Killer swine! Yes, those notoriously filthy beasts have been at it again, only unfortunately this time they've been mixing it up and cavorting with pigs would you believe? Hence, mutated viruses, yada yada, resulting in a human-contagious swine flu sweeping the world. To an extent at least. As yet, the World Health Organisation isn't declaring it a proper pandemic, but it has caused 6497 cases of illness including 65 confirmed deaths, spread between 33 countries as of yesterday apparently.

The UK Government even made a little booklet about it to send to every citizen, so it must be pretty much as serious as terrorism no less. And yes, the book is not all that far off being as pointless and patronising as the terrorism handbook was – suggesting such wacky concepts as not sneezing a nose full of infected bogies into your dearly beloved's face. Still, the previous Governmental advice to walk away from, not towards, a roaring fire in a building has kept the Poorhouse alive so far, so can't complain.

The Poorhouse is a big lover of pop-economics, the sort of stuff famously published in tomes such as The Undercover Economist or Freakonomics. The quantitative inter-relation of sometimes disparate-seeming topics, but mostly concentrating on cold hard money, is a fascinating insight into how the world really works. The more popularised writings on such topics may be a little dumbed down for the masses, but on the other hand they are actually interesting to read.

Nonetheless, there are some activities that at first it is hard to see that they would innately relate to financial incentives such as taxation in a consumer-driven way. The truly mortal stuff, births and deaths, one can see easily would relate strongly to wealth - if you have the money for good medical care, you'll likely live longer - but at the end of the day generally people don't have a lot of active choice over exactly which day they are born or die in a way that they can choose their brand of cola...or do they? Work by Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh indicates maybe there are more active - financially incentivisable - choices going on that one might expect.

Only slightly past its sell by date from the journals of Really Should Have Known Better comes word of a special cake-related promotion from Ted Kefalinos of Greenwich Avenue's Lafayette French Pastry bakery. Along with the rest of the US / world he decided to help commemorate the wonders of President Obama's election. Only, unlike most people, he did it via rather racist baked goods.

Here we are - latest product: the Drunken Negro Face.

Check the vid, below.

In recent days, an ex-BNP-er managed to leak something of a membership list for that foul party. It seems that it's a few years out of date and includes a few people more accurately described as prospects than fully paid up members, but nonetheless, it's out. The list also included some addresses, phone numbers, and job descriptions it seems. It was not a good thing to release, especially not if you're a loathed neo-facist right wing party.

I mean normally, who would care? Yes, it's a bit annoying that your address is available to all and sundry, but the fact you (mostly) chose to affiliate with a party you believe in, well surely you should be campaigning loud and proud for them, not praying that no-one finds out you're in it. Anyone would think that even its own members realises its sheer wrongness.

So the verdict is in, and the Obama & Biden (Biden? Who's he?) dream team are in, with the biggest democratic vote % in, erm, lots and lots of years - 364 vs 162 electoral college votes, and 52.5% vs 46.2% of the popular vote. Whoop. But that's still no license to let Palin ride easy. After all, she may not be on the verge of presidency any more - well, not for 8 years or so, but she still is in control of something one imagines.

Let's laugh at her for a bit. A couple of comedians from Quebec managed to get on the phone to Ms Palin her very self, and using their best dodgy French accents made out that they were indeed President Sarkoz. He runs France, for any non-Europeans. Check it:

Sarah Palin: nasty

As you might have heard, it's not so far off before the election for the President of the great free world and universe etc. (i.e. the United States) is to take place. Candidates are in place, debates are in motion, and the usual kind of tedious - but not as tedious as the UK it must be said - political process is in action.

One particular enlivening star in a world of otherwise lacklustre Republican (ugh) politicos is of course Sarah Palin, the vice-presidential candidate to John McCain's presidency for their party. The more the Poorhouse learns about her, the more bad-film-fictitious the whole event seems. The film "Legally Blonde", as well as being awesome, had a greater credibility to it than the thought of Palin as VP (and perhaps even the president, should McCain who is not far off the average US life expectancy sort of age anyway, plus has his all too often mentioned Vietnam war injuries to contend with) come to a sticky end - and the protagonist was a whole lot more decent too.

The answer to the question posted in part 1:

Of course you didn't get it right! And not only because you didn't understand the word separatist.

Shocked? Yes - those awful Islamist extremists you spend your days fearing committed an amount of terror attacks so goddamned low in 2006 compared to other various terrorist factions that you can't even really see their slice of the pie. Here's the figures by country:

What a silly title eh? As if we don't constantly have images, videos, sights and sounds of "our" terrorist foe drummed into us every time we do anything other than literally watch paint dry. I mean, this little game of spot the terrorist isn't exactly difficult is it? Try your luck!

Tax, never a dull moment where that's concerned right? Actually something has caught many UK tax-payers attention in recent time, and quite rightly so - the abolishment of the 10p tax rate.

It's far too complicated to go into, but the deal is that when you earn up to X amount in the UK, some of your pay will be taxed such that 10% goes to the Government rather than for your personal pleasure. Above that value to a point, any surplus money gets 22% taken by the exchequer. For no earthly reason Gordon Brown et al. have decided it's a good idea to reduce the 22% to 20%...and pay for it by eliminating the 10% rate. This might all sound like inane complicated numbers, but really this is a properly unfair move that even an idiot can see hurts the poorest in society.

Researching the mental effects of chemicals on humans is notoriously difficult and complicated, not least because of the immense amount of ways that a certain person may react to any given substance, the huge number of external factors that may be involved in a psychological outcome, and the difficulty in quantifiably measuring many mental effects. Add to this the sometimes extreme politicisation and bias of results that comes when researching controversial topics like the use of illegal drugs and one can see that researching the mental effects of banned-but-fun substances is especially troublesome.

This trouble is often seen in mass-media reports of such experiments. Often, presumably in order to make the "news" exciting and dramatic for their readers the "shock horror - you will die if you even look at illegal drugs" conclusions are heightened to the max, and any opposing conclusions, grey areas and other interpretations of the same data are ignored. Not only does this undermine any sensible attempt at presenting results with potentially important public health conclusions to the public at large, but research suggests that it could be this very style of reporting that causes some of the mental problems it shouts about so loudly.