Morts Musings

Coming as it does during a period when many of the world’s major economies are still crawling their ways out of recession there have been question marks about how successful the 2009 Dubai Airshow would be in terms of generating sales for it’s exhibitors.

However, as the show progresses it would appear that it’s not all doom and gloom for the aviation industry. It seems that this year’s big winner will most likely be the military hardware sector, and it’s no surprise that companies which produce military aircraft are lining up to take part in the show, one consultancy recently estimated that Middle Eastern spending on military aircraft would top £100bn by 2014.
Amid all the clamour and competition it’s nice to see a British company, BAE, managing to grab it’s share of the sales. It would appear that so far they’re having a pretty good show, as part of the consortium which makes the Eurofighter Typhoon they’ll no doubt have been buoyed up by how much interest the jet fighter has generated from Gulf States during the airshow.

BAE have also generated quite a bit of buzz with the annoucement that their unmanned Mantis aircraft completed it’s maiden test flight recently. This is particularly significant since the Mantis is the first ever fully autonomous, twin-engined UAV. It hasn’t all been military hardware for BAE though, their Avro Business Jet has also proved popular; not only has it been selected by the governments of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai as their VIP aircraft, it’s also won orders from the British firm Infinite Engineering Services.

Another big piece of news from the show is the annoucement by the UAE’s national carrier, Etihad, of a £750m investment package to enhance their operations across the board; no doubt they’ve got a few quid to splash around after all the flights to Dubai which they sold to those attending the airshow.

So, maybe the doom mongers are wrong; some sections of the civilian aviation industry might still be looking a little flat but overall it’s obviously far from penniless, and military spending never seems to go out of fashion. Overall it looks like the speculation that the Airshow would be a complete and utter flop may have been a little premature.

Lingerie, we all know what it is, it’s great stuff! It makes women feel more confident and attractive, and us men, well, we love it because it makes women more confident and attractive, everybody’s a winner!
Naturally enough then, it’s no surprise that there are a host of companies selling naughty nighties and underwear these days. Everyone from M&S, whose sexy, yet somehow at the same time sensible, lingerie is one of their flag ship product ranges, to the slightly more niche, and perhaps provocative brands; whatever your fancy it’s probably only a quick Google away.

Still, there’s “niche” markets and then there are some truly odd offerings which occasionally hit the world of underwear. One example of the latter is the, soon to be released, “golfing bra” from novelty bra maker Triumph International. The bodice includes an unfoldable 1.5m putting mat with the bra cups, unsurprisingly, becoming the holes themselves, & a built in speaker which congratulates you with a cry of “Nice shot!” whenever you hit the targets. But wait, there’s more! The top also features pockets for carrying balls and tees, as well as a flag pin that doubles as a scoring pencil. The outfit also includes a skirt, with the words “Be Quiet” on it’s rear, which can easily be transformed into a flag.

Other than carrying a putter around, the wearer really is all set and ready to go whenever they fancy some putting action, at least in theory; The fact that doing so would require the wearer to strip down to their pants is, sadly, likely to deter many from using this novelty lingerie outfit to it’s full potential.

I saw this article in The Times and thought it was such an odd little story that it would be perfect for a dull Friday afternoon.

The piece looks at the robbery of a French bank security van, the twist being that it appears it was the security firm’s own driver who was responsible for the heist. You’ve got to think that the man has to have balls the size of water melons, be really desperate, or be a few scones short of a picnic to try something so brazen.
Apparently his plan was so audacious (i.e. stupid) that the French police were originally working on the theory that he’d been kidnapped, along with the van, by a gang of robbers, or that someone close to him was being held captive by a gang in order to ensure his co-operation. However, it appears that this isn’t the case, and having visited the chap’s home, to find it pretty much cleaned out, and checked on his bank accounts, which have all been emptied recently, the French Police have come to the conclusion that the driver took off with the van, and the 11 million Euros it contained, of his own free will!

The driver had obviously planned his heist quite carefully, not only had he tied up loose ends, ready to dissappear, but he’d also done his homework well enough to be able to disable the van’s tracking system, and get the money out of the van’s armoured vault; A job which normally requires two people co-operating. Another thing which points at him having accomplises is the sheer amount of money he managed to shift, 11 million in notes has got to make for a fair old stack of paper! Even though the security van was abandoned in a quiet side street you’d still think that someone shifting the contents of a bank securitry van into some other vehicle (maybe he’d planned ahead and arranged van rental?) would draw attention, but as of yet the French Police haven’t mentioned witnesses coming forward.

So is the guy going to get away with it? On one hand it seems like such a stupid plan that it has to fail, but the guy’s obviously planned fairly well. The police don’t appear to have got him yet, despite knowing his identity, & although the French borders are being watched for him, you’d think anyone who had planned such an audacious robbery would have thought about where they were going to go in the longer term, and how they were going to get there.
One thing’s for sure, if the French Police don’t manage to catch this guy pretty soon, they’ll end up looking a little more like Inspector Clouseau than they’d like:

It’s not the first time we’ve seen the Govt reject the advice of experts when they fail to come to the conclusion’s which the Govt would like them to, but to me the sacking of Dr Nutt, chair of the Govt’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, last weekend, when he had the termerity to give an expert opinion which contradicts the Govts uninformed, but official, line, sums up the hubris & utter arrogance which have been hallmarks of both the Brown and Blair govts.

It also quite clearly reveals that the govts objections to cannabis and ectasy seem to come down to “drugs are illegal because they’re bad, and they’re bad because they’re illegal”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these drugs are 100% harmless, but if an expert, whose job it is to know, is stating that they’re less harmful than substances which are legal and freely available then surely that has to be a pretty good arguement for their legalisation?
OK, you could take the opposite tack and say that maybe tobacco and alcohol should be made illegal instead, but apart from being a non-starter in terms of getting the populace to accept such a move, not to mention how much it would cost the exchequer in terms of lost duty, there comes a point where govt has to butt out and let people make their own choices (and take responsibility for them) even if there is some risk involved; Else we’ll eventually end up as a society of joyless wage slaves whose only purpose is to be good little workers. I mean, if you want to start talking about banning anything which is dangerous then lets start by looking at privately owned vehicles; how many deaths and injuries do they cause each year on our roads? By contrast we’re talking about cannabis & ectasy, susbstances which routinely kill less people each year than bed related misadventures!

There’s also the fact that history has shown that prohibition doesn’t work, where someone stands to make a profit you’ll just get a black market economy spring up to meet consumer demand for prohibited goods. As things stand in this country millions of otherwise perfectly law abiding, productive members of society are criminalised because they want, and choose, to smoke cannabis. If the govt truly represented the people they’d accept that for most users cannabis is a relatively benign substance with minimal knock on effects for wider society, and they’d legalise it.
Yes I said legalise it, forget decriminalisation, although it’s often touted as an acceptable method for govt to look the other way and quietly accept that maybe cannabis isn’t such an evil drug after all, decriminalisation is in fact the worst of both worlds from a societal point of view. Users are still forced to interact with the black market, organised criminals, in order to get the stuff, and this has a number of wider implications. It means that there aren’t any safe guards on quality, no product information in terms of the strength of any particular batch, and most importantly of all, money spent on cannabis is going to support organised crime!
On the other hand if it were legalised these issues could all be eliminated; users could be sure they knew what they were getting, and wouldn’t be funding criminals, but on the contrary could be providing revenue for govt.

At a time when we’re being told that, due to the banking bail out, our country is going to be in debt for decades to come you’d think that the govt might be open to new means of raising revenue. The Home Office estimates that in 2006 the UK drug trade was worth between £3.5 and £5.8 billion, not enough to solve the country’s money woes, but getting a slice of any figure which is measured in the billions isn’t to be sniffed at!

Really it seems like a no brainer to me. Now that “the genie’s out of the bottle” it’s never going away, people are going to take these drugs, they’ll find a way to get them because someone else can make money from supplying them. When even the experts are saying that dope is less harmful than substances which society already makes freely available, why can’t the govt just get over the outdated dogma that “drugs are bad m’kay” and do the thing which would benefit everbody except the organised criminals?

This piece in the New Scientist lays out the wider picture, in terms of the govt’s rocky relationship with it’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. There’s also a petition running on the No. 10 site here, if you want to join the call to re-instate Dr Nutt.