the head of Alfredo Garcia, on a chip

It's portable

It's starch

It's got fake chemical flavours

it's been tested on rats, so

EAT IT!

what is it with modern cuisine that we are
waiting for new flavours of potato chip?
Honestly, chicken flavour, pork flavour. As
if those flavours could possibly be real.

You'll be at the counter saying "oh, never
tried that flavour". It's chemicals, you
morons.
Now it's made the news.

I'm gunning for bagel flavour. And then
used panty flavour, or caviar flavour.

cut to the video:

Postman decapitated by bankers in Canary Wharf

It's well-known now that the Tory goverment
in the UK has given away the Royal Mail service
to their buddies in the City.

But did they have to decapitate Postman Pat, that
cultural icon? in a satanic ritual? and keep his
head as a trophy? oh, the humanity of it all!

the real bloody story is how the government gave away
national wealth to their friends. They were looking
for anybody in a suit to give them money. I hope at least
GDP went up.

checkit: The Guardian

Royal Mail sell-off advisers allocated millions of shares

Shares allocated to advisory banks have risen in value by £29m since floatation
Rowena Mason, political correspondent
Friday 25 October 2013 19.52 BST

Royal Mail
Royal Mail shares closed on Friday at a new record of 555p. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Banks advising the government on the controversial sell-off of Royal Mail were allocated millions of shares that have shown a profit of about £29m since its flotation. The gains come on top of the near £17m handed over to the banks in fees for their advice on the float.

Ministers have revealed that City advisers helping with the flotation were given the opportunity to buy 13m shares in Royal Mail as investors rushed to buy into the new private company.

Since then, the government has been criticised for potentially short-changing the taxpayer by selling the shares at 330p, when they closed on Friday at a new record of 555p, valuing the company at £5.55bn – 67% up in a fortnight.

Vince Cable, the business secretary, has defended the price of the sell-off, saying value for money is "about more than just the level of proceeds received on day one".

A spokesman for the Department of Business said the government's advisers, including Goldman Sachs, UBS and other junior advisers, were not given preferential treatment when shares were allocated and some did not get any at all.

He refused to say how many shares were offered to each adviser. The spokesman stressed that it is "standard practice", saying there was no possibility of a conflict of interest because of "Chinese walls" between different banking divisions.

However, Adrian Bailey, the chairman of the House of Commons business committee and a Labour MP, late Friday raised questions about the process, saying he plans to grill ministers about how many shares were offered to each bank, their level of fees and their role in the valuation of the company.

"These are questions that I will ask on November 20th," he said. "When you look at the balance between the retail and the institutional percentage of shares allocated, and the potential conflict of interest from the advisers, I think there are grounds for looking at the whole way privatisations are carried out in future. Unfortunately the government at the moment seems completely blind to that and the perception it creates".

The shares were allocated to the banking advisers separately from the £16.9m of fees due to be paid for their role in the flotation, and may have been sold or added to at any point since the flotation date.

Their allocation emerged after Labour peer Lord Donoughue asked the government how many shares were sold to the banking advisers who advised on the price of the flotation.

Lord Popat, a Conservative whip, said no employee working on the transaction or investment bank division was allocated shares but "other divisions of our banking advisers, separated from the investment banking divisions by the information barriers, were allocated 13m shares".

A senior banking source strongly denied any of the banks would directly profit from the being allocated shares, saying they would have been bought to help make money on behalf of clients in the asset management divisions. He said there were strict Chinese walls at the banks that mean those advising on the deals would not even ever have met those buying shares on behalf of clients.

Goldman Sachs and UBS declined to comment.

The news comes amid reports that JP Morgan put a possible top-of-the-range valuation on Royal Mail at £10bn – more than three times the £3.3bn that it was eventually sold for by the government.

Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, said there were now a "wide range of questions being asked about the government's Royal Mail fire sale which Ministers need to answer".

"While Vince Cable has claimed that guaranteeing taxpayer value was 'central' to his strategy, doubts are emerging on the process ministers put in place. We know that Vince Cable considered, and rejected, the option of getting a better deal for the taxpayer," he said.

"At a time when the public are seeing services cut back and their living standards squeezed, they will not forgive ministers if they are left short changed."

Royal uncharted waters- Good Ship Yellow Journalism

When it comes to media regulation, the British Theatrical Troupe
of Westminster is expert at appearing to be Basil Fawlty. They
wrap their media handling in kid gloves.
We have serious crimes of phone hacking just going to court,
so I ask, why is there a new royal charter coming for the media?
Why do they need a royal charter and not a law?

Is the royal charter a dodge? Is it necessary if criminal behaviour
is actually policed? Why mess around with a pseudo-law that
will be ineffective?

They do it all so as to appear decisive, and yet to most of us
they look like morons. The joke is on us though, because
as we belittle them, we don't see them doing immoral stuff.

The Tories then warn the media that Red Ed will 

go outside the law to ban them all. What utter

bullsh*t.

there are more than a few hints that the new 
charter the new libel law will make matters worse
for us, and especially the internet, and better
for the media barons.



Maybe these guys can help you understand 
what's going on:
http://hackinginquiry.org/
they speak for the victims of the latest media
crimes

checkit:   The Guardian

Maria Miller tells press: agree to charter or face worse

Culture secretary warns industry that Labour and Lib Dems could join forces to regulate if new system is rejected

    Nicholas Watt and Josh Halliday          

   Friday 11 October 2013 20.23 BST      

Britain's newspaper industry has been given a blunt warning by the government that it risks being subject to full statutory regulation if it refuses to accept a royal charter that is designed to place the system on a lighter footing.

Maria Miller, the culture secretary, is understood to have told the industry that she cannot stop the Labour party and Liberal Democrats joining forces to agree amendments to future legislation if the press refuses to abide by the new system.

The warning was issued as Miller held negotiations with the industry on the eve of an agreement by the three main parties over a royal charter, which was announced on Friday. Days after rejecting a rival press royal charter submitted by the industry, three privy counsellors from the three parties – Miller, Harriet Harman for Labour and Lord Wallace of Tankerness for the Lib Dems – agreed an amended version of the cross-party royal charter.

The revised charter addresses concerns raised by local and regional publishers by introducing a small administration fee for complainants who wish to use the new regulator's arbitration scheme, which aims to settle legal disputes out of court.

It's a housing bubble, not inflation

I don't know why nobody has, until recently tried to publish
data that show that the UK government is lying about
inflation? We all know that they're lying. We can see the
food bill rise.

The reason CPI is stuck at 2% is because the government
fears that a higher percentage will lead to wage demands.
And the dogma is to squash pay demands, and kill unions.

Well, I've replaced the CPI with the CIF inflation indicator.

Consumers is F$%^ked

Now, thanks to the power lobby asking for 9.999% rises, on
average, in our bills, they've finally gone too far. Maybe there
will be a Westminster Inquiry that will reach a verdict in
2025. The companies with the big balls opted for the two-
digit increase. 10%

checkit: The Green Benches

Dr Éoin Clarke (PhD) - TheGreenBenches@Hotmail.com

Friday, 18 October 2013

A list of every major price rise on life's essentials to occur under David Cameron

Wages have grown at an average of 1.5% a year for the last 3 years, and wages have grown by 6% since the Tories came to power. The reason you have not felt the benefits of these pay rises (or freezes as I recognise for many of you) is that prices have been rising much quicker than wages. Below I detail 8 key sectors of the economy that are essential to our survival. I'm not interested in the rising costs of luxury items, or the profits companies wish to make from things we do not need, the focus of this research is on the items we need to survive. Food, Water, Shelter, Heat, Electricity, Rail, Bus, Stamps are the day to day basics we all rely upon to conduct our daily business, such as traveling to work. Prices in these areas have been sky rocketing far and above wages for the last 3 or 4 years and perhaps longer. If you wish to explore the evidence I based my calculations upon then please see the hyper links that you can click on in brackets after each item on the list.

Price Rises since 2010

    Stamps 46%-56%                           (evidence here).

    Electricity 22-39%                        (evidence here).

    Gas 17-45%                                   (evidence here).

    Private Rents up £1,100 a year    (here, here).

    Food 19%                                     (here).

    Water Charges 20%                      (here, here, here).

    Bus Fares 22%                              (here, here, here).

    Rail Fares 27%                             (here, here).

A breakdown of Food Rises (evidence here).

    Vegetables 15%.

    Potatoes 20%.

    Fish 26%.

    Fruit 49%.

aspire to be Eminem

There's a big future in trailer parks, around the
world. Bankers have made home ownership
impossible for many people. Banks are so
seriously in debt they cannot lend out any
money, unless they get it first, for free, from
the government.

So, the big money boys are investing in all manner
of trailer park paraphernalia. They're saying that
the whole white-picket-fence dream is about to
go down the sh*tter.

Just think, your kid could become the next 

Eminem, the 8-mile wunderkind. 

[the world's so empty without me]

checkit: Liberty blitz

The Carlyle Group is the Latest “Smart Money” Investor to Ditch the Buy-to-Rent Trade

Posted on October 2, 2013           

At first, the rise in residential real estate prices across the U.S. was hard to explain. The economy remained in the dumps, while college kids were saddled with debts and poor paying jobs. A large portion of the demographic that typically enters the first home market was simply put, not in the market. Pretty soon it became obvious what was happening. Insider types and “smart money” was simply buying up every property they could find in order to turn around and rent them to the average citizen who had just been priced out of the market due their all cash bids. Add to this tens of billions of dollars in foreign laundered money and voilà, a new housing bubble was born.

However, as more and more lemmings began to chase the trade, initial investors have started to get nervous. First it was Och Ziff, then OakTree, then Carrington and finally now perhaps the most infamous of all insider private equity firms, the Carlyle Group. So now we have four well known and respected investors actively and publicly trying to exit the trade. As usual, they are selling to suckers such as life-insurance companies and real estate investment trusts.

From Bloomberg:

Carlyle Group LP (CG), the private-equity firm with more than a third of its $2.3 billion U.S. real estate fund in apartments, is reducing holdings of multifamily housing as rent growth slows from a post-recession surge.

Apartment-rent growth is slowing as the U.S. homebuying market rebounds and a wave of multifamily building adds to supply. In the third quarter, tenants on average paid 3 percent more than a year earlier after landlord concessions, down from 3.9 percent annual growth in effective rents in 2012, research firm Reis Inc. (REIS) said in a report today.

Apartment-rent growth is slowing as the U.S. home buying market rebounds and a wave of multifamily building adds to supply. In the third quarter, tenants on average paid 3 percent more than a year earlier after landlord concessions, down from 3.9 percent annual growth in effective rents in 2012, research firm Reis Inc. (REIS) said in a report today.

As it sells apartments, Carlyle is focusing investments in areas such as senior housing, self-storage units and manufactured homes, where demand tends to be driven by life changes such as retirement or marriages, and isn’t so closely tied to changes in employment and gross domestic product, Stuckey said.

About one-third of the firm’s real estate investments are in properties that are more directly affected by the economy, such as office and retail.

“Our basic view is we’re in a low-growth environment,” Stuckey said.

They know full well what’s coming…