Glottal stops

There are times when reading the gaps tell us more than reading between the lines.

The glottal stop in speech is used by people when they know what they are saying is a lie, as if believing it cannot be quoted or on record. Ed Balls is a prime user. He says, Suddenly found ou'. He was in government for years; he left the pensions time bomb as a land mine to those who come after him. The phrase was in common parlance. It was no surprise to anyone that public sector pensions are unaffordable and would have to be reformed but the highly educated and highly paid Mr Balls tries to offset all rebuke with a glottal stop.
Tony Blair used that trick on many occasions to offset a lie as if missing out the Ts was enough to make it a casual comment that could not stand up in court or public enquiry. When promising that a second tranche of best performing teachers should get more pay he hoped the teachers would not hold him to it because he used the glottal stop. They did. But his government only part funded the extra pay to the detriment of all state schools with higher performing teachers. He told us with a chuckle that Gordon Brown was the best Chancellor this country ever had, a sentence littered with glottal stops, dropped Ts and H’s littering the floor at his feet. And yet the sentence that included the 45 minutes claim was all pronounced correctly.
One wonders if these trained and experienced speakers actually practice the glottal stop in front of the mirror ready for when they feel the need to let a lie slip from their lips.

Of cucumbers

My neighbour decided to cut back the cluster of cherry laurels out side his house. What started out as a ring of cute bushes in now over twenty feet high. Through the window I glanced over at him sweeping it with an electric hedge trimmer. The sound stopped. He looked at the trimmer. He reached back and pulled the cable out of the bushes and examined the cut end. He went into the house and came out later to start again, cable fixed with yet another join.
I asked if was trying to do topiary, what shape was he looking to end up with? An elephant?
No. A cucumber.
Why a cucumber?
He said he had in mind the big green building in London, a cucumber.
You mean the Gherkin?
That is a gherkin, but this one will not look pickled. This one will be a cucumber.

The people have the final say

We are a democracy. We elect representatives to send to parliament to make laws on our behalf – in consenting to have them do that job and to pay them for doing it we are saying that the British parliament is sovereign. British law, done in the name of the British people, is subordinate to parliament because we pay them to be sovereign.
In 1215 the Magna Carta gave us all the right, in perpetuity, to be tried by our peers in open court.
Down the ages exceptions have been put in law - national security is one and the needs for children to be protected is another. Children about whom there is talk of law breaking or victimisation might suffer in social circles, mainly the playground. Protecting their privacy was required but withholding publishing court cases no longer works, simply because it should never happen. Closed courts are bad justice. The law must be seen to be made and justice must be carried out and be seen to be carried out.
Now we are seeing injunctions taken out, usually to prevent talk of a misdemeanour, by those who can afford to do it. And we are seeing family courts held behind closed doors with all concerned bound to secrecy about every detail, and no right of appeal. Gradually our inherited right to be heard in open court is being taken away. We need to have sovereign parliament rule that the freedoms we won at Runnymead remain in perpetuity here in England at least – right of free speech, right to be given a fair trial in open court and right to justice. Privacy of the individual must be secondary to these universal rights because we are one world, one society and the law should apply equally to all without prejudice.

A thief’s greatest threat is the victim.

Burglars, we are told, fear disturbance by their victims. They aim to do their illegal work when they know where the victim is, often asleep in bed. An identity thief has the same problem with the exception that the identity still lies with the victim so long as the victim lives, breathes and does what their identity drives them to do. If the identity theft is carried out for money, the theft of credit cards and bank details is enough to get them the money before the thief disappears into the firmament to become anonymous once more. But there are other reasons to steal an identity. Someone who feels so dissatisfied with what they have that they wish to abandon it and take on a new persona. To steal one from another living person.

Imagine a woman whose own life is deeply depressing. She feels small, meaningless and ignored. Imagine one such woman who then takes up the identity of someone she fantasises has everything anyone could ever crave, and talent to go with it. The choice of persona to take on must be made on some basis, maybe an infatuation with a man in the office and whose wife she wishes to be. In the twisted mind of such a hopeless case the target of obsession grows to be a super person, life and soul of every party, wit of the century with perfect mind, body and hair. Of course no such person exists. In real life even Kate Moss has blemishes like the rest of us do. The sad woman takes on the name of a woman she wishes to emulate, maybe encouraged to do so by a group of people to whom the supposed super star is seen as a threat to their aspirations. She proclaims that is her name and pursues a happier life with that name, achieving the acquisition of fame and fortune using that name but one that the original owner of that identity never applied for, having her own reasons for reticence.

The only fly in the ointment, gristle in the pie, is the cold hard fact that the original owner of the identity still exists. The characteristics that made the true person a target remain, she lets it be known that she remains in existence, as she always has in spite of having been diagnosed a serious illness that is mistakenly thought to be fatal. In the twisted mind of the thief the real person is a threat to be erased, deleted, destroyed. The thief could kill of have killed the original and persistent owner of the identity. Like in a plot from an Agatha Christie story therein lies the twist.

Social networking gives raised profiles but also makes it easier to delete an identity. Libel laws do exist. Just as police detectives do catch burglars social network managers do keep records and can prosecute customers who do not give true answers on demand. Extradition to the USA, home of social networks, is a lot easier than it used to be.

Sue Doughty
18/5/2011.

In every hospital that has special needs baby unit in this country there lies a child whose life depends on a reliable uninterrupted supply of electricity.
The Cutty Sark is famous for being the fastest ship ever built and, like the proposed off-shore wind farms, it was wind powered and "zero carbon", in spite of it being mostly made of steel. The Cutty Sark is in dry dock because it won its accolade on the back of favourable weather on the day and could never repeat it again, being becalmed too often for profit. Given that on land it takes 20 years for a wind turbine to generate as much energy as it took to make even the concrete it stands in I suspect that the off-shore wind generation machines will themselves be scrapped or abandoned as monuments of human folly in trying to catch the wind, their arms wilting in desperate abandonment of a quasi religion that failed to meet expectations. For every generation project dependent on the weather we have to have a back system that automatically steps in to stream on full power immediately and without any noticeable pause because although wind may be tree-hugger friendly but if we depend on it that baby dies.
Coal fired power stations, and waste burning generators have to be lit and got burning well before their power can be harnessed. You cannot switch to a cold power station when the wind drops it has to be already running hot, and if it was running hot that heat was being wasted while the wind was blowing. That cannot be right, we must not allow that waste. Apart from the fact that someone is paying for that fuel and hardware it would be very bad for the environment to just have heat being sent out to no purpose. So we either have carbon burning power stations and use them all the time to the exclusion of all others or we have none. The modern way of thinking is that we should not be sending men to sweat in the bowels of the earth to bring up carbon based fuel – especially since we can get it to come up through pipes more easily.
So if the wind drops we could have the fuel rods of a nuclear power station slide down into business to fill the gap without the lights even blinking. It is a fast switch on and start up system that emits no carbon whatsoever, it makes no smoke.
All of this has been known for decades yet this country is facing power cuts for lack of generating capacity – the baby in intensive care being kept alive with a smoky local diesel powered emergency generator as if in the third world outpost.
People matter, government is set up to make sure people have what they need in order to live and make a living. New Labour failed to believe that and delayed the new nuclear age for Britain. New Labour have departed so why have we still not got nuclear power plants being sorted and brought online?
Chris Huhne, Energy Secretary, has a lot to answer for!

Frequent deaths of socialism and its causes

Socialism, be it Lib Dem or Labour, will never live up to its aspirations because it attracts people who would take personal advantage of it and allows the many, through dearth of mental strength and confidence, to permit the few to take over. Even Stalin might have started out trying to bring the poor into power, but convinced of his own poverty of birth took all power to himself to the exclusion of all others while speaking the mantra of inclusively.
And after thirteen years of Labour in Britain we see inclusivity being preached and exclusivity being practiced in all walks of life. They even gerrymandered the election constituency boundaries to ensure Labour alone would be included in power in spite of having been awarded fewer votes than another party at the ballot box.
Socialism excludes imaginative wealth creators while pandering to them when in need of second hand glory or profits. It excludes people and ideas of difference and initiative while calling all their little bits of social engineering and meddling initiatives.
Socialism is a beautiful dream described by someone who does not know about humanity by not being in among it and part of it. It is written by observers not by partakers, like the theatre critic watching from the stalls the vagaries of courses and lives being lived out beyond his reach.
On the ground it does not work. It actually makes the poor even more poor than they would have been if socialism had never been invented. It prevents the children of the poor from dragging themselves and their own from the mire of underachievement. It conspires to remove and block any avenues to self-betterment that appeal to their core supporters.
Basically it does not work because it eschews profit making and confiscates any proceeds of work and effort thus cutting off its own supply of capital with which to appease the poor. And it can never be seen to have worked because that would allow for the applauding of success, another dirty word in the dictionary of socialism.
So we see socialism peddled at election time in underhand and devious ways as if it would work if only we all agreed to be poor.
We the people are human and we do not assent to be poor, rather we aspire to something better and strive to achieve it from the cradle to the grave.

The future is dismal

I was taught that having clawed one’s way to the top it is bad form to pull up the ladder – but Blair and mostly Gordon Brown whisked and pulled that ladder as hard as they could with all the forces they could muster, putting in place enormous barriers to having it ever restored.

Moves to increase tuition fees are putting further education out of reach for anyone whose parents are not in work or who do not have job security. And to anyone whose parents do not own property against which to borrow. The likelihood of employment for boys whose parents are economically weak these days is dismal. Even getting a driving license is now a huge cost and as for insuring a car for anyone under 25 to drive – hopelessly expensive. British boys are disenfranchised at birth thanks to 13 years of Labour government.

There has to be new ways of creating avenues to success for young people. There must be bursaries; there must be fiscal advantages to encourage the creation of new ones that must not be limited to students who agreed to separate to enable access to them. Come to think of it, the tax, grant and other income advantages of being a single parent household should be widened to include stable, two parent, family households.

Making this happen is a huge challenge to any government, and getting elected on a promise to do that would be hard. But now we have a stable coalition government with a promise to serve for 5 years and do the dynamic reforms we need.
First sort out the benefits system to allow the unemployed to do short term seasonal work without the present loss of income that brings. IDS is onto that already. Then sort out avenues to betterment for all through the colleges and university funding fiasco. But most of all we need jobs, we need to make employing people easier in Britain today and tariffs on imports from places that do not pay social costs that we have to pay for workers here, such as for the NHS and for holiday and sick pay. Level the playing field so wealth creation is encouraged, profit is no longer a dirty word and job creation follows.