baldysblog.co.uk

Archive for February, 2009

Perhaps one of the most outrageous and yet ever continuing events is Government Agencies, including the Military, losing laptops and data containing all kinds of personal, even classified information. Perhaps the most ridiculous being an “Intelligence Officer” leaving classified documents on a train that should not have left Downing Street in the first place, just how intelligent was that ?

However it doesn’t just stop there because there are other “security issues” to consider such as keeping IT Systems free of virus and malware attacks which means keeping them fully “patched” and in this regard, the private sector seems to do as badly as the public sector does.

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I like Stephen Fry even if his QI show format is rather weak and unimaginative as too often are his guests. Apparently the recent edition included the now past her sell by date Jo Brand, Phil Jupitus a once good comedian but who seems to have stopped still for some time now and anti-Margaret Thatcher remarks.

Iain Martin of the DT commented that if Jeremy Clarkson currently in Oz had to apologise for calling Brown a “One-eyed, Scottish Idiot”, then surely Maggie was due an apology from the BBC also. I suspect that Iain was being a bit tongue in cheek but pointing the absurdity of the BBC getting itself in the middle of these things and inevitably being accused of bias.

Of course the really funny thing was that Clarkson only apologised because of protests from the Royal National Institute for the Blind and some Scottish politicians, not because of calling Brown an idiot which by and large now, most agree with as an accurate description…

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In Thursday’s Telegraph blog, Iain Martin put forward an interesting perspective on City Bonuses by pointing out that in the “cut and thrust” of the City, Bankers and Traders feel no loyalty to their employers because they know, their employers have none to them. At the first sign of any turndown in trading, the employees get shown the door’.

The consequence is that “big bonuses” are the only way to recruit and retain the available talent. I suppose from that, the argument must follow that in the current economic circumstances, you need the best talent and that means bonuses, whether the Bank is partly owned or even fully owned by the taxpayer. I do not know whether that is true or not…

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I have no doubt that Brown made a slip of the tongue yesterday with the use of the ‘Depression’ word when he meant ‘Recession’ but Freudian slip or not, the mood has most certainly changed across the country and media, depression seems a more accurate reflection of this change.

It was mailing in opinions to the Daily Telegraph “Comments” sections that first got me interested in writing a personal perspective on the current news stories. Although the experience could be ‘bruising’ at times from other people also writing in, it was invigorating and the ‘debates’ often interesting. From this interest came the motivation to write my own blog…

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Although like any youngster I had ridden bicycles, it was following a divorce over 20 years ago and encouraged by my youngest son, a keen cyclist to this day, that I got back into cycling. Moving back into Central London, quite apart from the economics, riding a bike as my main mode of transport and not owning a car, made most sense.

It gave me freedom of movement, cost effective reliability and, the most surprising thing of all – total predictability in the time taken to ride from one place to another, regular ‘commutes’ could be timed to within one minute regardless of traffic. I still have three of the bikes I bought along the way or should I say, three stories…

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With the recent scandal in the House of Lords, one of the rather more pointless Cabinet Ministers, Jack Straw is now to rush out legislation to reform the Lords and apply enforceable penalties that are retrospective for “naughty Peers”. Jack Straw is the Justice Minister which basically is the other half of the Home Office that ‘Portly Smith’ didn’t end up with.

His job appears to be once a year coming up with new ways to reform the House of Lords and in that endeavour, illustrates perfectly why your average politician of any party, should not be allowed near “Constitutional Matters” because clearly, they haven’t a clue.

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In today’s Daily Telegraph, Matthew d’Ancona postulated the idea that perhaps the last week in January, in many ways be the week when Labour lost the next election. His point was not that there was any one specific news item or individual event, merely a sudden accumulation of many that collectively speak loudly of a dead Duck if not actually a rotting corpse.

But in a sense, it was hardly worth writing although I suppose, a journalist has to write something. The reality has been for some considerable time that even if Brown single-handedly solved the global crisis, he would still be out on his ear come the next election.

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