What a yawnathon the Large Hadron Collider is.

After fifteen years and six billion quid, the army of tax-feeders at CERN have announced the results of the search for something called a Higgs bosun: they may have pinned it down, and the results are ‘intriguing’.

What they mean is, ‘more research is required, behold our grasping hands’. Yes, they want a Super Large Hadron Collider.

I was actually researching a post on whether Foreign Aid actually does any good at all, when I came across this little gem from ‘The Window on Malawi’ which stated:-

“He said the project had been delayed due to a change in Government in Britain where recently Gordon Brown and his Conservatives were voted out of power in favour of the Liberal Democrats led by David Cameron”

Well, at least he got one thing right, in that David Cameron is like no Tory I have ever seen before!

David Cameron has announced that millions of pounds of foreign aid has been ‘wasted’, but insists this is not a reason to turn off the tap.

The Prime Minister, on a curtailed tour of Africa,  hit out at those in his own party who criticise his decision to pour billions more into foreign aid at a time of cutbacks at home. In a speech in Lagos, Nigeria, he will declare: ‘The aid sceptics are wrong. Aid is essential. It can work and we are making it work”

Nonsense. Of course Africa needs help. It just doesn’t need cash thrown at. As is argued eloquently here by Dambisa Moyo, there is much we can do to help African countries but Cameron has it precisely wrong. He is lavishing OUR cash in order to keep assorted thugs, tyrants, and theocrats in the sort of limos they feel they deserve.

 … or not so Apple fans.

Ye Olde Nokia is conking out. I think it’s the valves or something but it means I’m in the market for a new phone.

So I’d like to know if these new-fangled iPhone 4 thingies are much cop. Are they worth it? Would I get a signal and (if it’s “yes” so far) does anyone know where to get a good deal?

All consumer advice gratefully received.

One of the financial and business boom yachts looks as though the wind has been taken clean out of it’s sails. The long-term parking areas of Dubai International airport is being clogged with over three thousand luxury cars, limousines and 4 X 4’s, and the queue is getting longer by the day.

Seems as though the gloss has gotten a little dull when redundancies hit, as the credit crunch mows its’ way through even the once super-rich of the Emirates expat workforce. The expensive properties, once taken up on a mortgage without a second view of the paperwork are being abandoned, along with the expensive lifestyles made available by a high earning NO TAX income. 

So the Brits, the Americans; the host of expat workers who zoomed onto the palaces available during the free-spending decade just passed, are crowding the flights homeward bound, along with their tans, their memories and not a great deal more, as they abandon everything just to get out from under the crippling debts they have built up during the Good Life, as Francis once crooned!

Noted how the Bent Business Secretary, Lord Rhumba of Rio is planning to arrange either a credit reform package for the British car industry in general, or else Jaguar/Land Rover in particular. Now while the plan’s basis, is to my mind, flawed in that we, the taxpayer, are being asked to underwrite loans from banks and corporate finance houses for things like cars because the banks/finance people have finished with easy credit, having had their own fingers badly burnt, and wish to shovel the debt burden onto us, the taxpayers; it brings up one or two queries, at least to me.

1.     To the best of my recollection, nowhere in Labour’s last Manifesto was there a commitment to finance a bunch of banks and shady money-lenders because they lacked the foresight to operate in a prudent and commercially-correct fashion.

2.     Why should the British taxpayer, who have already seen huge amounts of cash dissappear into the cash drawers of the piratical Phoenix bunch, take care of an Indian company who bought Jaguar/LandRover on the open market. Phoenix, who bought Rover from BMW for a nominal ten pounds, and were presented with a bonus of approximately half-a-billion pounds worth of cars, materials and equipment. This bunch of crooks ran the company into the ground and legally dissappeared with their money firmly locked up in bonus cash, pensions and other semi-legal theft operations, leaving debts of over £1.4 billion pounds; 

3.    Have you ever studied a LandRover showroom? They are pretty nice vehicles, but they all have one thing in common, they are all BIG!, both in terms of actual size but also in terms of engine capacity and consequently, the dreaded CARBON factor. So we are being asked to place either cash or credit at the diposal of an Indian company making some of the world’s most Carbon-unfriendly cars, and of course allowing those same vehicles on to British roads, vehicles which our good friends at the DVLA and Dept. of Transport are trying to get rid of?

4.   Of course it could all be placed at the zippers of Lord Mandy anyway, as it ain’t the first time he’s come, literally, to the aid of some very friendly Indians! Hasn’t he widened the circle of his friends enough? 

I see that Nicola Horlick, the so-called ‘City Superwoman’ who apparently juggled a city financiers job with raising four kids, has fallen foul of just about the oldest trick in the financial book; which of course is the old ‘Ponzi’ stunt. Nicola had apparently invested some twenty percent of her managed-money portfolio, some £21 million, in an American hedge fund investment vehicle run by one Bernard Madoff. His declaration that he didn’t have any of the huge amounts of cash left, was made to his sons after he had told them that he was planning to pay some small bonuses to his New York staff before closing shop. This statement sent the two boys racing to the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) to blow the whistle on dear old dad.

The get-rich-quick routines of the shady side of the financial world have been with us for a very long time, but shouldn’t someone have looked at this one financial vehicle which was apparently surpassing all problems and generating huge profits for all, and casually wondered,

“If it looks too good to be true, it probably is!”

What was it again?  $700 billion dollars to bail out the banks, homeowners, and auto companies?   Where’s my bailout?