I really don’t care about the “human rights” of a terrorist or one who advocates terror.

I can think of better ways of improving our transport infrastructure than spending billions on a high speed rail system that won’t be fully operational until 2032

I don’t see why my gas and electricity bill should be higher in order to pay for wind farms that blight the landscape and are so unreliable they have to be backed up with alternative energies when the weather is calm

If I were in government “gay marriage” would not be top of my agenda. In fact it wouldn’t be item 999 on my agenda

I do not expect a “conservative” government to be taking money out of the pockets of poor people in Britain so that it can end up in the Swiss bank accounts of rich people from third world countries

Neither do I want a “conservative” government to waste time and money on “initiatives” to tell me what to eat and drink and how to be a jolly good chap

I am not impressed by plump faced, well heeled privately educated politicians from Oxbridge who have never held down a real job pretending to be “right on” while prancing around in shirt sleeves for silly photo ops

We have too much debt. We pay too-high taxes. We build too few houses. We are losing old jobs and costs prevent us creating new ones. We are having a bad time, and we want the people who rule us to lead us out of that, and think of little else. It is simple, but not easy.

Why oh why can’t we have a set of politicians who throw all their energies into that and NOTHING ELSE!!!!!

What do you see nurse, what do you see?
What are you thinking when you look at me,
A crabby old woman, not very wise,
Uncertain of habit with far away eyes,
Who dribbles her food, and makes no reply,
When you say in a loud voice: “I do wish you’d try.”
Who seems not to notice the things that you do,
And forever is losing a stocking or shoe,
Who, quite unresisting, lets you do as you will
With bathing and feeding, the long day to fill.
Is that what you’re thinking, is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, you’re not looking at me.

I’ll tell you who I am, as I sit here so still,
As I move at your bidding, as I eat at your will,
I’m a small child of ten, with a father and mother,
And brothers and sisters, who love one another,

A girl of sixteen, with wings on her feet,
Dreaming that soon a lover she’ll meet;
A bride soon a twenty my heart gives a leap,
Remembering the vows that I promised to keep;

At twenty-five now I have young of my own,
Who need me to build a secure, happy home;
A woman of thirty, my young now grow fast,
Bound together with ties that should last;

At forty, my young sons have grown up and gone;
But my man stays beside me to see I don’t mourn;
AT fifty once more babies play ’round my knee;
Again we know children, my loved one and me.

Dark days are upon me, my husband is dead,
I look at the future, I shudder with dread.
For my young are all busy, wit young of their own,
And I think of the years and the love I have known.

I’m an old woman now, and nature is cruel,
‘Tis her jest to make old age look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles, grace and vigor depart,
There is a stone where I once had a heart.

But inside this old carcass, a young girl still dwells,
And now and again my battered heart swells.
I remember the joys, I remember the pain,
And I’m loving and living all over again.
I think of the years, all too few and gone too fast,
And accept the stark fact that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, nurses, open and see,
But a crabby old woman, look closer, see me.

h/t Mattie

Witnesses testified that Tyson told them he saw two “crackers” — his phrase for white people — walking through the neighborhood and that he intended to rob them. The tourists said they didn’t have any money and begged Tyson to let them go home. The men also told Tyson that they were lost.
“Since you ain’t got no money, then I have something for your ass,” Tyson recounted to a witness, then added that he shot the men several times.

Yes the two British tourists James Cooper, 25, and James Kouzaris, 24, had been drinking when they came across Shawn Tyson. Yes, they were lost…and yes they should have been savvier about dangerous areas. But would everyone from those projects have acted like Shawn Tyson? I hope not.

Watch this clip of two of their friends making statements outside the court. The awkwardness of their delivery serves only to enhance the extent of their contempt for Shawn Tyson.

The Washington Post says the trial and verdict have been big news here in the UK, probably not so much in the USA. But the father of one of the victims still thought it was worth writing a letter to President Obama.

Joe Hallett, a friend of James Kouzaris and James Cooper has spoken of his “dissatisfaction” at the lack of messages of support or condolence from the US government or President Obama.

He said Mr Kouzaris’ father has written to President Obama on three separate occasions and has yet to receive the courtesy of a reply.

Surprisingly there was no response to any of the three letters, even from some lowly member of the White House staff.

But then it is clearly not within the President’s paygrade to comment upon specific crimes…….

Chained......

I feel I am in chains – I want a government that breaks those chains by implementing policies that might be deemed unfashionable by the media and cultural elite…

The will of Parliament should be sovereign over the the opinions of judges and external officials and/or institutions

People who break the law should suffer considerable inconvenience and if they continue to break the law the consequences should not be pleasant

The so called “conservative” government of David Cameron and his metropolitan elite would sneer at me for being naive while emptying my pockets to fund their feelgood fantasies. Liberals and left wingers would call me a “fascist”.

Is there any political party rooted in the present and future rather than in an idealised past and untainted by racist intolerance that would find my list fit for purpose?

h/t for Prometheus

Last Monday Fiachra Gibbons at the UK Guardian just knew in his bones who had perpertrated those vicious killings of Jewish children and French soldiers.
What could be the link, they ask, between Jewish children and French military personnel? The link is they are both seen – and not just by a far-right fringe – as symbols of all that has sabotaged la France forte, to borrow Sarkozy’s election slogan. Confessional schools, be they Jewish or an informal weekend madrassa, are seen as actively undermining the secular Republic by activists of groups like the Bloc Identitaire and the Front National, as well as some members of Sarkozy’s UMP, and even some on the left.
This was echoed across the UK media with adjectives like “toxic”, “hatred” and “racism” being bandied about alongside references to Dreyfus and Vichy. The whole of France, nay all Europe was invited to rise up and crush the noxious weed of “right wing extremism” and attempts to question the wisdom of unrestricted immigration.

But now it is practically certain that the killings were committed by a French Muslim gunman who appears to be associated with Jihadist groups the tone has suddenly changed. There are now pleas for everyone to calm down and BBC hack Gavin Hewitt has obviously been ordered to tell people that this event will have nil long term impact on the forthcoming French presidential election, essentially telling everyone to “Move along, please, nothing to see here”

I wonder why?

Young American conservative blogger Tina Korbe at Hot Air is shocked

U.K. schools to kids: No best friends for you!

One speculative quote, no evidence but still a neat hook for a slow news day. I actually like Tina’s more personal style but when she edges towards this going to hell in a handcart schtick all it does is bring out the endoftheworld brigade who always lurk around the edges at Hot Air and fantasise about “socialist” policies and/or Britain becoming a province of the new caliphate.

FYI I have five delightful granchildren who are all in different UK schools and a permanent strand of their conversation is about friendships including the making and the breaking of the same.

Almost all parents and teachers get involved in the fall out when best friendships go sour. I would bet that most of us then advise the child to maintain a wider circle of friends to alleviate the extent of the heartache when these relationships drift apart – which is, I suspect, the reasoning behind the original quotation.

There is no official policy in this matter, no UK government diktat and it was a tad misleading to imply such in the headline and in the opening paragraph….”apparently, they’re a thing”

As in the USA we in the UK have enough official fruitloopery to befuddle our brains without having to invent them so, Tina, do use a little shoeleather to tease out the background before waving flags like these.

Unless, of course, one UK school has decided to import an idea from…….the good old US of A……

BTW…this is an expansion of a comment I made on Tina’s article at Hot Air

Well, folks, so now you know. It’s all down to the white middle class again, the cause of almost all the world’s problems.
In fact this time we can narrow it down to a subset – those white middle class women teachers..

It found the majority of those training to enter the classroom were white, monolingual, middle-class women who were taught by people similar to them.
This, it is claimed, had led to “race equality issues to become hidden”, with often little discussion of issues surrounding ethnicity.

Who says so? Why it’s those academic highflyers at Manchester Metropolitan University (recently ranked 104th out of 118 of all UK universities) so it must be true.

Hidden race equality issues…..all those modern buzzwords….race…equality….ISSUES…and they’ve been swept under the carpet, hidden away….oh dear, what are we going to do?

No need to panic, folks because Dr Peter Hick is on the case. He’s not scared of those white middle classes and has given them a very stern warning…

We cannot rest on our laurels as racial equality remains under threat.

…and to make certain we don’t rest on our laurels he has come up with a twofold solution

Employ more teachers from ethnic minorities

Give the remaining white middle class teachers a very large dose of equality training and make it regular and continuous in case they lapse into their old blinkered ways.

Job done.

Let’s get rid of the quaint, old fashioned idea that we need to have teachers who can give children a basic grounding in how to treat other people as well as an understanding of those areas of knowledge that keep our society going. We don’t want teachers who can teach science and maths and history and literature. We want teachers who are racially and ethnically aware. There needs to be TRAINING…..so we’ll need TRAINERS. Moreover those trainers will need to be paid (by the taxpayer, of course) and someone will have to provide them.

Who on earth can step into the breach?

No need to worry – step forward once more Dr Peter Hick…equality expert extraordinaire and his team. No doubt as a result of this “survey” he already has a well thought out bid for the juicy tranche of government cash that will be diverted into equality training after the great and the good get chivvied into a moral racism panic by the BBC and a prial of bishops. More money for his department at Manchester Met and more feathers in his academic hat.

White middle class female teachers of England – Peter Hick is going to sort you out.

What was that? Maybe some of the students in our schools need to be given a bit of training in respecting their teachers, especially their female teachers?

What are you, some sort of neanderthal? The reason you’re being sworn at, punched, kicked or pushed up against a wall is because, as a white middle class woman teacher you are simply not “culturally competent in teaching an increasingly diverse pupil population.”

But slip Dr Hick at Manchester Met a million quid and he’ll show you the error of your ways, no problem….

President Obama’s birth certificate, made public as a result of Donald Trump’s brief “campaign”, is a forgery.

This is an astonishing claim.

Note that nobody has said that Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen of the USA – just that the document purporting to prove his natural born citizenship is not an honest piece of evidence.

With the results of Maricopa County, AZ sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse,” an incredible claim has become an incredible situation: a team of professional investigators, commissioned by a major law-enforcement agency, has determined that the alleged birth certificate produced by the president of the United States is a probable forgery.

One would have expected a veritable tsunami of claim and counter claim as a result of the Mariscopa County investigation with Obama’s supporters and opponents slugging it toe to toe in print and on screen. I expected to see in the Obama friendly BBC and Guardian a line by line dissection of the Cold Posse’s case with a host of experts drafted in via the NYT and the US networks to pour scorn on it’s conclusions. CBS in particular might well have been rather sensitive to the issue of forged documents after its own Dan Rather debacle.

But instead there has been a deafening silence. Not a syllable from the White House. Zilch from the DNC official newsletters at NYT and WaPo. Nothing from Sandra Fluke, the Democrats Presidential candidate for 2028………….and also nothing from any of the scuffed retreads sleepwalking to the 2012 GOP nomination.

I wonder why?

Good news – Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey is making a four part television drama about the Titanic. It will not be able to match the magnificent special effects of James Cameron’s Hollywood blockbuster but he does hope to avoid Camerons simplistic and hackneyed symbolism of the ship as a microcosm of the class struggle where plucky but poor steerage passengers were left to drown while the rich seized all the lifeboats.

He points out that third class women and children were rescued ahead of first class men, that all the evidence appears to indicate a fairly orderly evacuation and that, above all, there is no guarantee that a similar accident happening today would be handled more effectively.

Indeed he believes that our modern assumption that previous generations were less adept at organising a bold and efficient response to the unexpected merely demonstrates a baseless arrogance and a shallow understanding of the past. We have convinced ourselves that the contemporary tendency to “emote” and sustain the continuous mantra of “caring and sharing” somehow endows us with a higher purpose in life.

The mistake is to imagine the sort of Channel 4 thing that everything was ghastly until 1968 and Woodstock and then it all took a tremendous turn for the better. That’s essentially bogus. Every period has some things to offer that worked well and others that were unjust and wrong and repressive.

Whoops – take care, Julian…in some quarters going public with the view that maybe previous generations made a better fist of things than team 21st century might well be characterised as a “Hate Crime”….

Since the secretive Barclay Brothers took over the UK Telegraph the once highly respected broadsheet has been transformed into a lifestyle paper on a par with those glossy magazines you find in front of you on a long haul flight.

All the experienced hacks were despatched into the ether because they were far too expensive and you couldn’t easily link their output to advertising fashion or furniture, food or flydrives. They were then replaced with cheap gap year students highly skilled in cutting and pasting stuff from other media outlets – in other words the Telegraph became a slightly upmarket version of the Daily Mail.

In yet another brilliant cost cutting wheeze they realised they didn’t really need specialists in reporting politics. Instead they could get one of their lifestyle drones to double up.

Enter Matthew Norman, restaurant critic, wine expert – and ace commentator on UK and US politics.

He writes a Bryony Gordon style “filler” column every Saturday (just to plug up what would be a rather white patch of paper) and this week he gives the US Republican Party some advice culled from his vast experience of eating freebie meals in expensive restaurants….go for the middle.

You see failed lawyer Matthew knows that the GOP needs to copy the Democrats and get a “centrist” candidate like Obama. Forget the wingnut Tea Party, listen to the wise men from New York and Washington and choose an MSM selected safe pair of hands who won’t rock the boat, won’t worry about the deficit and certainly won’t do anything to irritate Iran or North Korea.
Hey and forget about Sarah Palin

Obama’s one serious electoral fear is the imposition of a more dangerous candidate at an open or brokered GOP convention in August. That worry has now receded. The only Republican to show an interest in that, and then only for a tease, is the high priestess of folksy narcissism from Alaska – and even the Republican party isn’t bonkers enough to hand the keys to the asylum to Sarah Palin.

After all, of what use was she or the Tea Party in the 2010 midterms…

Besides if you want to find an expert on narcissism look no further than restaurant critic….