Even Newer Labour?

Bit of a strange speech by Milliband E at the conference I thought.  It may be the result of selective reporting by the media, but it seemed to me that he spent most of his time rubbishing pretty well everything that the last three Labour governments had done.  Not that I didn't agree with much of what he said, but it does raise the question of just what party he is intending to lead.  Can you really be leader of the Labour party if you have specifically divorced yourself from what that party has done and stood for in the past?  Tony Blair realised that the party had to be rebranded if it was to convince the electorate that it was not just same-old, same-old, but he was careful to make the point that this was still Labour - just New Labour.  He didn't seek to get rid of Clause 4 and other baggage on the grounds that it was wrong, simply that it was outdated and irrelevant in the 1990s.  But in his anxiety to confess that the party has made mistakes in the past, Red Ed seems to be seeking to shut the door on what has gone before, in which case can it still really be considered to be the Labour party?

First things first.

The Deputy Governor of the Bank of England has exhorted us to go on a spending spree to boost the economy.  Great - give me the money and I'm your man!

Bye bye Labour?

So it's Red Ed, and on the basis of the speeches he made during the campaign, and the fact that he was not the first choice of either the MPs or party members, but succeeded on the back of the union vote, I can see nothing but trouble ahead for both him and the party.  I think Labour's only faint hope is that the coalition become so unpopular as a result of the spending cuts they are going to make and the consequences for jobs and services, that they are able to win the next election by default as it were.  But it's a very faint hope!

Oh yeh?

A friend sent me this gem -
Seen on a packet of breakfast cereal - GREAT NEW COMPETITION.  £10,000 TO BE WON.  NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. (See inside for details).

Do we really need it?

A couple of years ago I questioned whether the Olympic Games had any real relevance these days when there are so many international sporting competitions being held almost continuously every year.  So the same argument goes in spades for the Commonwealth Games.  I suppose you could argue that it's an opportunity for athletes who would otherwise never get a chance to come away with medals, but just what satisfaction do they get from an award at a Games where the big competitors - notably the US, Russia and China - are not represented.  I've got a certificate saying I won the fathers' sack race at our local primary school in 1975 (most of the others fell over) but it hardly counts as a high point in my career!  Given how much these get-togethers cost, isn't it time to reconsider their usefulness in today's world?

Shine on...

...shine on harvest moon, up in the sky.  So goes the song.  But just what is the harvest moon?  Quite simply it's the full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal equinox (early on 23rd of September this year).  And this year is a bit special because the two events coincided, which is something which only happens about once every 20 years.

Explanation - of a sort.

I've been researching this business of passports being required on internal UK flights (see last Monday's post) - and perhaps I should have done this before originally posting, but there you go. I was relieved to find that there is absolutely no legal requirement to provide identification on internal flights, but it seems certain airlines - notably the cheap carriers - do require you to prove you are who you say you are, and it is a matter for them as to what proof they are willing to accept. Many will be satisfied with any form of photo ID, but some will only accept a passport. And the reason for all this it appears is nothing to do with security as you might think, but is purely a commercial matter. Because their fares are so low, they see a danger that people could buy up lots of tickets, and then sell them on at a profit, so they feel the need to satisfy themselves that the person presenting the ticket is the person who purchased it. This does of course mean that if you're not a passport holder, you need to check before buying a ticket from a low-cost carrier that you will in fact be allowed to board the plane.

You're joking!

Delhi much in the news at the moment, what with all the problems over the Commonwealth Games, but what caught my eye was that the chief minister of that fair city has been put in charge of cleaning-up operations, and her name, believe it or not, is Sheila Dikshit! Don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Ha ha.

Had to pass this one on from my 5-year-old grand-daughter -

Why did the banana go to the doctor?

'Cause it wasn't peeling well!

What is truth - conclusion.

I've been trying to think of a neat short way to wrap this discussion up, but it's not easy. I hope I've convinced you that truth is simply one aspect of reality, and reality depends on information. Different people can be in possession of different information, depending on the frame of reference within which they are working, or perhaps on the speed at which information is capable of moving in their particular circumstances - a blind person, for example has to rely on what they hear, which means that their information may well lag behind that of a sighted person. So there is really no such thing as The Truth - there are Truths, plural, and each truth is as valid (or invalid) as any other. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, you can take solace from the fact that it is unlikely to affect your every-day life. For the most part, we are all working within the same frame of reference, and in general the speed of information is the same for all of us. But it's worth bearing in mind that, in the words of the song - it ain't necessarily so!

What the....?

Am I missing something? Reports in the press say that Frankie Dettori was refused permission to fly from Stanstead to Prestwick over the weekend because he didn't have his passport. Since when have you needed a passport - or for that matter any form of ID - to travel within the United Kingdom? Has Scotland become independent without telling anyone? Does this just apply to travel by air - and if so, why? Just what is going on?

Leave me be!

What the hell is "aggressive secularism"? How can secularism be aggressive when it is essentially a negative concept? Secularism is like the floor, and religion - or indeed any other system of beliefs - is a rug placed on it. What you can see is the rug, but the floor is still there, and if the rug is taken away, or begins to get threadbare and develop holes, the floor comes into view again. To suggest that this is "aggressive" behaviour by the floor is laughable. I assume what the Pope really had in mind was atheism, which is a positive philosophy, and certainly has found a rather strident voice recently. Secularism is simply an acceptance of things as they are, without the need to adopt any particular philosophical stance - religious or otherwise. The aggression comes from those who demand that everybody sees things their way - whether it be the Pope or Richard Dawkins.

Why change a winning team?

Yet another report suggests that glucosamine and chondroitin don't have any effect on painful knees and hips. Well all I can say is that I used to have big problems with my right leg - specifically knee and hip pain, and I've now been taking G&C tablets for about ten years, and the problem has disappeared. Maybe just a coincidence, but I'm not risking a return to the bad old days, and will continue "taking the tablets".

Special needs.

A report suggests that a significant proportion of schoolchildren assessed as having "special needs" are in fact just victims of poor teaching. Not surprisingly, this has produced howls of outrage from teaching unions. I think the real problem stems from our unwillingness to accept that children - like all of us - are individuals, and don't necessarily fit into neat little niches. Schools are sausage machines, designed to turn out a specific product from "average" raw material. When that raw material - that is the young child - is not average, schools struggle to cope simply because of the way they work, and this is so whether the child is above or below what is considered to be the norm. The reality is that every child has special needs because every child is different - unfortunately our education system is not designed to cope with that.

Ha ha.

A clergyman was walking down a country lane when he saw a young farmer struggling to load hay back onto a cart after it had fallen off. "You look hot, my son," said the cleric. "why don't you rest a moment, and I'll give you a hand." "No thanks," said the young man, "my father wouldn't like it." "Don't be silly," said the minister, "Everyone is entitled to a break. Come and have a drink of water." Again the young man protested that his father would be upset. Losing his patience, the clergyman said, "Your father must be a real slave driver. Tell me where I can find him and I'll give him a piece of my mind!" "Well," replied the young farmer, "he's under this load of hay."

Alphabet soup

We've talked before about the basic stupidity of the concept that putting certain letters in a certain order can cause offence, or even outrage. Did you know that there is a town in Austria called F***ing? There is, I kid you not. Further the German term for a light ale is Hell, so some enterprising German firm has had the idea of marketing a light beer called "F***ing Hell" - it even intends to produce a range of clothing under the same name! The EU have given its approval, saying that the name "cannot be considered reprehensible merely because it may have an ambiguous meaning in other languages". Apparently the Mayor of the town in question is less than impressed at this hijacking of his town's name - particularly as the town has no brewery, nor any plans to have one.

It's a date.

Why did I put "9/11" in inverted commas in my post last Thursday (and indeed in this one)? Because to me, and I would imagine to most of you, 9/11 as a date means the 9th of November. This American style of putting the month before the day has always struck me as slightly strange and illogical. It's rather ironic that our own terrorist atrocity took place on July 7th, so it's 7/7 whichever way you look at it.

Playing away...

It must be a journalist's dream when a headline writes itself. Following the latest Wayne Rooney shenanigans, his wife has left him (if only temporarily) taking their young son with her. The son's name is Kai - yes, I know, me too - but this means that any article concerning Rooney can now be headlined "No woman, no Kai"!

Tax isn't taxing....ho, ho!

There's very little solid information coming out as to why some 6 million people have paid the wrong amount of tax over the last few years - most of them paid too much, but a significant number paid too little and will now be asked to cough up the balance. From the little that is being said, it seems that the problem is with the PAYE system and stems from people being given the wrong tax code - but it's far from clear whether this is the result of the Revenue being given incorrect information, or whether it is simply a matter of the Revenue making mistakes. Given that the situation seems to have come to light as a result of a computer audit, rather than from inspectors going round checking up on people, it seems likely that it is the latter. Unfortunately, the Revenue's position is and always has been that the responsibility for ensuring your tax affairs are in order lies with you, and not the Revenue, and therefore even if it's their mistake, it's your responsibility!

Only in England...

I'm always on the lookout for examples of English eccentricity and so I was taken by the Knutsford Great Race which is held every ten years in the Cheshire town of that name and is a race for "penny-farthing" bicycles. It attracts entries from all over the world it appears. Great!! By the way, penny-farthings weren't originally called that - they were called "ordinaries" - the name penny-farthing appears to have come along after the event as it were. And for those who don't go back that far, a farthing was a small coin worth a quarter ("fourth-ing") of an old penny. If memory serves, it used to have the image of a bird on the reverse side - was it a wren? Penny-farthings had their heyday in the 1870s, but within a decade or so had given way to the early forms of what we would recognise today as a bicycle.

My name is Bond.....

Another for the "Well I never" collection. One in four of us, it appears, use a false name when registering on an internet site. No surprise to me - given the amount of spam and phishing and such that goes on, it seems to me a perfectly reasonable precaution to take. And no, before you ask, David Random is not my real name!

Wrong target?

There's a church in the US it appears, that intends to mark the anniversary of "9/11" by burning copies of the Koran. Seems somewhat of a self-defeating exercise in that - if it has any effect at all - it will probably be that of exacerbating the very extremism it is seeking to condemn. And anyway, Muslim extremism has little or nothing to do with the Koran - you might just as well blame football hooliganism on the match programme or the FA handbook.

Pecuniate obediunt omnia.

Unfortunately, we have to accept that sponsorship is now part of everyday life. Even the Colosseum in Rome is looking for a sponsor, we hear. But there are two ways of doing this - I am just about willing to accept something like "The F.A. Cup sponsored by E-ON", but what gets my goat is when the sponsor takes over the product - did you know for example that football's Northern Premier League is now the Evo-Stik League? How would you feel about "the McDonald's Colosseum"?

Who pays?

Much discussion as to whether the taxpayer should foot the bill for the Pope's forthcoming visit. The question seems to be - is this a state visit (in which case the taxpayer pays, no argument) or is it a Papal visit (in which case the Church would normally meet the cost). The Vatican is of course a state in its own right, and the Pope is its head, but he is also head of the Catholic Church, so in which capacity is he coming? He was invited to come by Gordon Brown - presumably as head of state of the Vatican - but it's clear that a major purpose of his visit is the beatification of Cardinal Newman and the celebration of Masses in Glasgow, London and Birmingham. The reality is that the costs are in fact being shared between the public purse and the Catholic Church, which seems fair enough.

What is truth - continued.

Going off slightly at a tangent, the 17th century philosopher Decartes spent some time thinking about this question and came to the uncomfortable conclusion that he could not be sure about the existence of anything. The chair on which he was sitting, the table at which he was sitting, the room in which he was, all the people he came into contact with - indeed the whole of the world as he knew it - could simply be figments of his imagination. Or he might be dreaming, or some supernatural being could, for whatever reason, be fooling him into thinking that these things existed (shades of The Matrix here). But then he realised that he could not be a figment of his own imagination - to have an imagination, he must exist. Equally if this was all a dream, he had to be dreaming, and to be dreaming, he had to exist. And if he was being fooled, then once again if he didn't exist, there would be nobody to fool. So he realised that the one thing he could be sure of was his own existence. The very fact that he was capable of thought meant that he must exist. He encapsulated this idea in the phrase "I think, therefore I am" which is often given in Latin as Cogito, ergo sum, or in French (for he was French) as Je pense, donc je suis. So in Cartesian terms, the only truth is - I exist!

Does God believe in Professor Hawking?

So has Stephen Hawking done away with the need for God - using the word in its widest meaning? I don't pretend to understand half of what Hawking is talking about, but I keep coming up against this fundamental problem - however you slice it, there must have been a time when there was nothing followed by a time when there was something, and according to my (perhaps imperfect) understanding, this contravenes a basic law of physics, and therefore, by definition, must have been a super-natural event, and therefore caused by some supernatural entity. So it seems to me that we can't get away from the need to have "God" as the original creator of everything.

Dog in the manger - part II.

Well apparently I was wrong (see post of 11th August) - Southampton it seems are continuing with their ban on press photographers at their ground, and requiring anybody wanting photographs of a game to have to buy them from the club. The Swindon Advertiser has resorted to Subbuteo figures to give their readers a flavour of the highlights of Swindon Town's recent match against the Saints. I really can't see Southampton winning this particular fight.

Hic!

According to excerpts published in the press, Tony Blair in his autobiography confesses to having a Scotch or G & T before dinner and half a bottle of wine with his meal most nights, and considers that this was a problem. Well all I can say is that if he was a problem drinker, I am right down there in the gutter!

Another one down the drain.

August was the coldest for 17 years it seems. So the private forecasting service which earlier in the year confidently predicted a good summer, and specifically that the beginning of August would be really hot (see post dated 23rd March), has proved as fallible as the Met Office. Why don't we stop listening to these people, and simply take every day as it comes? Might just as well.

Cricket, lovely cricket(?)

Let's stand back and look at this objectively. It is not against the laws of the game, or a criminal offence, to bowl a no-ball. If it can be proved that a no-ball was bowled deliberately (for a monetary consideration or any other reason) then that could be seen as bringing the game into disrepute, and the International Cricket Council could impose such sanctions as it thinks fit - against the bowler, or indeed the team. For a criminal offence to have been committed it must be shown that as a result of the deliberate no-ball somebody has been defrauded - that is, has lost money as a consequence. What we have at present is an allegation that money was handed over to a "fixer" who then arranged for no-balls to be bowled at specific times during the match. Certainly this brings the ICC into play, but at present as far as I am aware there is no evidence of anybody being defrauded as a result. Of course, what it does raise is the question of whether other aspects of this and other matches have been "fixed" and doubtless this is what the police are looking into. For the immediate future, it is for the ICC to decide what, if any, action to take.