Explain

Posted on 21st May 2012 by essiep

27°C, windy

Gove: “He said: “To suggest that anti-Semitism can ever be explained, rather than be condemned, is insensitive and, frankly, bizarre. AQA needs to explain how and why this question was included in an exam paper.”

Aah, freedom of expression. Where do I be

Michael Gove speaking at the Conservative Party “Big Society” policy launch (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

gin to explain why this is so very wrong. Gove has some responsibility to the nation for the education system. Maybe he wants a system that stifles free roaming thought, one that avoids an old, valid and effective technique to combat opponents= know your enemy”. The Anti-Semites are a standard opponent to post-war westerners. We speak of freedom of expression but the minister of education wants to prevent freedom of thought in this statement. Gove doesn’t want us to explain bigotry, he wants condemnation. Perhaps we are to think through our stance without discussing the issues. This is where he has gone so badly wrong. That is why I have reacted so much, even though he is a member of the much despised UK government. Sorry to say, I still haven’t found grounds to forgive their recent crimes against honesty and openness.

To be doing?

Posted on 1st Apr 2012 by essiep

-2C~? Clear

I know language is an organic thing that evolves over the decades. But there is a trend that doesn’t rest easily with me, the prevalence of the passive present continuous voice. It’s everywhere and sounds so weak and excessively wordy. One day, not too far in the future you’ll hear this:

Will you be taking this man, to be having and to be holding…?

Yuk! Sometimes this form is necessary but more often it’s clumsy , wordy and just glaringly ugly.

Gay marriage- where to draw the line

Posted on 25th Mar 2012 by essiep

17°C, no clouds. CR:68miles.

I’ve heard this challenge to Same Sex marriage a few times. Most recently from a colleague with some maturity & standing, though he does wear his Christianity as a badge (literally). The argument goes like this: If you allow same sex marriage, then what’s to stop someone marrying a donkey*, where will it end, where’d you draw the line (etc.).

*the animal suggested varies with each time the argument is used. Curiously, they never seem to choose an animal that mates for life. Perhaps they can’t think of one, or maybe that would weaken the strength of their case. Who knows?

It’s a surprisingly persistent argument for one so easy to dismiss.

The line is an easy one to draw- we use the same line that prevents forced marriage or underage marriage. The limit is defined by consent of the parties involved, plus societal norms. Marriage is a consenting union between adults. Neither donkeys nor children can give convincing consent to a marriage so they can’t, therefore, be married. So what problem can there be with a gay couple joining in a marriage with mutual consent?
The next argument that is trotted out sometimes is that it somehow, weakens the institution of marriage. No it doesn’t, traditional marriage remains unaffected. Straight marriage remains untouched and continues to exist as before.

Christianity plays some role in all of this, but don’t they have some idea about all men are created equal in the eyes of God? Clearly they’re not all equal in the eyes of the Church.

My remaining, unanswered question is – why would a gay couple want anything to do with a bigoted, homophobic institution like the Christian church anyway? After the way they have been treated in this debate and many before, I’d want to keep well away if I was in a position like theirs.

80

Posted on 30th Sep 2011 by essiep

27°C, clear & still

Two loosely related news stories this week have caught my attention with their retrograde trend. One, proposes to raise the speed limit on motorways to 80mph. This has sparked numerous threads on forums (or is that fora?), interviews in TV and is said to be opposed by “environmental groups”. What worries me about the debate is its one-dimensional nature. MPs and most commentators seems to think there is only one reason against a change- safety. It’s almost as if they haven’t considered that there are other reasons at all. As I get older I am increasingly pushed towards the view that our leaders & decision makers are just plain stupid.
Look guys, here are some factors to consider just so you don’t have to think any up yourselves: fuel consumption (oil is going to run out eventually), noise, wear (on cars and on the roads), fear (cars full of kids because mums fear the traffic). All of those problems increase with speed.

11th Sept. 2001+10

Posted on 11th Sep 2011 by essiep

18C,

The media haas been full of 9/11 ten years on stories this week. I expected to really hate all of this, but as it happens, there have been some moving personal accounts. Opinions varied hugely on questions like “is the world safer after the War on Terror?”. Even high ranking US govt. men had seemingly balanced views on this, Bush had been advised to drop the term but decided to stick to it because American’s aren’t bright enough to adjust (how ironic). It was reassuring to remember how we felt threatened by that war on terror- it did indeed create a huge recruitment drive for the anti-American groups as we warned at the time. The reassurance lies in being right ten years ago. With hindsight- GW Bush was every bit as bad as we thought at the time, he did make the world a worse place, a less safe one. Many more US soldiers died in the various campaigns than civilians had in the World Trade Centre. The USA can’t begin to imagine how much the world hates them, and why.

I have to take this opportunity to answer the challenge that we don’t feel any diminution of our civil liberties. We do: detention without trial, tourists who are arrested for taking pictures of ‘sensitive’ buildings in London, and for most people- the conduct of security checks at airports.

60 watts

Posted on 1st Sep 2011 by essiep

11°C, perhaps upto 21°C, light cloud. CR:28 miles

60 Watt bulbs will cease to be made in the Eurozone from today. The govt. have effectively banned them amid media stories that folks are hoarding incandescent bulbs. I suppose it’s a bit like the food parcels passed over the fences of schools that adopted healthy eating policies. A policy undercut despite the apparent benefit to the populous. News reports always show mercury-vapour lamps as the new low-power replacement. They have, just like last time, ignored the other alternatives. There are a number of types: tungsten, mercury-vapour, Halogen and LED. I have always hated mercury-vapour lamps, especially strip lights because of the quality of the light. That means for me, flicker. They flicker at 50Hz which is quite annoying when seen in peripheral vision though less obvious seen directly. The colour of the light is odd too- slightly pink in direct light but the room is cast with a green glow that is so obvious in photographs taken in that room. My choice- Halogen where I need bright light, LED if not.

Maybe a fritillary?

Last day of summer

Posted on 31st Aug 2011 by essiep

19C, cloudy, CR:29 miles

Our local free newspaper is a lot of fun. It’s full of schools boasting of their record breaking GCSE results. It’s their best year ever, they exclaim. But wait, it’s always the best year ever, the results have gone up each year for the last 24 years. So, of course it’s their best year. It would be weird if the results stayed level for a year. How many years does it take before they notice the pattern.
Are they all too sensitive to risk upsetting the teenagers by telling them it’s all getting easier?

It’s the last day of summer but looks as if autumn is already here. The remaining green plants are starting to turn already. The long dry spring is said to be the cause of an early autumn.

Gotcha back

Posted on 29th Jul 2011 by essiep

20°C, light grey, warm & close

Result: the gutter press have been clobbered for their bad behaviour last Christmas. Observers have felt annoyed about this story over the last half-year, now they are ordered to pay large fines to the innocent landlord for their ludicrous inventions last winter. It’s still remarkable that these papers make up those stories with no apparent inhibition; we knew back then, it was probably false. They must have felt, at the time, that there was nothing to stop them.

Home: Tiled behind the cooker; paid unbelievable amounts of money to get the car serviced. Weather is threatening Wales and a hiking trip there next week.
King Cnut: look up where he came from on GoogleEarth:

I'm in this kind of mood today.

Try it yourself & let me know what result you see.

Comic Cartoon Strip?

Posted on 8th Jun 2011 by essiep

16°C, sunshine & moving air

“the Daily Mail as a “sexist, racist, bigoted, comic cartoon strip”.
-John Bercow

So it’s official, Bercow is the Speaker in the House of Commons. I wouldn’t normally bother with this, a paper that I never buy. But this is the 2nd top selling paper in the UK at over 2 million copies a day. People read this, much of which is irrational, contradictory or obviously wrong. Mind you, The Sun sells 3 million to an almost illiterate small-minded ‘readership’.

It’s all very well grumbling, but this post would be incomplete without a solution. Here is an add-on for Firefox which replaces links to bigoted pious DM rants with nice pictures of kittens: Link. Clearly such a feature is an outrage of the worst kind, but you know…

Micycle

Mike thinks b/hikes

Category Archives: News and politics