The scourge of Dublin 6

More clamper dust -- observe -- well, you may have to imagine - the car in the picture does not have insurance or registration -- obviously the magic conceals it from police officers as well as parking enforcers

Good Morning A-hole!

A bit stiff finger to the taxi driver in 04 D 3912 who tried to run me into the back of another car at the end of the bus lane on Georges Street, Dublin, Ireland going north at 09.35 GMT. Just made you famous sucker! I doubt the use of reporting officially to the Carriage Office - but let me tell the world at large -- anyone who under takes you from behind and rams on the brakes when they get in front of you because you hooted and then spends the best part of a minute abusing you while obstructing the road doesnt deserve to hold a Public Service Vehicle licence ... there rant over

Magic clamper dust

I've held off on this one for a year, to see if anything changed ...observe the picture: this is a section of street (Cambridge Road) in Rathmines, Dublin, Ireland. All the surrounding area is pay or get clamped parking, except this little stretch, which must have been cursed by the little people. Or something.

Market forces - me ear!

So BUPA Ireland have lost their High-Court challenge to risk equalisation for the VHI.
For those of you living under or a rock or outside Ireland, BUPA is the national British private health insurance company, and VHI is the national Irish private health insurance company, which just happens to be owned by the government of the Republic of Ireland and ah... makes up for the deficiencies of the Irish national public health system, which is also, what do you know, owned by the government of the Republic of Ireland. The bureacracy of the Irish Department of Health apparenlty employs nearly as many people as all the rest of the government departments put together, which probably explains why the Health budget is reassuringly huge but with so many mouths to feed, not an awful lot of money gets spent on things like hospitals. I personally would nt go near any of them public or private unless I was in dire straits.
Any how-- the point is -- the government of the Republic of Ireland professes to be big into Market Forces economics, but always arranged that the VHI would have a monopoly -- the arrival of BUPA under European Union open market type auspices seemed to be good news, but it seems that due to the loyalty of older insurance customers, BUPA started to build up a much younger and it is being assumed healthier client base and therefore were making 'unfair' profits. Now I hate insurance companies in general, so hearing any of them talking about their social role and fairness makes my blood boil ... If BUPA had accidentally scooped up all the old fogies then I'm sure VHI and the minister for Unhealthy over-weightness would both be arguing for market forces to rule and an end to pernicioius talk about the social aspects of health insurance provision. And yes, I am a slighly younger BUPA customer...

London burning hot

Was in London the weekend just past - very hot, the Underground stifling. Dont know if I was there in the height of the summer season before, the parts I visited seemed brisk and bright and making an effort. More police and less derelicts than I remember, unwelcome though the sight of a policeman strolling across Trafalger Square with a H-K sub-machine gun, seems excessive.
People less polite on the roads too, I remember my first time in London about fifteen years ago being impressed at how cars would stop for me at a zebra crossing -- almost always. Very rarely now, unless you step right out in front of them.

more notes on social contract

3. Social Contract for the world
4. World Law – states to act towards each other as persons are expected to act – war as affray and assault
5. Separate the government from the people – how to punish one and not the other?
6. Paxd Romana – Paxc Britaniica – Pax Americana – Pax Sinica?

What’s a blog for anyway?

- ok, so a lot of people use it as a journal or diary or a reporting tool – I see it as a sort of sand-box for essays (this is a bit cheeky of me as I have’nt read many essays lately, and haven’t even touched some of the greats of the last three hundred years – giving them their own web sites would be a worth first step ..there’s a hmmm moment J

Brevity on the web

– they say brevity is the soul of wit, and indeed maybe the web encourages this up to a point – the danger is that it also becomes like the television and radio news and the tabloids – and everything gets reduced down to one-liners which don’t mean very much…the Ten Commandments would be a counter-example of course.

Social contract

Step back a bit - ok, so the idea of a Social Contract is that you have a Society - comprising of a city or county or even a state, where the people acknowledge that they have rights and duties in relation to each other - so the idea of a social insurance system, where everyone contributes to the government so that when times are hard and you are out of a job, the rest of society will help you out financially instead of stepping over your quivering form on the street. It's a nice idea, but part of it involves actually contributing, in the twentieth century there has been a lot of people sitting around with their hand out not willing to contribute much, and they have given the whole idea a bad name

And World Peace :-)

the law of nations and the laws of men

social contract for the world

to be returned. might have to explain what social contract is. might have to find out for definite first. Read Rousseau? sheesh!

the real price of oil

so what happens when you top up your car? Is your money slowly but surely being saved up to chopper some troops into the Amazon rain-forest to finsih off the pesky natives who are holding up the oil drilling?