[blogfocus saturday] entertaining and provocative

Foreword: I'm not running UK Daily Pundit this evening for the simple reason that he's the next victim in the "Watch" series [Tim Worstall's the current victim]. So, straight down to it:

1 Highly entertaining post by L'Ombre on "tagging the senile":

Another one of those "Huh" moments. Some bright spark in HMG thinks we should tag our senile old grannies and grandpas and let the poor dears wander around the place on their own … I'm not a GPS expert but I can tell you that GPSes are not exactly pin-point accurate, especially in urban areas, and are total pants if you go inside buildings or enclosed metal vehicles.

Is she in the pub's beer garden having a snooze or 5m north on the other side of the wall by the rubbish bins? Is she walking across the highstreet using the bridge and stopping to admire the view or did she just step out in front of a car? … And that assumes she's remembered to put the thing on, has had the battery charged up etc.

But I have a concrete suggestion. Tag our politicians and civil servants and let them see how well the system works first. For extra fun and games make sure the tag has a high voltage shocker for those periods when the scum need a bit of a reminder and let random members of the public decide when to set them off.

2 Trixy reveals something just as entertaining:

Driving to the office this morning on the M25 motorway, I looked over to my right and there was a woman in a brand new Audi A4 convertible' doing 90 miles an hour with her face up close to her rear view mirror putting on her lipstick! I looked away for a couple of seconds and when I looked back she was halfway over in my lane still working on the lipstick!

It scared me (and this coming from a bloke....) so much that I dropped my electric shaver, which knocked the bacon roll out of my other hand. In all the confusion of trying to straighten up the car using my knees against the steering wheel, it knocked my mobile from my ear, which fell into the coffee between my legs, causing it to splash and burn BIG JIM AND THE TWINS, causing me to scream, which made me drop the cigarette out of my mouth, ruined my shirt and DISCONNECTED A VERY IMPORTANT CALL.

Women Drivers!!!!!!!

3 Tom Paine says "hold on a moment" to the Brits who rushed to judgement over the Virginia killings:

Britain's anti-American media were all over the sad story of the V-Tech killings. They tore gleefully into America's "gun culture" and its people in general. Let's get this straight. This horror didn't happen because the killer was American. It didn't happen because he was ethnically Korean. It happened because the poor young man was mad.

Some Britons seem to enjoy it when something like this happens in America, but Britain has no moral standing to judge America harshly. Violent crime is declining in America and rising in Britain. The risk of being violently attacked in England & Wales is already higher than in America and rising. In Scotland," the situation is worse.

4 Toque's come up with an idea:

"Health and social work; Education and training; Local government and housing; Justice and police; Agriculture, forestry and fisheries; The environment; Tourism, sport and heritage, and; Economic development and internal transport."

Unlike the Scots the English will not be voting to elect MPs to represent them in these devolved areas because England does not have its own parliament. Instead British MPs in the UK Parliament will continue to decide upon these matters for England.

But what if England had its own parliament?

5 It's not just Fabian Tassano's post but the comments which follow it which need to be read on this issue:

One of the supposed aims of the socialist project is to replace "privilege" with "meritocracy". (Except that lately meritocracy has fallen out of favour with the Left — Anthony Giddens, for example, claims it is "socially destructive".)

But the original aim was seriously misconceived to begin with. As history has shown time and again, a system which claims to be against elitism merely ends up with a different elite. Or sometimes simply with the same elite, under a different name.

6 Vox Day can certainly write - it's not for his shock-power he has his readership. This is one of his more uncharacteristic self-examinations:

While it's extremely unjust that Cho chose to unleash his revenge on those who didn't mistreat him, it's not hard to understand that source of inner rage that years of constant abuse at school produces.

Being nearly a year younger than most of the people in my school class and too socially clueless to hide my intelligence, I was unlucky enough to be one of those on the bottom of the social totem pole for most of elementary school and junior high. It was a combination of three things that changed my social fortunes and my subsequent outlook:

1. Because I developed open contempt for my teachers before anyone else did ...

2. Scoring six goals in one game against our archrivals ...

3. The kindness of one of the most popular guys in our class ...

7 Not a great deal of doubt about what Gates of Vienna is about and that's in keeping with the "outspoken" theme this evening. Baron Bodissey:

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is the generous fellow from Saudi Arabia who offered New York City ten million dollars after 9/11. The money didn’t come without strings — New York was to help promote greater understanding about Islam — so Mayor Rudy Giuliani told the prince that he could take his money and go home.

But not everyone in America is as principled as Rudy, and the Saudis have been busy over the last few years endowing chairs and establishing study centers at universities across the length and breadth of the Great Satan.

Georgetown University has been one of the beneficiaries of Prince bin Talal’s largesse, and the institution that was once a light of Jesuit learning has become a propaganda arm of the Umma.

8 Long, long time since Bryan Appleyard was quoted. He needeth not the hits, he needeth not the mention but mention him we must:

So, I conclude, it is time to say something about philosophy itself. I don't go all the way with my friend - a distinguished thinker who would probably not wish to be named in this context - when he says philosophy is just arguments about arguments or that it is little more than a way of finding good reasons to hold utterly conventional views. But I do go quite a long way. I don't think Daniel Dennett, for example, is a philosopher at all, but merely a flunky at the court of secular, materialist scientism.

He's just there to assure Dawkins and friends that they are wonderful in every way. I find no sense of exploration or meditation in Dennett. Much academic philosophy is like this and I am constantly disappointed when, having read the works of hyper-intelligent philosophers, I find they are, in the real world, amazingly, well, unamazing.

That's it until Tuesday, when I have Blognor Regis in my sights.