Yesterday's Happiness Experiment Entry

Protesting outside the Town Hall to save our library

Meeting with Rick Edwards about election/politics - he sent a message of support during the protest

Book group at Paul's - The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Trouble on the Estates

The 1st Estate:
Child abuse rife in the Catholic church in Ireland and beyond

The 2nd Estate:
Lords taking cash in brown envelopes (and largely getting away with it); Prince Andrew's network of dodgy connections; Prince Charles' marital infidelity

The 3rd Estate:
MPs fiddling their expenses on a grand scale

The 4th Estate:
Phone-hacking a widespread practice in the tabloid press

The Police: (neighbouring the Fourth Estate)
Selling stories to the tabloids

The Judiciary: (neighbouring the Fourth Estate)
Supressing the truth by enabling super-injunctions

The City: (neighbouring the Third Estate)
Gambling Other People's Money, then taking public money as a bail-out; speculating at everybody else's expense; creaming off unmerited bonuses regardless of preformance

No wonder the estates are rioting...

My concerns about the Tories

Ex-Bank aide attacks ‘bizarre’ Tory plan

This is the most wildly dangerous thing I have seen in 100 years of economic policy in Britain

Joe Murphy, Political Editor - London Evening Standard
09.10.09

David Cameron's economic plans have been branded “wildly dangerous” by a former senior Bank of England official.

Economist David Blanchflower, former member of the Bank's monetary policy committee, said the Tories would risk plunging Britain into a deeper recession by turning off the Government's measures to stimulate recovery.

In his conference speech at Manchester, Mr Cameron said quantitative easing should end “soon”. Mr Blanchflower called the stance “bizarre” and told the Daily Mail that calling off stimulus too early would snuff out recovery. “This is the most wildly dangerous thing I have seen in 100 years of economic policy in Britain” he added. He said the Tories showed “no understanding of economics”: “It could drive the economy into depression.”

The Bank has held interest rates at their 0.5 per cent record low. So far it has created £146 billion of fresh cash, buying up debt in the form of government and corporate bonds. Mr Cameron said: “If we spend more than we earn, we have to get the money from somewhere. Right now, the Government is simply printing it. Sometime soon that will have to stop, because printing money leads to inflation.”

Chancellor Alistair Darling said: “If we stop supporting the economy now it would crash.”

on Politics

"The politics of youth are, by definition, the politics of ignorance."
Howard Jacobson - If you say you want a revolution...

Nothing is neutral and neutral is less than nothing

"Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

Elie Wiesel - writer, Nobel laureate