[kernow] exciting new life for young people

Fine, fine, 20 000 Cornish men, tell you what we'll do - let us help you out. We'll grant you immediate independence, build a no go zone between two twenty foot high walls along the Tamar and patrol the coast north and south to ensure no illegal Cornish immigrants get into England by sea or vice versa. There'll be a two month period of grace, during which people can decide which side of the Tamar they'd like to live on and then the border will be sealed up.

You can then enjoy your independence and trade your tin and fish with Bretagne and Wales. You'll have to forget tourism though because no one's coming through that wall. So those double lanes of English and foreign cars will no longer enter your sacred land - we'll respect the land of your forefathers, protect you from the trampling tourists and wish you all the best for the next 100 years.

When would you like to start?
.

[support out troops] get out of this political mire

It's not often this blog quotes The Mail:

The steep rise in casualties in Afghanistan is being matched by increasingly bitter recriminations between the Government and the British Army.

Soldiers accuse ministers of failing to give the troops on the ground the support they need. Ministers charge the Army with dangerously politicising its role.

General Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, has especially angered Labour by complaining privately to a group of Tory MPs about under-resourcing of the campaign.

Senior officers are impenitent about speaking out, because they regard the stakes as so high - the lives of their men. One told me yesterday: 'I regard the losses of the past fortnight as a wake-up call to the Government.

'If we are going to fight this war as it needs to be fought, we need a properly-resourced army.

'We also need the Prime Minister and the Cabinet to explain to the British people, as they have never convincingly tried to do, why we are in Afghanistan and what we are trying to do there.'

There is a tendency amongst patriots and pro-armed forces bloggers to see any opposition to Afghanistan as a bunch of conchy lefties whining about the brave boys and girls defending our country. While the opposition might include such people, you'd hardly lump the British Army itself under that heading would you, boys?

This blog is 100% behind our troops and the number of posts on how shoddily the armed forces have been treated shows the mindset of your humble correspondent. But I'm sure as hell not going to support a war we should never have been in, for purely political purposes which have zero to do with defending our nation, completely ill-equipped, defending peope who don't give a damn about this country and which the British Army itself is outspoken against.

You can support Gordo, Mandy and the Afghan quagmire if you like.

This blog, however, supports the Armed Forces.

Interesting American perspective here on how the government over there is planning to ban cigarette smoking for the military to make them healthier.

[By the way, I tried to rejoin the army last October and got as far as papers being prepared by recruiting but then the brass rang back and said I was too old. If I'd been a doctor they would probably have taken me. Oh well.]
.

[sportsmanship] difficult when there's a lot riding on the result

[This pic has been used by most of the dailies so I'll just acknowledge the Independent and move to the post.]

Sportsmanship.

What does it mean? In a game which has been a byword for sportsmanship for so long and the spawner of that remonstrance 'it's just not cricket', Ponting's words were restrained:

I'm not saying any of this changed the result – they were only brief interruptions, and I don't want to make too big a deal of them. But they were such visible incidents that I'm sure others will be taking these issues up with the England management.

The Telegraph took those words and made a headline: 'Ponting hits out at England'. No he didn't - he mentioned some things, that's all. I don't particularly like a lot of what Ponting has done over the years but I equally don't like the beat-up in the Telegraph.

The trouble with the concept of sportsmanship is that at the top level, the game is so competitive and there is a lot riding on the result. Even at junior level, it was always interesting the way we'd take teams to schools which shouted 'sportsmanship' from the rooftop but in the actual game, all sorts of little advantages were allowed to them but if one even looked askance at a strange decision, 'sportsmanship' was the repost.

It reminded me of Terry Gilliam's Brazil where Big Brother was constantly referring, in his broadcasts, to 'playing the game', in his attempts to have Tuttle caught or turned in.

If you're going to play a game for sportsmanship, fine - let's have independent umpires and nothing riding on the result. But if we are playing a game to win, then within the rules, let's go all out to win and not be so hypocritical as to accuse the opposition of not displaying sportsmanship. You can't have it both ways.

Unfortunately, cricket is a game which, like tennis and its line calls, lends itself to controversy, not least with the LBW rule. And how much time wasting should be allowed on the field when one side is playing for a draw? I've seen the Australians do it many times, particularly under Ian Chappell but this is our turn now.

I didn't notice but were the umpires ours?
.

[swimming pool drains] waiting for your child

Have to confess I've never really thought much about swimming pools but this stopped me short:

A 14-year-old schoolboy from the Isle of Man has died while on holiday in Thailand, after he was sucked into a swimming pool pumping system.

There are some U.S. stats which could be added to that:

Following are just a few facts uncovered by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in a comprehensive study of drowning and submersion incidents involving children under 5 years old in Arizona, California, and Florida.

* Seventy-five percent of the submersion victims studied by CPSC were between 1 and 3 years old; 65 percent of this group were boys. Toddlers, in particular, often do something unexpected because their capabilities change daily.

* At the time of the incidents, most victims were being supervised by one or both parents. Forty-six percent of the victims were last seen in the house; 23 percent were last seen in the yard or on the porch or patio; and 31 percent were in or around the pool before the accident. In all, 69 percent of the children were not expected to be at or in the pool, yet they were found in the water.

* Submersion incidents involving children usually happen in familiar surroundings. Sixty-five percent of the incidents happened in a pool owned by the child's family and 33 percent of the incidents happened in a pool owned by friends or relatives.

* Pool submersions involving children happen quickly. A child can drown in the time it takes to answer a phone. Seventy-seven percent of the victims had been missing from sight for 5 minutes or less.

* Survival depends on rescuing the child quickly and restarting the breathing process, even while the child is still in the water. Seconds count in preventing death or brain damage.

* Child drowning is a silent death. There's no splashing to alert anyone that the child is in trouble.

Drains, by definition, catering for a large volume of water, even in family pools, are a source of hazard. While we don't want to go down the draconian H&S route and over-regulate everything or ban it, there needs to be some sort of middle position found. Perhaps when schools take kids for weekly swimming lessons, the dangers of the pool itself, not just the standard safety lessons, can be given.

All the same - to be able to be sucked into a drain in a public pool says something about the owners and the builders, doesn't it? The last thing we want is to stop kids swimming and yet this sort of thing is just a little too prevalent for comfort.

[weekend poll] closed, results here

Which three do you vote for?

1. Cheetah (1)	2%
2. Lion (1)	2%
3. Tiger (12)	23%
4. Cat Woman (2)	4%
5. Jaguar (8)	15%
6. Puma (2)	4%
7. Black Panther (4)	8%
8. Snow Leopard (11)	21%
9. Domestic Cat (10)	19%
10. Sabre-Toothed Tiger (1)	2%

Total Votes: 52

The results were fairly steady throughout the polling and thanks to all who voted.

[after the destruction] come the calls for the dismantling

Welcome to your future

Sorry to post again on the state of the economy but I couldn't let one particularly cynical piece of rubbish go by without comment.

This article by former Revolutionary Communist Party organiser James Heartfield was quoted by Flip Chart Fairy Tales. "Former" communist? As in former male or former female? Former breather of the air?

In summary, Heartfield’s view is that British capitalism is now so crap that it needs to be supported by the state. That is why the government is nationalising and privatising at the same time. Privatisation, he argues, allows the private sector to make money from state functions while nationalisation and state intervention is used to prop up failing banks and car companies. Both are a result of capitalism’s decreasing ability to generate profits in the traditional way; by creating products that sell in the marketplace. It is because capitalism is now so feeble, says Heartfield, that it needs propping up by state spending on outsourced services and bailouts.

What absolute bollocks and precisely what was expected as the next stage in the dismantling of the free state. Rick's contention is that today's managers are rubbish, "intelligent" cuts are necessary and that capitalism has failed. He's right on two of these.

With one or two words altered, by and large, this was my reply to his post:

As I and many others have been pointing out for some years now, the problem is not capitalism. It is the international socialism as represented in Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BIS, Round Table groups et al who advise and control governments. One key figure in this, in British terms, is Paul Tucker.

The immediate goals in America are different to in Europe – here it is tied in to post-Lisbon and the unsustainable Blair/Brown utopia which Blind Freddy could see was never going to work. It’s hardly fair to accuse “capitalism” of failing when Brown’s treasury has snuffed out incentive to start up small and medium businesses and those which do have their hands tied by a punitive tax code and a range of stealth taxes are on a hiding to nothing.

It’s wonderful these calls for cuts which are going to be dumped onto the Tories plus the debt for two generations. And who will be cut first? The NHS patients least able to afford it and newly redundant middle-class employees.

Brown’s lot have crippled “capitalism” and then turned around and said capitalism’s failed. As Chesterton said, “it hasn’t been tried and failed. It’s been found too difficult and left untried.” Or in other words, turned into state and monopoly capitalism and imposed on a market which would like to be free please, thanks very much.

We haven’t seen unfettered capitalism for decades, the sort which gives the jobs, not the sort which is now losing jobs all across the country. Heartfield would be expected to trot out that balderdash because it is part of the dismantling of the bourgeoisie that that lot have always subscribed to.

What's the difference between a communist and a socialist? In my book, it is that the socialist swallows the balderdash which the communist feeds him and actually believes in a state where everyone is forced onto the one wage, everyone is forced to be equal by Procrustean legislation, everyone is forced to become dependent on the omnipotent state and everyone lives happily ever after.

The communist knows it will never work but it's a good enough path to the totalitarianism which is their true objective - not the dictatorship by the proletariat but the state dictatorship over the proletariat. It has ever been so.

The sheer gall in suggesting that a system which can't even breathe under these circumstances and is at the mercy of Them, as named above, has somehow "failed"!

Wolfie points us to this article about Madoff 2.

Now, what should be done? Penalize the man in the early stages of his game and have him thrown out, as the regulatory body at the stock exchange used to do or to extinguish capitalism altogether?

What is needed now is for the socialist shackles to be thrown off, for government incentives to be given to start up small and medium businesses in terms of cranking down legislation, for venture capital to be available on terms from a plethora of small banks, for the managers of the large banks and all their bailed-out ilk to be prosecuted for their crimes instead of given pay rises, for them to be prevented from going anywhere near the trough in future, for the tax codes to be radically altered so that both business and the ordinary citizen can breathe again, for the cuts to be made to the ridiculous socialist programmes such as ID card legislation, CCTV and so on and so on and for representation at Westminster to be on the basis of merit rather than cynical preselection procedures.

The NEP men in the USSR, the PFIs and the like show categorically that the socialists are well aware that capitalism is the best model. Heartfelt above even acknowledges that. So it's time to allow it to show what it can do free of the touch of death of Mandelson, Brown and their ilk.

Martin Kelly quotes these people:

Globalization certainly requires authority, insofar as it poses the problem of a global common good that needs to be pursued.

... and then comments:

This statement does not acknowledge that no electorate has ever been asked whether they wish their government to pursue a globalist economic policy, the Global North having had globalisation imposed upon them by elites, the South by a World Bank and an IMF in thrall to The Washington Consensus; and accordingly it does not and indeed cannot address the fundamental question of whether globalisation, whatever it actually is, can be considered to be legitimate.

Amen to that. Finally, tangentially to the main theme above, William Gruff brings us a ray of hope for the new week:

Thirteen 'specialist medics' have come together to allege that Dr David Kelly was murdered ...

New Kelly inquest required?