Neighbours Entrails Intact

My thanks to Steve Green for including me in his blog-roll and especially for creating a rather good new icon for BilloTheWisp. I feel torn between Steves new icon and the original old Neanderthal BilloTheWisp. Consequently, from now on I have decided that BilloTheWisp is going to have a split personality and veer from fundamental Neanderthalism through to an etherial Englishness. The exact choice will be highly dependant on the amount of cider I have had to opportunity to consume that evening.

In Neanderthal BilloTheWisp mode I should report that I have had some complaints about using a neighbours entails for forcasting the events of the new year (BilloTheWisps Crystal Ball for 2010)

There are those who feel that sacrificing one of my neighbours for the rather dubious data retrieved was somewhat over the top. However I can reassure everyone that nobody actually lost their life.

I can further relay the happy news that the neighbour concerned will be out of intensive care before the end of the week with his entrails fully restored to their proper location.

Finally as a precursor to a set of posts on Globalisation and Foreign Aid, I will post a statement I heard many years ago from a bitter retired career diplomat. I also saw this repeated almost word for word in a Spectator article Here.

The old guy said:

Foreign aid is really just an excellent way to get the poor in rich countries to subsidise the lifestyles and excesses of the rich in poor countries.

It may be an extremely cynical and pessimistic viewpoint but, unfortunately it has some echoes of truth about it. I'm going to beat this about a bit as is my want in future posts.

Particularly I want to examine how the average Joe usually gets screwed irrespective of whether he lives in Dorchester or Mumbai. But more on that on another day.