic values, basic literacy and numeracy, and cooking skills. Dependent on the length of sentence, they should also follow a course of training in one or more skills that would help them find jobs on release.

Waste

• Copy new 2016 French law that bans throwing away in-date retail and supermarket food waste; shops must give food away to charities or for use as animal feed, with heavy fines and even jail sentences to back up legislation. Italy has a similar law. [While the nine major uk supermarkets do donate unsold food to local food banks and charities, the proportion still thrown away is not published. Approvedfoods.co.uk sells food on or approaching its best before date at a discount.]
• Product packaging needs to be more recyclable.
• Educational strategies are needed to encourage people to use less energy and to recycle more. 

Media

• Implement the findings of the Leveson Report in full.
• All broadcasters and newspapers should be impartial and check facts fully. Media owners should not be able to use a media product to promote a particular political viewpoint.
• UK print press and broadcast media must be legally required to be neutral during UK local and national election periods.

 Reform Parliament

• Move to Single Transferable Vote for elections to Westminster Parliament (and local councils / unitary authorities)
• Stop the heckling - Parliament looks worse than a school classroom on a bad day.
• Put a stop to philibustering (talking an opponents bill out of time).
• Reform the way private members bills are dealt with.
• Restrict the amount of advertising (press, broadcasting, house-to-house deliveries) each party is allowed during the election period, and in between elections.
• Restrict the amount anyone can give per year to a political party. Or stop it altogether and allocate public funds by proportion of total votes cast in previous election?
• MPs cannot have other employment during their terms of office. 
• Ex-MPs should be restricted in the jobs they take on after leaving - e.g. not working as lobbyists for at least (5?) years.

Election Voting Reforms

• Move to proportional representation - some people's views are never heard or taken into account.

Electioneering Reforms - Print (and digital versions) of newspapers and magazines.

• Cannot accept paid adverts from political parties or candidates.
• Any feature or editorial on the election (irrespective of political party) must be treated the same throughout an election period. E.g. all such material is always on the recto (or the verso) side.
• All facts regarding statements by or about political parties must be verified to avoid misleading language or inaccurate facts. 

Military (usually euphemistically called defence)

• Get rid of all nuclear arms (e.g. Trident)
• Cut down the arms industry, and gradually reduce the amount of arms sold to other countries.
• Reduce the armed forces. We should be training a competent emergencies response force instead.

International

• Revoke Article 50 and Brexit - we need to be in Europe.
• Find better ways of sending aid to less advantaged countries, so that funds and equipment do not end up in the hands of corrupt regimes. 
• Support projects and agencies that focus on issues including (but not limited to) educating women, family planning, raising marriage age and restricting the dowry system so that it does not impoverish families, eliminating female genital mutilation and female infanticide, challenging perceptions around rape and spousal abuse, and ensuring women have the same legal rights as men.
• We have made distastrous decisions attempting to influence politics overseas in recent history and should stop this and concentrate on providing humanitarian aid - including acceptance of refugees.

Various sources and my own ideas on the above topics.
Original post 7th October 2015 

UK Housing Market

UK’s housing market is broken, and only a radical solution can fix it by Peter Hetherington

Rising land values should fund councils to build affordable homes rather than fuel developers’ profits.

Britain for the past three decades, relative to population size, has built fewer houses than any other western European country. In January 2017 a white paper showed that just 140,660 homes in England were completed in the year to December, a 1% fall on 2015. It also revealed that housing associations, the main providers of homes classed as “affordable”, built a fifth fewer homes in 12 months, due to Conservative policies that forced them to cut rents and sell off valuable housing stock.

Continuation of the right-to-buy policy, pioneered by the Thatcher government in the early 1980s, is not an incentive to build for the neediest – if a new breed of council-owned housing companies will be subject to enforced sales of new homes.

It seems the focus has now shifted from blaming councils for delaying plans, through a cumbersome planning system, to blaming builders and developers for sitting on large land banks once planning permission has been granted.

When around 270,000 homes are annually given planning permission, why are only half that number being built? Two years ago an independent commission, reported that six firms of land agents alone were holding strategic land banks of 23,000 acres and warned that owners were holding onto land, sometimes with planning permission, in the hope that it would rise in value. Why is so much tied up in opaque agreements between owners and developers? Is an artificial scarcity of land distorting the housing market and limiting building?

“Ministers, implicitly critical of the building industry, have floated the idea of giving powers to the Land Registry, which logs house transactions and – ostensibly – ownership of land, to try to uncover the scale of the problem. There is even a strong hint that the public sector – councils and government agencies – rather than developers should get the financial benefit from an uplift in land value once planning permission is granted. If that sounds radical, it is a model that funds housing, and infrastructure, in many other countries. That alone might go some way towards fixing a broken market – if it ever happens. We shall see.”

Source: UK’s housing market is broken, and only a radical solution can fix it by Peter Hetherington in The Guardian, 28 February 2017