Sainsbury's Again

Just seen an advert from Jamie Oliver advertising their Basics range. Now, all well and good you think.

Now, why is it that if I go and buy a bag of Class 2 own brand carrots packaged to 1.5kg they cost more than the Class 1 lose carrots in pence/kg? Why do they even stock these class 2 carrots and why do people buy them? It just doesn't make sense.

Another thing is some of their olive oils and HP brown sauce. It's actually cheaper to buy three small bottles adding up to (say) 1.5l than it is to get a single 1.5l bottle. Why do they even stock the larger bottles? What idiots buy them?

NICE and cost benefit analysis

Interesting programme on BBC tonight about the cost of prolonging life.

Bearing in mind that everything has to be paid for, and rare drugs cost a lot of money, the question then becomes how much should the country spend per year of productive live saved?

Apparently it's about £30,000. That seems like a lot of wonga to me. There are rare cancer drugs that cost (say) £100,000/year and might give an additional life expectancy of 1 to 2 years. Let's face it, it's not worth the cost to provide this kind of care for someone who is going to die anyway with no chance of reprieve. This sounds heartless, but we're all going to die, £100,000 on a child of 2 with an additional 80 years life ahead is nothing. £100,000 to prolong the life of a dying person for a year or two is not worth it.

We're all going to die, I'd rather die in comfort, with fantastic medical support for palliative care than have heroic efforts spent on giving me a few months extra life.

We need to enhance the quality of death, not prolong life at all costs. It's done with dogs all the time, would you spend 100,000 to prolong the life of your beloved dog? Or would you rather spend 1000 to ensure the last couple of months were pain free and a good death?

Francis Maude MP

The MP for Horsham certainly sounds very hard done by. Let's look at it without emotion.

He owns a house in his constituancy worth around £500,00, fair enough, he's earned or inherited it.

He's bought a house in London worth around £500,00 again, can't complain about that, he's every right to have a house in London if he wishes.

Then it starts to get more interesting. He rents out his house in London (what's a £1/2M house going to rent for? £1500/month? give or take) and decides what he really wants is a flat, a couple of hundred yards away, and thinks it's ok for the British taxpayer to fund this new flat.

I've got one thing to say to this guy, it isn't! You have two properties, you have a property in London which you can use as an MP, you don't need a flat funded by poor people while you rent out your house which you could have used. 

This from the Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5304772/Francis-Maude-claimed-for-second-London-home-MPs-expenses.html

"He claimed £18,112.50 in mortgage interest payments for the year 2006-07, £1,790 for council tax, £2,237 for a service charge and £820 for cleaning.

A further £9,801.78 was claimed for mortgage interest payments from April 1 to Aug 31, 2007.

The senior Tory MP then submitted a claim for the mortgage interest payments for the remainder of the 2007-08 financial year, which came to £13,070.96.

In a note to the House of Commons fees office he said he knew there was not enough left in his ACA account to cover the payments.

The fees office paid out £6,748.52, up to the maximum of his allowance."

So, he has an income from his house (remember he owns it outright) of (what?) £15k - £20k he's got capital gains on the house in London, he then gets an additional £21k from us because he thought his house 1 min walk away wasn't good enough.

Nice work if you can get it! Talk about pigs snouting in the trough!

Then when the crap hits the fan he offers to pay the capital gains back to the governemnt. Well it's too late, you shouldn't have done it in the first place. If you were on the 'social' you'd be in front of the beek facing a prison term, an offer to just pay it back and all would be forgiven wouldn't happen.

Do the honourable thing and resign now!

Chiropractors

Well, today Simon Singh lost his preliminary hearing on a defamation case brought by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) because of an article he published in The Guardian (since removed from their web site).

Fortunately, the original BCA advertising material has be archived in case they attempted to change it. Here is what the BCA claims its members can do.

"There is evidence to show that chiropractic care has helped children with the following symptoms:

Asthma, Colic, Prolonged crying Sleep and feeding problems, Breathing difficulties, Hyperactivity, Bedwetting, Frequent infections, especially in the ears"

Well very nice claims, no frigging evidence to show how cracking-bones is going to cure any of these things. This just stinks of the BCA shutting down a world renowned science writer to cover their arses. The judge was probably one of the worse that Simon could have asked foe. Mr. Justice Eady, who has ruled some strange rulings in the past - Max Mosley has the right to privacy when he is strutting round shouting in German brandishing a whip with a few prostitutes, a gagging order on the husband of a wife who ran off with a celebrity, well you can Google for yourselves.

Frankly we might as well give up on science now and let the lunatics run the asylum. Just wait until the homoeopaths and the mad Prince get a hold of this, all opposition to quackery will be shut down and we'll go back to rubbing in spit, mud and leaches.

Catholic Church has Lost It

This kind of thing just makes me so angry.

Everyone knows about the press reports by now, but just in case let's do a quick review. In Brazil it's illegal to have an abortion unless the mother's life is at risk, and it seems the Catholic Church doesn't even like the last bit.

A 9 year old girl was raped by her stepfather over many years and was pregnant at 9, with twins. Her doctors went to court so that they could perform an abortion because they deemed that her uterus and body were not capable of bringing to term twins. Now you'd have thought this was sensible hey. Oh, but you forget the Catholic church's role in all this, and the right-wing christo-fascists in the US.

Do the catholic church show comfort and support for the girl and everyone else concerned? Do they heck! The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, "the law of God is above any human law.". So what does he do? Excommunication for the child's mother and her doctors! Just how frigging heartless can you be?

Now, you'd have thought the guys in the Vatican would be a little more politically astute, but no! What do they do, they support the bloody idiot of an archbishop of theirs. From the BBC news http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7930380.stm "A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help."

There is no hope for this organization, but then they are lead by a former member of the Nazi party and it's good to see he hasn't lost his dictatorial and extreme fascist views.

"Sieg Heil"