The poem, Leisure, by W.H. Davies was brought to my attention a little earlier today, just as I was on the run to see how my extremely pregnant daughter was getting on. There is no news on the expected arrival yet, but the poem does put life’s entire journey into a better perspective.
We are all so busy running and jumping through hoops that we don’t pause to look at or smell the roses right in front of us. While I was waiting on news of my daughter I was eating lunch with my grandson, the wonderful Archie, with his grandmother, Val, from his father’s side.
We sat outside in the little park café. The sun was ablaze, the air was succulent with the juice of Summer, young mums were cajoling their ankle biting kids to eat, keep clean, avoid table tops with their heads, stop peeing on the lawn, sit up straight, speak clearly, wipe their noses, eyes, chins, mouths, in fact anything that came into contact with anything else.
Grandparents smiled indulgently as their kids dealt with the grandkids, and all was as it should be. If only every day was like that part of today!
Monday, June 30, 2008
Poetry
W. H. Davies
Leisure
WHAT is this life if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare?—
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
Daughter
Today’s blog is cut short because my very pregnant daughter, Georgia, has just rung. Need I say more?
Bye for now, updates will be forthcoming..
Bye for now, updates will be forthcoming..
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Changes
The leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Wendy Alexander has just resigned. It’s an honorable thing for her to have done. There has not been a great amount of honor in her behavior up to now, but at least she has fallen on her sword, and lived up to the rules of her own party and Parliament, at last!
This is one of three examples of sleaze permeating the arrogant upper reaches of our political elite. It used to be said that the Tories always had sex scandals, whereas the Labour party were more inclined to financial scandals. Now sleaze seems to be universal and has no boundaries.
There has always been sleaze within any political system but there used to be an attitude within British politics that if you were caught in the full glare of public exposure you, the exposed, would hold your hands up, and in the old fashioned world, said, “it’s a fair cop gov.” You then vanished into an obscure retirement from public life, either to a remedial career in charity, if you were a Conservative of independent means, or to a career as a non-executive director of a series of small public companies on the make if you were Labour.
Now there appears to be no shame, even recognition of having done anything wrong, by those discovered with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar. They are pried from office with media enhanced pickaxes, like barnacles from the political ship of state.
Talking of pooh stuck on the shoe of the world, President Mugabe has won his election in Zimbabwe. He would do so as he was standing against no one in his sham election. This proves that you can beat yourself.
The only present hope for the people of Zimbabwe is that the current meeting of African leaders taking place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, will mandate the use of extreme sanctions to drive Mugabe and his regime from power. His country is landlocked and his lifeline flows direct via South Africa. If that country turns off the tap he will be forced out. On the down side this will unfairly affect the already downtrodden citizens of Zimbabwe who have done nothing wrong. Therefore the least bad consequence is for the African states to quickly invade Zimbabwe and drive this wicked regime into the dustbin of history.
This is one of three examples of sleaze permeating the arrogant upper reaches of our political elite. It used to be said that the Tories always had sex scandals, whereas the Labour party were more inclined to financial scandals. Now sleaze seems to be universal and has no boundaries.
There has always been sleaze within any political system but there used to be an attitude within British politics that if you were caught in the full glare of public exposure you, the exposed, would hold your hands up, and in the old fashioned world, said, “it’s a fair cop gov.” You then vanished into an obscure retirement from public life, either to a remedial career in charity, if you were a Conservative of independent means, or to a career as a non-executive director of a series of small public companies on the make if you were Labour.
Now there appears to be no shame, even recognition of having done anything wrong, by those discovered with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar. They are pried from office with media enhanced pickaxes, like barnacles from the political ship of state.
Talking of pooh stuck on the shoe of the world, President Mugabe has won his election in Zimbabwe. He would do so as he was standing against no one in his sham election. This proves that you can beat yourself.
The only present hope for the people of Zimbabwe is that the current meeting of African leaders taking place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, will mandate the use of extreme sanctions to drive Mugabe and his regime from power. His country is landlocked and his lifeline flows direct via South Africa. If that country turns off the tap he will be forced out. On the down side this will unfairly affect the already downtrodden citizens of Zimbabwe who have done nothing wrong. Therefore the least bad consequence is for the African states to quickly invade Zimbabwe and drive this wicked regime into the dustbin of history.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Soldiering
Soldiering is a brave but bloody business. In the British army the general female to male ratio is one in ten, but in Iraq and Afghanistan that ratio rises to one in five.
In the last week the first British woman soldier killed in action in the Afghanistan conflict, Corporal Sarah Bryant, was buried as were her two male colleagues. She was killed, alongside three male Territorial Army special forces, in a large roadside explosion east of Lashkar Gah, in the south of Afghanistan. The three men who died were from 23rd Special Air Service Regiment, which is one of two Territorial Army (Reserve) SAS units.
This article is not the personal stories of any of these soldiers. I am not comparing their fate or their bravery but only the consequence of their gender.
It is noticeable that even in these days of legally mandated sexual equality there was a huge, some would say disproportionate reaction to the death of Sarah Bryant. It’s obvious that the first reason for this reaction is that there hadn’t been a previous female soldiering fatality.
However, there is another reason, which, I believe relates to the fact that there is an inbuilt, almost primal fear harbored deep within us for the fate of our women in combat. I use the word “our” specifically because we clearly appear to be identifying with these women in a very personal and emotional way, that we don’t employ when contemplating male combat casualties.
Our unspoken fear includes the very real regarding what an enemy might do to a captured woman. This includes the prospect of sexual attack that no one wishes to contemplate. The truth is that this can and does sometime happen to some captured female combatants as it does to female citizens who just happen to get in the way.
Other countries have long had female soldiers in their ranks, but very few have them in their front lines, undertaking combat roles. Sarah was on an intelligence related mission in a war that knows no front lines or safe areas. The men who died with her were there to guard her.
Another reason for male reticence regarding female combat soldiers is that most women do not have the necessary physical strength. Those that have utilized women in combat under extreme situations have found these women to be as good or better than their male counterparts.
The American military, like the British, have an increasing number of their women in certain types of combat roles, now flying fighter jets and other military aircraft, that were formerly an exclusively male preserve.
It is hard not to feel defensive of our women in these situations but we have to understand that women serving on the front line and suffering the awful consequences is an inevitable consequence of sexual equality.
In an idealized world there would be no need for female combat soldiers, but in that world there would be no war.
In the last week the first British woman soldier killed in action in the Afghanistan conflict, Corporal Sarah Bryant, was buried as were her two male colleagues. She was killed, alongside three male Territorial Army special forces, in a large roadside explosion east of Lashkar Gah, in the south of Afghanistan. The three men who died were from 23rd Special Air Service Regiment, which is one of two Territorial Army (Reserve) SAS units.
This article is not the personal stories of any of these soldiers. I am not comparing their fate or their bravery but only the consequence of their gender.
It is noticeable that even in these days of legally mandated sexual equality there was a huge, some would say disproportionate reaction to the death of Sarah Bryant. It’s obvious that the first reason for this reaction is that there hadn’t been a previous female soldiering fatality.
However, there is another reason, which, I believe relates to the fact that there is an inbuilt, almost primal fear harbored deep within us for the fate of our women in combat. I use the word “our” specifically because we clearly appear to be identifying with these women in a very personal and emotional way, that we don’t employ when contemplating male combat casualties.
Our unspoken fear includes the very real regarding what an enemy might do to a captured woman. This includes the prospect of sexual attack that no one wishes to contemplate. The truth is that this can and does sometime happen to some captured female combatants as it does to female citizens who just happen to get in the way.
Other countries have long had female soldiers in their ranks, but very few have them in their front lines, undertaking combat roles. Sarah was on an intelligence related mission in a war that knows no front lines or safe areas. The men who died with her were there to guard her.
Another reason for male reticence regarding female combat soldiers is that most women do not have the necessary physical strength. Those that have utilized women in combat under extreme situations have found these women to be as good or better than their male counterparts.
The American military, like the British, have an increasing number of their women in certain types of combat roles, now flying fighter jets and other military aircraft, that were formerly an exclusively male preserve.
It is hard not to feel defensive of our women in these situations but we have to understand that women serving on the front line and suffering the awful consequences is an inevitable consequence of sexual equality.
In an idealized world there would be no need for female combat soldiers, but in that world there would be no war.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Decay
The UK was the first country to be industrialized, and we have been at the vanguard of the modern world ever since. We were first or near the front of every major development that makes life appear civilized. That goes for developments such as properly surfaced roads, railways, central heating, powered shipping, radio, television, computer, radar, airplanes and hey, it was a great British person, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web and other Brits who designed such modern marvels as Apple’s recent generations of products, the Dyson vacuum cleaner and the entire concept of Formula One racing cars, the world renowned Open University and a little thing called the National Health Service.
This should all be put within a context that makes matters clear and easy to evaluate. The UK is one of the richest countries in the world, ever. It still has huge overseas investments, and riches beyond measure. So why is everything falling apart?
We have grid lock on many of our roads, it is estimated that it was faster to traverse the centre of London a hundred years ago, on a horse, than it is today, during rush hour traffic. Our sewerage system, once the envy of engineers around the world, is creaking at the seams. Train travel is a travesty. The National Health service, previously the model that, the rest of the world copied slavishly, is now not clean enough in certain of its hospitals to trust. You can go in well and come out of a British hospital dead because of the germs you can be infected with. Educationally we have certainly stopped going forward, and appear to be going backwards in the core subject curriculum in comparison with the emerging economic powerhouses.
In the last few days Britain’s top Muslim, Asian police officer, Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, who serves in the Metropolitan Police, has accused his immediate boss, the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, of racism. When the third most powerful police officer in London accuses his number one like this what chance is there for the rest of us? It’s difficult to find a good word to say about either of these gentlemen who spend their time fiddling while our new Rome burns with feral youths committing crime in every direction you look.
The British authorities repeatedly tell us that crime is going down, so why does everyone you talk with share the view that the opposite is true, and that it’s going up? Perhaps, as if with many other things in our cockeyed country, it’s really the peculiar way our leaders have of counting.
One of the present current problems in the UK is the sheer proliferation of laws that come out of the maw of Parliament in an unending stream of politically correct rubbish. There have never been such a huge number of new laws, regulations and proposals in our history. One that has been proposed, that I do support is the idea that all forms of ageism be legally banned.
Ageism is as iniquitous as any other form of discrimination. It permeates employment opportunities, financial matters and insurance issues, particularly those regarding health insurance. It’s obvious that private health insurers put up the rates for older people so that the effect is to allow the health insurance companies to edit out anyone who’s considered too risky because of their actuarial age, unless they’re very rich.
Local councils in Britain have the power to snoop on their local inhabitants by using surveillance powers that were originally reserved for judicial control by the police and security services. Before David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, changed the law, there were 9 state bodies then allowed to use such rights to spy on citizens, now that number has risen to 790 organizations. This is insanity and must be stopped before the issue gets even worse. Do we want to go down the same road as the total power to spy on their citizens found in China? We now have anti terrorism laws in the UK being used to stop local residents over filling their dustbins. This is a totally inappropriate use of power.
There was a by election last night in Henley. This is a beautiful part of England hard by the River Thames, formerly represented in Parliament by the newly elected London mayor, Boris Johnson. His party, the Conservatives won by a huge majority as expected. More shocking for the government of Gordon Brown was that their candidate didn’t even come third after the Liberal Democrats, no they limped into fifth place, behind the Greens and the British National Party, making Labour the new fringe party of British politics. They even lost their deposit which is the price every party has to pay for entry into a Parliamentary election, which is supposed to guarantee you’re candidature is serious. Do you think the Prime Minister will learn anything from this? No, I expect he’s sitting at his breakfast in Number 10 Downing Street this morning saying to anyone who will listen, “ Why can’t everyone understand how right I am?”
This week the same British government finally saw fit to remove President Mugabe’s honorary knighthood. This is another example of their total lack of backbone and judgment. After all, how could they have waited until now? Never mind, as the saying goes, better late than ever. Also, I’m happy and relieved to report, Nelson Mandela, did, as many others and I had asked, and finally made a statement about Mugabe. In it he said, “We watch with sadness the continuing tragedy in Darfur. Nearer to home we have seen the outbreak of violence against fellow Africans in our own country and the tragic failure of leadership in our neighboring Zimbabwe.” It wasn’t much to say Nelson, but it’s a great deal more than the deafening silence we’d heard so far from Africa’s moral giant.
The common theme of these stories is that they demonstrate the total lack of vision of our leadership. On the first anniversary of Gordon Brown being Prime Minister I offer up the fervent prayer for our country that he is gone before he does too much more damage. There is a saying that a country gets the government it deserves; but what did Britain do that was so bad?
This should all be put within a context that makes matters clear and easy to evaluate. The UK is one of the richest countries in the world, ever. It still has huge overseas investments, and riches beyond measure. So why is everything falling apart?
We have grid lock on many of our roads, it is estimated that it was faster to traverse the centre of London a hundred years ago, on a horse, than it is today, during rush hour traffic. Our sewerage system, once the envy of engineers around the world, is creaking at the seams. Train travel is a travesty. The National Health service, previously the model that, the rest of the world copied slavishly, is now not clean enough in certain of its hospitals to trust. You can go in well and come out of a British hospital dead because of the germs you can be infected with. Educationally we have certainly stopped going forward, and appear to be going backwards in the core subject curriculum in comparison with the emerging economic powerhouses.
In the last few days Britain’s top Muslim, Asian police officer, Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, who serves in the Metropolitan Police, has accused his immediate boss, the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, of racism. When the third most powerful police officer in London accuses his number one like this what chance is there for the rest of us? It’s difficult to find a good word to say about either of these gentlemen who spend their time fiddling while our new Rome burns with feral youths committing crime in every direction you look.
The British authorities repeatedly tell us that crime is going down, so why does everyone you talk with share the view that the opposite is true, and that it’s going up? Perhaps, as if with many other things in our cockeyed country, it’s really the peculiar way our leaders have of counting.
One of the present current problems in the UK is the sheer proliferation of laws that come out of the maw of Parliament in an unending stream of politically correct rubbish. There have never been such a huge number of new laws, regulations and proposals in our history. One that has been proposed, that I do support is the idea that all forms of ageism be legally banned.
Ageism is as iniquitous as any other form of discrimination. It permeates employment opportunities, financial matters and insurance issues, particularly those regarding health insurance. It’s obvious that private health insurers put up the rates for older people so that the effect is to allow the health insurance companies to edit out anyone who’s considered too risky because of their actuarial age, unless they’re very rich.
Local councils in Britain have the power to snoop on their local inhabitants by using surveillance powers that were originally reserved for judicial control by the police and security services. Before David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, changed the law, there were 9 state bodies then allowed to use such rights to spy on citizens, now that number has risen to 790 organizations. This is insanity and must be stopped before the issue gets even worse. Do we want to go down the same road as the total power to spy on their citizens found in China? We now have anti terrorism laws in the UK being used to stop local residents over filling their dustbins. This is a totally inappropriate use of power.
There was a by election last night in Henley. This is a beautiful part of England hard by the River Thames, formerly represented in Parliament by the newly elected London mayor, Boris Johnson. His party, the Conservatives won by a huge majority as expected. More shocking for the government of Gordon Brown was that their candidate didn’t even come third after the Liberal Democrats, no they limped into fifth place, behind the Greens and the British National Party, making Labour the new fringe party of British politics. They even lost their deposit which is the price every party has to pay for entry into a Parliamentary election, which is supposed to guarantee you’re candidature is serious. Do you think the Prime Minister will learn anything from this? No, I expect he’s sitting at his breakfast in Number 10 Downing Street this morning saying to anyone who will listen, “ Why can’t everyone understand how right I am?”
This week the same British government finally saw fit to remove President Mugabe’s honorary knighthood. This is another example of their total lack of backbone and judgment. After all, how could they have waited until now? Never mind, as the saying goes, better late than ever. Also, I’m happy and relieved to report, Nelson Mandela, did, as many others and I had asked, and finally made a statement about Mugabe. In it he said, “We watch with sadness the continuing tragedy in Darfur. Nearer to home we have seen the outbreak of violence against fellow Africans in our own country and the tragic failure of leadership in our neighboring Zimbabwe.” It wasn’t much to say Nelson, but it’s a great deal more than the deafening silence we’d heard so far from Africa’s moral giant.
The common theme of these stories is that they demonstrate the total lack of vision of our leadership. On the first anniversary of Gordon Brown being Prime Minister I offer up the fervent prayer for our country that he is gone before he does too much more damage. There is a saying that a country gets the government it deserves; but what did Britain do that was so bad?
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Waiting
Are you waiting for the other foot to drop? I am, I find myself fearing the future after always looking forward to it. We all know, and if you don’t why haven’t you been reading my blogs, that the old order is changing in the world. Suddenly the old certainties are no longer so certain. It used to be that there was an order to things, that America was top dog, and we were top of the middle sized countries, which made us comfortably in the top six or seven of all the countries, whatever their size, in whatever way you measure these things.
Now there are seismic shifts which are not in our control and which promise to be unpleasant. The Americans will have to adjust to not being the lone superpower, and possibly, one day in the not too distant future, to not being a superpower at all. My definition of that word, superpower, meaning that you can impose your will on other countries, wherever they are and for whatever reason you pick, in whichever manner you select, be it military, diplomatic or economic.
The threat to the established order comes from the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China, and we mustn’t forget the others yapping at the fringes like Canada who have smaller populations but vast natural resources that will become increasingly vital. It does not come in equal measure from the supposedly asymmetric conflicts with various Islamic groups or countries as these are threats that can be dealt with.
I don’t claim that the Anglo Saxon countries have a divine right to rule or dominate other countries, but I do make a case for our having been of benefit to the rest of the world, a benign influence. Let’s not forget if it were not for British obduracy and undeniable courage plus American capacity and bravery, albeit a bit late, Nazism would today dominate the entire world. No other countries demonstrated that capacity or willingness to fight the evil tyranny until it was too late.
Like every other country ours have taken many, if not most of their decisions for purely pragmatic and selfish reasons, but sometimes, like in World War Two we did what we thought to be right because it was the moral thing to do.
It is a common belief that China follows a course of action for reasons of pure expedience? Witness how the Chinese government cynically manipulates the publicity surrounding the Beijing Olympics during the torch runs around the globe. Everyone else in the world acknowledges the systematic rape of Tibet but is powerless to act. Once the Games are over what will remain to coerce the Chinese government to show any modicum of restraint or reasonable behavior. We shouldn’t assume that the Chinese people agree with my Western view of their rationale. I think a great many Chinese nationals are very proud of their country’s economic and cultural leap forward. They like a system that works for their pockets and stomachs and gives them back their pride.
Likewise Russia, now led by its latest Czar, Vladimir Putin. We already see all the signs of a returned dictatorship, with almost all the recent flowering signs of a thriving democracy being carefully controlled or eliminated. Perversely the Russian people en masse seem to love the man. He has won several elections with increasingly large majorities. Perhaps its true that the Russian historical liking for a strong man at the centre of power remains their nation’s driving wish. Why should we assume that everyone does, or should aspire to our form of democratic governance?
Russia has restored its morale and increasing power via its regaining control of its vast natural resources. As Russia re-asserts itself among the top table of countries it will increasingly drain the Anglo American focus. This is inevitably going to prove to be a problem.
The other great player in the world which no one pays much attention to is the quiet behemoth, the European Union. This now comprises 27 countries and, of course, lest we forget, includes the UK. If you consider it as an economic and political block it is the biggest and strongest in the world. However no one has seriously suggested that it sees itself in this way. At the moment it is either Hydra, the mythical beast with many heads and one writhing body or Sisyphus, one of the Titans condemned to push a stone up a hill that everlastingly rolled back down again in unceasing but fruitless labor.
Presently the European Union’s biggest problem is its genuine lack of transparency and democratic answerability. The EU hierarchy’s lack of responsiveness to the no votes against the proposed Lisbon Treaty demonstrates their inability to understand or empathize with the European people.
But all it will take is one charismatic leader who can combine the people’s common dreams and aspirations. Hopefully this will be a democratic and not follow the previous proponents of such a combination of European power, which included Hitler and Napoleon and many Emperors of Rome. In the end all had the same flaw that it is very hard, if not impossible to create a power bloc of component parts without central authority being exerted by a very small controlling force.
We need to re-think how we work with the Russians and our fellow Europeans rather than ignore these new realities and America in particular has to figure out to react before they are forced to reconsider their strategies. America was at its most powerful after the Second World War all the way through to the trauma of 9/11. America was also at its most magnanimous during that period and now it must return to a policy of listening as well as talking.
The UK should return to its post war role of being the political, cultural and sometimes economic bridge between Europe and America, understanding both places better than either understands the other.
Now there are seismic shifts which are not in our control and which promise to be unpleasant. The Americans will have to adjust to not being the lone superpower, and possibly, one day in the not too distant future, to not being a superpower at all. My definition of that word, superpower, meaning that you can impose your will on other countries, wherever they are and for whatever reason you pick, in whichever manner you select, be it military, diplomatic or economic.
The threat to the established order comes from the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China, and we mustn’t forget the others yapping at the fringes like Canada who have smaller populations but vast natural resources that will become increasingly vital. It does not come in equal measure from the supposedly asymmetric conflicts with various Islamic groups or countries as these are threats that can be dealt with.
I don’t claim that the Anglo Saxon countries have a divine right to rule or dominate other countries, but I do make a case for our having been of benefit to the rest of the world, a benign influence. Let’s not forget if it were not for British obduracy and undeniable courage plus American capacity and bravery, albeit a bit late, Nazism would today dominate the entire world. No other countries demonstrated that capacity or willingness to fight the evil tyranny until it was too late.
Like every other country ours have taken many, if not most of their decisions for purely pragmatic and selfish reasons, but sometimes, like in World War Two we did what we thought to be right because it was the moral thing to do.
It is a common belief that China follows a course of action for reasons of pure expedience? Witness how the Chinese government cynically manipulates the publicity surrounding the Beijing Olympics during the torch runs around the globe. Everyone else in the world acknowledges the systematic rape of Tibet but is powerless to act. Once the Games are over what will remain to coerce the Chinese government to show any modicum of restraint or reasonable behavior. We shouldn’t assume that the Chinese people agree with my Western view of their rationale. I think a great many Chinese nationals are very proud of their country’s economic and cultural leap forward. They like a system that works for their pockets and stomachs and gives them back their pride.
Likewise Russia, now led by its latest Czar, Vladimir Putin. We already see all the signs of a returned dictatorship, with almost all the recent flowering signs of a thriving democracy being carefully controlled or eliminated. Perversely the Russian people en masse seem to love the man. He has won several elections with increasingly large majorities. Perhaps its true that the Russian historical liking for a strong man at the centre of power remains their nation’s driving wish. Why should we assume that everyone does, or should aspire to our form of democratic governance?
Russia has restored its morale and increasing power via its regaining control of its vast natural resources. As Russia re-asserts itself among the top table of countries it will increasingly drain the Anglo American focus. This is inevitably going to prove to be a problem.
The other great player in the world which no one pays much attention to is the quiet behemoth, the European Union. This now comprises 27 countries and, of course, lest we forget, includes the UK. If you consider it as an economic and political block it is the biggest and strongest in the world. However no one has seriously suggested that it sees itself in this way. At the moment it is either Hydra, the mythical beast with many heads and one writhing body or Sisyphus, one of the Titans condemned to push a stone up a hill that everlastingly rolled back down again in unceasing but fruitless labor.
Presently the European Union’s biggest problem is its genuine lack of transparency and democratic answerability. The EU hierarchy’s lack of responsiveness to the no votes against the proposed Lisbon Treaty demonstrates their inability to understand or empathize with the European people.
But all it will take is one charismatic leader who can combine the people’s common dreams and aspirations. Hopefully this will be a democratic and not follow the previous proponents of such a combination of European power, which included Hitler and Napoleon and many Emperors of Rome. In the end all had the same flaw that it is very hard, if not impossible to create a power bloc of component parts without central authority being exerted by a very small controlling force.
We need to re-think how we work with the Russians and our fellow Europeans rather than ignore these new realities and America in particular has to figure out to react before they are forced to reconsider their strategies. America was at its most powerful after the Second World War all the way through to the trauma of 9/11. America was also at its most magnanimous during that period and now it must return to a policy of listening as well as talking.
The UK should return to its post war role of being the political, cultural and sometimes economic bridge between Europe and America, understanding both places better than either understands the other.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Tribulations
I feel I should apologize. Several times a week I write another blog, mainly regarding entertainment at http://tonyklinger.blogspot.co.uk I am also on the run to a meeting in the City of London and situations like this mean that I try to write my companion piece here on days like this, in a lighter, briefer style. The reasoning is that it would be easier and less complicated. The trouble is that there has been hardly one day during the recent past in which nothing of consequence has happened.
Even the latest twist in our tortured judicial procedures seems trivial by comparison with the issues of the world today. Police investigating extreme crime in the UK went into meltdown yesterday. A major crime trial was halted when the judge stated that the accused had the right to know who the witnesses against him were. Up to this point it had become standard operating procedure when dealing with suspected violent criminals for the witnesses against them to be granted total anonymity. As a consequence, the man on trial had not been able to see who his accusers were and his lawyers successfully argued that it was not in the interests of justice for a conviction to be gained in this way.
This means that there can be no further anonymous witnesses and this in turn will result in convicted criminals being released on appeal on this basis, and about forty cases currently going through the courts collapsing because the witnesses will withdraw in fear for their safety and that of their families. It also equates to already convicted criminals being released on this basis. There were immediate moves made by the government to find a way to over-rule this judge’s ruling. It seems as if the judiciary in the UK are determined to be politically correct at the cost of any common sense.
At the same time, in Southern Africa only the President of Zambia can hold his head up. He is the only leader to unequivocally condemn the tin pot dictator of nearby Zimbabwe. “ A fair election was not possible,” echoed the head of the United Nations. Mugabe called the MDC opposition leader, “a cry baby”.
Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew from Friday's presidential run-off, handing victory to President Robert Mugabe. Mr. Tsvangirai said there was no point running when elections would not be free and fair and "the outcome is determined by... Mugabe himself".
He called on the global community to step in to prevent "genocide". But the ruling Zanu-PF said Mr. Tsvangirai had taken the decision to avoid "humiliation" in the poll.
The man still illegitimately claiming to be President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe is seemingly determined to go ahead with the election on Friday, despite having forced the opposition leader to withdraw from the process.
Belatedly even South Africa announced that they accepted the UN leaders comment regarding Mugabe, as the President of the ruling ANC said that they feel that Mugabe has gone out of control. The American government has also condemned the Zimbabwean leaders attempts to pretend at legitimacy. Still, no one has done anything concrete to force Mugabe out of power, and he isn’t going to volunteer to vanish. Perhaps, as distasteful as it feels, the best solution is to offer the old despot safe passage to a neutral country with some of his money and retinue and a guarantee of non-prosecution or pursuit as long as he agrees to retire. Surely anything that warranties his safe exit would be of huge benefit to the world.
Even this suffering is put into perspective when you compare it to the pain aching at the heart of the people of Somalia, already racked by civil war and now afflicted by drought and crop failure. People in this country have nothing but their unbelievable endurance and capacity to suffer. Estimates are that 2.5 million people are being given aid currently, and the situation continues to get worse.
This puts into perspective our griping at the cost of fuel, the problems with inflation and the fall in our house prices. How would we feel if we lived in Zimbabwe and had no democracy, the threat of violence and a lack of everything? Or, heaven forbid, in Somalia, where your only means of transportation might be your feet, and you have no food, hygiene or medicine.
Even the latest twist in our tortured judicial procedures seems trivial by comparison with the issues of the world today. Police investigating extreme crime in the UK went into meltdown yesterday. A major crime trial was halted when the judge stated that the accused had the right to know who the witnesses against him were. Up to this point it had become standard operating procedure when dealing with suspected violent criminals for the witnesses against them to be granted total anonymity. As a consequence, the man on trial had not been able to see who his accusers were and his lawyers successfully argued that it was not in the interests of justice for a conviction to be gained in this way.
This means that there can be no further anonymous witnesses and this in turn will result in convicted criminals being released on appeal on this basis, and about forty cases currently going through the courts collapsing because the witnesses will withdraw in fear for their safety and that of their families. It also equates to already convicted criminals being released on this basis. There were immediate moves made by the government to find a way to over-rule this judge’s ruling. It seems as if the judiciary in the UK are determined to be politically correct at the cost of any common sense.
At the same time, in Southern Africa only the President of Zambia can hold his head up. He is the only leader to unequivocally condemn the tin pot dictator of nearby Zimbabwe. “ A fair election was not possible,” echoed the head of the United Nations. Mugabe called the MDC opposition leader, “a cry baby”.
Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew from Friday's presidential run-off, handing victory to President Robert Mugabe. Mr. Tsvangirai said there was no point running when elections would not be free and fair and "the outcome is determined by... Mugabe himself".
He called on the global community to step in to prevent "genocide". But the ruling Zanu-PF said Mr. Tsvangirai had taken the decision to avoid "humiliation" in the poll.
The man still illegitimately claiming to be President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe is seemingly determined to go ahead with the election on Friday, despite having forced the opposition leader to withdraw from the process.
Belatedly even South Africa announced that they accepted the UN leaders comment regarding Mugabe, as the President of the ruling ANC said that they feel that Mugabe has gone out of control. The American government has also condemned the Zimbabwean leaders attempts to pretend at legitimacy. Still, no one has done anything concrete to force Mugabe out of power, and he isn’t going to volunteer to vanish. Perhaps, as distasteful as it feels, the best solution is to offer the old despot safe passage to a neutral country with some of his money and retinue and a guarantee of non-prosecution or pursuit as long as he agrees to retire. Surely anything that warranties his safe exit would be of huge benefit to the world.
Even this suffering is put into perspective when you compare it to the pain aching at the heart of the people of Somalia, already racked by civil war and now afflicted by drought and crop failure. People in this country have nothing but their unbelievable endurance and capacity to suffer. Estimates are that 2.5 million people are being given aid currently, and the situation continues to get worse.
This puts into perspective our griping at the cost of fuel, the problems with inflation and the fall in our house prices. How would we feel if we lived in Zimbabwe and had no democracy, the threat of violence and a lack of everything? Or, heaven forbid, in Somalia, where your only means of transportation might be your feet, and you have no food, hygiene or medicine.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Greatness
Shakespeare wrote, “But be not afraid of greatness: some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Many people are very good at what they do, but never attain greatness. Greatness is a term handed out with too much ease at present. An athlete runs a good race and is given the sobriquet, great, he isn’t, he’s fast, but he hasn’t earned the word great yet. Being great means that you rise above all others, to join a pantheon of giants, to actually transcend normal expectations and be exceptional, and become immortal.
Just because a footballer scores a great goal, or has a season or two in which he scores a great many, or an athlete can run a bit faster than the next person, or a cricketer hit an incoming ball despite it bouncing in front of him at 100 miles per hour it doesn’t render them great. Even the assumption of greatness by association doesn’t work. Take the example of a rainy day in London. A priest met his friend, the local vicar. They stopped to chat for a moment, and then, as they were parting, the priest said to the vicar, "by the way, Vicar, before you could settle an argument, one of my ladies in the church said I look the image of Jesus Christ.... modesty forbids me having an opinion, but do you agree?" the Vicar laughed in his colleagues face, "You.... look like the Lord? I can assure you, my parishioners are unanimous that I am the living image of Jesus."
They soon nearly came to blows and only stopped by the arrival of the local rabbi who seeing their animosity stopped to speak to his friends. They explained their argument, asking "Jesus was born of a Jewish mother rabbi so you’d be in a good position to judge which of us Rabbi, is created in the image of Jesus Christ?" the Rabbi burst into wild laughter.
" Neither of you" and continued to belly laugh. "In fact" he replied, "I KNOW I am the image of Jesus Christ.... and we can prove it!"
Both the Christian clergymen looked at each other in silence. "Go on, then, prove it!" The rabbi said,” OK, follow me." The three men walked down the backstreets of Kings Cross and eventually arrived at a very run down, seedy area.
The rabbi led the way to a particularly dilapidated house where rooms can be rented by the hour. There’s a notice by the door offering "French Lessons Upstairs" the rabbi said, "Here we go, follow me." He led them up the rickety stairs to a door, which he thumped on, and it was opened by a blonde lady in a negligee, she stared at the rabbi and proclaimed "Jesus Christ.... it's you again!!!"
There are very few greats in sport, or any other human endeavor. Strangely the very greatest of our real heroes, men like Winston Churchill, Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi all had humility in common, and this was not false modesty. A lack of humility in the immodest doesn’t make them great, it makes them louder. A celebrity once said to me, with false self deprecation, "I’m modest about my achievement” and I borrowed the line, “you’ve got a lot to be modest about.” He thought it was a compliment.
It’s the self-aggrandizement of the “I” generation. Look over here; I’m smarter, richer and more amazing than you. The fact that you say you’re great guarantees that you’re not.
Greatness is a much over used word, devalued by this over use to describe people of limited talent and no lasting claim on it. It was, I believe, Winston Churchill who said, “we’re all worms, I just hope to be a glow-worm”. Perhaps the lesson from this is to aim to be as good as we can be, and hope someone else might, one day, label us great.
Just because a footballer scores a great goal, or has a season or two in which he scores a great many, or an athlete can run a bit faster than the next person, or a cricketer hit an incoming ball despite it bouncing in front of him at 100 miles per hour it doesn’t render them great. Even the assumption of greatness by association doesn’t work. Take the example of a rainy day in London. A priest met his friend, the local vicar. They stopped to chat for a moment, and then, as they were parting, the priest said to the vicar, "by the way, Vicar, before you could settle an argument, one of my ladies in the church said I look the image of Jesus Christ.... modesty forbids me having an opinion, but do you agree?" the Vicar laughed in his colleagues face, "You.... look like the Lord? I can assure you, my parishioners are unanimous that I am the living image of Jesus."
They soon nearly came to blows and only stopped by the arrival of the local rabbi who seeing their animosity stopped to speak to his friends. They explained their argument, asking "Jesus was born of a Jewish mother rabbi so you’d be in a good position to judge which of us Rabbi, is created in the image of Jesus Christ?" the Rabbi burst into wild laughter.
" Neither of you" and continued to belly laugh. "In fact" he replied, "I KNOW I am the image of Jesus Christ.... and we can prove it!"
Both the Christian clergymen looked at each other in silence. "Go on, then, prove it!" The rabbi said,” OK, follow me." The three men walked down the backstreets of Kings Cross and eventually arrived at a very run down, seedy area.
The rabbi led the way to a particularly dilapidated house where rooms can be rented by the hour. There’s a notice by the door offering "French Lessons Upstairs" the rabbi said, "Here we go, follow me." He led them up the rickety stairs to a door, which he thumped on, and it was opened by a blonde lady in a negligee, she stared at the rabbi and proclaimed "Jesus Christ.... it's you again!!!"
There are very few greats in sport, or any other human endeavor. Strangely the very greatest of our real heroes, men like Winston Churchill, Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi all had humility in common, and this was not false modesty. A lack of humility in the immodest doesn’t make them great, it makes them louder. A celebrity once said to me, with false self deprecation, "I’m modest about my achievement” and I borrowed the line, “you’ve got a lot to be modest about.” He thought it was a compliment.
It’s the self-aggrandizement of the “I” generation. Look over here; I’m smarter, richer and more amazing than you. The fact that you say you’re great guarantees that you’re not.
Greatness is a much over used word, devalued by this over use to describe people of limited talent and no lasting claim on it. It was, I believe, Winston Churchill who said, “we’re all worms, I just hope to be a glow-worm”. Perhaps the lesson from this is to aim to be as good as we can be, and hope someone else might, one day, label us great.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Observations
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. All of the crisis situations in the world are matters of morality or conscience, and are populated by people who are good or evil. Many who observe do nothing.
Here are some thoughts for you to ponder at the start of a new week. Several people asked whether I thought that the Hamas and Israel cease-fire would hold. My view is that it will whilst the Hamas government of Gaza finds it expedient. As soon as they no longer believe it to be so they will resume their rocket attacks on the nearby Israeli town of Sedirot and the Southern Negev. They will privately be smirking that their cease-fire came immediately prior to Israel launching its military to suppress the incessant terrorist attacks coming from Gaza. Thus they achieved their objective of goading their powerful neighbor without being demolished by a powerful Israeli response.
There is no justification for undue optimism about the good intentions of Hamas, who still call for the destruction of Israel. Their acceptance of a ceasefire is a prelude to their re-arming and re-organization ready for the next round. Israel was politically forced to show willing in this macabre dance. If they had not been seen to show a willingness to seek a diplomatic solution the world would soon resound to the charge that Israel was war like, unreasonable and belligerent.
Unfortunately there will be a resumption of terrorist attacks by Hamas when they feel the time is right and the cycle of violence will resume. But remember there is a difference between defending yourself against terrorist combatants, which might accidentally lead to some civilian casualties, and Hamas attacking civilians. Let me remind you what Benjamin Netanyahu said, " If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel ".
A question that is being repeatedly discussed, even in polite circles, is why doesn’t anyone get rid of Robert Mugabe? This is a man with a track record of murder and infamy to his name. In 1982, his troops killed 20,000 members of the Ndebele tribe, their principal crime being opposition to his rule.
Moreover, the turbulence of recent years has amply tested the mettle of the leader of the opposition, and real President of Zimbabwe, MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who has undergone beatings, death threats and a false treason charge, who remains bloodied but unbowed as a leader and statesman. Tsvangirai withdrew from the election because he believed he had no alternative in light of the total unfairness of the current run off for the election. Prior to which, Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, suggested that Friday's run-off election in Zimbabwe should be halted for talks on a unity government, in which the MDC and Mr. Mugabe would share power. But those of us of with long memories know just how that might end up.
When I asked a very well brought up lady what she meant precisely by getting rid of Mugabe, she smiled demurely and said, “Kill him.” I realized that this was the consensus view when all the people we were with agreed with the lady. I am not usually a fan of political assassination but in this case I have to admit that the killing of Mugabe would be the exact equivalent of someone who might have saved the world tremendous suffering if they had assassinated Adolf Hitler. We would all be better off. The leader of Zimbabwe is evil personified.
One of the icons of the modern age reaches the venerable age of 90 this weekend, Nelson Mandela. This proud African has been given the moral authority of the world because he sought reconciliation after his 26 years incarceration instead of revenge. I would like to hold my personal birthday greetings to this man until he gathers up the strength to publicly condemn Mugabe and tell him to go. Until he and the current leaders of the South African government condemn the despot without equivocation, we have to suspect their motives and beliefs.
Another historic event of significance this week is the 100th anniversary of the Hyde Park march of some 250,000 supporters of the suffragettes. How could any man, child of their mothers, brother to sisters and father to daughters ever have done anything other than support the female of the species? With the benefit of hindsight it seems inconceivable that there was ever a time when women didn’t automatically have equal political rights. But even now, in our current world we still don’t give women equal jobs or pay whether by accident or design. I hope and pray that it won’t be another 10 years before this remaining injustice against our women is finally and irrevocably corrected.
Here are some thoughts for you to ponder at the start of a new week. Several people asked whether I thought that the Hamas and Israel cease-fire would hold. My view is that it will whilst the Hamas government of Gaza finds it expedient. As soon as they no longer believe it to be so they will resume their rocket attacks on the nearby Israeli town of Sedirot and the Southern Negev. They will privately be smirking that their cease-fire came immediately prior to Israel launching its military to suppress the incessant terrorist attacks coming from Gaza. Thus they achieved their objective of goading their powerful neighbor without being demolished by a powerful Israeli response.
There is no justification for undue optimism about the good intentions of Hamas, who still call for the destruction of Israel. Their acceptance of a ceasefire is a prelude to their re-arming and re-organization ready for the next round. Israel was politically forced to show willing in this macabre dance. If they had not been seen to show a willingness to seek a diplomatic solution the world would soon resound to the charge that Israel was war like, unreasonable and belligerent.
Unfortunately there will be a resumption of terrorist attacks by Hamas when they feel the time is right and the cycle of violence will resume. But remember there is a difference between defending yourself against terrorist combatants, which might accidentally lead to some civilian casualties, and Hamas attacking civilians. Let me remind you what Benjamin Netanyahu said, " If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel ".
A question that is being repeatedly discussed, even in polite circles, is why doesn’t anyone get rid of Robert Mugabe? This is a man with a track record of murder and infamy to his name. In 1982, his troops killed 20,000 members of the Ndebele tribe, their principal crime being opposition to his rule.
Moreover, the turbulence of recent years has amply tested the mettle of the leader of the opposition, and real President of Zimbabwe, MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who has undergone beatings, death threats and a false treason charge, who remains bloodied but unbowed as a leader and statesman. Tsvangirai withdrew from the election because he believed he had no alternative in light of the total unfairness of the current run off for the election. Prior to which, Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, suggested that Friday's run-off election in Zimbabwe should be halted for talks on a unity government, in which the MDC and Mr. Mugabe would share power. But those of us of with long memories know just how that might end up.
When I asked a very well brought up lady what she meant precisely by getting rid of Mugabe, she smiled demurely and said, “Kill him.” I realized that this was the consensus view when all the people we were with agreed with the lady. I am not usually a fan of political assassination but in this case I have to admit that the killing of Mugabe would be the exact equivalent of someone who might have saved the world tremendous suffering if they had assassinated Adolf Hitler. We would all be better off. The leader of Zimbabwe is evil personified.
One of the icons of the modern age reaches the venerable age of 90 this weekend, Nelson Mandela. This proud African has been given the moral authority of the world because he sought reconciliation after his 26 years incarceration instead of revenge. I would like to hold my personal birthday greetings to this man until he gathers up the strength to publicly condemn Mugabe and tell him to go. Until he and the current leaders of the South African government condemn the despot without equivocation, we have to suspect their motives and beliefs.
Another historic event of significance this week is the 100th anniversary of the Hyde Park march of some 250,000 supporters of the suffragettes. How could any man, child of their mothers, brother to sisters and father to daughters ever have done anything other than support the female of the species? With the benefit of hindsight it seems inconceivable that there was ever a time when women didn’t automatically have equal political rights. But even now, in our current world we still don’t give women equal jobs or pay whether by accident or design. I hope and pray that it won’t be another 10 years before this remaining injustice against our women is finally and irrevocably corrected.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Why
During the last week the BBC showed two programs with Jewish themes on one night. They were an interview with the gay Liberal Rabbi Blue and another, which was the first episode of a three part documentary series, entitled “Jews”.
On the surface these programs were both philo- Semitic hours sympathetic to the Jewish community in modern Britain. They are not, they are, in fact, barely concealed, sophisticated anti Semitism. Why do I come to this conclusion?
The reasons are complex but no less real for this. Once again British television will trot out certain facts in mitigation and denial of this. I don’t even know if they realize that they are being anti-Semitic, such is the deep-seated bigotry within that organization.
The first defense they will trot out is that the maker of “Jews” is herself, a Jewish woman. The other program maker’s religion is unknown to me, but they will point out that the interviewer was clearly sympathetic to the Rabbi. It’s all a lot more subtle than that.
Why do you suppose that a gay rabbi is spoken with at such length? Do you think that the fact this rabbi also appear to despise Israel and Zionism has anything to do with it?
The way this works is that the anti-Semites look for and find a useful idiot, to use Stalin’s term, and let him or her do the work of Jew loathing for them. After all who could accuse the BBC of any intolerance if the person doing the hating is, in fact, a self-hating Jew?
Don’t misunderstand me, I think Rabbi Blue is a mostly well intentioned man, who unfortunately is coming to the end of his earthly journey, and who I have watched in his one man show and who’s book I have read.
In “The Jews” the program makers chose to observe the ultra orthodox, Stamford Hill (an area of London) Charedi community. I won’t question the selection of this very small and unrepresentative group because this is one of three programs and the remaining two might bring some balance. However the choice of this as the first episode is questionable. No, much more worrying for me is that despite this community being acknowledged as ultra law abiding when compared to the rest of the country is that the BBC then zeroed in on one man in that community in particular. That man was a convicted drug smuggler. I question whether there is another drug smuggler in the entire community, or probably, for that matter another individual who has served three prison terms.
However you dress it up you now had two continuous hours of supposedly superior British network television about the British Jewish community in which the featured Jews were either gay, criminal, convict, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist or plainly confused. No room here for any of us who might fit a more “normal” profile, support Israel, or feel good about being a Jew. Those that hate the Jews, and there, unfortunately still many of that persuasion, don’t need help like this.
On the surface these programs were both philo- Semitic hours sympathetic to the Jewish community in modern Britain. They are not, they are, in fact, barely concealed, sophisticated anti Semitism. Why do I come to this conclusion?
The reasons are complex but no less real for this. Once again British television will trot out certain facts in mitigation and denial of this. I don’t even know if they realize that they are being anti-Semitic, such is the deep-seated bigotry within that organization.
The first defense they will trot out is that the maker of “Jews” is herself, a Jewish woman. The other program maker’s religion is unknown to me, but they will point out that the interviewer was clearly sympathetic to the Rabbi. It’s all a lot more subtle than that.
Why do you suppose that a gay rabbi is spoken with at such length? Do you think that the fact this rabbi also appear to despise Israel and Zionism has anything to do with it?
The way this works is that the anti-Semites look for and find a useful idiot, to use Stalin’s term, and let him or her do the work of Jew loathing for them. After all who could accuse the BBC of any intolerance if the person doing the hating is, in fact, a self-hating Jew?
Don’t misunderstand me, I think Rabbi Blue is a mostly well intentioned man, who unfortunately is coming to the end of his earthly journey, and who I have watched in his one man show and who’s book I have read.
In “The Jews” the program makers chose to observe the ultra orthodox, Stamford Hill (an area of London) Charedi community. I won’t question the selection of this very small and unrepresentative group because this is one of three programs and the remaining two might bring some balance. However the choice of this as the first episode is questionable. No, much more worrying for me is that despite this community being acknowledged as ultra law abiding when compared to the rest of the country is that the BBC then zeroed in on one man in that community in particular. That man was a convicted drug smuggler. I question whether there is another drug smuggler in the entire community, or probably, for that matter another individual who has served three prison terms.
However you dress it up you now had two continuous hours of supposedly superior British network television about the British Jewish community in which the featured Jews were either gay, criminal, convict, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist or plainly confused. No room here for any of us who might fit a more “normal” profile, support Israel, or feel good about being a Jew. Those that hate the Jews, and there, unfortunately still many of that persuasion, don’t need help like this.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Decision
Decision Time
The leadership of Israel is about to make a momentous decision. Should they decide to attack the Iranian nuclear facility or not?
There is compelling evidence that on June 2 the Israeli Air Force flew up to 100 of its jet fighters, F15’s and F16’s, some 900 miles towards Greece in a full dress rehearsal for flying a similar distance to Iran. The BBC and New York Times report that this was to test and rehearse Israel’s capacity to take a full fleet of fighters, refueling tankers, and helicopter rescue teams.
The Israeli exercise was seemingly designed to send a clear message to Tehran that Israel has the power and will to attack Iran.
Warnings against any such action were immediately announced by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Viktorovich Lavrovand and were echoed by the head of the UN atomic energy commission, the nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei. I am confident that this lawyer who became a career United Nations diplomat, and who was born and educated in Cairo, and who worked (1964-80) in the Egyptian diplomatic service, becoming special assistant to the foreign minister (1974-78) is a total neutral when it concerns Israel.
Iran continues to insist its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, but Israel sees Iran's development of the technology as a serious threat.
The Iranians are continuing to defy a UN demand to stop their uranium enrichment program and the Security Council approved a third round of sanctions against Iran over the issue in March 2008.
No one knows if any of what has been said and done means an attack on Iran is imminent as previous talk of such action dissipated after a US intelligence report at the end of 2007 indicated their belief that Iran had, at that time, given up its nuclear weapons programme.
Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the UN's watchdog, said an attack would put Iran on a "crash course" to building nuclear weapons.
"A military strike, in my opinion, would be worse than anything possible - it would turn the region into a fireball," he told the television station, Al Arabiya. "It would make me unable to continue my work," he said. Too bad if we lose this undoubtedly good man’s efforts but we’d live without him, but could Israel live with the consequences of an Iranian nuclear strike if he was wrong?
The international diplomatic community is insistent that Israel must give diplomacy more of a chance to succeed. I usually subscribe to the Winston Churchill motto that “Jaw, jaw is better than war war,” but we all need to remember that the Iranian leadership, led by the mad Iranian President has a direct correlation with Churchill’s nemesis, Adolf Hitler. Both these despots contain at the core of their belief system, a total hate for the Jewish people. Hitler perpetrated the holocaust and the Iranian President; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the world’s leading holocaust denier. He simply insists it didn’t happen. Iran's president called for Israel to be moved to Europe. "If European countries claim that they have killed Jews in World War II... why don't they provide the Zionist regime with a piece of Europe," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Iranian television.” Germany and Austria can provide the... regime with two or three provinces for this regime to establish itself, and the issue will be resolved." Clearly we are talking about a lunatic who is capable of doing exactly what he threatens, just like Hitler.
Let’s weigh up the risks. In one scenario Israel attacks and fails, perhaps unable to reach or destroy the targets. The ramifications would be very bad for Israel and the men and women she might lose but not a problem for anyone else. A second scenario is Israel succeeds in its attack and eliminates the Iranian capacity to develop its nuclear bombs. The possibility thereafter is that Iran or its surrogates, mainly Hamas and Hezbollah, launch a series of asymmetric counter strikes against Israel. The consequences would be awful but not unbearable.
The last option for Israel is that it does nothing and just hopes that the threat goes away. The probability is that this would be a fatal mistake on Israel’s behalf, one from which there is no possibility of recovery. Remember the Iranian President has announced, on several occasions that Israel will cease to exist and be wiped from the face of the earth.
If your enemy has repeatedly sworn to wipe you out, do you wait or get your revenge in first? In circumstance such as these it isn’t madness to attack, it’s lunacy to wait.
The leadership of Israel is about to make a momentous decision. Should they decide to attack the Iranian nuclear facility or not?
There is compelling evidence that on June 2 the Israeli Air Force flew up to 100 of its jet fighters, F15’s and F16’s, some 900 miles towards Greece in a full dress rehearsal for flying a similar distance to Iran. The BBC and New York Times report that this was to test and rehearse Israel’s capacity to take a full fleet of fighters, refueling tankers, and helicopter rescue teams.
The Israeli exercise was seemingly designed to send a clear message to Tehran that Israel has the power and will to attack Iran.
Warnings against any such action were immediately announced by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Viktorovich Lavrovand and were echoed by the head of the UN atomic energy commission, the nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei. I am confident that this lawyer who became a career United Nations diplomat, and who was born and educated in Cairo, and who worked (1964-80) in the Egyptian diplomatic service, becoming special assistant to the foreign minister (1974-78) is a total neutral when it concerns Israel.
Iran continues to insist its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, but Israel sees Iran's development of the technology as a serious threat.
The Iranians are continuing to defy a UN demand to stop their uranium enrichment program and the Security Council approved a third round of sanctions against Iran over the issue in March 2008.
No one knows if any of what has been said and done means an attack on Iran is imminent as previous talk of such action dissipated after a US intelligence report at the end of 2007 indicated their belief that Iran had, at that time, given up its nuclear weapons programme.
Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the UN's watchdog, said an attack would put Iran on a "crash course" to building nuclear weapons.
"A military strike, in my opinion, would be worse than anything possible - it would turn the region into a fireball," he told the television station, Al Arabiya. "It would make me unable to continue my work," he said. Too bad if we lose this undoubtedly good man’s efforts but we’d live without him, but could Israel live with the consequences of an Iranian nuclear strike if he was wrong?
The international diplomatic community is insistent that Israel must give diplomacy more of a chance to succeed. I usually subscribe to the Winston Churchill motto that “Jaw, jaw is better than war war,” but we all need to remember that the Iranian leadership, led by the mad Iranian President has a direct correlation with Churchill’s nemesis, Adolf Hitler. Both these despots contain at the core of their belief system, a total hate for the Jewish people. Hitler perpetrated the holocaust and the Iranian President; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the world’s leading holocaust denier. He simply insists it didn’t happen. Iran's president called for Israel to be moved to Europe. "If European countries claim that they have killed Jews in World War II... why don't they provide the Zionist regime with a piece of Europe," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Iranian television.” Germany and Austria can provide the... regime with two or three provinces for this regime to establish itself, and the issue will be resolved." Clearly we are talking about a lunatic who is capable of doing exactly what he threatens, just like Hitler.
Let’s weigh up the risks. In one scenario Israel attacks and fails, perhaps unable to reach or destroy the targets. The ramifications would be very bad for Israel and the men and women she might lose but not a problem for anyone else. A second scenario is Israel succeeds in its attack and eliminates the Iranian capacity to develop its nuclear bombs. The possibility thereafter is that Iran or its surrogates, mainly Hamas and Hezbollah, launch a series of asymmetric counter strikes against Israel. The consequences would be awful but not unbearable.
The last option for Israel is that it does nothing and just hopes that the threat goes away. The probability is that this would be a fatal mistake on Israel’s behalf, one from which there is no possibility of recovery. Remember the Iranian President has announced, on several occasions that Israel will cease to exist and be wiped from the face of the earth.
If your enemy has repeatedly sworn to wipe you out, do you wait or get your revenge in first? In circumstance such as these it isn’t madness to attack, it’s lunacy to wait.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Doers
Almost every day someone tells me they have a great idea. This has been happening all my adult life, especially since I started to make films, run companies or direct study at universities. Originally I found this very flattering. How great that people wanted to show me their terrific ideas that were about to change the world as we know it.
It took me a very long time to understand that this wasn’t the point. Most people are showing you their idea because they want you to help them.
Why admire people who simply have ideas and then think this makes them wonderful. Ideas are like anal orifices, everyone has one. I admire people who complete ideas and turn them into a finished article. These people are doers rather than dreamers. Just such a person is Jon Mackley.
Jon used to work with me when he was a very young man, and I was merely younger. He jobs became progressively less menial, as he went up the ranks in our small, but taxing firm. I should add that he is still a youngish man, well comparatively, but not quite so youthful. Jon went to university after his work with my family’s business and I believe he earned two degrees plus a doctorate.
Whilst working as a lecturer and completing his doctorate he also found the time to write his learned book, “The Legend of St. Brendan” which describes how the Irish abbot journeys to Paradise and the marvelous encounters he experiences. It will soon be available on Amazon books and I hope some of you buy it. Good luck with the book J.S. you deserve it, you’re a talented and hard working man, which I always knew, but add to that the most important of all accolades, Jon, you’re a doer!
It took me a very long time to understand that this wasn’t the point. Most people are showing you their idea because they want you to help them.
Why admire people who simply have ideas and then think this makes them wonderful. Ideas are like anal orifices, everyone has one. I admire people who complete ideas and turn them into a finished article. These people are doers rather than dreamers. Just such a person is Jon Mackley.
Jon used to work with me when he was a very young man, and I was merely younger. He jobs became progressively less menial, as he went up the ranks in our small, but taxing firm. I should add that he is still a youngish man, well comparatively, but not quite so youthful. Jon went to university after his work with my family’s business and I believe he earned two degrees plus a doctorate.
Whilst working as a lecturer and completing his doctorate he also found the time to write his learned book, “The Legend of St. Brendan” which describes how the Irish abbot journeys to Paradise and the marvelous encounters he experiences. It will soon be available on Amazon books and I hope some of you buy it. Good luck with the book J.S. you deserve it, you’re a talented and hard working man, which I always knew, but add to that the most important of all accolades, Jon, you’re a doer!
Friends
Beginning about fifteen years ago I started to meet friends from my childhood. It started when I was editing a small video series I had produced in London. Someone saw my name, and remembering me from our mutual childhood he contacted me. His name is Roger. I recalled a tall, blond, thin guy when he was young. Time passes, and now Roger, although still tall, is no longer the proud owner of a head full of lustrous blond hair, and you couldn’t call him thin, but underneath the years he’s still the same Roger I lived one street away from. I suppose we all some carbuncles on us now, and perhaps a few pounds of excess baggage. But when I look at Roger I still see the hopeful teenager, and I guess he feels the same way about me.
Then I was looking for a house a few years later in Stanmore, the same district I had spent some of my formative years. The real estate agent told me that the house I was looking at was also being reviewed by another couple, and that they would be at the agency later the same day. I heard them mention the name Nigel, and that being a pretty unusual name, I asked whether it was a man called Nigel Schneider, and the woman clearly thought I was toying with her. It was indeed, the same Nigel I had last seen a bit more than forty years before at our secondary school, Harrow High School for Boys.
I followed up and met Nigel and it was reassuring to discover that his memories of school and adolescence were the same as mine. Up to that point I had begun to think I must have imagined some of the strange and deviant teachers it was our misfortune to encounter. Along with the good memories we had endured paedophilia from some of the senior staff that no one believed. I remember writing about this for our unofficial school magazine, Fanfare, which I produced with another great friend of the time, Michael Elton. Our publication was soon brought to an end despite it being a big success. We told our parents about the constant groping of some of the male staff, and in those less enlightened times, we were ignored. It was only when our headmaster was arrested for importuning outside a Gentlemen’s public lavatory in Harrow and was, as a consequence, banned from teaching at any boys’ school were we believed.
Some things have changed for the better, and the control of inappropriate adult supervision is certainly one of them.
More recently I received a communication from two friends who I went to primary school with. Jeff and Neville. The school was Holland House in Edgware, on the outskirts of North West London. These two venerable gentlemen hadn’t seen each other in nearly fifty years. At their reunion my name came up, in the spirit of whatever happened to Tony Klinger. They knew I had gone into the entertainment business but nothing much more. Whilst they raised my name the partner of Neville, soon to be wife, (mazeltov for later this month!) Roz, overheard. Earlier that same day she had been in contact about the charity showing of my film, Full Circle, for the charity she works at, WJR. By ridiculous fluke she was able to tell the guys where I was that day!
Some people call that kismet, but in our vernacular we would call it bashert, our way of saying an event is fated or predestined.
We have since followed through and become friends once more. But I have to admit that when I look at Neville particularly, I see the eager ten or eleven year old and not the middle aged man. I wonder if that’s why it’s so particularly comforting to rekindle these old relationships. It’s like throwing on a comfortable old sweater, you know it isn’t the most fashionable shape or colour, but it feels good, smells better and keeps you warm. I wonder if he sees the grey haired me, or the small boy in the pictures he had kept of us? We were both in the boxing and soccer teams, and we were small and nervous about getting hit on the nose. My mother used to let me go to school on boxing match days with the admonition, “don’t let them hit you on the face!” I did try mum, no one ducked lower or more often than me, but still they tried to hit me, the bastards. Happily they didn’t connect too often on the Klinger proboscis, as I only lost once.
I remember my grandfather’s friend, a famed ex champion boxer, telling me, “hit them on the nose and in the kishkeh, they’ll sprout some claret and be sick and it’ll be all over! Roughly translated it meant I should hit them on the nose to make it bleed and in the belly. Schoolboy amateur boxers and their families never did understand that it’s best not to eat for many hours before a fight. I have to admit that in my mind I was boxing like Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali) but I was floating like a bumblebee and stinging like a butterfly.
But in the small world of Holland House School we were holding our own and building happy memories. Looking back its hard not to see everything through a rosy glow of happy memories. Of course the world was not in sepia, and the sun didn’t always shine, but it was a simpler world, and there seemed to be a clearer distinction between right and wrong. There was less grey, more black and white. The world was better for this clarity and it certainly felt better. Wouldn’t it be great if our present society were to rediscover some of those forgotten, simple, straightforward core values of civility, courtesy and honesty?
Then I was looking for a house a few years later in Stanmore, the same district I had spent some of my formative years. The real estate agent told me that the house I was looking at was also being reviewed by another couple, and that they would be at the agency later the same day. I heard them mention the name Nigel, and that being a pretty unusual name, I asked whether it was a man called Nigel Schneider, and the woman clearly thought I was toying with her. It was indeed, the same Nigel I had last seen a bit more than forty years before at our secondary school, Harrow High School for Boys.
I followed up and met Nigel and it was reassuring to discover that his memories of school and adolescence were the same as mine. Up to that point I had begun to think I must have imagined some of the strange and deviant teachers it was our misfortune to encounter. Along with the good memories we had endured paedophilia from some of the senior staff that no one believed. I remember writing about this for our unofficial school magazine, Fanfare, which I produced with another great friend of the time, Michael Elton. Our publication was soon brought to an end despite it being a big success. We told our parents about the constant groping of some of the male staff, and in those less enlightened times, we were ignored. It was only when our headmaster was arrested for importuning outside a Gentlemen’s public lavatory in Harrow and was, as a consequence, banned from teaching at any boys’ school were we believed.
Some things have changed for the better, and the control of inappropriate adult supervision is certainly one of them.
More recently I received a communication from two friends who I went to primary school with. Jeff and Neville. The school was Holland House in Edgware, on the outskirts of North West London. These two venerable gentlemen hadn’t seen each other in nearly fifty years. At their reunion my name came up, in the spirit of whatever happened to Tony Klinger. They knew I had gone into the entertainment business but nothing much more. Whilst they raised my name the partner of Neville, soon to be wife, (mazeltov for later this month!) Roz, overheard. Earlier that same day she had been in contact about the charity showing of my film, Full Circle, for the charity she works at, WJR. By ridiculous fluke she was able to tell the guys where I was that day!
Some people call that kismet, but in our vernacular we would call it bashert, our way of saying an event is fated or predestined.
We have since followed through and become friends once more. But I have to admit that when I look at Neville particularly, I see the eager ten or eleven year old and not the middle aged man. I wonder if that’s why it’s so particularly comforting to rekindle these old relationships. It’s like throwing on a comfortable old sweater, you know it isn’t the most fashionable shape or colour, but it feels good, smells better and keeps you warm. I wonder if he sees the grey haired me, or the small boy in the pictures he had kept of us? We were both in the boxing and soccer teams, and we were small and nervous about getting hit on the nose. My mother used to let me go to school on boxing match days with the admonition, “don’t let them hit you on the face!” I did try mum, no one ducked lower or more often than me, but still they tried to hit me, the bastards. Happily they didn’t connect too often on the Klinger proboscis, as I only lost once.
I remember my grandfather’s friend, a famed ex champion boxer, telling me, “hit them on the nose and in the kishkeh, they’ll sprout some claret and be sick and it’ll be all over! Roughly translated it meant I should hit them on the nose to make it bleed and in the belly. Schoolboy amateur boxers and their families never did understand that it’s best not to eat for many hours before a fight. I have to admit that in my mind I was boxing like Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali) but I was floating like a bumblebee and stinging like a butterfly.
But in the small world of Holland House School we were holding our own and building happy memories. Looking back its hard not to see everything through a rosy glow of happy memories. Of course the world was not in sepia, and the sun didn’t always shine, but it was a simpler world, and there seemed to be a clearer distinction between right and wrong. There was less grey, more black and white. The world was better for this clarity and it certainly felt better. Wouldn’t it be great if our present society were to rediscover some of those forgotten, simple, straightforward core values of civility, courtesy and honesty?
Thursday, June 19, 2008
UnGovernment
There continues to be ever more strange happenings that beg to be commented upon in dear old blighty Some of these events might seem to be disconnected but I insist there is a common theme.
Over the last few days the judicial system decided, in its infinite wisdom, to release Abu Qatada from prison. This is a man variously described as a “fanatical preacher”, “the right hand man in Europe of Osama Bin Laden” and “the spiritual father of European acts of terror”. It is said that this spreader of hate influenced others to attack the West, including civilians, despite his living in comfort, in England. This is made worse by the fact that he gained entry fourteen years ago into this country with a fake passport. The reason he could not be deported was because in Jordan, he was wanted for capital offences, which could result “in an unfair trial which could then result in his being executed. Our laws don’t allow us to extradite prisoners to a third country where that could be the consequence.
When the judge granted him bail, he stated that there were no grounds for keeping Abu Qatada in prison. How about these grounds –for being a murdering, lying, deceitful bastard who should be sent back to Jordan to be tried and executed?
We also had official notification that the inflation rate in the UK had reached 3.3%, it’s highest rate for 16 years. This doesn’t sound so bad, but that would only be the case if this figure were accurate. Of course it isn’t. This is the inflation rate if you deduct falling house prices and similar drops in items that simply wouldn’t see in the real inflationary spiral, currently overtaking us. If you take that out of the equation the real inflation rate is more like 10% to 20% on everyday living costs such as oil, gas, petrol and food. These are the items that affect us all and which are spiralling out of reach.
My only bright spot is that as we have to pay to look after the criminal bastard Abu Qatada by handing him money so he can live on bail in the manner to which he has become accustomed, but at least there’s the thought that his benefit will be eaten up a bit by the inflation we’re all now going to suffer. Then again, I bet you he gets an inflation linked rise in the money we give him so that he can laugh some more at us.
Whilst on the subject of madmen and idiots it has been repeatedly asked of me that I voice the opinion of the majority who ask this question, why has no country sanctioned the assassination of Robert Mugabe? I genuinely don’t agree with the state sanctioned killing of anyone, but when that someone qualifies as some kind of black Hitler you are forced to the conclusion that the world would be better off if Mugabe simply ceased to exist.
Staying with the idiots, and yet another of these, the unjustifiably perky, always pesky Hazel Blears, Secretary for the Communities in our Ruritarian government, had her computer stolen. As in the last nine recent instances of our leaders and custodians losing our top-secret information, it contained secrets and confidential information that should not be in the public domain. I have two questions in this regard;
1. Why are these secret files ever removed from the offices of these officials unless there is a concrete reason for doing so?
2. Failing which, if they do have to be allowed out of the offices in which they are secure, why are these documents not encrypted before they are put onto anyone’s computer?
The government’s official idiot spokesman will say, “there will be an immediate and wide ranging enquiry, and no cover up.” which we all know will exonerate anyone senior as some junior and faceless bureaucrat takes the punishment in return for a comfortable pension, unless he or she has a conscience, in which case they will commit suicide, real or professional. As for the patronizing Ms. Blears, she who never admits to any wrongdoing or blemish will no doubt attempt to spin this incident so that she is not only blameless but able to lecture us, her public, on how to live our lives as she does, perfectly, with a smile locked on her silly, patronizing face. It seems obvious to me that the only reason this incompetent still has a government job is that our Prime Minister keeps her in government so he can look good when compared.
Perhaps those of you who don’t know the background need a quick reminder. Over the last few days there was the mysterious case of the senior civil servant who worked as a Cabinet official who after confessing to his error, was suspended after leaving top-secret documents on a train, followed, one day later with Treasury papers dealing with global terrorism, and how its funded, found on a second train. Then there was the laptop belonging to the deputy chief constable of Avon and Somerset, who clearly has access to top-secret information, which was stolen from his car. These are just the most recent of ten or so manifestations of incompetence to a degree not seen outside of a Pink Panther movie.
Or do you agree with my theory, that I voiced a few days back, in which I surmised that such an outbreak of happenings defy the cock up theory and become a much more likely plot to expose and get rid of this government?
I expect exploding cakes, men in wheelchairs unable to hear the old German national anthem without giving the Nazi salute and others saying the immortal words, “I will tell you the code, only once!” Our leadership is a total farce and the only people who don’t appear to know this is our leadership. The message to the whole sorry bunch of them is listen to the voice of the people and go!
Over the last few days the judicial system decided, in its infinite wisdom, to release Abu Qatada from prison. This is a man variously described as a “fanatical preacher”, “the right hand man in Europe of Osama Bin Laden” and “the spiritual father of European acts of terror”. It is said that this spreader of hate influenced others to attack the West, including civilians, despite his living in comfort, in England. This is made worse by the fact that he gained entry fourteen years ago into this country with a fake passport. The reason he could not be deported was because in Jordan, he was wanted for capital offences, which could result “in an unfair trial which could then result in his being executed. Our laws don’t allow us to extradite prisoners to a third country where that could be the consequence.
When the judge granted him bail, he stated that there were no grounds for keeping Abu Qatada in prison. How about these grounds –for being a murdering, lying, deceitful bastard who should be sent back to Jordan to be tried and executed?
We also had official notification that the inflation rate in the UK had reached 3.3%, it’s highest rate for 16 years. This doesn’t sound so bad, but that would only be the case if this figure were accurate. Of course it isn’t. This is the inflation rate if you deduct falling house prices and similar drops in items that simply wouldn’t see in the real inflationary spiral, currently overtaking us. If you take that out of the equation the real inflation rate is more like 10% to 20% on everyday living costs such as oil, gas, petrol and food. These are the items that affect us all and which are spiralling out of reach.
My only bright spot is that as we have to pay to look after the criminal bastard Abu Qatada by handing him money so he can live on bail in the manner to which he has become accustomed, but at least there’s the thought that his benefit will be eaten up a bit by the inflation we’re all now going to suffer. Then again, I bet you he gets an inflation linked rise in the money we give him so that he can laugh some more at us.
Whilst on the subject of madmen and idiots it has been repeatedly asked of me that I voice the opinion of the majority who ask this question, why has no country sanctioned the assassination of Robert Mugabe? I genuinely don’t agree with the state sanctioned killing of anyone, but when that someone qualifies as some kind of black Hitler you are forced to the conclusion that the world would be better off if Mugabe simply ceased to exist.
Staying with the idiots, and yet another of these, the unjustifiably perky, always pesky Hazel Blears, Secretary for the Communities in our Ruritarian government, had her computer stolen. As in the last nine recent instances of our leaders and custodians losing our top-secret information, it contained secrets and confidential information that should not be in the public domain. I have two questions in this regard;
1. Why are these secret files ever removed from the offices of these officials unless there is a concrete reason for doing so?
2. Failing which, if they do have to be allowed out of the offices in which they are secure, why are these documents not encrypted before they are put onto anyone’s computer?
The government’s official idiot spokesman will say, “there will be an immediate and wide ranging enquiry, and no cover up.” which we all know will exonerate anyone senior as some junior and faceless bureaucrat takes the punishment in return for a comfortable pension, unless he or she has a conscience, in which case they will commit suicide, real or professional. As for the patronizing Ms. Blears, she who never admits to any wrongdoing or blemish will no doubt attempt to spin this incident so that she is not only blameless but able to lecture us, her public, on how to live our lives as she does, perfectly, with a smile locked on her silly, patronizing face. It seems obvious to me that the only reason this incompetent still has a government job is that our Prime Minister keeps her in government so he can look good when compared.
Perhaps those of you who don’t know the background need a quick reminder. Over the last few days there was the mysterious case of the senior civil servant who worked as a Cabinet official who after confessing to his error, was suspended after leaving top-secret documents on a train, followed, one day later with Treasury papers dealing with global terrorism, and how its funded, found on a second train. Then there was the laptop belonging to the deputy chief constable of Avon and Somerset, who clearly has access to top-secret information, which was stolen from his car. These are just the most recent of ten or so manifestations of incompetence to a degree not seen outside of a Pink Panther movie.
Or do you agree with my theory, that I voiced a few days back, in which I surmised that such an outbreak of happenings defy the cock up theory and become a much more likely plot to expose and get rid of this government?
I expect exploding cakes, men in wheelchairs unable to hear the old German national anthem without giving the Nazi salute and others saying the immortal words, “I will tell you the code, only once!” Our leadership is a total farce and the only people who don’t appear to know this is our leadership. The message to the whole sorry bunch of them is listen to the voice of the people and go!
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
America
During those particularly American rites of passage, the Primaries and later, the election for President we tend to forget the bigger issues. What is happening to the USA and its place in the world?
The last few days have seen President Bush visit the UK and address his place in history. It was almost surreal to see the outgoing President standing shoulder to shoulder with our fairly new Prime Minister. In fact they looked as if someone must have got the running order wrong. The President looked great, almost floating a foot above the ground, whereas the Prime Minister looked like the world had just pooped on his head. Not a bad idea perhaps?
From the outside it might look as if the two big armed conflicts, in Iraq and Afghanistan, should be America’s principal concern. Although these are undeniably important, they pale into insignificance against the fast looming economic crisis that faces America. With a national debt of more than $2 trillion (that is two thousand billion dollars!) and a still staggeringly high balance of trade deficit, America will not, in future, be able to borrow and spend its way out of recession, and this could lead to leaps in unemployment, business confidence collapsing, and therefore a depression.
It is not that America cannot and does not manufacture anything anymore, which might be the common misconception, but it doesn’t make much for the consumer when compared to its new Asian economic foes. America still supplies the world with heavy machinery, big ticket, heavy, industrial items, creative industries output and raw materials. From the latest statistics it is still the world’s biggest manufacturer. The trouble comes from the fact that it is also, by much bigger margins, the world’s biggest consumer. There are several possible outcomes to this imbalance.
America could and maybe should work hard to increase its exports even further. This will be helped, and is, to a degree happening because of the shrinking value of the US $. Once the mightiest and simplest manifestation of American hegemony over the global economic system it is no longer anything but an embarrassment. Two months ago, in Mexico, I had my U.S. dollars rejected by Mexican shopkeepers who would once have been fighting for these symbols of American financial muscle. I remember the same thing once happening to me, in the seventies, with our pounds sterling, and it is a very unpleasant reminder that things are seriously wrong with your country and its place in the world order, when this happens.
On the plus side America is already fairly well placed in terms of its productivity and output levels. There has been good recent investment in plant and machinery, but as the recession bites there is a concomitant decrease in consumer demand that results in less need for this increasing efficiency. Investing more in infrastructure was the right thing to do, but it probably came too late in the economic cycle.
If America’s consumerism helped to fuel the recent boom in the economic cycle could its own rapidly decreasing consumer demand save it from itself? I doubt this is a possibility because the poor credit situation and the consequent lack of liquidity are presently locked in a negative spiral. It’s as if we have to beat ourselves up economically first, then we can look at the other side of the suffering.
Of course the best thing that America could do for itself as a short and medium term fix is to reduce the amount of everything it consumes. This would damage the rest of the world because we have become addicted to the drug that was created via America’s consumer spending. Long term America is going to have to reduce on almost everything it uses, or we are all going to have even more major problems. For example there just isn’t enough fuel in the world for it to be sustainable for about 20% of the world’s gasoline to be used on the freeways of California.
We have not come to the bottom of this economic downturn yet and one of its prime causes was the sub prime mortgage debacle from which there can be no easy escape. It is unavoidable that there will be more pain to come from the lunacy our bankers imposed on the rest of us with their profligacy and stupidity. Their greed seemed to make them forget their own rules and codes and common sense. Because there was big money to be had while the music played no one remembered that it was bound to stop. There were no soft landings to be found.
However poorly reported it has been Bush and Brown will have been told that there have been food riots in several countries around the globe in the last months, and similarly there have been further violent riots about the price and availability of oil products. We stand together on the edge of a general breakdown of international law and order, divided by days from disintegration.
The sovereign investment groups do have enough money to strap a financial parachute onto America’s back as it leaps into the precipitous drop into the money chasm so that their landing is cushioned. I’m not sure that they aren’t getting too much fun watching the US discomforted. The Germans have a word for it, “schadenfreude”, which means the sheer pleasure of observing someone you don’t like, suffer misfortune. The big funds come out of the oil rich Arab states, China and some other Asian success stories. I think they’ll enjoy America suffering. However, in the end where else is there for them to invest that’s a better, bigger investment opportunity which they can also enjoy living in if all else fails. America has gone from being the engine to become the envied lifestyle.
I have always liked America and what it has stood for historically. I don’t believe it has unfailingly done the right thing, but name a single country that has. It has tried to do the right thing on most occasions and that’s a big plus for the rest of us. America is, therefore, generally a benign influence and a guardian for what’s right and decent. Despite the protests against Bush for breathing in and out I am convinced that most people share my positivism towards the USA. My reason for saying this is not because there has been a poll on which I can base this argument; it’s subtler than that. But ask yourself what television and films you watch, what music you listen to, what games you play and books you read? The odds are enormously high that the vast majority of these will come from America. Add to this the shops, the clothing lines, the restaurants, fast food outlets and coffee bars, predominately from the States. We are culturally very closely linked to America, not because we have to be, but because most of us want to be. The sneering glitterati will stick their noses up at this argument as they despise America, but are nevertheless irresistibly drawn towards it.
Does this decreasing economic power of the American juggernaut lessen the country’s ability to dictate events politically on a global scale? Not yet, is the answer for now. America is still the sole superpower; able to project its power, economically, socially and militarily around the world, when and how it wants. But this will not continue to be the case if the American economy fails to get its own economic house in order. I think, on balance, that this is more than a desirable outcome if you love our western form of democracy and lifestyle.
The last few days have seen President Bush visit the UK and address his place in history. It was almost surreal to see the outgoing President standing shoulder to shoulder with our fairly new Prime Minister. In fact they looked as if someone must have got the running order wrong. The President looked great, almost floating a foot above the ground, whereas the Prime Minister looked like the world had just pooped on his head. Not a bad idea perhaps?
From the outside it might look as if the two big armed conflicts, in Iraq and Afghanistan, should be America’s principal concern. Although these are undeniably important, they pale into insignificance against the fast looming economic crisis that faces America. With a national debt of more than $2 trillion (that is two thousand billion dollars!) and a still staggeringly high balance of trade deficit, America will not, in future, be able to borrow and spend its way out of recession, and this could lead to leaps in unemployment, business confidence collapsing, and therefore a depression.
It is not that America cannot and does not manufacture anything anymore, which might be the common misconception, but it doesn’t make much for the consumer when compared to its new Asian economic foes. America still supplies the world with heavy machinery, big ticket, heavy, industrial items, creative industries output and raw materials. From the latest statistics it is still the world’s biggest manufacturer. The trouble comes from the fact that it is also, by much bigger margins, the world’s biggest consumer. There are several possible outcomes to this imbalance.
America could and maybe should work hard to increase its exports even further. This will be helped, and is, to a degree happening because of the shrinking value of the US $. Once the mightiest and simplest manifestation of American hegemony over the global economic system it is no longer anything but an embarrassment. Two months ago, in Mexico, I had my U.S. dollars rejected by Mexican shopkeepers who would once have been fighting for these symbols of American financial muscle. I remember the same thing once happening to me, in the seventies, with our pounds sterling, and it is a very unpleasant reminder that things are seriously wrong with your country and its place in the world order, when this happens.
On the plus side America is already fairly well placed in terms of its productivity and output levels. There has been good recent investment in plant and machinery, but as the recession bites there is a concomitant decrease in consumer demand that results in less need for this increasing efficiency. Investing more in infrastructure was the right thing to do, but it probably came too late in the economic cycle.
If America’s consumerism helped to fuel the recent boom in the economic cycle could its own rapidly decreasing consumer demand save it from itself? I doubt this is a possibility because the poor credit situation and the consequent lack of liquidity are presently locked in a negative spiral. It’s as if we have to beat ourselves up economically first, then we can look at the other side of the suffering.
Of course the best thing that America could do for itself as a short and medium term fix is to reduce the amount of everything it consumes. This would damage the rest of the world because we have become addicted to the drug that was created via America’s consumer spending. Long term America is going to have to reduce on almost everything it uses, or we are all going to have even more major problems. For example there just isn’t enough fuel in the world for it to be sustainable for about 20% of the world’s gasoline to be used on the freeways of California.
We have not come to the bottom of this economic downturn yet and one of its prime causes was the sub prime mortgage debacle from which there can be no easy escape. It is unavoidable that there will be more pain to come from the lunacy our bankers imposed on the rest of us with their profligacy and stupidity. Their greed seemed to make them forget their own rules and codes and common sense. Because there was big money to be had while the music played no one remembered that it was bound to stop. There were no soft landings to be found.
However poorly reported it has been Bush and Brown will have been told that there have been food riots in several countries around the globe in the last months, and similarly there have been further violent riots about the price and availability of oil products. We stand together on the edge of a general breakdown of international law and order, divided by days from disintegration.
The sovereign investment groups do have enough money to strap a financial parachute onto America’s back as it leaps into the precipitous drop into the money chasm so that their landing is cushioned. I’m not sure that they aren’t getting too much fun watching the US discomforted. The Germans have a word for it, “schadenfreude”, which means the sheer pleasure of observing someone you don’t like, suffer misfortune. The big funds come out of the oil rich Arab states, China and some other Asian success stories. I think they’ll enjoy America suffering. However, in the end where else is there for them to invest that’s a better, bigger investment opportunity which they can also enjoy living in if all else fails. America has gone from being the engine to become the envied lifestyle.
I have always liked America and what it has stood for historically. I don’t believe it has unfailingly done the right thing, but name a single country that has. It has tried to do the right thing on most occasions and that’s a big plus for the rest of us. America is, therefore, generally a benign influence and a guardian for what’s right and decent. Despite the protests against Bush for breathing in and out I am convinced that most people share my positivism towards the USA. My reason for saying this is not because there has been a poll on which I can base this argument; it’s subtler than that. But ask yourself what television and films you watch, what music you listen to, what games you play and books you read? The odds are enormously high that the vast majority of these will come from America. Add to this the shops, the clothing lines, the restaurants, fast food outlets and coffee bars, predominately from the States. We are culturally very closely linked to America, not because we have to be, but because most of us want to be. The sneering glitterati will stick their noses up at this argument as they despise America, but are nevertheless irresistibly drawn towards it.
Does this decreasing economic power of the American juggernaut lessen the country’s ability to dictate events politically on a global scale? Not yet, is the answer for now. America is still the sole superpower; able to project its power, economically, socially and militarily around the world, when and how it wants. But this will not continue to be the case if the American economy fails to get its own economic house in order. I think, on balance, that this is more than a desirable outcome if you love our western form of democracy and lifestyle.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Listening
Listening To The People
There are matters of liberty and democracy that the British government is ignoring at the peril of both it and the society it exists to serve. Over the weekend I sat with a group of middle class people, the type who form the backbone of England. These are not wide-eyed radicals; by and large they are a calm group, patient, friendly, almost docile in their decency. I can report that they are now becoming very impatient and angry with the British leadership, unable to accept what’s happening and convinced that no one in governmental power is listening to their concerns. I do not pretend that this is a scientifically chosen or representative group, but I am prepared to bet that this is the view of the vast majority of British people. These are the issues they discussed and I list them in the order they raised them, not in my personal priority listing. On all these matters I am expressing the unanimous view except where I state otherwise.
Prison sentencing is too lax. Life has to mean life for murder, or other serious crime. It is not acceptable that life has come to mean 15 years in the UK, with up to one third off for good behavior. The common view is that if we need to build more prisons we should get on with doing it.
If the system will not allow “proper” life meaning life sentences the consensus is that capital punishment must be reintroduced. I was only one of two who expressed a dissenting view on this. I believe that capital punishment is premeditated murder by the state, which cannot justify taking a life in revenge for taking a life. If it’s wrong for an individual to murder someone, it must be equally wrong for the state to do the same. There is also the reasonable chance that mistakes, that are unalterable, could and would be made.
People no longer understand our criminal justice system, and have lost faith in its fairness, efficiency and transparency. No one in this group believed in the top level of management in the police service any more, although there was widespread respect for the men and women on the beat. There was universal belief that they had too much paper work to do, and that most of this was motivated by political correctness rather than to help maintain law and order and protect the citizenry.
There is total belief in and admiration for the efficiency and bravery of our armed forces. But there is a common perception that they are mismanaged, under resourced and equipped. The old saying from World War 1 comes to mind when the German leader described the British armed forces thus, “Lions led by donkeys.”
Everyone believed that the current fuel taxes and duties are grotesquely high and must be urgently reduced. Only one person felt that the proposed additional duties would in any way help the environment although they provided no evidence as to why they thought this was so. Their view was that if we didn’t take such measures now our children and grandchildren would be fighting for food and other resources.
The entire group thought that the British Prime Minister is a second rater, unable to lead and unwilling to listen. It also should be said that Gordon Brown is as unlucky as his predecessor was lucky. Blair had another huge advantage over his successor, charisma by the truckload whereas Brown is a black hole in the charm stakes. I don’t think anyone can dispute this, including the increasingly peevish PM. If Gordon were a political genius I would love to see any evidence, as would the country. If he’s a nice guy then we need some help us to see it.
Above all the group was furious that we, as a nation, are being spied upon, relentlessly and with increasing frequency. There was only one supporter for the huge increase of CCTV cameras, whereas everyone else was vehemently opposed. The supporter trotted out that old canard “If you’ve done nothing wrong what have you got to worry about?” The correct response is that this constant spying intrudes into our privacy and the presumption of our common innocence. The fact that the nearly 5 million cameras in this small country do occasionally catch a criminal does not mean that there are no other means by which those criminals would have been caught had there been no cameras. Add to this the almost unbelievable and daft spying now directed by the tin pot dictators in our town halls. This includes placing hundreds of thousands of concealed mini cameras in our waste bins to detect whether or not we are correctly sorting our rubbish according to their environmentally friendly regulations. At the same time no official appears to do anything when many families living in sinkhole housing estates throw their rubbish over their balcony parapets, so that they don’t have to bother walking down the steps in order to place it in the correct bins. No one could fabricate such lunacy, but it’s happening all over Britain today.
I think my fellow Brits are right to feel and express these views and it’s long overdue that this, the previously silent majority, is listened to. The British are the most placid of nations, until they are made angry, and then they are an implacable and terrible enemy to those who have offended their sense of decency and fair play. History is peppered with the bleached bones of tyrants destroyed by the British when they became angry.
There are matters of liberty and democracy that the British government is ignoring at the peril of both it and the society it exists to serve. Over the weekend I sat with a group of middle class people, the type who form the backbone of England. These are not wide-eyed radicals; by and large they are a calm group, patient, friendly, almost docile in their decency. I can report that they are now becoming very impatient and angry with the British leadership, unable to accept what’s happening and convinced that no one in governmental power is listening to their concerns. I do not pretend that this is a scientifically chosen or representative group, but I am prepared to bet that this is the view of the vast majority of British people. These are the issues they discussed and I list them in the order they raised them, not in my personal priority listing. On all these matters I am expressing the unanimous view except where I state otherwise.
Prison sentencing is too lax. Life has to mean life for murder, or other serious crime. It is not acceptable that life has come to mean 15 years in the UK, with up to one third off for good behavior. The common view is that if we need to build more prisons we should get on with doing it.
If the system will not allow “proper” life meaning life sentences the consensus is that capital punishment must be reintroduced. I was only one of two who expressed a dissenting view on this. I believe that capital punishment is premeditated murder by the state, which cannot justify taking a life in revenge for taking a life. If it’s wrong for an individual to murder someone, it must be equally wrong for the state to do the same. There is also the reasonable chance that mistakes, that are unalterable, could and would be made.
People no longer understand our criminal justice system, and have lost faith in its fairness, efficiency and transparency. No one in this group believed in the top level of management in the police service any more, although there was widespread respect for the men and women on the beat. There was universal belief that they had too much paper work to do, and that most of this was motivated by political correctness rather than to help maintain law and order and protect the citizenry.
There is total belief in and admiration for the efficiency and bravery of our armed forces. But there is a common perception that they are mismanaged, under resourced and equipped. The old saying from World War 1 comes to mind when the German leader described the British armed forces thus, “Lions led by donkeys.”
Everyone believed that the current fuel taxes and duties are grotesquely high and must be urgently reduced. Only one person felt that the proposed additional duties would in any way help the environment although they provided no evidence as to why they thought this was so. Their view was that if we didn’t take such measures now our children and grandchildren would be fighting for food and other resources.
The entire group thought that the British Prime Minister is a second rater, unable to lead and unwilling to listen. It also should be said that Gordon Brown is as unlucky as his predecessor was lucky. Blair had another huge advantage over his successor, charisma by the truckload whereas Brown is a black hole in the charm stakes. I don’t think anyone can dispute this, including the increasingly peevish PM. If Gordon were a political genius I would love to see any evidence, as would the country. If he’s a nice guy then we need some help us to see it.
Above all the group was furious that we, as a nation, are being spied upon, relentlessly and with increasing frequency. There was only one supporter for the huge increase of CCTV cameras, whereas everyone else was vehemently opposed. The supporter trotted out that old canard “If you’ve done nothing wrong what have you got to worry about?” The correct response is that this constant spying intrudes into our privacy and the presumption of our common innocence. The fact that the nearly 5 million cameras in this small country do occasionally catch a criminal does not mean that there are no other means by which those criminals would have been caught had there been no cameras. Add to this the almost unbelievable and daft spying now directed by the tin pot dictators in our town halls. This includes placing hundreds of thousands of concealed mini cameras in our waste bins to detect whether or not we are correctly sorting our rubbish according to their environmentally friendly regulations. At the same time no official appears to do anything when many families living in sinkhole housing estates throw their rubbish over their balcony parapets, so that they don’t have to bother walking down the steps in order to place it in the correct bins. No one could fabricate such lunacy, but it’s happening all over Britain today.
I think my fellow Brits are right to feel and express these views and it’s long overdue that this, the previously silent majority, is listened to. The British are the most placid of nations, until they are made angry, and then they are an implacable and terrible enemy to those who have offended their sense of decency and fair play. History is peppered with the bleached bones of tyrants destroyed by the British when they became angry.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Secrets
Yet another of our country’s secrets were lost over the weekend। This is the ninth recorded incident over the last few months. It must set a record for ineptitude never before achieved.
Several thoughts occur to me. Perhaps there are just so many bits of secret information being transported around the country that the sheer scale of the transportation of these bits and pieces will result in some of them being mislaid.
Another theory could be that for some strange reason a whole bunch of our most senior secret bureaucrats all decided to get into their nearest train, bus, taxi, airplane or public space so that they could leave top secret information laying around in an envelope marked Top Secret.
We now know that these lapses were not caused by theft of these articles or breaches in internal security. It seems as though, in the majority of cases, senior officials simply walked out of their offices with vital documents that they then appear to have forgotten and “mislaid.”
A person I know, who used to work in Intelligence, told me of another possibility. He stated that this series of events looked much more like a series of attempted “dead letter drops” in which an agent was intending topass information on to a third party. He does know much more about this type of thing than me, but although my normal inclination is to heartily subscribe to the cock up theory I can’t see how any organization would get it so wrong so often and so publicly, unless they wanted to.
There is also a disturbing uniformity to the reactions of the people finding such documents, folders, computers and discs. Almost every time the offending lost item has been handed in to the BBC or a newspaper and then on to the police or security services. Personally I find this strange, as I would deliver an item of such type to the police or directly to the security service. Why would you give it to the BBC or a newspaper first?
All these accidents and oversights where items of top secret or a confidential nature follow a disturbing pattern. They all give the appearance of overwhelming official incompetence. Do you believe that?
Has everyone suddenly become totally stupid? There is another possibility, and this is so far fetched it makes you stop and think. Perhaps this series of errors was not a bunch of innocent accidents. Is it possible that there are people within the security services who decided there needed to be a change in the way the government was handling intelligence issues. What better way to weaken and demoralize senior government than by discrediting it?
If you wanted to achieve this goal there would be no better method than a series of accidents such as these. Is this not more likely than 9 separate, serious incidents in less than one year?
I leave you to draw your own conclusions whilst we all carefully monitor progress on what’s sure to be an interesting series of investigations.
Several thoughts occur to me. Perhaps there are just so many bits of secret information being transported around the country that the sheer scale of the transportation of these bits and pieces will result in some of them being mislaid.
Another theory could be that for some strange reason a whole bunch of our most senior secret bureaucrats all decided to get into their nearest train, bus, taxi, airplane or public space so that they could leave top secret information laying around in an envelope marked Top Secret.
We now know that these lapses were not caused by theft of these articles or breaches in internal security. It seems as though, in the majority of cases, senior officials simply walked out of their offices with vital documents that they then appear to have forgotten and “mislaid.”
A person I know, who used to work in Intelligence, told me of another possibility. He stated that this series of events looked much more like a series of attempted “dead letter drops” in which an agent was intending topass information on to a third party. He does know much more about this type of thing than me, but although my normal inclination is to heartily subscribe to the cock up theory I can’t see how any organization would get it so wrong so often and so publicly, unless they wanted to.
There is also a disturbing uniformity to the reactions of the people finding such documents, folders, computers and discs. Almost every time the offending lost item has been handed in to the BBC or a newspaper and then on to the police or security services. Personally I find this strange, as I would deliver an item of such type to the police or directly to the security service. Why would you give it to the BBC or a newspaper first?
All these accidents and oversights where items of top secret or a confidential nature follow a disturbing pattern. They all give the appearance of overwhelming official incompetence. Do you believe that?
Has everyone suddenly become totally stupid? There is another possibility, and this is so far fetched it makes you stop and think. Perhaps this series of errors was not a bunch of innocent accidents. Is it possible that there are people within the security services who decided there needed to be a change in the way the government was handling intelligence issues. What better way to weaken and demoralize senior government than by discrediting it?
If you wanted to achieve this goal there would be no better method than a series of accidents such as these. Is this not more likely than 9 separate, serious incidents in less than one year?
I leave you to draw your own conclusions whilst we all carefully monitor progress on what’s sure to be an interesting series of investigations.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Rita
Most articles I write are about big issues and stories, but today I am going to the funeral of an old family friend so the story is both personal and small. I am very sad. The lady was called Rita, and she was very special to everyone who knew her, including me. The reasons were obvious to all of us who were fortunate to have that opportunity.
Rita always seemed to be smiling, and when she wasn’t she was laughing. Those who came into contact with her found themselves joining in the fun, it was hard not to. One of the favorite compliments I pay is to say someone possesses a generosity of spirit, and Rita had such generosity in spades.
The lady was also bright, loyal, intelligent and a good friend. In fact all of the attributes I admire were packaged in her, including bravery in adversity. She never seemed to complain about her own problems even when they were bad.
I was told that when you go to your afterlife you are greeted, and then guided to your final destination by your ancestors. I find that concept very appealing because our forebears love us whatever we do, and that sounds oddly comforting. I’m sure there’ll be the sound of Rita laughing with her ancestors tomorrow. Maybe this isn’t such a small story, after all what’s bigger than heaven and earth?
Goodbye Rita, travel safely.
Rita always seemed to be smiling, and when she wasn’t she was laughing. Those who came into contact with her found themselves joining in the fun, it was hard not to. One of the favorite compliments I pay is to say someone possesses a generosity of spirit, and Rita had such generosity in spades.
The lady was also bright, loyal, intelligent and a good friend. In fact all of the attributes I admire were packaged in her, including bravery in adversity. She never seemed to complain about her own problems even when they were bad.
I was told that when you go to your afterlife you are greeted, and then guided to your final destination by your ancestors. I find that concept very appealing because our forebears love us whatever we do, and that sounds oddly comforting. I’m sure there’ll be the sound of Rita laughing with her ancestors tomorrow. Maybe this isn’t such a small story, after all what’s bigger than heaven and earth?
Goodbye Rita, travel safely.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Jackpot
Years ago I predicted that someone, and I named Apple, would come up with one package that included all your hand held computing, phone, camera, information and organizational needs; Apple’s new iPhone has achieved this. This new draft of the iPhone is being released on July 11th.
I come to praise the new iPhone not to bury it. I am, it has to be admitted up front, an unashamed fan of most things Apple. I have several Mac products at home and in business, and generally they live up to their brilliant design, packaging and marketing. To put it into perspective this mobile is twice as fast and half as much to buy. That will sound good to everyone. I don’t want to pretend to excessive technical knowledge. I neither know nor care how the thing works, but rather, that it does what it says on the packet. I still have connection difficulties with my solid state MacBook Air when I’m on wifi at home and my security password is in place. Even with all kinds of patches and fixes and technical support we’re still struggling unless I take down the security. So, I’m not a crazy Apple fan, I see faults when they’re there. Not only do I have several Macs at home and business but when I was in charge of such things at a university I also purchased several hundred thousands of dollars of their kit, mostly good, but occasionally with the odd problems attached. With the new iPhone I don’t conceptually see any faults.
Clearly this is the iPhone that should have been released in the first place, but I guess Apple were feeling pressured and had to get the 2G version out last year or suffer from anxious shareholders. The new, 3G version, is a quantum leap forward.
I have not been handed a phone to play with nor am I a Beta tester but I have been following progress via the web and other users. My daughter was an early owner of the previous version but was instantly depressed by the knowledge of the impending, apparent redundancy of her phone. Apple have announced that they will be supplying free downloads and upgrades to this generation of users but it’s not clear whether these patches will compare with the new phone.
One of the big leaps forward is Apple opening up their doors to outside developers. In fact they are actively encouraging them, which is great news. More innovation on an already great platform has got to be desirable. Some of the new Applications already demonstrated are fantastic. Equally amazing is the fact that the developers have managed to deliver on their developments in just a few weeks. This means that the development processes are simple to work with as well as being brilliantly designed and engineered.
I loved the fact that everything you have will now synchronize seamlessly and effortlessly. Stuff that was a real pain will more or less just happen, oh happy days when I can synch my various electronic diaries, photos and media, information and e-mails without having to think about it. When my information is being securely stored without a second’s worry. Oh happy days have arrived with the iPhone.
I’m not a great games player, being more interested in their development, but the iPhone gives a whole new dimension to mobile games playing that millions of people are going to love.
I won’t bore you with the technical specifications, which are stunning, nor will I carry on extolling the virtues of almost every aspect of this amazing piece of kit for fear of it being too obvious that I can’t wait to see the new iPhone be rolled out. I will leave you with the thought that when the new iPhone is available it is going to make every other hand held device redundant; and I want one!
I come to praise the new iPhone not to bury it. I am, it has to be admitted up front, an unashamed fan of most things Apple. I have several Mac products at home and in business, and generally they live up to their brilliant design, packaging and marketing. To put it into perspective this mobile is twice as fast and half as much to buy. That will sound good to everyone. I don’t want to pretend to excessive technical knowledge. I neither know nor care how the thing works, but rather, that it does what it says on the packet. I still have connection difficulties with my solid state MacBook Air when I’m on wifi at home and my security password is in place. Even with all kinds of patches and fixes and technical support we’re still struggling unless I take down the security. So, I’m not a crazy Apple fan, I see faults when they’re there. Not only do I have several Macs at home and business but when I was in charge of such things at a university I also purchased several hundred thousands of dollars of their kit, mostly good, but occasionally with the odd problems attached. With the new iPhone I don’t conceptually see any faults.
Clearly this is the iPhone that should have been released in the first place, but I guess Apple were feeling pressured and had to get the 2G version out last year or suffer from anxious shareholders. The new, 3G version, is a quantum leap forward.
I have not been handed a phone to play with nor am I a Beta tester but I have been following progress via the web and other users. My daughter was an early owner of the previous version but was instantly depressed by the knowledge of the impending, apparent redundancy of her phone. Apple have announced that they will be supplying free downloads and upgrades to this generation of users but it’s not clear whether these patches will compare with the new phone.
One of the big leaps forward is Apple opening up their doors to outside developers. In fact they are actively encouraging them, which is great news. More innovation on an already great platform has got to be desirable. Some of the new Applications already demonstrated are fantastic. Equally amazing is the fact that the developers have managed to deliver on their developments in just a few weeks. This means that the development processes are simple to work with as well as being brilliantly designed and engineered.
I loved the fact that everything you have will now synchronize seamlessly and effortlessly. Stuff that was a real pain will more or less just happen, oh happy days when I can synch my various electronic diaries, photos and media, information and e-mails without having to think about it. When my information is being securely stored without a second’s worry. Oh happy days have arrived with the iPhone.
I’m not a great games player, being more interested in their development, but the iPhone gives a whole new dimension to mobile games playing that millions of people are going to love.
I won’t bore you with the technical specifications, which are stunning, nor will I carry on extolling the virtues of almost every aspect of this amazing piece of kit for fear of it being too obvious that I can’t wait to see the new iPhone be rolled out. I will leave you with the thought that when the new iPhone is available it is going to make every other hand held device redundant; and I want one!
Friday, June 13, 2008
Thanks Ireland
Thank you Ireland. Today the citizens of that fair country voted against ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon. The rules were that if one country out of the entire 27-country membership of the European Union voted against this second version of the previous constitution, it would be abandoned. As there was only one country that allowed its citizens the right to vote, you can guess that in reality the EU was trying not to allow its voters any chance to be contrary. Because Ireland’s constitution doesn’t permit such alterations without a public vote there was no alternative, it was unavoidable. The Irish were allowed to vote and they rejected this treaty, again. Perfect justice has been served.
This is the same treaty that was previously voted against, as a constitution by several countries and had been supposedly abandoned as the rules had stipulated. However, like Dracula, it leapt out of its coffin, bloodied but unbowed. It then morphed from a rejected constitution into a series of parliaments rubber-stamping the new version, now called a treaty. Last time round, when it was called a constitution, we were, you will recall, also told it would be abandoned if any of the countries voted against it. The politicians in Brussels simply changed the rules when they lost. They did a bit of judicious cutting and pasting and regurgitated the same constitutional dinner, re-heated. They clearly can’t believe they are in the wrong, and frankly they don’t care what their people think.
The European President has announced that the ratification process of the now twice rejected constitution / process will proceed despite promises to the contrary. What’s a twice broken promise between old European friends? Public shame should be heaped on all such arrogant, pumped up tin-pot dictators. However, I bet you that this same set of nonentities would accept any vote in their favor.
The EU leadership is demanding further and deeper integration of the European Union but every time the electorate has been allowed to vote on this issue they have responded by rejecting the proposed changes.
The reasons for this continuing objection by the populace are obvious to anyone with a democratic bone in their body. No one wants this constitution or treaty, nor understands it, nor sees the justification for it.
Ladies and gentlemen of Brussels, take your constitution or treaty, and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine, and please, don’t forget the staples!
This is the same treaty that was previously voted against, as a constitution by several countries and had been supposedly abandoned as the rules had stipulated. However, like Dracula, it leapt out of its coffin, bloodied but unbowed. It then morphed from a rejected constitution into a series of parliaments rubber-stamping the new version, now called a treaty. Last time round, when it was called a constitution, we were, you will recall, also told it would be abandoned if any of the countries voted against it. The politicians in Brussels simply changed the rules when they lost. They did a bit of judicious cutting and pasting and regurgitated the same constitutional dinner, re-heated. They clearly can’t believe they are in the wrong, and frankly they don’t care what their people think.
The European President has announced that the ratification process of the now twice rejected constitution / process will proceed despite promises to the contrary. What’s a twice broken promise between old European friends? Public shame should be heaped on all such arrogant, pumped up tin-pot dictators. However, I bet you that this same set of nonentities would accept any vote in their favor.
The EU leadership is demanding further and deeper integration of the European Union but every time the electorate has been allowed to vote on this issue they have responded by rejecting the proposed changes.
The reasons for this continuing objection by the populace are obvious to anyone with a democratic bone in their body. No one wants this constitution or treaty, nor understands it, nor sees the justification for it.
Ladies and gentlemen of Brussels, take your constitution or treaty, and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine, and please, don’t forget the staples!
Feeling Lucky?
Today is Friday the 13th. Some consider this a super unlucky date. I’m not worried by this because in my Jewish religious tradition, the number 13 is thought to be lucky, and as Friday is the start of Sabbath, the most holy of days, it should be doubly lucky today!
It appears obvious to me that our moral decline is both steep and rapid, furthermore there seems to be no end in sight. I am fond of forecasting that this disintegration of our moral core will have dire consequences. I’m also aware that if I keep predicting dire consequences sooner or later I shall turn into a prophet when I eventually get something right!
There are two additional facts that should also be borne in mind; I’m not into any organized religion nor am I superstitious. My being Jewish is what I am culturally, tribally and by tradition. I do, nevertheless fervently believe that we must preserve the moral and ethical dimensions of our civilization. In other words I can sometimes do something wrong, but I do try not to. I admit to weakness, not wickedness. I try very hard to keep within the laws and general rules and conventions of our world.
This goes as far as my trying my utmost not to get a speeding or parking ticket and never to park in a disabled parking space. In fact I once made a citizen’s arrest of someone who did this despite his being a very fit and healthy young man who just didn’t want to bother with parking legally. Yes, I am a pain, but if we don’t draw a line and allow anything, we are doomed to live in a very unpleasant world.
I understand and envy faith in others, and although I’m agnostic about such things I am open to be convinced. I have to admit that when I nearly died I didn’t see any white lights, chaps with wings or hear the chorus fantastic. In fact there was nothing and I was, I admit, most disappointed. Maybe I wasn’t quite ill enough, but I would hate to test the theory just to prove a point.
Despite my lack of religious belief I am a traditionalist. During my childhood my family vigorously taught me the difference between right and wrong. I don’t know if that’s the reason I find it impossible to take a stamp from work, and always have done. I don’t see the difference, other than degree, between the one stamp and several, or some money and where do you draw the line? This has resulted in my being an absolutist in these matters. I would instantly sack anyone for stealing, and indeed I have done so.
Some, who have known me, will tell you that I can be a pain in the bum about such matters. The reason for me raising this matter now is that this week saw the climactic selection of the successful Apprentice, in the TV show of the same name. The winner was a young man called Lee McQueen. He seems a personable, rough diamond sort of fellow. Not especially brilliant, but not total losers like some of his colleagues. During the penultimate weeks show Lee’s CV was exposed. There were many spelling and grammar errors, too many to be excused by most employers I suspect. More importantly, his interviewer asked Lee, did he stand by his statement that he had attended Thames Valley University for 2 years as it stated in his CV? He repeated this claim. His interrogator then showed him a letter he had received from that university which stated that he had actually, only attended for 4 months, “how do you respond to that?”
The young applicant hardly turned a hair. His attitude was OK, I got caught, but he clearly felt no guilt. When the inquests took place this incident was mentioned, but Sir Alan Sugar, the grand inquisitor, didn’t consider the matter to be of sufficient concern to worry him. I was shocked. I have always considered Sir Alan to be a moral man, but his attitude was that he’d probably done the same kind of thing when he was a young man and, to him, it was not an end of the world situation.
It was pointed out to Sugar that the incident proved that Lee would lie when he felt it necessary, and his response was that he could deal with that. His response seemed to indicate that he felt he could still trust Lee, and this wasn’t such an important matter. As Henry Ibsen said so accurately, “Don’t use that foreign word ideals. We have that excellent word lies.”
I had recent experience of both good and bad examples of behavior by colleagues. A “friend” and co-worker, behaved very badly, to my detriment after ten years of our being friends and working together. He told me that the excuse or motivation for his actions was his personal financial situation. Compare that to another ex-colleague and friend in America who felt it appropriate that he gift me shares in his new enterprise, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. Which of these examples will Lee follow, the knife in the back of the former or the generosity of spirit of the latter? I believe Sir Alan should carefully watch his back.
Sir Alan comes across as a shrewd, tough businessman, self confident to the point of arrogance. If you asked Sugar how he sees the future with Lee and he would no doubt tell you that he has the money and business experience to deal with any situation. But ask him in a year’s time, I wonder if Sugar will still have all his money and whether he will rue his disregard for the discredited value of honesty? You can’t buy good character but being able to totally trust your colleagues is still a vital, but increasingly rare virtue.
It appears obvious to me that our moral decline is both steep and rapid, furthermore there seems to be no end in sight. I am fond of forecasting that this disintegration of our moral core will have dire consequences. I’m also aware that if I keep predicting dire consequences sooner or later I shall turn into a prophet when I eventually get something right!
There are two additional facts that should also be borne in mind; I’m not into any organized religion nor am I superstitious. My being Jewish is what I am culturally, tribally and by tradition. I do, nevertheless fervently believe that we must preserve the moral and ethical dimensions of our civilization. In other words I can sometimes do something wrong, but I do try not to. I admit to weakness, not wickedness. I try very hard to keep within the laws and general rules and conventions of our world.
This goes as far as my trying my utmost not to get a speeding or parking ticket and never to park in a disabled parking space. In fact I once made a citizen’s arrest of someone who did this despite his being a very fit and healthy young man who just didn’t want to bother with parking legally. Yes, I am a pain, but if we don’t draw a line and allow anything, we are doomed to live in a very unpleasant world.
I understand and envy faith in others, and although I’m agnostic about such things I am open to be convinced. I have to admit that when I nearly died I didn’t see any white lights, chaps with wings or hear the chorus fantastic. In fact there was nothing and I was, I admit, most disappointed. Maybe I wasn’t quite ill enough, but I would hate to test the theory just to prove a point.
Despite my lack of religious belief I am a traditionalist. During my childhood my family vigorously taught me the difference between right and wrong. I don’t know if that’s the reason I find it impossible to take a stamp from work, and always have done. I don’t see the difference, other than degree, between the one stamp and several, or some money and where do you draw the line? This has resulted in my being an absolutist in these matters. I would instantly sack anyone for stealing, and indeed I have done so.
Some, who have known me, will tell you that I can be a pain in the bum about such matters. The reason for me raising this matter now is that this week saw the climactic selection of the successful Apprentice, in the TV show of the same name. The winner was a young man called Lee McQueen. He seems a personable, rough diamond sort of fellow. Not especially brilliant, but not total losers like some of his colleagues. During the penultimate weeks show Lee’s CV was exposed. There were many spelling and grammar errors, too many to be excused by most employers I suspect. More importantly, his interviewer asked Lee, did he stand by his statement that he had attended Thames Valley University for 2 years as it stated in his CV? He repeated this claim. His interrogator then showed him a letter he had received from that university which stated that he had actually, only attended for 4 months, “how do you respond to that?”
The young applicant hardly turned a hair. His attitude was OK, I got caught, but he clearly felt no guilt. When the inquests took place this incident was mentioned, but Sir Alan Sugar, the grand inquisitor, didn’t consider the matter to be of sufficient concern to worry him. I was shocked. I have always considered Sir Alan to be a moral man, but his attitude was that he’d probably done the same kind of thing when he was a young man and, to him, it was not an end of the world situation.
It was pointed out to Sugar that the incident proved that Lee would lie when he felt it necessary, and his response was that he could deal with that. His response seemed to indicate that he felt he could still trust Lee, and this wasn’t such an important matter. As Henry Ibsen said so accurately, “Don’t use that foreign word ideals. We have that excellent word lies.”
I had recent experience of both good and bad examples of behavior by colleagues. A “friend” and co-worker, behaved very badly, to my detriment after ten years of our being friends and working together. He told me that the excuse or motivation for his actions was his personal financial situation. Compare that to another ex-colleague and friend in America who felt it appropriate that he gift me shares in his new enterprise, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. Which of these examples will Lee follow, the knife in the back of the former or the generosity of spirit of the latter? I believe Sir Alan should carefully watch his back.
Sir Alan comes across as a shrewd, tough businessman, self confident to the point of arrogance. If you asked Sugar how he sees the future with Lee and he would no doubt tell you that he has the money and business experience to deal with any situation. But ask him in a year’s time, I wonder if Sugar will still have all his money and whether he will rue his disregard for the discredited value of honesty? You can’t buy good character but being able to totally trust your colleagues is still a vital, but increasingly rare virtue.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Looking For A Leader
Britain has always been blessed. Whenever there is a national emergency the country has found a leader to forge a path through the crisis. What a panoply of giants has graced us with their presence over the last millennia. The names read like a roll call of great heroes, Winston Churchill, The Duke of Wellington, Nelson, Queen Elizabeth the First, Walter Raleigh, the list is laced with infinite splendor.
In my own lifetime, my family and I left for America when the country no longer seemed governable. This was in the late 70’s, and we were suffering from innumerable strikes, industrial work limited to three-day weeks because of a lack of electric power, runaway inflation, a sinking pound, enormous unemployment numbers and a gigantic balance of payment deficit.
We left but Margaret Thatcher arrived. When we returned to this country from America it was a country in the midst of a transformation, which it has benefited from ever since. I am not saying that I loved the woman, because, if I was to tell the truth, I didn’t even like her. I found her cold, aloof, patronizing and unkind, but she saved my country from itself. From her genesis the UK was re-branded and re-launched. From a no hope country slipping to ignominy the country re-discovered its balls and over the last twenty years has become one of the world’s powerhouses.
Lest we forget it was Thatcher that changed the world’s mindset about de-nationalization and how the economy could work. It was Thatcher who destroyed the unseemly agglomeration of power that the unions had accumulated which was making the country ungovernable. Without this fundamental shift back to common sense there could have been no other fundamental changes.
Last night the government forced legislation through the House of Commons the new forty-two day detention rule. This means that, should the police believe there is a reason to arrest a terrorist suspect, this person could be held by them for up to six weeks before he is even charged. This is a shameful act, and is yet another breach of habeas corpus enshrined in this country’s original guarantee of democracy, the Magna Carta, signed in 1215. It states a prisoner is entitled to be bought before a court of law so that the legality of his detention can be verified. I quote Article 39, “No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned or outlawed or exiled or in any way harmed. Nor will we proceed against him, or send others to do so, except according to the lawful sentence of his peers and the Common Law.” This is a disgraceful act of infamy by our lawgivers. It is a victory for the expedient, short-term tacticians who run our affairs, and clearly demonstrates their total lack of respect for the rights of its citizens.
Now, once again the country is on the slide. We need another leader, and it isn’t our present Prime Minister or David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, the man most likely to succeed him when we have our next election. Cameron is simply a watered down carbon copy of Tony Blair. Britain doesn’t need re-packaging, it needs a conviction politician ready to lead from the front, and Cameron doesn’t offer this. Let us all hope that somewhere, lurking in the wings, is such a person. Our country is looking for a leader, the need is becoming urgent!
In my own lifetime, my family and I left for America when the country no longer seemed governable. This was in the late 70’s, and we were suffering from innumerable strikes, industrial work limited to three-day weeks because of a lack of electric power, runaway inflation, a sinking pound, enormous unemployment numbers and a gigantic balance of payment deficit.
We left but Margaret Thatcher arrived. When we returned to this country from America it was a country in the midst of a transformation, which it has benefited from ever since. I am not saying that I loved the woman, because, if I was to tell the truth, I didn’t even like her. I found her cold, aloof, patronizing and unkind, but she saved my country from itself. From her genesis the UK was re-branded and re-launched. From a no hope country slipping to ignominy the country re-discovered its balls and over the last twenty years has become one of the world’s powerhouses.
Lest we forget it was Thatcher that changed the world’s mindset about de-nationalization and how the economy could work. It was Thatcher who destroyed the unseemly agglomeration of power that the unions had accumulated which was making the country ungovernable. Without this fundamental shift back to common sense there could have been no other fundamental changes.
Last night the government forced legislation through the House of Commons the new forty-two day detention rule. This means that, should the police believe there is a reason to arrest a terrorist suspect, this person could be held by them for up to six weeks before he is even charged. This is a shameful act, and is yet another breach of habeas corpus enshrined in this country’s original guarantee of democracy, the Magna Carta, signed in 1215. It states a prisoner is entitled to be bought before a court of law so that the legality of his detention can be verified. I quote Article 39, “No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned or outlawed or exiled or in any way harmed. Nor will we proceed against him, or send others to do so, except according to the lawful sentence of his peers and the Common Law.” This is a disgraceful act of infamy by our lawgivers. It is a victory for the expedient, short-term tacticians who run our affairs, and clearly demonstrates their total lack of respect for the rights of its citizens.
Now, once again the country is on the slide. We need another leader, and it isn’t our present Prime Minister or David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, the man most likely to succeed him when we have our next election. Cameron is simply a watered down carbon copy of Tony Blair. Britain doesn’t need re-packaging, it needs a conviction politician ready to lead from the front, and Cameron doesn’t offer this. Let us all hope that somewhere, lurking in the wings, is such a person. Our country is looking for a leader, the need is becoming urgent!
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Oops!
I posted a blog just a few hours ago in which I reminded everyone that you can't trust the government with your confidential information on any database. I told you that you shouldn't volunteer information to these national custodians.
How quickly the chickens came home to roost!
Within the last 10 minutes BBC TV announced that secret government documents, marked top secret, about Al Qaeda, had accidentally been left on a train in London, then handed to the BBC. The BBC showed the folder on air, without revealing the contents.
If we didn't see it with our own eyes we would have to believe this was a fabrication. It proves what I've been saying, the government's own people must be properly policed as they are clearly irresponsible, and constitutionally incapable of even average care and attention.
How quickly the chickens came home to roost!
Within the last 10 minutes BBC TV announced that secret government documents, marked top secret, about Al Qaeda, had accidentally been left on a train in London, then handed to the BBC. The BBC showed the folder on air, without revealing the contents.
If we didn't see it with our own eyes we would have to believe this was a fabrication. It proves what I've been saying, the government's own people must be properly policed as they are clearly irresponsible, and constitutionally incapable of even average care and attention.
100 On Up!
Today is special for me, as it marks the 100th blog I’ve posted. It is quite a commitment to post a blog almost every day, but like everything it’s mostly about discipline.
I decided that I was going to use this opportunity to review the world’s current situation. This is My State of the Blog, in which I will offer solutions and predictions for the balance of the year.
Clearly there is no end in sight for the major conflicts in the world. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is anywhere near to a conclusion. However, what’s worrying me isn’t that we might lose militarily, but that we have done nothing to root out the endemic corruption of the Iraqis or Afghanistanis we have ceded power to. While this is the case there is no moral imperative for any local inhabitants to believe in our form of democracy. The answer is for us to do one of two things. Put in more force, and aim to win the conflicts rather than to contain them. Or we could simply pull out and leave those two countries to their fate. Personally I believe we will do neither and therefore everyone will suffer.
The Israel / Palestine conflict is really about Israel and Hamas and Israel and Hezbollah. Until these two terrorist organizations are cut off from their Iranian paymasters this conflict will continue and escalate into direct conflict between Iran and Israel. This will take the form of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear capacity and Iran seeking some form of surrogate revenge via their terrorist proxies both regionally and internationally. The solution is that the rest of the world must act now to force Iran to abandon their nuclear weapons program, and their vicious rhetoric threatening Israel’s existence. Meanwhile Osama is still hiding in a cave somewhere in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Many moderate Muslims agree that the world will be better for his death. I hope they get their wish. He is truly an evil and misguided man, and his work has caused misery for many millions of people, most of them people he would claim as his own.
The sub prime mortgage induced credit crises will rumble on and recession is the result. In fact we will be lucky if this doesn’t worsen into a full-blown depression, complete with mass bankruptcies, unemployment and shrinking business opportunities. Today, in the UK the news organizations were reporting a forecast that, if property prices continue to drop at their present rate, more than two million homeowners face negative equity. Put another way this means that these mortgages are now bigger than the value of the properties. Wake up everyone, a great many of these mortgages were 100% or more of the value of the property when they were taken out, or put another way, they were in negative equity to start with! These greedy risk takers, otherwise known as the banks, were betting that there was going to be a never ending rise in prices and therefore it didn’t matter whether or not the loan was as big or bigger than the value, because values would overtake this loan in double quick time.
I am giving this subject it’s own second paragraph. The solution is for the banks not to panic and to find ways to help their clients survive where they are. It pays everyone to keep the borrowers in the properties under almost any foreseeable circumstance. This can be achieved by government working with the banks to create a shared ownership, affordable housing scheme designed, retroactively, to take over some of the equity, which could be recovered later, if possible. This could reduce the monthly exposure and divide it into some mortgage payment plus a reduced “rental” sum.
The next generation iPhone from Apple is being released momentarily and will be an even bigger smash hit than its first draft. It is said that this model is not only faster, thinner and more user friendly, but is also going to be a lot cheaper. I love my blackberry but I can’t resist for much longer. Whilst I am on things Apple I have to admit that I’m typing this on my Mac Book Air, and its bloody fantastic. Not only does it meet my every computing need but also it’s easy to schlep through airports on the run, and it really makes a difference.
Manchester United will have another great season in English and European football whether they still have Cristiano Ronaldo in the team or not. I idolize the young man as the best footballer on the planet, but if his greed overwhelms his common sense and he seeks to be released from his contract, that he signed last year, then the club should show him the door.
China will do exceptionally well in the Beijing Olympics, but I suspect you, like me, won’t be able to look at the athletic medalists without your suspicions being elevated. What a shame, these people once epitomized for the world, the finest attributes of human endeavor.
Freedoms will continue to erode in the Western democracies as America elects Barak Obama and he turns out to be more Jimmy Carter than John Kennedy. I sincerely hope that this prediction doesn’t come true as I have very little time for the peanut farmer from Georgia.
In my home country Gordon Brown will sink to immeasurably low numbers in the opinion polls, and instead of trying to chase the lost millions he does what he should have done in the first place, which is to relax and just do the best job he can rather than to be a pale imitation of Tony Blair. Nevertheless, it’s going to be too little too late for the iron Chancellor, who turned out to be the Prime Minister made out of putty.
Like you I shall generally not get thinner or fitter, but I shall keep trying. The sun will shine too little in the UK and too much elsewhere, when it doesn’t rain for more than a week here we call it a drought, and when it does rain for more than a week, we have floods, and we will blame both on global warming. I will continue to write my blog and I hope you will still read it. 100 blogs delivered, and many more to come.
I decided that I was going to use this opportunity to review the world’s current situation. This is My State of the Blog, in which I will offer solutions and predictions for the balance of the year.
Clearly there is no end in sight for the major conflicts in the world. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is anywhere near to a conclusion. However, what’s worrying me isn’t that we might lose militarily, but that we have done nothing to root out the endemic corruption of the Iraqis or Afghanistanis we have ceded power to. While this is the case there is no moral imperative for any local inhabitants to believe in our form of democracy. The answer is for us to do one of two things. Put in more force, and aim to win the conflicts rather than to contain them. Or we could simply pull out and leave those two countries to their fate. Personally I believe we will do neither and therefore everyone will suffer.
The Israel / Palestine conflict is really about Israel and Hamas and Israel and Hezbollah. Until these two terrorist organizations are cut off from their Iranian paymasters this conflict will continue and escalate into direct conflict between Iran and Israel. This will take the form of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear capacity and Iran seeking some form of surrogate revenge via their terrorist proxies both regionally and internationally. The solution is that the rest of the world must act now to force Iran to abandon their nuclear weapons program, and their vicious rhetoric threatening Israel’s existence. Meanwhile Osama is still hiding in a cave somewhere in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Many moderate Muslims agree that the world will be better for his death. I hope they get their wish. He is truly an evil and misguided man, and his work has caused misery for many millions of people, most of them people he would claim as his own.
The sub prime mortgage induced credit crises will rumble on and recession is the result. In fact we will be lucky if this doesn’t worsen into a full-blown depression, complete with mass bankruptcies, unemployment and shrinking business opportunities. Today, in the UK the news organizations were reporting a forecast that, if property prices continue to drop at their present rate, more than two million homeowners face negative equity. Put another way this means that these mortgages are now bigger than the value of the properties. Wake up everyone, a great many of these mortgages were 100% or more of the value of the property when they were taken out, or put another way, they were in negative equity to start with! These greedy risk takers, otherwise known as the banks, were betting that there was going to be a never ending rise in prices and therefore it didn’t matter whether or not the loan was as big or bigger than the value, because values would overtake this loan in double quick time.
I am giving this subject it’s own second paragraph. The solution is for the banks not to panic and to find ways to help their clients survive where they are. It pays everyone to keep the borrowers in the properties under almost any foreseeable circumstance. This can be achieved by government working with the banks to create a shared ownership, affordable housing scheme designed, retroactively, to take over some of the equity, which could be recovered later, if possible. This could reduce the monthly exposure and divide it into some mortgage payment plus a reduced “rental” sum.
The next generation iPhone from Apple is being released momentarily and will be an even bigger smash hit than its first draft. It is said that this model is not only faster, thinner and more user friendly, but is also going to be a lot cheaper. I love my blackberry but I can’t resist for much longer. Whilst I am on things Apple I have to admit that I’m typing this on my Mac Book Air, and its bloody fantastic. Not only does it meet my every computing need but also it’s easy to schlep through airports on the run, and it really makes a difference.
Manchester United will have another great season in English and European football whether they still have Cristiano Ronaldo in the team or not. I idolize the young man as the best footballer on the planet, but if his greed overwhelms his common sense and he seeks to be released from his contract, that he signed last year, then the club should show him the door.
China will do exceptionally well in the Beijing Olympics, but I suspect you, like me, won’t be able to look at the athletic medalists without your suspicions being elevated. What a shame, these people once epitomized for the world, the finest attributes of human endeavor.
Freedoms will continue to erode in the Western democracies as America elects Barak Obama and he turns out to be more Jimmy Carter than John Kennedy. I sincerely hope that this prediction doesn’t come true as I have very little time for the peanut farmer from Georgia.
In my home country Gordon Brown will sink to immeasurably low numbers in the opinion polls, and instead of trying to chase the lost millions he does what he should have done in the first place, which is to relax and just do the best job he can rather than to be a pale imitation of Tony Blair. Nevertheless, it’s going to be too little too late for the iron Chancellor, who turned out to be the Prime Minister made out of putty.
Like you I shall generally not get thinner or fitter, but I shall keep trying. The sun will shine too little in the UK and too much elsewhere, when it doesn’t rain for more than a week here we call it a drought, and when it does rain for more than a week, we have floods, and we will blame both on global warming. I will continue to write my blog and I hope you will still read it. 100 blogs delivered, and many more to come.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Fight For Freedom
Britain, my Great Britain, wake up, you the father of modern democracy, are sleepwalking to a totalitarian state. Inch by stinking inch we are allowing our freedoms to be eroded, all, of course, in the name of freedom. We seem unaware of what the result will be of reducing our freedom by the millions of cameras watching our every move. Now they link these systems. They are putting microphones and speakers in combination with many of these cameras.
Our leaders are allowing, or sanctioning or ordering that our tax and other, related financial information, be combined. What’s the reason behind this? When you undertake almost every meaningful financial transaction in the UK today you now have to show either a passport, or your driving license. Why should this be necessary? Ask yourself how many terrorists have been caught in the security net because there are these compliance measures? The official answer is, none!
Add to this the new, combined government information database in which our health information is to be held. We can all understand the theoretical and practical reasons that this might benefit us, but the truth is that this is another system that is completely open to abuse. Imagine if your prospective employer knew you had a medical problem that you wanted to keep private. Does this mean you don’t get the job, but will never learn why you were turned down?
We just don’t know whether the people being entrusted with the confidential information about us are well intended, but we do know they are hopelessly inefficient. This country’s government has, as I have written before, admitted that it is early stage development of a system that enables it to listen to and record every phone call, every visit to every website and study every text message at its leisure. This is a gross breach of our human rights and should be fought by every person who values their future freedom.
Various council authorities in this country are, apparently, sending out information forms for every household in their area to complete. This is compulsory and there are severe penalties for value to complete the forms. The kinds of questions being asked are an attempt by the authorities to spy on every aspect of that household’s lifestyle, expenditure and income levels.
These council authorities are using the anti terrorism legislation, never intended for this purpose, to spy on the householders in their districts. Under law they are doing so quite legitimately but clearly for illegitimate reasons.
Let’s examine another frightening outcome that will surely follow the misuse of medical knowledge in this country, and probably elsewhere. If all the data-bases become linked, and DNA sampling is progressively standardized we will have a situation in which we will be able to forecast which children are going to be born with or will develop various degenerative diseases in later life. Will society allow such children to be born into the poorer world that decreasing resources is likely to engender? If insurance companies are warned in advance that someone is going to develop a long-term illness, or one that might lead to premature death, how likely is it that they will provide any form of insurance cover?
What is the moral and ethical position of our society in dealing with these issues? We must have this debate and arrive at our conclusions BEFORE we enable this truly frightening technology not AFTER.
Remember that our governmental sanctioned data-bases failure rate is 70%. Remember the bigger the data collection the more likely we are to suffer what the American military used to call a SNAFU, Situation Normal All F…d Up!
We also have our government demanding new legislation in which terrorist suspects can be arrested and held without trial, for 42 days. I am, as those of you who have previously read my articles know, extremely hard line with terrorists. Note the difference, I am tough on terrorists, not suspected terrorists. Unless you’ve forgotten, like our government apparently has, you are innocent until you’re proven guilty in this country. There must be a presumption of innocence or we have truly become a totalitarian regime. It was bad enough that our legislators meekly allowed the previously demanded 28 days of arrest without charge, why do we need 42 days? What does 42 days precisely give us, that 28 days did not, or is this simply a number without any meaning?
The real terrorist organizations want our society to over react and turn on itself. Our government is falling into this trap. Obviously this is a difficult balance to achieve, and whatever route our leaders take will be open to error, but there are fundamental truths at stake. These must include the presumption of innocence and that includes the right to trial by a jury of your peers. Our governments must not behave beyond the law to protect us from illegal actions. There is one exception to this, and that's the extraordinary powers a democracy allows its government at time of war.
The question is, are we at war? If we are at war with a global terrorist threat, then you have to make that clear and then these, extraordinary powers could be allowed, but only for the duration of the conflict. When we are already asking questions as to whether it is allowable for the authorities to torture a terrorist suspect for the greater good we are clearly entering a new type of war situation. I find the idea of torture repugnant until this scenario is put into context. For example the terrorist knows where in London or New York, that his friends have planted a dirty nuclear device, ready to explode in one hour. Do you ask him politely to let you know where the bomb, that might kill 500,000 people is, or do you do whatever is necessary to find out where it is, immediately?
For me the answer is obvious, you do whatever you can, and you don't wait one second. The counter argument relates to the size of the threat, and the possibility that you might have the wrong suspect under arrest. I respond that if one person is under threat of being murdered it is worth the risk, and yes, there would be mistakes, and that's too terrible to contemplate, but is a legitimate price in times of war.
Back to the UK, pure and simple; here I have already written to my medical center telling them I want to opt out of the National Health database currently being collected.
I have also checked to see whether my council is one of those placing concealed mini cameras in our wheelie bins to check for “proper” segmentation of paper, glass and other rubbish. Would you believe they are now confirming whether the weight of the bin is too much for our over protected refuse collectors. They’re calling this the “two finger rule”. If it takes more than two of the bin collectors fingers to roll the wheeled bin to his truck they will not remove it. This is, of course, political correctness gone mad, but it is real nevertheless. In England we have a two fingered salute, which means the same as the single finger salute in the States. I want to share this salute with the town hall little Hitlers who are coming up with these ridiculous rules.
Watch out America, because for your Barak Obama read our Tony Blair a decade ago. What we’re experiencing now you can anticipate for your future. Like Blair there is something of the nanny state provider about Obama. All the things we now have in the UK that I‘m outlining were well intentioned laws, regulations and ideas that were founded in the absolute certain belief that these were all being done for our own good. Every day our lives are peppered with news of a never-ending barrage of such ideas. All conceived by our leaders to tell us how to live. This week there were announcements about our health, the packaging and pricing of alcohol, advertising on TV, further congestion charging in another of our major cities, Manchester, and I could go on without end.
My advice to the reader is to fight this type of legislation wherever you find it, and never give in. If there’s an alternative take it. If you’re compelled, try to resist. Tell them no, don’t fill in their forms, don’t volunteer any information, and if you get an opportunity to be in contact with your elected representative tell them, loud and clear what you think about this continual erosion of your freedom. Then, when there are elections, vote the idiots out, or it might be too late.
Our leaders are allowing, or sanctioning or ordering that our tax and other, related financial information, be combined. What’s the reason behind this? When you undertake almost every meaningful financial transaction in the UK today you now have to show either a passport, or your driving license. Why should this be necessary? Ask yourself how many terrorists have been caught in the security net because there are these compliance measures? The official answer is, none!
Add to this the new, combined government information database in which our health information is to be held. We can all understand the theoretical and practical reasons that this might benefit us, but the truth is that this is another system that is completely open to abuse. Imagine if your prospective employer knew you had a medical problem that you wanted to keep private. Does this mean you don’t get the job, but will never learn why you were turned down?
We just don’t know whether the people being entrusted with the confidential information about us are well intended, but we do know they are hopelessly inefficient. This country’s government has, as I have written before, admitted that it is early stage development of a system that enables it to listen to and record every phone call, every visit to every website and study every text message at its leisure. This is a gross breach of our human rights and should be fought by every person who values their future freedom.
Various council authorities in this country are, apparently, sending out information forms for every household in their area to complete. This is compulsory and there are severe penalties for value to complete the forms. The kinds of questions being asked are an attempt by the authorities to spy on every aspect of that household’s lifestyle, expenditure and income levels.
These council authorities are using the anti terrorism legislation, never intended for this purpose, to spy on the householders in their districts. Under law they are doing so quite legitimately but clearly for illegitimate reasons.
Let’s examine another frightening outcome that will surely follow the misuse of medical knowledge in this country, and probably elsewhere. If all the data-bases become linked, and DNA sampling is progressively standardized we will have a situation in which we will be able to forecast which children are going to be born with or will develop various degenerative diseases in later life. Will society allow such children to be born into the poorer world that decreasing resources is likely to engender? If insurance companies are warned in advance that someone is going to develop a long-term illness, or one that might lead to premature death, how likely is it that they will provide any form of insurance cover?
What is the moral and ethical position of our society in dealing with these issues? We must have this debate and arrive at our conclusions BEFORE we enable this truly frightening technology not AFTER.
Remember that our governmental sanctioned data-bases failure rate is 70%. Remember the bigger the data collection the more likely we are to suffer what the American military used to call a SNAFU, Situation Normal All F…d Up!
We also have our government demanding new legislation in which terrorist suspects can be arrested and held without trial, for 42 days. I am, as those of you who have previously read my articles know, extremely hard line with terrorists. Note the difference, I am tough on terrorists, not suspected terrorists. Unless you’ve forgotten, like our government apparently has, you are innocent until you’re proven guilty in this country. There must be a presumption of innocence or we have truly become a totalitarian regime. It was bad enough that our legislators meekly allowed the previously demanded 28 days of arrest without charge, why do we need 42 days? What does 42 days precisely give us, that 28 days did not, or is this simply a number without any meaning?
The real terrorist organizations want our society to over react and turn on itself. Our government is falling into this trap. Obviously this is a difficult balance to achieve, and whatever route our leaders take will be open to error, but there are fundamental truths at stake. These must include the presumption of innocence and that includes the right to trial by a jury of your peers. Our governments must not behave beyond the law to protect us from illegal actions. There is one exception to this, and that's the extraordinary powers a democracy allows its government at time of war.
The question is, are we at war? If we are at war with a global terrorist threat, then you have to make that clear and then these, extraordinary powers could be allowed, but only for the duration of the conflict. When we are already asking questions as to whether it is allowable for the authorities to torture a terrorist suspect for the greater good we are clearly entering a new type of war situation. I find the idea of torture repugnant until this scenario is put into context. For example the terrorist knows where in London or New York, that his friends have planted a dirty nuclear device, ready to explode in one hour. Do you ask him politely to let you know where the bomb, that might kill 500,000 people is, or do you do whatever is necessary to find out where it is, immediately?
For me the answer is obvious, you do whatever you can, and you don't wait one second. The counter argument relates to the size of the threat, and the possibility that you might have the wrong suspect under arrest. I respond that if one person is under threat of being murdered it is worth the risk, and yes, there would be mistakes, and that's too terrible to contemplate, but is a legitimate price in times of war.
Back to the UK, pure and simple; here I have already written to my medical center telling them I want to opt out of the National Health database currently being collected.
I have also checked to see whether my council is one of those placing concealed mini cameras in our wheelie bins to check for “proper” segmentation of paper, glass and other rubbish. Would you believe they are now confirming whether the weight of the bin is too much for our over protected refuse collectors. They’re calling this the “two finger rule”. If it takes more than two of the bin collectors fingers to roll the wheeled bin to his truck they will not remove it. This is, of course, political correctness gone mad, but it is real nevertheless. In England we have a two fingered salute, which means the same as the single finger salute in the States. I want to share this salute with the town hall little Hitlers who are coming up with these ridiculous rules.
Watch out America, because for your Barak Obama read our Tony Blair a decade ago. What we’re experiencing now you can anticipate for your future. Like Blair there is something of the nanny state provider about Obama. All the things we now have in the UK that I‘m outlining were well intentioned laws, regulations and ideas that were founded in the absolute certain belief that these were all being done for our own good. Every day our lives are peppered with news of a never-ending barrage of such ideas. All conceived by our leaders to tell us how to live. This week there were announcements about our health, the packaging and pricing of alcohol, advertising on TV, further congestion charging in another of our major cities, Manchester, and I could go on without end.
My advice to the reader is to fight this type of legislation wherever you find it, and never give in. If there’s an alternative take it. If you’re compelled, try to resist. Tell them no, don’t fill in their forms, don’t volunteer any information, and if you get an opportunity to be in contact with your elected representative tell them, loud and clear what you think about this continual erosion of your freedom. Then, when there are elections, vote the idiots out, or it might be too late.
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