Daily Archives: February 8, 2007

Boris talks turkey

Posted on by

This is the best piece published today. Boris Johnson rides to the rescue of Bernard Matthews, the firm which has just been obliged to slaughter 160,000 prime turkeys in an attempt to stamp out bird flu.

As soon as I arrived at work this morning I told the troops their duty. This is it, I said. The Russians have banned our turkey. The pathetic Japanese have slapped an embargo on any poultry emanating from this country. South Korea, Hong Kong and South Africa are all equally chicken about our chicken.

We are the second largest poultry exporters in Europe, I reminded them, with a £300 million business at stake. Here we are, in the cockpit of the nation, and the people expect us to show a lead. It is a time for greatness, a time for calm, a time for reassurance – and we are going to show all three.

I reached for my wallet and fished out twenty. “Frances,” I said, “go to the supermarket and buy as many slices of Bernard Matthews as you can find. Someone somewhere has got to show that the great British turkey is safe to eat! And that someone is going to be us.”

In no time she was back, laden with an extraordinary assortment of meat and meat-related produce. As we beheld the bewildering versatility of Mr Matthews’s fowls, I felt a spasm of rage that the people of South Korea – where they eat poodles, for heaven’s sake – should turn their noses up at the favourites of the British people.

It gets better.

We had Bernard Matthews wafer thin turkey ham, 95 per cent fat free. We had a perfectly cylindrical Turkey Breast Roast, serving three or four. Mr Matthews’s chefs had miraculously added water, potato and rice starch (and about 20 nourishing chemicals) to what the front of the packet said was “100 per cent breast meat”. We had delicious golden turkey escalopes, containing as much as 38 per cent turkey.

Not to forget the Matthews product containing

a mixture of turkey skin, pea starch, milk, potassium chloride, sodium nitrite and assorted other life-giving ingredients, boiled up and turned into a sliced roll complete with a beautiful picture of a dinosaur. Look! I held up the Dinosaur, showing how it ran all the way through, like a stick of rock.

Lovely!

Footnote: I have never knowingly eaten anything produced by Bernard Matthews. Indeed, I would cross the street to avoid walking past a shop that stocked his products.

Iran here we come

Posted on by

Is the Bush regime getting ready to attack Iran? Paul Rogers thinks it might be. In April.

Timothy Garton-Ash has also been brooding on this.

f we don’t bomb Iran, Iran is quite likely to get the bomb. If Iran gets the bomb, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others in the Middle East will be tempted to follow. The last barriers to nuclear proliferation, already breached by North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel, could rapidly break – in the most volatile region in the world. The risk of nuclear war will then be greater than it was in the 1980s, when CND, END and other west European peace movements marched against new US and Soviet missile deployments. The likely scale of the nuclear conflict is much smaller than a superpower nuclear apocalypse, but that in itself makes it more not less probable that an unhinged leader would take the risk.

On the available evidence, the Islamic Republic of Iran is trying to edge towards a technological position from which it could, should it choose, rapidly move towards 90% uranium enrichment and the production of nuclear weapons. The best analysis we have suggests that Ayatollah Khameini, the supreme leader of the revolutionary regime, has not made a decision to go for nuclear weapons, and it would take a number of years to get there even if he had. But Iran has been doing a number of things that are not explicable simply by a desire to have the civilian nuclear energy to which it is entitled under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

The real question is therefore how, without the use of force, you can stop Iran going down this path…

Loadsamoney 2.0

Posted on by

From ye olde New York Times

Everyone suspected that the investors, founders and early employees of YouTube made tidy sums when it was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in stock late last year.

But until yesterday, few knew just how tidy those sums were. The answer, which Google delivered in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is now in: The sums are big enough to spark a new wave of envy across Silicon Valley.

The biggest windfalls went, not surprisingly, to the company’s three founders and to Sequoia Capital, the main financial backer of YouTube, the popular video-sharing site.

A founder and YouTube’s chief executive Chad Hurley received 694,087 shares of Google and an additional 41,232 in a trust. Based on Google’s closing price yesterday of $470.01, the shares are worth more than $345 million.

Another founder, Steven Chen, received 625,366 shares and an additional 68,721 in a trust, for more than $326 million.

Sequoia Capital XI, the Sequoia fund that invested close to $11.5 million in YouTube from November 2005 to April 2006, was listed as having 941,027 shares, which are valued at more than $442 million.

The filing lists a Sequoia Capital XI Principals Fund owning 102,376 shares, valued at more than $48 million, and Sequoia Technology Partners XI with 29,724 shares, valued at nearly $14 million.

Sequoia, considered one of the most successful venture capital firms in the country, was also a principal investor in Google.

The third founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, who left the company early on to pursue a graduate degree in computer science, received 137,443 shares worth more than $64 million.

In addition, several funds affiliated with Artis Capital Management, a San Francisco hedge fund managed by Stuart L. Peterson that was a co-investor with Sequoia, were listed as having received 176,621 shares, valued at $83 million.

When the deal was announced in October, YouTube was less than two years old and had about 70 employees. Several of the early employees are listed in the filing statement as owning thousands of Google shares.

Mute but moving

Posted on by

Every day, for as long as I can remember, there’s been a lone Falun Gong demonstrator outside the Chinese Embassy in Portland Place. Here is this morning’s protestor. It’s an impressive, quiet display — all the more so when you see someone sitting motionless in the freezing cold for hours on end. Meanwhile virtually every UK university and FTSE company is sending people to China, touting for business like tarts on the road from Milan airport. And of course Google China (and Yahoo and MSN) block access to search results for ‘Falun Gong’.