Complete and Utter Zebu

During the holiday season, unless there is a Zebu stampede, we thought we’d instead provide a little light relief. Although we only encountered this letter recently, dated 2009, it was apparently sent to Mr. Miliband back in 2007. It is, naturally, said to be genuine. However, this seems possible as Nigel Johnson-Hill does exist, being chairman of Bedlam Asset Management and director of the Vintry Wine Company. Sadly, we have been unable to find any evidence of a reply.

NIGEL JOHNSON-HILL, PARK FARM, LIPHOOK GU30 7JF

Rt Hon David Miliband, MP
Secretary of State
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)
Nobel House
17 Smith Square
London SW1P 3JR

1st July 2007

Dear Secretary of State,

My friend, who is in farming at the moment, recently received a cheque for £3,000 from the Rural Payments Agency for not rearing pigs. I would like to join the “not rearing pigs” business.
In your opinion, what is the best kind of farm not to rear pigs on, and which is the best breed of pig not to rear? I want to be sure I approach this endeavour in keeping with all government policies, as dictated by the EU under the Common Agricultural Policy. I would prefer not to rear bacon pigs, but if this is not the type you want not rearing, I will gladly not rear porkers. Are there any advantages in not rearing rare breeds such as Saddlebacks or Gloucester Old Spots, or are too many people already not rearing these?

As I see it, the hardest part of this programme will be keeping an accurate record of how many pigs I haven’t reared. Are there Government or Local Authority courses on this?

My friend is very satisfied with this business. He has been rearing pigs for forty years or so, and the best he ever made on them was £1,422 in 1968. That is, until this year, when he received a cheque for not rearing any.

If I get £3,000 for not rearing 50 pigs, will I get £6,000 for not rearing 100?

I plan to operate on a small scale at first, holding myself down to about 4,000 pigs not raised, which will mean about £240,000 for the first year. As I become more expert in not rearing pigs, I plan to be more ambitious, perhaps increasing to, say, 40,000 pigs not reared in my second year, for which I should expect about £2.4 million from your department. Incidentally, I wonder if I would be eligible to receive tradable carbon credits for all of these pigs not producing harmful and polluting methane gas?

Another point: These pigs that I plan not to rear will not eat 2,000 tonnes of cereals. I understand that you also pay farmers for not growing crops. Will I qualify for payments for not growing cereals to not feed the pigs I don’t rear?

I am also considering the ‘not milking cows’ business, so please send any information you have on that too. Please could you also include the current Defra advice on set aside fields? Can this be done on an e-commerce basis with virtual fields (of which I seem to have several thousand hectares)?

In view of the above you will realise that I will be totally unemployed, and will therefore qualify for unemployment benefits.

I shall of course be voting for your party at the next general election.

Yours faithfully

Nigel Johnson-Hill

A TV show in Australia called Hungry Beast decided to see just how assiduously their nation’s press checked the gibberish, spin and self-promotion that comprises most press releases before reporting them. They invented a body called The Levitt Institute to make “nation wide studies of the Australian sociological character”

The Levitt Institute’s first report was, rather fittingly, about gullibility. It claimed to have studied various cities and found that Sydney was the most gullible in Australia. They issued the report through a news service and it should have got no further. After all, the only reference online to The Levitt Institute was the website they had only just set up, the Levitt Institute’s address was a derelict building and within the report was the sentence:

“These results were completely made up to be fictitious material through a process of modified truth and credibility nodes.”

It didn’t matter a spit. The nation’s press lapped it up like a cat attacking spilt cream. Eventually, one journalist smelt something fishy and did a bit of digging. It took them just 10 minutes to work out what was going on.

Here’s the video explaining it all. The question is, would news organisations in America or Europe be any more diligent in checking something out before parrotting press release guff? As the guys on Hungry Beast point out, if they found it so easy to con the press with their slender resources, how much easier is it for well-funded special-interest groups to get their message across?

Other posts:

The wine label that breaks the law – by telling the truth

CCTV cameras. You won’t believe how they “calculated” how many there are

A text message from Virgin Mobile says ” Some news about your Virgin Mobile call costs. We’re making some changes to a few of our call charges. National and local toll rates – that’s numbers like 0870, 0871, 0844 and 0845 – are changing to 40p per minute.”

What “making some changes” actually means, of course, is “increasing our charges”. More weasel words.

Although it’s almost over. Debenham’s “Summer Spectacular” caught our eye for several reasons. The first, clearly, is the title. By what stretch of a retailer’s imagination can May possibly be called summer, particularly given that the past few days have been the coldest in May for many years?

It isn’t that, however, that got our goat. Nor is it the discount of “up to 25% OFF”, with the “up to” in small type. No, what staggered us is the boast of “FREE DELIVERY”.

Look at the top and you can see what “Free Delivery” actually means. There it says “Free delivery when you collect from store”.

That’s right. You have to wait till you get a confirmation email and then, providing you collect it within 14 days, you can have the goods you paid for without paying anything more, providing you go and get them yourself. Wow! We can hardly contain ourselves.

Debenhams got a mention in Complete and Utter Zebu for letter it sent its customers about a sale with “15% Off Everything All Weekend”. Debenhams, however, had a weird understanding of the word “everything”, for it did not include cosmetics, wine, kettles, toasters, blenders, mobile phones or many other items. In fact, the Advertising Standards Authority later rules that the store had been misleading people.

The offer of “free delivery” has the odd exception too. “This offer is not available on debenhamskitchenappliances.com, debenhamselectricals.com, debenhamscurtains.com, debenhamspersonalisedart.com, Debenhamsentertainment.com, Debenhamstailoredshirts.com, Debenhams Flowers, Debenhamsdesignerflowers.com, Hallmark.co.uk/debenhams, Debenhams Gift Vouchers and Gifts Cards, Debenhams Personalised Wedding Stationery, Debenhams Wedding Gift Lists, Debenhams Wine and Champagne, Debenhams hampers and Financial Services”.

We look forward to their Autumn sale, which is probably happening any day now.

Professor John Bridgeman, the former Director-General of the Office of Fair Trading, has laid into supermarkets – particularly Asda and Tesco – for giving a misleading impression that they are cutting prices across the board, when the reality is very different.

In a full week just before Christmas, Asda cut nearly the price of almost 800 products. However, for two-thirds of those items, the cut was only 1p. At the same time, it put up the price of more than 850 items, with over half of those going up by more than 10p.

In that same week, Tesco cut the cost of over 900 items but over two-thirds of them saw only a 1p price reduction, while over a 1,000 products saw their price rise, 60% by more than 10p.

Professor Bridgeman calls this practice “price flexing” and, reported in The Guardian, he claims that it shows “a cynical manipulation of the language of value…They are not in reality cutting prices but flexing prices, making them go up and down and destabilising the price structure. All they are doing is introducing so much volatility no one can tell whether prices are going up or down. It can only be to consumers’ detriment and it does their image no good.”

“The most dangerous thing [for] competition in this sector is price volatility. It confuses consumers, deters investors and has driven corner shops out of business because they don’t know what price they have to compete on.” – Professor John Bridgeman

Research by Loughborough University confirms that average price rises are far larger than price cuts among the big four supermarkets, which also includes Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. By far the most common price cut made in the past four years is just 1p which, as Loughborough’s Professor Paul Dobson points out, makes little difference to the bill at the checkout but enables the supermarkets to make the benevolent claim that they are cutting “thousands of prices”.

See: The Guardian report

France’s greatest living thinker, Bernard-Henri Lévy is looking about as great a brain as Ricky Gervais’ podcasting tame idiot Karl Pilkington. In his new book On War in Philosophy, he quotes extensively from the lesser-known philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul. Attacking Immanuel Kant as being a “fake” and “raving mad”, Lévy frequently refers to Botul’s great work The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant. Apparently, he has frequently used him as a source in the past when giving talks, but it is only in his new book that he has done so in print.

A little embarrassing therefore, to discover that Botul never existed. He was created as a gag in 1999 by Frederic Pages, a journalist with Le Canard Enchainé, France’s equivalent of Private Eye. The imaginary Botul founded a school of thought known as Botulism, believing in the theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” or “the Metaphysics of the flabby”. So well known is the Botul spoof that there is even a Wikipedia entry on him.

It isn’t only the flamboyant Lévy – usually known just as BHL – who has been made to look a fool, but all the critics who lauded his book. At least Lévy has had the good grace to acknowledge how daft he’s been: “It was a truly brilliant and very believable hoax from the mind of a Canard Enchainé journalist, who remains a good philosopher all the same.”

The rest of us, of course, know all we need to know about Kant and other philosophers from Monty Python:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table

David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya ’bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed.


John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
 with half a pint of shandy was particularly ill
Plato, they say, could stick it away,
 half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
, Hobbes was fond of his dram.

And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, “I drink therefore I am.”

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;

A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed.

Related post:
Photo that could have changed history is a fake.

With money tight, we’re all looking to save money. But those who buy cheap perfume or after-shave at markets, online or when abroad, believing they’re conserving cash, may not realise they are actually putting some deeply unpleasant substances on their skin.

Harper’s Bazaar in the United States investigated a range of counterfeit perfumes and found ingredients such as urine, antifreeze and bacteria.

Valerie Salembier, publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, said: “You’re putting something on your face, on your neck, on your wrists. Those are sensitive parts of the body, so, to have active ingredients that could endanger your life is a very serious health risk.”

Dermatologist Jeannette Graf told ABC News, on which Salembier appeared, that while she had never seen a skin reaction from perfume, fake fragrances could cause contact dermatitis or inflammation of the skin in some people.

“They felt burning. They saw redness. It felt uncomfortable, it didn’t smell right. And that’s almost immediate” – Dematologist Jeannette Graf

Although, perhaps surprisingly, the story wasn’t reported in the British press, the findings chime with previous reports in the UK. A while back, for instance, Trading Standards Officers discovered that bottles of Chanel No. 5 eau de toilette on sale in an Oxfordshire market had rather more of the “toilette” about them than usual. In Australia, as well as urine, perfumes have been found which contain a mix of fragrance and pond water.

As the fakes can look so much like the originals, apart from the fact that you seem to be getting a bargain, how do you tell if what’s on offer is counterfeit?

• Look for dodgy spelling, and dodgy people selling it in dodgy places
• If the smell doesn’t last much longer than an hour, it may be a fake. Try spraying some on a piece of cardboard and leaving it for a while.
• If the cellophane around the box isn’t snug, that could be a tipoff.
• And, as with everything, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

According to the Netmums website, over 100,000 women a year are being conned into paying money for useless fertility treatments.

A survey of 2,000 women found that one in three of those trying to have a child were so desperate that they spent over £500 on bizarre treatments. As well as acupuncture and aromatherapy, many turned to clairvoyants and mediums. Some bought fertility statues to be placed in the bedroom and a quarter bought fertility spells. Perhaps not surprisingly, 85% of those would paid for spells did not succeed in becoming pregnant.

Siobhan Freegard of netmums said: “Our team was shocked by how many women are using spells and statues.”

MORE ZEBU
A new book out claims that the responsibility for Britain’s obesity epidemic lies with the Government, which is giving disastrously wrong dietary advice to the public. It isn’t fat in foods that is the problem, claims Hannah Sutter, but starch which, we are constanty told, is good for us, despite our increasingly sedentary lifestyles. She also points out that the Government vendetta against fats is based on highly debatable research, something we covered in Complete and Utter Zebu. The Daily Mail carries an interesting piece on her book, Big Fat Lies: Is Your Government Making You Fat?

Over the past few weeks, rumours have been growing that the gold which forms a large part of the reserves of many major countries may not be all it seems. The Chinese government, it is said, took delivery of some 400-ounce gold bars last October and decided to do a random test.

To their surprise, the bars were not solid but were made of tungsten, much the same density as gold, and surrounded by an outer coating of bullion. The tale has it that the bars – nigh on 6,000 of them – came from America and had previously been stored in Fort Knox. Some time during the Clinton administration, so it is said, 640,000 tungsten blanks were coated with gold and placed in the depository at Fort Knox.

This story has all the hallmarks (sorry!) of a great conspiracy, particularly as the wilder variants suggest that this is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. As with all the best conspiracy theories, it is hard to disprove, given that the guardians of Fort Knox and the Bank of England aren’t likely to throw their doors open to visitors. With gold at a 10-year-high of well over $1,000 an ounce, imagine the consequences if there was even the slightest grain of truth (sorry again!). It would make the recent financial crisis resemble a flea bite on an elephant.

But how to find out? We could, of course, have mounted a full-scale raid on Fort Knox as in the James Bond film Goldfinger. But we reckoned some of the people there must have seen the movie, so the element of surprise would probably not be on our side. We could have bought ourselves a few bars and had them tested but as they currently cost over $400,000 a bar, that seemed a little extravagant.

So instead we contacted the London Bullion Market Association. If anybody knows about gold, it is the LBMA. It sets the “Good Delivery” standards, ensuring that all gold traded around the world meets the same criteria and thus removing the need for gold to be tested every time a transaction occurs. They claimed not to have heard the rumours (a little odd, perhaps) but were quick to say that it was utter tosh. With gold only a little below its peak, it is clear that the market as a whole does not give the yarn much credence. If they did, the price of gold would be in free fall.

And, as one City expert pointed out, given the vociferousness of the Chinese government on so many other matters, if it really had discovered that 6,000 gold bars from America were nothing more than shiny tungsten, would they not be making a very, very, very loud noise about it?

So, a great conspiracy theory, but almost certainly nothing more than that. That does not mean, of course, that there are not other scams involving gold, but we’ll return to that another day.