Three Masted Sailing Ship Whitby

The UK general election is not far away, I reckon that if one of the parties were to adopt the following strategy, we might be able to put the “Great” back into Britain; I wish.

“Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College“

Rolling Back Government: Lessons from New Zealand
Maurice P. McTigue
Maurice P. McTigue is a distinguished visiting scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he directs the government accountability project. Previously, he was a member of the New Zealand Parliament and New Zealand’s ambassador to Canada, and was closely involved in New Zealand’s deregulation of labor markets, deregulation of the transportation industry, and restructuring of the fishing industry through the creation of conservation incentives. He also served as Minister of Employment, Minister of State Owned Enterprises, Minister of Railways, Minister of Works and Development, Minister of Labour and Minister of Immigration. Among his many honors, Mr. McTigue is a recipient of the Queen’s Service Order, bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. In the U.S., he was recently appointed to the Office of Personnel Management Senior Review Committee, formed to make recommendations for human resources systems at the Department of Homeland Security. He also sits on the Performance Management Advisory Committee for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on February 11, 2004, on the Hillsdale campus, during a five-day seminar on “The Conditions of Free-Market Capitalism,” co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series.

What we’re seeing around the world at the moment is what I would call a silent revolution, reflected in a change in how people view government accountability. The old idea of accountability simply held that government should spend money in accordance with appropriations. The new accountability is based on asking, “What did we get in public benefits as a result of the expenditure of money?” This is a question that has always been asked in business, but has not been the norm for governments. And those governments today that are struggling valiantly with this question are showing quite extraordinary results. This was certainly the basis of the successful reforms in my own country of New Zealand.

New Zealand’s per capita income in the period prior to the late 1950s was right around number three in the world, behind the United States and Canada. But by 1984, its per capita income had sunk to 27th in the world, alongside Portugal and Turkey. Not only that, but our unemployment rate was 11.6 percent, we’d had 23 successive years of deficits (sometimes ranging as high as 40 percent of GDP), our debt had grown to 65 percent of GDP, and our credit ratings were continually being downgraded. Government spending was a full 44 percent of GDP, investment capital was exiting in huge quantities, and government controls and micromanagement were pervasive at every level of the economy. We had foreign exchange controls that meant I couldn’t buy a subscription to The Economist magazine without the permission of the Minister of Finance. I couldn’t buy shares in a foreign company without surrendering my citizenship. There were price controls on all goods and services, on all shops and on all service industries. There were wage controls and wage freezes. I couldn’t pay my employees more—or pay them bonuses—if I wanted to. There were import controls on the goods that I could bring into the country. There were massive levels of subsidies on industries in order to keep them viable. Young people were leaving in droves.

Spending and Taxes
When a reform government was elected in 1984, it identified three problems: too much spending, too much taxing and too much government. The question was how to cut spending and taxes and diminish government’s role in the economy. Well, the first thing you have to do in this situation is to figure out what you’re getting for dollars spent. Towards this end, we implemented a new policy whereby money wouldn’t simply be allocated to government agencies; instead, there would be a purchase contract with the senior executives of those agencies that clearly delineated what was expected in return for the money. Those who headed up government agencies were now chosen on the basis of a worldwide search and received term contracts—five years with a possible extension of another three years. The only ground for their removal was non-performance, so a newly-elected government couldn’t simply throw them out as had happened with civil servants under the old system. And of course, with those kinds of incentives, agency heads—like CEOs in the private sector—made certain that the next tier of people had very clear objectives that they were expected to achieve as well.

The first purchase that we made from every agency was policy advice. That policy advice was meant to produce a vigorous debate between the government and the agency heads about how to achieve goals like reducing hunger and homelessness. This didn’t mean, by the way, how government could feed or house more people—that’s not important. What’s important is the extent to which hunger and homelessness are actually reduced. In other words, we made it clear that what’s important is not how many people are on welfare, but how many people get off welfare and into independent living.

As we started to work through this process, we also asked some fundamental questions of the agencies. The first question was, “What are you doing?” The second question was, “What should you be doing?” Based on the answers, we then said, “Eliminate what you shouldn’t be doing”—that is, if you are doing something that clearly is not a responsibility of the government, stop doing it. Then we asked the final question: “Who should be paying—the taxpayer, the user, the consumer, or the industry?” We asked this because, in many instances, the taxpayers were subsidizing things that did not benefit them. And if you take the cost of services away from actual consumers and users, you promote overuse and devalue whatever it is that you’re doing.

When we started this process with the Department of Transportation, it had 5,600 employees. When we finished, it had 53. When we started with the Forest Service, it had 17,000 employees. When we finished, it had 17. When we applied it to the Ministry of Works, it had 28,000 employees. I used to be Minister of Works, and ended up being the only employee. In the latter case, most of what the department did was construction and engineering, and there are plenty of people who can do that without government involvement. And if you say to me, “But you killed all those jobs!”—well, that’s just not true. The government stopped employing people in those jobs, but the need for the jobs didn’t disappear. I visited some of the forestry workers some months after they’d lost their government jobs, and they were quite happy. They told me that they were now earning about three times what they used to earn—on top of which, they were surprised to learn that they could do about 60 percent more than they used to! The same lesson applies to the other jobs I mentioned.

Some of the things that government was doing simply didn’t belong in the government. So we sold off telecommunications, airlines, irrigation schemes, computing services, government printing offices, insurance companies, banks, securities, mortgages, railways, bus services, hotels, shipping lines, agricultural advisory services, etc. In the main, when we sold those things off, their productivity went up and the cost of their services went down, translating into major gains for the economy. Furthermore, we decided that other agencies should be run as profit-making and tax-paying enterprises by government. For instance, the air traffic control system was made into a stand-alone company, given instructions that it had to make an acceptable rate of return and pay taxes, and told that it couldn’t get any investment capital from its owner (the government). We did that with about 35 agencies. Together, these used to cost us about one billion dollars per year; now they produced about one billion dollars per year in revenues and taxes.

We achieved an overall reduction of 66 percent in the size of government, measured by the number of employees. The government’s share of GDP dropped from 44 to 27 percent. We were now running surpluses, and we established a policy never to leave dollars on the table: We knew that if we didn’t get rid of this money, some clown would spend it. So we used most of the surplus to pay off debt, and debt went from 63 percent down to 17 percent of GDP. We used the remainder of the surplus each year for tax relief. We reduced income tax rates by half and eliminated incidental taxes. As a result of these policies, revenue increased by 20 percent. Yes, Ronald Reagan was right: lower tax rates do produce more revenue.

Subsidies, Education, and Competitiveness
…What about invasive government in the form of subsidies? First, we need to recognize that the main problem with subsidies is that they make people dependent; and when you make people dependent, they lose their innovation and their creativity and become even more dependent.

Let me give you an example: By 1984, New Zealand sheep farming was receiving about 44 percent of its income from government subsidies. Its major product was lamb, and lamb in the international marketplace was selling for about $12.50 (with the government providing another $12.50)per carcass. Well, we did away with all sheep farming subsidies within one year. And of course the sheep farmers were unhappy. But once they accepted the fact that the subsidies weren’t coming back, they put together a team of people charged with figuring out how they could get $30 per lamb carcass. The team reported back that this would be difficult, but not impossible. It required producing an entirely different product, processing it in a different way and selling it in different markets. And within two years, by 1989, they had succeeded in converting their $12.50 product into something worth $30. By 1991, it was worth $42; by 1994 it was worth $74; and by 1999 it was worth $115. In other words, the New Zealand sheep industry went out into the marketplace and found people who would pay higher prices for its product. You can now go into the best restaurants in the U.S. and buy New Zealand lamb, and you’ll be paying somewhere between $35 and $60 per pound.

Needless to say, as we took government support away from industry, it was widely predicted that there would be a massive exodus of people. But that didn’t happen. To give you one example, we lost only about three-quarters of one percent of the farming enterprises—and these were people who shouldn’t have been farming in the first place. In addition, some predicted a major move towards corporate as opposed to family farming. But we’ve seen exactly the reverse. Corporate farming moved out and family farming expanded, probably because families are prepared to work for less than corporations. In the end, it was the best thing that possibly could have happened. And it demonstrated that if you give people no choice but to be creative and innovative, they will find solutions.

New Zealand had an education system that was failing as well. It was failing about 30 percent of its children—especially those in lower socio-economic areas. We had put more and more money into education for 20 years, and achieved worse and worse results.

It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well. The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration. Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else. We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school. We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day.

But we went even further: We made it possible for privately owned schools to be funded in exactly the same way as publicly owned schools, giving parents the ability to spend their education dollars wherever they chose. Again, everybody predicted that there would be a major exodus of students from the public to the private schools, because the private schools showed an academic advantage of 14 to 15 percent. It didn’t happen, however, because the differential between schools disappeared in about 18-24 months. Why? Because all of a sudden teachers realized that if they lost their students, they would lose their funding; and if they lost their funding, they would lose their jobs. Eighty-five percent of our students went to public schools at the beginning of this process. That fell to only about 84 percent over the first year or so of our reforms. But three years later, 87 percent of the students were going to public schools. More importantly, we moved from being about 14 or 15 percent below our international peers to being about 14 or 15 percent above our international peers in terms of educational attainment.

Now consider taxation and competitiveness: What many in the public sector today fail to recognize is that the challenge of competitiveness is worldwide. Capital and labor can move so freely and rapidly from place to place that the only way to stop business from leaving is to make certain that your business climate is better than anybody else’s. Along these lines, there was a very interesting circumstance in Ireland just two years ago. The European Union, led by France, was highly critical of Irish tax policy—particularly on corporations—because the Irish had reduced their tax on corporations from 48 percent to 12 percent and business was flooding into Ireland. The European Union wanted to impose a penalty on Ireland in the form of a 17 percent corporate tax hike to bring them into line with other European countries. Needless to say, the Irish didn’t buy that. The European community responded by saying that what the Irish were doing was unfair and uncompetitive. The Irish Minister of Finance agreed: He pointed out that Ireland was charging corporations 12 percent, while charging its citizens only 10 percent. So Ireland reduced the tax rate to 10 percent for corporations as well. There’s another one the French lost!

When we in New Zealand looked at our revenue gathering process, we found the system extremely complicated in a way that distorted business as well as private decisions. So we asked ourselves some questions: Was our tax system concerned with collecting revenue? Was it concerned with collecting revenue and also delivering social services? Or was it concerned with collecting revenue, delivering social services and changing behavior, all three? We decided that the social services and behavioral components didn’t have any place in a rational system of taxation. So we resolved that we would have only two mechanisms for gathering revenue—a tax on income and a tax on consumption—and that we would simplify those mechanisms and lower the rates as much as we possibly could. We lowered the high income tax rate from 66 to 33 percent, and set that flat rate for high-income earners. In addition, we brought the low end down from 38 to 19 percent, which became the flat rate for low-income earners. We then set a consumption tax rate of 10 percent and eliminated all other taxes—capital gains taxes, property taxes, etc. We carefully designed this system to produce exactly the same revenue as we were getting before and presented it to the public as a zero sum game. But what actually happened was that we received 20 percent more revenue than before. Why? We hadn’t allowed for the increase in voluntary compliance. If tax rates are low, taxpayers won’t employ high priced lawyers and accountants to find loopholes. Indeed, every country that I’ve looked at in the world that has dramatically simplified and lowered its tax rates has ended up with more revenue, not less.

What about regulations? The regulatory power is customarily delegated to non-elected officials who then constrain the people’s liberties with little or no accountability. These regulations are extremely difficult to eliminate once they are in place. But we found a way: We simply rewrote the statutes on which they were based. For instance, we rewrote the environmental laws, transforming them into the Resource Management Act—reducing a law that was 25 inches thick to 348 pages. We rewrote the tax code, all of the farm acts, and the occupational safety and health acts. To do this, we brought our brightest brains together and told them to pretend that there was no pre-existing law and that they should create for us the best possible environment for industry to thrive. We then marketed it in terms of what it would save in taxes. These new laws, in effect, repealed the old, which meant that all existing regulations died—the whole lot, every single one.

Thinking Differently About Government
What I have been discussing is really just a new way of thinking about government. Let me tell you how we solved our deer problem: Our country had no large indigenous animals until the English imported deer for hunting. These deer proceeded to escape into the wild and become obnoxious pests. We then spent 120 years trying to eliminate them, until one day someone suggested that we just let people farm them. So we told the farming community that they could catch and farm the deer, as long as they would keep them inside eight-foot high fences. And we haven’t spent a dollar on deer eradication from that day onwards. Not one. And New Zealand now supplies 40 percent of the world market in venison. By applying simple common sense, we turned a liability into an asset.

Let me share with you one last story: The Department of Transportation came to us one day and said they needed to increase the fees for driver’s licenses. When we asked why, they said that the cost of relicensing wasn’t being fully recovered at the current fee levels. Then we asked why we should be doing this sort of thing at all. The transportation people clearly thought that was a very stupid question: Everybody needs a driver’s license, they said. I then pointed out that I received mine when I was fifteen and asked them: “What is it about relicensing that in any way tests driver competency?” We gave them ten days to think this over. At one point they suggested to us that the police need driver’s licenses for identification purposes. We responded that this was the purpose of an identity card, not a driver’s license. Finally they admitted that they could think of no good reason for what they were doing—so we abolished the whole process! Now a driver’s license is good until a person is 74 years old, after which he must get an annual medical test to ensure he is still competent to drive. So not only did we not need new fees, we abolished a whole department. That’s what I mean by thinking differently.

There are some great things happening along these lines in the United States today. You might not know it, but back in 1993 Congress passed a law called the Government Performance and Results Act. This law orders government departments to identify in a strategic plan what it is that they intend to achieve, and to report each year what they actually did achieve in terms of public benefits. Following on this, two years ago President Bush brought to the table something called the President’s Management Agenda, which sifts through the information in these reports and decides how to respond. These mechanisms are promising if they are used properly. Consider this: There are currently 178 federal programs designed to help people get back to work. They cost $8.4 billion, and 2.4 million people are employed as a result of them. But if we took the most effective three programs out of those 178 and put the $8.4 billion into them alone, the result would likely be that 14.7 million people would find jobs. The status quo costs America over 11 million jobs. The kind of new thinking I am talking about would build into the system a consequence for the administrator who is responsible for this failure of sound stewardship of taxpayer dollars. It is in this direction that the government needs to move.

The Header Photo

A recent photograph taken on the quay in Whitby, three masted as was Cook’s Endeavour, but styling looks nineteenth century, I think!

This is a real laugh, it sums up exactly the corrupt science of global warming. Bye the way I emailed the met office about how the notian that CO² can re-heat the Earth as it absorbs the outgoing infra-red radiation, simply asked if they could explain it in the context of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Still nothing, but them I’m just a prole, why bother, they already have the scientific consensus, I think they are due a fall!

Following the purchase of Manfrotto Pano head [Mentioned in an earlier post here] I am now busy producing exciting wide angle shots from locations around Yorkshire, and beyond. The picture above is a 17″ [42cms] wide reproduction of Lotherton Hall, resplendent in the thick coating of winter snow! Below is a detail view at 100% of the same image.

Not to be outdone, Pip, my eldest daughter has produced a magnificent photo-realistic picture of the Triumphal Arch at Parlington, this follows on from an earlier model I did using Sketchup, which always looked very cardboard like due to the simple rendering of the software. The full size print version will run to A2 width nearly 24″ wide [59.4cms]. A larger scale version than the one shown here is viewable from the Parlington History site, home page., the backdrop to the arch uses some of my photographic images as well!
Both pictures will be for sale shortly on www.parlington.biz, once I get the site design and shopping basket sorted out!

Whilst strolling around York yesterday afternoon, on a dull St Valentine’s Day, I took the opportunity to get some pictures of St Mary’s a ruined Benedictine Abbey [Wikipedia reference], in the grounds of the Yorkshire Museum, the photo above is of the west wall and the return with the open arch on the north elevation. The weather turned sour and I put my camera away as I hurried back to the car, thus missing out on the opportunity to take a decent shot of the Sir Edwin Lutyens designed war memorial adjacent to the former North Eastern Railways Headquarters. The memorial is less impressive than the more famous work by him of the Cenotaph, Whitehall, however what struck me was that the memorial was commissioned by NER and commemorates the loss of over 2,300 soldiers during the First World War, all of whom were NER (North Eastern Railways Company) employees. A horrific reminder of the tragedy of war, this on the second day of our increased assault in Helmund, Afghanistan more destruction, all very distressing.

The distress brought by war continues but our Prime Minister, seeks to show us his caring side by displaying an un-characteristic and stomach wrenching, tearful moment on TV discussing his family grief. Call me a cynic but if he cared so much he would not have allowed our troops to be so badly prepared for the IED’s encountered under his watch over the purse strings as Chancellor and later in his role as Prime Minister.

This moved me to reflect more on the past years of the labour government and I recalled an oft used quotation by the late American Adrian Pierce Rogers from 1984.
You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don’t multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else. Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don’t have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don’t get to enjoy the fruit of their labor.

C’est la vie!

I am sitting here typing this with tears welling up in my eyes, pausing from time to time to blow my nose, and trying to look positively to the future. Although at the moment with my tax return still to do, days away from the deadline, it all seems a bit pointless. My appetite has wained but I am fortified by a glass or two of Blossom Hill, Californian wine.

Death is a sobering moment, and this last year with the passing of my first wife back in June, and the consequent affects on my and her, three daughters, we have had enough to deal with! So after the discovery that Meg had a cancer also, it has been only a matter of time before the big “C” did its worst. Meg remained active until the very end, at Christmas she was jumping about catching snowflakes, and generally enjoying herself in the deep snow, helping or perhaps, hindering, the building of a snowman, which coincidentally only finally melted today!

I decided that a burial in Parlington at a suitable private location would be the best bet as she so enjoyed the open spaces here. Her grave may one day be discovered when Parlington becomes a golf course, a theme park or whatever else is in vogue at some point in the distant future. They may also discover the carefully sealed CDROM with these same pictures and the following note:

Megan and Life at Parlington

Brian & Helen Hull and my daughters Pippa, Mandy & Chloe.
Also Helen’s daughters Victoria and Laura, and Richard, who are also saddened at Meg’s death.
Parlington 2010

The extreme winter conditions have had a toll on the roads and many buildings, however I was dismayed to discover that the Round Building in Parlington Park, classed as either a Deer Shelter, or Cattle Shelter according to the listing on English Heritage, had partly collapsed no doubt due to the movement caused by frost followed by thawing conditions. Hopefully it can be re-instated in the near future before it gets any worse. I have written about it previously, the design was by William Lindley, a Doncaster architect who trained under the famous Yorkshireman John Carr. Further information about the structure is on the Parlington History site here, about a third way down the page is a QuickTime VR 360° panorama taken inside the building late last year.

An earlier article about the possible roof that may have been part of the original structure is here.

The temperature at 7:00 am today was around -5.0° and leaving the estate by car, the padlock securing the gates on the driveway was frozen, fortunately previous experience has taught me to have a warming device to hand, to free the mechanism. After a couple of minutes with my camping lighter, which is like a mini blowlamp, the lock mechanism freed up and I was able to open the gates and proceed beyond Narnia, which is how Parlington seems at this time of year, and over to Saxton. Passing by the Crooked Billet, on route, I noticed that the place looked decidedly undisturbed by visitors, perhaps it has closed down?

I returned to Parlington around sunrise and was pleasantly greeted by the scene you see in the picture at the head of this post. The cold weather has provided us with an excellent opportunity for taking pretty landscape pictures. Only yesterday I was talking to a lady who was seeking to catch the whisps of light snow falling from the trees on the main Parlington drive. Armed with her digital SLR she was hoping to catch that icing sugary spray that gentle breezes across tree branches can produce. The snow has been on trees for days now, and as the temperature has rarely risen above zero centigrade, it has remained in a fine powdery state, so the slight breeze was sufficient to cause these micro-avalanches.

The sub-zeros temperatures have encouraged the usual collection of birds to telegraph their friends and relatives, who are all enjoying the endless supply of seeds and nuts my wife provides, hourly re-stocking the feeders! There is a down side to this, the overspill on to the ground, attracts unwanted visitors. So Roland Rat and his extended family have taken residence in a hole in the garden nearby. They, along with the pheasants compete for the seeds which fall from the seed feeders. It is amusing to note the pecking order [pun intended] the rats are very wary of the pheasants with their ability to strike a savage blow with their beaks on the back or head of the rodents. All are frightened of me, despite the fact I am assisting their wellbeing.

The order of things is most evident in the country, the pheasants, are refugees from the woods, realizing that they are out of the combat zone, and can survive on human endowments provided they stay in the curtledge of the hall. Beyond they are most likely to fall to the guns, sometimes it sounds like a civil war enactment is in progress. Even as I write are the crack of guns from a shooting party, well at least they eat the catch. Then wherever you are in the woodland there are plenty of wood pigeons, from time to time I come across their remains, stumps of the wings and a profusion of feathers on the ground; prey no doubt to some aerial invader, there are many hawks around, but of all the birds of prey, I am most impressed by the sheer size and effortless gliding of the red kites.

Small rodents and rabbits also have much to be afraid of, there are no end of circling birds waiting to swoop down and scoop them up in their claws, another predator is Matilda our cuddly cat, who has a darker side, she is a merciless killer of small furry mammals and less so birds. A brush with a pheasant taught Matilda to be wary of things with beaks! But she has credits on her fusilage from her forays with small rabbits and the odd grey squirrel. The dog, Meg, not to be outdone, chases after everything, and twice to my knowledge has caught a rat. Although the recent visitors, Roland as I have termed him, seems to have outwitted the dog at every turn. The consequence of the dogs inability to reign in the growth of the rodent population has led me to take extreme measures. Thus far I have tried the trench warfare approach of hiding in a dugout, well sort of, whilst waiting for one of the little blighters to show its head over the trench line. This is a cold and thankless task, so we have used more subtle tactics, employed in days of yore, by trapping the pests in a cunningly constructed cage trap. Sadly this requires an executioner to carry out the summary sentence, of the imprisoned rodent, a bullet, well air rifle slug, through the brain. Helen, decided this was too much to bear, well she is a nurse, so we are on to chemical warfare now, with rat poisoning, but with all the other creatures around this is a tricky call.

I really don’t like poison, the lingering death is horrible, better the swift execution. Some visitors think I am heartless for dealing with the rats in this way, saying, why not live and let live? To be honest these folk tend to be from the cities, if they have a problem they call in the Pest Control Officer, (notice the avoidance of anything suggesting death), who does the dirty work and they carry on with life undisturbed, these people are of the same ilk as those who are un-aware of the daily goings on in an abattoir, here things are a bit more brutal. I look at it like this, there is plenty of space for the small, and not so small rodents, in the woods and field edges. I will not bother them, but if the decide to camp out in the garden, and send raiding parties, to retrieve the bird seed, they are fair game! But it should be done as painlessly as possible, for them and me!

On a lighter note to finish this blog; I saw a snipe yesterday taking the opportunity beneath the fir trees, where there is little snow, to seek out small grubs and worms with its exeedingly long beak. The picture below is from the RSPB site, the picture is a link to the page about the snipe.

Snipe [Latin: Gallinago gallinago]

Although this may seem a little off topic, the proposed acquisition of Sun Systems by Oracle, will bring MySQL under the control of the world’s largest provider of closed source databases. MySQL is probably the leading open source database system on the market and is used by many sites around the world. For example this blog which is Wordpress based uses MySQL as do all Wordpress blogs, regardless of who hosts the site. Similarly my Parlington history site uses MySQL for certain aspects of its functioning. If MySQL is absorbed by Oracle and becomes a propriety format, the world will change, many, many blogs will be affected and the whole culture of the Internet will be damaged.

The following paragraphs are from helpsavemysql.org which sets out the problem.

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.

If those IPRs fall into the hands of MySQL's primary competitor, then MySQL immediately ceases to be an alternative to Oracle's own high-priced products. So far, customers had the choice to use MySQL in new projects instead of Oracle's products. Some large companies even migrated (switched) from Oracle to MySQL for existing software solutions. And every one could credibly threaten Oracle's salespeople with using MySQL unless a major discount was granted. If Oracle owns MySQL, it will only laugh when customers try this. Getting rid of this problem is easily worth one billion dollars a year to Oracle, if not more.

If you, like me, value the Internet, please visit the petition site and make your voice heard, the link is here at helpsavemysql.org

The intro photo was taken on Christmas day by my eldest daughter, Pip, she thought it worth capturing the moment! I have cooked the Christmas turkey on a Weber BBQ since the late 80’s. The BBQ in the image is the fifth I have owned, and with the ash collection system beneath the kettle, is, I can testify, the best yet! Behind and almost obscured is an earlier model, which had just completed cooking a duck to accompany the turkey.

The ability to free up the oven for accompaniments, is the great advantage of cooking on a BBQ, also as can be seen just in shot, is a warming glass of port, an obligatory addition to keep out the chill! For anyone unaccustomed with cooking on a bbq, the secret is to use an indirect method of heating the bird, the coals, and this only works with briquettes, should be constrained to either side of the fire bed, avoiding any direct heat beneath the bird. Also it is sensible to cover the top of the bird with foil until the last forty minutes or so, to allow the browning effect of the hot gases passing over the meat, to be golden coloured. I always prep the bird with garlic butter, between the skin and the flesh, this infuses with the meat to give a tasty flavour with a moist texture, important, as it is so easy to create a very dry roast with a turkey.

I first took up barbecuing when I lived in the Middle East in the early 1980’s, at that time I had a small Weber kettle BBQ, called a “Smokie Joe”, I recall returning to the UK in the summer of ‘81 and attempting to find another Weber, which proved to be a real problem, I eventually discovered one at a garden centre in the Cotswolds, not far from my then in-laws home near Broadway. The small kettle bbq served well during the early years, but on leaving the Middle East in 1984 and returning to the UK, as the owner of two small bbq’s I elected to retire them and purchased a large version. From then on cooking over charcoal became something of a mission.

This picture of daily life at Parlington is published simply to record how things are today, perhaps if anyone is interested in the future they will get an understanding of what we do, or did, in the early twenty first century. I would love to know how the Gascoigne family enjoyed Christmas all those years ago, we can only surmise!

When I was at school, I recall being taught physics and it is the lasting recollections of that time that have caused me to be confused about the science of climate change; the present daily dose of verbal abuse from our political apparatchiks and the endless stream of doom from the msm (main stream media), have left me wanting to know the truth about what is happening. I say this because I have lived through times of previous doom laden predictions, all of which failed to materialise to the extent predicted. But there is a difference this time, my understanding of basic physics is being undermined.

How could there be a greenhouse effect; the earth’s atmoshere is an open system, nothing like a greenhouse, which gets hotter during the day, as the glass enclosure prevents convection of the warmed air?

Why is it that a trace gas CO² which represents such a vital part of life on the planet, is cast as a pollutant?

Then there is the matter of the second law of thermodynamics, which to me and many others completely destroys the arguments put by the proponents of AGW, so I am worried, was my education a complete waste of time?

The funny thing is that I know of no previous time when our enlightenment has lifted us from the grip of nature such that we enjoy longer life terms and generally better health, with an ability to have leisure time, previously denied to most of our forebears. How is it that our “progress” is cast as the devil in all this?

The following is from another web site which looks to address the inconsistencies in the present alarm about anthropogenic climate change.

Paper by John McRobert

The events at Copenhagen reveal a latter day lynch mob in full fury. In this case, the innocent victim is Carbon Dioxide. Without fair trial it has been deemed guilty of a most heinous crime, warming the planet.

Regards,
John McRobert
Indooroopilly
Qld Australia

The full paper is available here [You will need Adobe Acrobat]:



Also worth reading is this article, [again Adobe Acrobat is required]:



For more information about the subject from John McRobert, click here.