Chambers out!

March 9th, 2009

Dwayne Chambers is is proven cheat and should never be allowed to take part in athletics at any level for the rest of his life.

Do the apologists - those who tell us that he has served his time and should be allowed to start again with a clean slate - do they realise what damage he and his ilk have done to the track and field. Once the purest form of sporting activity, it has descended to a level at which each new achievement is greeted with suspicion about whether it has been chemically enhanced. Until it rids itself of those who have sullied its name it will cotinue to sink into the pits.

Forgive him by all means; we can forgive the bank clerk who has boosted his pay packet with a little creative accounting and been found out, but when he has served his time, he will not find the high street banks queueing up to offer him employment. This would be so even if he were the greatest bank clerk who ever lived.

Forgive Chambers, but never, never, never let him on a running track again.

Antigua

February 14th, 2009

There are two questions to answer. Firstly, having played a 5 day test match there a year ago, how has the Sir Viv Richards Stadium been allowed to deteriorate into nothing more than a beach since then?

Secondly, having had that year to prepare the ground for the second West Indies vs England test and failed dismally, what cause is there to believe that the authorities can now prepare a ramshackle football stadium for the re-scheduled match in just two days?

The way in which the whole thing has been handled is hugely disrepectful to the visitors; playing and spectating; and a gross insult to the name of one of the greatest batsman ever to play the game. All connected with the administration of West Indies cricket should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Please don’t offend

February 4th, 2009

I don’t imagine that many will be unduly distressed by the departure of Carol Thatcher from the One Show, and most right minded people would not dream of uttering the word that she used. Nevertheless, there are some worrying issues here .

There is the question of the BBC’s inconsistency between their treatment of this incident; which involved a remark made in a private conversation; with the Brand-Ross affair, in which a harmless old man was publicly humiliated using vile and scurrilous language.

There is also the matter of the the breach of the principle of free speech. Here we have yet another example of pussyfooting political correctness driving a coach and horses through one of our greatest freedoms. I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

I’ve said it before, but it bears endless repetition; sticks and stone may break my bones, but words can’t hurt me.

I hope you’re not offended but if you are………get over it!

A perfect world!

February 3rd, 2009

I have long believed that the whole ‘global warming’ movement is completely spurious. Climates change, and anything that we might might or might not do to combat this will influence the natural state of things not a jot. The proponents of such actions claim the high moral ground, and tell us that we must protect the world for future generations. I suggest that if they had their way the world would be rendered virtually uninhabitable for the human race. Perhaps that is what they really want!

If not malign they are, at best naive. Governments, whose principal objective is to exert as much control over the populace as they possibly can, are only too eager to embrace the environmentalists’ crazy theories to help their cause. No matter what they say publically, freedom is a dirty word for these people. I believe that the cause of  the environmentalists has been helped enormously by the fact that their main opponent on the world stage has been George W Bush. There has rarely been a man who was so unfitted for high office and yet attained it, but he was right about global warming.

Take transport. Man’s enterprise and industry has made it possible for us to travel to every corner of the globe within a day. We even have the ability to leave it and explore other worlds. It is one of the greatest of all freedoms and therefore must be quashed. If you really must have your own vehicle we, the state, are going to do all that we can to make sure that you don’t use it. We say that we want you to use public transport but then we discover that there isn’t any.

Most of this stuff emanates from London, where the last sentence sounds ridiculous. If I lived in London I would be only too pleased to travel on the excellent transport system, and would question the need to own my own car. Out here in the real world, where 90% of us live, the notion that we could rely on the public transport system to get around is quite ludicrous. Furthermore, the sketchy network that exists is so overloaded that prices have to raised to criminal levels in order to dissuade us from using it.

The irony of all this is that this great freedom; the freedom to travel; is increasingly becoming the exclusive preserve of the wealthy.

There are so many other areas in which governments, encouraged by the environmentalists, seek to exert more and more control over us. The recycling/waste issue is one which leaves me in despair and I do not propose to dwell long on it. But the notion that our elected councils should penalise us for mistakenly placing a piece of rubbish in the wrong container, and that we should pay people to check up on whether we do so, is, frankly, obscene.

The latest stance by the environmentalists, however, puts everything that has come before it into the shade. The absurdly pompous Jonathan Porritt, the governments’s green adviser, has decreed that couples who produce more than two children are being irresponsible. We could easily take the argument down the lines of other ‘authorities’ who have attempted population engineering; the Nazis, for instance; but in some ways it is good that he has come out with this garbage. It blows the gaff on the whole thing and demonstrates that control is the objective.

You see, Mr Porritt, reproduction is not something that man has developed; a freedom that he has laboured for, like travel. Like all animals, man’s two most basic instincts are to feed, and to reproduce in order to maintain the species. Any attempt, by any authority, to interfere with this is sinister in the extreme.

Where will these future generations; for whom we are told we must protect the environment; come from? Mr Porritt, like most of his ilk, gives me the impression that he loves the world but hates people.

Forbidden Fruit

January 29th, 2009

The Chief Medical Officer, Dr Liam Donaldson, is to announce today that guidelines allowing children from the age of 5 to 15 to drink alcohol in the home, and under parental supervision, are wrong. His position will be that the years up to the age of 15 should be totally alcohol free, and the government will issue new guidelines based on this.

This is tosh for several reasons . We have known for many years that the French approach, in which alcohol is introduced gradually by parents, by means of watered down wine, is much more effective in training children to have a sensible approach as they grow into adulthood. How will Donaldson’s approach enable children to handle the inevitable peer pressure to drink outside the home? My belief is that it will make it all the more attractive for them to do so.

And how is it to be enforced? Will squads of parental supervision police batter down front doors at mealtimes to haul in offenders?

Of course, parental supervision is not an absolute concept, and it ranges in quality from superb to almost non-existent. But the top and bottom of all this is that it will be yet another excuse for the government to control us. Big Brother is absolutely relentless.

Rare show of commonsense by BBC

January 27th, 2009

Make the most of it; it’s not often that the BBC gets it right. Of course they would be guilty of not showing impartiality if they were to do anything else. 

There has been a big hue and cry over the last few days about the refusal of the BBC, and now Sky News, to broadcast an appeal for contributions to a fund to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinian victims of the fighting in Gaza. The BBC, for once, is right, and the publicity that this matter has received has served to promote the fund at least as well as would a 5 minute appeal.

Let there be a fund for all victims, whichever side of the border, and let Iran, who supply the rockets which initiated the conflict, make the first contribution.

Hail to the Chief

January 20th, 2009

I am writing this post as I watch the beginning of the inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. Whilst I feel that the good people of America have missed a wonderful opportunity by not electing Hillary as the second President Clinton, I am sure that Obama will be a breath of fresh air after 8 years of a man who was singularly ill equipped for high office.

There are many parallels with the arrival of President Kennedy on the world stage.  We devoutly hope that he does not leave it in a similar way.

What a load of Kaka!

January 16th, 2009

Manchester City have, apparently, offered £108million for the signature of a Brazilian footballer by the name of Kaka. If they are successful in securing it, they propose to pay him £250,000 a week. We are told that Kaka will not be swayed by the amount of money on offer. He is a devout catholic and donates a large proportion of his salary to the Catholic Church. Whilst I am sure that he sincerely believes that such donations will benefit mankind, it is hard to think of a less worthy cause than that bunch of paedophiles.

Premiership football lost touch with reality long ago, and we should not be surprised that one of the richest men in the world has taken over one of our clubs and upped the ante to breathtaking levels.

On the other hand, before Rupert Murdoch came along and pumped huge sums into the Premiership, football clubs were bankrolled by wealthy local businessmen. Now that we live in a global village, what is so different about what Abramovic and Sheik Mansour are doing? And if it gives City a chance to eclipse that other, cynical, Manchester team, then it has to be a good thing.

Sticks and stones - again

January 14th, 2009

The royal racism row has escalated with the revelation that Prince Charles addresses an Asian fellow member of the Cirencester polo team by the affectionate nickname ‘Sooty’. Give me strength!

The nickname by which Sooty addresses His Royal Highness is not reported. Might it be ‘Big Ears’?

The New Luddites

January 13th, 2009

Environmentalists are the new Luddites. There, I’ve said it. There is no concensus, amongst those who truly understand these things, that any climate change is taking place that we have any power to influence.

And yet we allow ourselves to be constantly hectored by all manner of groups seeking to modify our behaviour in order to conform with their particular views of the way that life should be lived. Our freedoms are anathema to them, and their biggest disappointment is that we are permitted the most important freedom of all - the freedom to travel.

I will return to this issue frequently, but the relevant news today is the purchase, by Greenpeace, of a piece of land which would be needed for the building of Heathrow’s third runway, effectively given the go-ahead by the government yesterday. They have sold parcels of this land to various people, including well known aviation experts Emma Thompson and Alastair McGowan, believing that this will make the compulsory purchase of the necessary land more difficult when the time comes.

Mr McGowan destroyed the case for a third runway with his perceptive and incisive analysis - ‘Heathrow already has a decent sized airport, so why do we need another runway?’

Fortunately, the latest planning laws mean that the pathetic efforts of those who would hold back progress are doomed to failure.