Overdressed? Or overvalued...

---

Oh good Lord: the best kept secret in luxury lingerie is out...but not all the way. Victoria's Secret has revealed, after three months of waiting - apparently - the Fantasy Miracle Bra, worn here by Brazilian model Adriana Lima (IMHO not the best of her pictures). The brilliant bra, valued at 2 MILLION Dollars/Euros/whatever was created by designers Itelieni Damiani and includes the odd topaz and sapphire amongst 2,000 diamonds and 18 carat white gold.

Wouldn't you love to get your hands on them...I mean it. Apparently Adriana says she kicks her butt into high gear - making sure everything she does is healthy - to get into shape; her workouts are skipping and boxing, where she can use her bodyweight instead of machines. Pass the tissue. Click to enlarge...the image!

Update: "Dyslexic man walks into a bra"...ROFL. 3rd in top 50 jokes...P.S. not sure if that's his but Tommy Cooper (Comedy God) is credited with 13 of the top 50 best jokes.

P.P.S. jokes 6,7 and 8...I think I just wet myself (booze helps...and it's nearly 3 am.)

Offering optimism, opportunity...

---

"This evening we have come here to celebrate a great leader who championed a profound idea. That idea was freedom. At home and abroad, she expanded the boundaries of freedom – and sculpted a legacy that spans generations and crosses party lines..."

"...This evening, I speak as more than an admirer of Margaret Thatcher. I speak as a person grateful for the opportunities this nation has given me – and the opportunities she has created for every other individual in Great Britain."

"...And we cannot forget that she is no ideologue, but a person of pragmatism, an optimist whose optimism is founded in her faith in the individual."

"Hers is a generous spirit, a spirit based in an appreciation of personal potential and not of an impersonal ideology. As she said: 'With all due respect to the drafters of the American Declaration of Independence, all men and women are not created equal, at least in regard to their characters, abilities and aptitudes.'"

Rupert Murdoch's inaugural Margaret Thatcher lecture [HERE...at The Guardian!]

Obvoluting observations...

---

England expects...today is Trafalgar Day

An apple a day...today is Apple Day

Sometimes what appears bad or uninviting is in fact the best course: despite fruit not being a usual impulse-buy or particularly "exciting" - especially among children - they are so good for us in many ways.

Sometimes our greatest defences don't at first appear as such: interestingly, after the Battle of Trafalgar the opposition declared that "The English fleet is annihilated"! Such is propaganda after such a decisive action.

Update: Oh, by the way, just in case you missed the parallels: overall spending by the UK government over the period of this parliament will fall - as predicted - but only by maybe a whole 3% in real terms (at worst). This is the same level of spending as in 2008...so why all the hyperbole, lies and abuse?

Some might say George Osborne should have gone further.

Update 2: say it again, loud and clear: For the avoidance of doubt, Repeat after me: "total public spending (Total Managed Expenditure) in 2014-15 will be higher in real terms than in 2008-09". How do they get away with this? "Even after these spending cuts, total public spending ... will be higher ". By any real world definition, these cannot be cuts." [EU Referendum]

Update 3: Just in case some dumb fuck hasn't got it: then please remember where the deficit came from [please]

Osborne...

---

Impressive display and content...Brown still missing.

First impressions: More for less; "Sanity and stability"! All Spending Review details at HM Treasury.

Owing, owing owed...

---

Worth highlighting time and again: The Real National Debt: A Decade of Reckless Growth. A new report by the TaxPayers' Alliance "reveals the true extent of UK national debt":

• At the end of 2009-10 the real national debt stood at £7.9 trillion, over £300,000 for every single household in Britain
• During the last decade debt has more than tripled, soaring from 230 per cent of GDP (£2.3 trillion) up to 560 per cent of GDP (£7.9 trillion)
• Official national debt (quoted by the Chancellor in his budget) hugely underestimates taxpayer liabilities
• Relative to GDP this is by far the biggest national debt we have ever had since records began

Source: Taxpayers' Alliance Full report (pdf): HERE

Also interesting to read the notes to editors at the end of that article, presumably because we are not being told by the MSM, the BBC won't tell you; we are getting "immune" to the consequences and fail to understand/take-in the problem: "Large numbers can be difficult to imagine; £1 trillion = £1,000 billion; £1 billion = £1,000 million". That and the confusion, sometimes intentional, of failing to distinguish the fact that the "national debt is the total amount of money the UK Government currently owes. This is different to the national deficit, which is the amount of money UK Government spends in excess of income. Each year we run a deficit, the national debt grows. Britain has been running a national deficit for the past 9 years" and that all-in-all it is "not merely the huge scale of the national debt that is cause for concern, but also the rate at which it is increasing."

Overrunning otters...

---

Not wanting to bad mouth the good news that the otter populations have recovered and are "back from the brink of extinction" (some areas at maximum capacity levels) but it is reported that the "Where once the population may have been as low as a few hundred, it is now thought to run into thousands". Yet HERE in the we're told that "Since July 2007 CUOP have taken otters from the whole of England and Wales, and have so far examined over a thousand otters from all over the UK, predominantly killed in road traffic accidents" (my emphasis). If over a thousand have been roadkill in a few years, why are the numbers only "thought" to run into thousands?

Update (about 5 minutes later!): maybe I misread it, or it's badly written and that it's really 'over a thousand' since 1992...mind you, over a thousand in 15 years is still a massive number if the population was considered "as low as a few hundred".

Outing over-hypers...

---

The BBC seem to very keen on bigging-up the cuts, on every news programme every day there seems to be at least some mention of the evil and woe the 'savage' cuts will have but very little castigation of who is the cause of WHY cuts are necessary: the bald, jug-eared, media whore HERE for example. They are labour luvvies through and through. I hope their coverage gets more and more scrituny; let's see what they say on Wednesday after Osborne sets out his stall in the spending review. However...

"As we approach the comprehensive spending review, it is worth reflecting on the scale of the mess left by Labour. Labour’s mismanagement of the economy means that this year the UK will be borrowing £109bn that has nothing to do with the recession...." [Link]

The modest cuts are merely CORRECTING THE SPENDING BINGE; they are, says Tim Morgan for the Centre for Policy Studies, "A shower, not a hurricane" [Pdf] He explains that New Labour was in office during a decade of irresponsible excess and that to understand why cuts are essential now we must understand where Blair and Brown went wrong.

"To understand this issue, policy-makers and the broader public need to be fully aware that the economic history of the UK (and of many other western countries) over the last decade has been a chapter of excess, on the part of individuals, businesses and government alike."

Nobody can deny this. In that paper Tim "demonstrates that so vast is the scale of Government spending following 13 years of profligacy that, relatively speaking, the proposed spending cuts are actually quite modest overall. They merely involve reversing, over five years, a comparatively small part of the enormous increases which took place in the previous decade.". So says George Trefgarne on "The true scale of the cuts".

Oncoming oligophagous options...

---

Oligophagous, adj. - eating a few sorts of food only.

In Venezuela, having only a few sorts of food is the likely future: hot on the heels of the Agroisleña (now to be called Agropatria, no really!) takeover last week Hugo showed yesterday that the trend continues when he announced, again on 'Aló, Presidente' a similar takeover of Fertinitro. This nationalization, said Chavez, would achieve "real and effective implementation of national plans for planting and production made necessary by the Executive and Socialist Plan for Agricultural and Food Sovereignty". Very Stalinesque. Interesting then, that  back in 2005, after "sabotage" of the oil and petrochemical industry, Crusty decreed the creation of Pequiven, parent company of Fertinitro, the precise aim of which was to meet domestic demand for fertilizer and boost the "National Sowing Plan" (ahem)...a program that "advances the Bolivarian Government". Yep, next week he announces record harvest and tractor production stats!

I've also just seen another sad tale, I had visited this farm, look what has become of it. I know similar tales in other farms I have visted and worked on. I hope deananash doesn't mind me copying here most of his - the first on that blogpost - comment:

""A picture is truly worth a thousand words." When one steals a man's work (production), it is morally equivalent to 'killing' him – at least in terms of the amount of time it took him to produce whatever was stolen...

Every theft by this government is the moral equivalent to murdering its citizens. Only in this case, it’s death by a thousand cuts.

And EVERYONE is going to pay."