Sunday, 9 August 2015

Ferguson Police Shooting

Today marks a year since Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson. Here is the fergusonaction.com response, which you can also download as a pdf.

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Tuesday, 13 January 2015

Everybody Yell Timber Because It's Going Down

In 1989, the Office for National Statistics began monitoring inflation. The idea was to give us more warning in times of economic volatility so we could take measures to cushion the blow in case of, say, a global financial meltdown. Today, however, they have served a purpose by telling us the Consumer Price Index is now at its lowest point since records began, even beating government targets.


In real terms, that means everything's getting cheaper. That is to say, things aren't getting as massively more expensive as usual. If the current rate continues, everything will only be 0.5% more expensive this time next year. That's 10% less expensive than they'd be now if they had increased at the same rate, as it was exactly a year ago, between then and today. So that's cleared that up.

In particular, petrol is exceptionally cheap right now with barrels costing just over $45 but the news was quick to issue us with a stark yet simple warning - don't fuck it up. Inexplicably, the media seems to have decided that because we can now fill up at something resembling a relatively reasonable price, the public are about to stop buying petrol.


Yes, the consensus among Britain's news outlets seems to be that we don't have to buy petrol, we just do - when it's really expensive. Now it's getting cheaper, we're all going to stop driving and wait for the price to keep falling like perpetual bargain machines. This will cause deflation, bringing the economy to a standstill and not even Bank of England governor Mark Carney could save us from our own stupidity. Of course, the poor bloke did his best to explain to Britain's reporters, with the tone of a patient parent teaching their child to read, that shops make products cheaper because they want us to buy more not less but he may as well have spoken to thin air for all the difference it made to this scaremongering narrative.

Mark did give the viewers something to smile about though, predicting
"Interest rates will start to increase over the next couple of years" before along came e.on director David Bird, announcing proudly that he's about to cut our gas bills by 3.5%. As it turns out, he's actually just screwing us out of the additional 11.5% he could be saving us after a 30% drop in gas prices since this time last year. Bird claims to need the surplus to keep up with the cost of e.on's infrastructure, so we could always hope he's lining our gas pipes with gold. Or perhaps the sun is about to be eclipsed by swarms of drones flying gas canisters to our homes.

We can seemingly look forward to these drastic changes in the very near future because tomorrow, the government is discussing whether to force the six biggest energy companies to pass on these wholesale savings to the public. I have every confidence David Cameron will fight our corner on this one so don't worry about that teacher you always hated, soon you'll be able to get a job flying gas canisters through their letterbox.