The government is apparently trying to suppress a report that damns the Minsirty of Defence for incompetent and wasteful procurement procedures. I suppose one should not be surprised really, after all, this important function is now in the hands of a bunch of overpaid filing clerks, none of whom know one end of a weapon from the other and certainly none of whom have ever had to live on a warship, travel in an armoured vehicle or fly in an aircraft purchased under their utterly chaotic system. Add to that the Treasury's disingenuous cost cutting and cheese paring of any budget they can - and defence is an easy target under this bunch of closet communists - and the imposition of the most inefficient and utterly pointless "Project Management" system in the world (Prince 2) and you have a recipe for disaster.
How do you arrive at this position? Easy, you create a climate in which, in order to get anything into a budget, you under price it. Then, when the project is already well advanced, you either up-spec it, or you put it on a "temporary" hold so that you can strip money from one project in order to pay for the overspend on another. THis is how our two new aircraft carriers have suddenly increased in cost by £500 million. No, they haven't been "up-speced" - yet - but the Civil Service decided to "delay" delivery by two years to "save money". Yes, they saved in the short term - as in they didn't spend the budget two years ago, but now we will be paying the extra in two years time. Reasonable? In the rarified atmosphere of Whitehall it seems that this is classed as "saving" simply because it shoves the overspend into the future. No wonder taxes and cost of government rise exponentially.
Then you also have the debacle of spending a vast amount of money developing something - and then cancelling the order. That list is extensive, Blue Streak, the rocket system which could have seen the UK as the world's first nation to put men in space, the successor to Concorde which would have seen mass transport at or near supersonic speeds, the new Rolls-Royce engines for the Joint Strike Fighter which will see not only our investment of £550 million down the tubes but several thousand jobs as well (As has every other cancelled project the Civil Service has screwed up). As I said, the list is extensive and growing all the time. Obviously the latest report is so embarrassing the government have decided that it has to be doctored before anyone can see it - perhaps to hide their involvement and complicity.
Time to clean house - starting with the entire Civil Service. There is simply no other option.
Friday, 7 August 2009
Thursday, 6 August 2009
Deft definition
From time to time you find something which sums up exactly what you think of some movement, ideology or doctrine. I have to thank Ozguru for posting this on Facebook where I found it ....
What more can one say?
Political Correctness (def.) - a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.
What more can one say?
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
Citizenship Qualifications ....
NuLabour's latest trick, having realised that they have lost public trust in their "Multi Cultural" social engineering programme, is to announce that immigrants will have to "prove" their adoption of "British Values" and their loyalty to "Britain." Apparently the "test" is ludicrously hard, in fact it's doubtful whether many born and bred Britons (Particularly those uneducated by the Comprehensive Failure System) would pass it. It is written, of course, by the worst possible people - Civil Servants and NuLabour "Special Advisers". That's right the very same idiots who have labelled us "Institutionally Racist", a "Nation of Bigots", who happily declare that religion "impedes morality" and argue that we must be a "Multicultural Society". Not content with having completely lost their way in the quagmire of ideology rooted in the 1930's concept of "socialist workers paradise" in a new "Internationalism" - actually a neat piece of Stalinist propaganda - they now feel that, just maybe, a teensy-weensy bit of patriotism might be in order.
So they have devised this mish-mash idea aimed at "integrating" anyone migrating to the UK, and having served the requisite number of years "on licence" is properly inducted into the concepts which supposedly underpin our great nation's liberties and freedoms. Perhaps the honour paid to the flag draped coffins returning home from Afghanistan by the citizens of Wotton Basset and those who travel there each time one of our people is brought home that way is finally beginning to penetrate the ideology. Or perhaps it is the placard waving Islamacists in Luton howling their hatred of Britain and its troops as they march through the city. Or is it the fact that the BNP is taking votes from all the main parties and now has MEPs in STrasbourg that has finally alerted Brown and his loney-lefties to the fact that we want our country back. Who knows?
There is a basic split in the loyalties of the UK anyway. Traditionally it is between the Crown and Parliament. You are in favour of one or the other, sometimes of both. But increasingly Parliament has isolated itself, acts in contradiction of the will of the people and rewards failure. In the Civil Service the bigger the disaster you have created the better the reward. Parliament has proved itself to be out of touch and unworthy of our loyalty. Personally I am a Loyalist, my loyalty lies with the Sovereign, not with the House of Corruption and self interest. It is a choice that has split my family and relatives since the Civil War. Parliament represent tribal interests, not the Nation as a whole.
It is ironic that NuLabour (And Old Labour come to that!) having campaigned for the last twelve years to create a "Multi Cultural, multi-faith" society are now - too late - realising the danger of the beast they have fostered and created. It is equally ironic that they have apparently selected a range of things they have denigrated so much over the last forty years as the very criteria to be applied for new immigrants.
Curry anyone?
So they have devised this mish-mash idea aimed at "integrating" anyone migrating to the UK, and having served the requisite number of years "on licence" is properly inducted into the concepts which supposedly underpin our great nation's liberties and freedoms. Perhaps the honour paid to the flag draped coffins returning home from Afghanistan by the citizens of Wotton Basset and those who travel there each time one of our people is brought home that way is finally beginning to penetrate the ideology. Or perhaps it is the placard waving Islamacists in Luton howling their hatred of Britain and its troops as they march through the city. Or is it the fact that the BNP is taking votes from all the main parties and now has MEPs in STrasbourg that has finally alerted Brown and his loney-lefties to the fact that we want our country back. Who knows?
There is a basic split in the loyalties of the UK anyway. Traditionally it is between the Crown and Parliament. You are in favour of one or the other, sometimes of both. But increasingly Parliament has isolated itself, acts in contradiction of the will of the people and rewards failure. In the Civil Service the bigger the disaster you have created the better the reward. Parliament has proved itself to be out of touch and unworthy of our loyalty. Personally I am a Loyalist, my loyalty lies with the Sovereign, not with the House of Corruption and self interest. It is a choice that has split my family and relatives since the Civil War. Parliament represent tribal interests, not the Nation as a whole.
It is ironic that NuLabour (And Old Labour come to that!) having campaigned for the last twelve years to create a "Multi Cultural, multi-faith" society are now - too late - realising the danger of the beast they have fostered and created. It is equally ironic that they have apparently selected a range of things they have denigrated so much over the last forty years as the very criteria to be applied for new immigrants.
Curry anyone?
Tuesday, 4 August 2009
Military madness
Pliny the Elder left the maxim "Si vis pacem, para bellum" to posterity. It is also credited to Tacitus and to several other writers. I first heard it from a Latin master at school and it is also the motto of the Royal Naval Gunnery School on Whale Island. It is an excellent maxim and one that several great nations have ignored to their detriment over the centuries since he uttered it. The last forty years in Britain it has been not just ignored, but actively campaigned against by such luminaries as the "Greenham Common Peace Camp" denizens, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Parliament and the Civil Service. From 1989 onwards the so-called "Peace Dividend" has seen the annual cut back of Defence spending in the UK so that we are now almost unable to send a Task Group to more than one theatre, the Fleet Air Arm has no fixed wing aircraft and the RAF is flying out dated aircraft and very few of them at that. As for the Army, well their Tanks and Armoured vehicles have been cut back to a bare minimum, the artillery is barely adequately equipped and don't ask about the stocks of ammunition.....
But, no problem, the MPs can spend twice the annual budget for salaries of fighting men and women on their plush new offices and the Civil Servants in the MOD can spend the price of a Type 45 Destroyer on refurbishing and refurnishing their very swish offices in Whitehall - but not on ensuring that a bunch of Chinook helicopters they bought 8 years ago are able to fly on operations. Nor can they find the money to properly arm and armour the Merlin Helicopters the Forces desperately need in Afghanistan. But they can reward themselves and witter on about "striking delicate balances with limited resources" while spending vast amounts on themselves and their needs and scrapping ships and entire regiments of troops to pay for it.
And Labour and Gordon Brown wonder why the public is so disillusioned with them and their grand Socialist Dream. Mind you, I doubt very much that the Conservatives would be much better and as for the LibDems ..... Let's just say CND and be done.
I suspect that the underlying problem, which, for all the hand wringing and wittering about the "tragic losses" of our troops, is that Labour and Socialists in general HATE anything disciplined or even resembling the military. Why? Simply because it represents everything they are not. It has a purpose, a structure and a strong identity. Socialism doesn't work, hasn't worked and has eroded our sense of identity and our concepts of liberty to the point that we will eventually, like the Roman citizens of 410 and 476 AD, have so lost all sense of our achievements and our identity that we will simply open the gates and welcome the invaders.
This country now spends less than any other European nation on its defence forces. Our once magnificent navy has been pared away to the point almost of being simply a coast defence unit. I doubt very much our new super carriers will ever be commissioned. Why? Again because Civil Service incompetence and Treasury duplicity has caused the costs to rise enormously and I am certain that very shortly the Navy will be told that if it wants the carriers it must give up even more ships and possibly the nuclear deterrent. That will leave this country dependent on the French Fleet for its defence. Yes, the rattling noise IS the remains of Nelson, Jervis, Pellew, Rodney and Hood rotating at pretty near light speed in their graves.
Today another soldier paid with his life for Mister Blair's Afghan adventure. Our Armed Forces are underfunded, over "managed" by incompetent Civil Servants, led by politicians who include a Defence Secretary who was a Communist Party member and quite possibly a KGB informer. His Cabinet colleagues include a man who under the laws passed by this government would be a terrorist, Greenham Common children, Che Guevarra admirers, Trotskyites, Stalin apologists and CND members. Not one has any military service and they are all on record as being against the military and desirous of unilateral disarmament.
In the mindset of these Socialist morons, the military is always "the enemy" and is almost always "Institutionally ...." Recently I listened with rising blood pressure as some young twit from the Student Union described the military as an expression of latent "fascism" - the sort of inane remark these stupid products of a biased and propagandised education system now routinely trot out ignoring the fact that their Workers Paradises almost always have vast military machines to keep their populations in line.
Our Defence Budget has hit the bottom of the pot. It is time to demand a rethink and a re-assignment of the funding that the Civil Service squanders so readily on every kind of stupid and wasteful project going as long as it employed ever more cloned morons. It is time we spent as much as the French or the Germans, Belgians and the Dutch on our Armed Forces. Each of these spends an average of 8% of GDP on their military to our paltry 6%.
Our young men and women in the Forces deserve a lot better, they deserve our support, our respect and the best equipment, ships, aircraft and weapons our money can buy. The Civil Service needs to have its wings clipped heavily and its power curtailed - and our MPs need to be kicked painfully until they do the decent thing by this country.
But, no problem, the MPs can spend twice the annual budget for salaries of fighting men and women on their plush new offices and the Civil Servants in the MOD can spend the price of a Type 45 Destroyer on refurbishing and refurnishing their very swish offices in Whitehall - but not on ensuring that a bunch of Chinook helicopters they bought 8 years ago are able to fly on operations. Nor can they find the money to properly arm and armour the Merlin Helicopters the Forces desperately need in Afghanistan. But they can reward themselves and witter on about "striking delicate balances with limited resources" while spending vast amounts on themselves and their needs and scrapping ships and entire regiments of troops to pay for it.
And Labour and Gordon Brown wonder why the public is so disillusioned with them and their grand Socialist Dream. Mind you, I doubt very much that the Conservatives would be much better and as for the LibDems ..... Let's just say CND and be done.
I suspect that the underlying problem, which, for all the hand wringing and wittering about the "tragic losses" of our troops, is that Labour and Socialists in general HATE anything disciplined or even resembling the military. Why? Simply because it represents everything they are not. It has a purpose, a structure and a strong identity. Socialism doesn't work, hasn't worked and has eroded our sense of identity and our concepts of liberty to the point that we will eventually, like the Roman citizens of 410 and 476 AD, have so lost all sense of our achievements and our identity that we will simply open the gates and welcome the invaders.
This country now spends less than any other European nation on its defence forces. Our once magnificent navy has been pared away to the point almost of being simply a coast defence unit. I doubt very much our new super carriers will ever be commissioned. Why? Again because Civil Service incompetence and Treasury duplicity has caused the costs to rise enormously and I am certain that very shortly the Navy will be told that if it wants the carriers it must give up even more ships and possibly the nuclear deterrent. That will leave this country dependent on the French Fleet for its defence. Yes, the rattling noise IS the remains of Nelson, Jervis, Pellew, Rodney and Hood rotating at pretty near light speed in their graves.
Today another soldier paid with his life for Mister Blair's Afghan adventure. Our Armed Forces are underfunded, over "managed" by incompetent Civil Servants, led by politicians who include a Defence Secretary who was a Communist Party member and quite possibly a KGB informer. His Cabinet colleagues include a man who under the laws passed by this government would be a terrorist, Greenham Common children, Che Guevarra admirers, Trotskyites, Stalin apologists and CND members. Not one has any military service and they are all on record as being against the military and desirous of unilateral disarmament.
In the mindset of these Socialist morons, the military is always "the enemy" and is almost always "Institutionally ...." Recently I listened with rising blood pressure as some young twit from the Student Union described the military as an expression of latent "fascism" - the sort of inane remark these stupid products of a biased and propagandised education system now routinely trot out ignoring the fact that their Workers Paradises almost always have vast military machines to keep their populations in line.
Our Defence Budget has hit the bottom of the pot. It is time to demand a rethink and a re-assignment of the funding that the Civil Service squanders so readily on every kind of stupid and wasteful project going as long as it employed ever more cloned morons. It is time we spent as much as the French or the Germans, Belgians and the Dutch on our Armed Forces. Each of these spends an average of 8% of GDP on their military to our paltry 6%.
Our young men and women in the Forces deserve a lot better, they deserve our support, our respect and the best equipment, ships, aircraft and weapons our money can buy. The Civil Service needs to have its wings clipped heavily and its power curtailed - and our MPs need to be kicked painfully until they do the decent thing by this country.
Monday, 3 August 2009
Back to normal services ....
Last night saw the end of another successful run of Musica Deo Sacra. It has been a fabulous year with organ recital, superb music, magnificent voices and a feast of liturgical colour. Our preachers have been excellent and everything ran like clockwork - except for one small thing last night - the batteries that power the belt packs for the radio microphones worn by the officiant and the "front of house" minister both decided to fail. One, mine, could be replaced - the officants couldn't be so those of us "In Quire" could hear his prayers and the Benediction - the nave couldn't. Still the music made up for it, but isn't it typical that some small and generally inexpensive item is the one thing that will let you down at the most inconvenient moment.
Another of the weeks "highlights" was the Medieval Feast in the Nave on Thursday evening.
It was great fun, presided over by "King" Michael the First, more normally known as the Town Crier, and the diners were regaled at the table by funny stories, medieval music on ancient instruments, and a fine selection of really glorious songs sung by the MDS Choir. The picture on the right shows the tables laid out in a great horseshoe and lit by candles. THe "Mummers" and singers, performed in the open space between. Some of the other fun can be seen in the pictures following which show the minstrels strolling, the choristers performing and some of the people enjoying the experience.
And before anyone has a wobbly about our use of the Nave in this manner, this is exactly how it was used in Medieval times, where it was used as a Market, a meeting hall for Parish and Town business and as a place where the "great unwashed" (In other words the common folk who weren't "In Orders") were allowed to gather to "hear" the Mass, but not usually to partake in it.
Another of the weeks "highlights" was the Medieval Feast in the Nave on Thursday evening.
It was great fun, presided over by "King" Michael the First, more normally known as the Town Crier, and the diners were regaled at the table by funny stories, medieval music on ancient instruments, and a fine selection of really glorious songs sung by the MDS Choir. The picture on the right shows the tables laid out in a great horseshoe and lit by candles. THe "Mummers" and singers, performed in the open space between. Some of the other fun can be seen in the pictures following which show the minstrels strolling, the choristers performing and some of the people enjoying the experience.
And before anyone has a wobbly about our use of the Nave in this manner, this is exactly how it was used in Medieval times, where it was used as a Market, a meeting hall for Parish and Town business and as a place where the "great unwashed" (In other words the common folk who weren't "In Orders") were allowed to gather to "hear" the Mass, but not usually to partake in it.
Sunday, 2 August 2009
The Day Thou Gavest...
These are the first words of one of Mausi's favourite hymns. Mausi heard it for the first time when she attended her first Evensong at Tewkesbury Abbey. This hymn was sung during the service and just fitted Evensong perfectly - Mausi distinctly felt a sense of peace and tranquillity settling upon her.
She was strongly reminded of the hymn while watching this evening sky picture roll out before her eyes a few days ago. Typical for this year's summer the afternoon had been filled with heavy showers and gusty winds but suddenly the sky had cleared into an unbelievable shade of blue, the last wisps of black rain clouds were driven away and the dry white clouds seemed to try and settle down on the hillsides around for a brief rest before moving on. Wherever the sun could get through it put a golden shine on the clouds. Very beautiful, especially as it was darkening on the ground already.
She was strongly reminded of the hymn while watching this evening sky picture roll out before her eyes a few days ago. Typical for this year's summer the afternoon had been filled with heavy showers and gusty winds but suddenly the sky had cleared into an unbelievable shade of blue, the last wisps of black rain clouds were driven away and the dry white clouds seemed to try and settle down on the hillsides around for a brief rest before moving on. Wherever the sun could get through it put a golden shine on the clouds. Very beautiful, especially as it was darkening on the ground already.
The day, thou gavest, Lord, is ended,
the darkness falls at thy behest;
to thee our morning hymns ascended,
thy praise shall sanctify our rest.
We thank thee that thy Church unsleeping,
while earth rolls onward into light,
through all the world her watch is keeping,
and rests not now by day or night.
As o'er each continent and island
the dawn leads on another day,
the voice of prayer is never silent,
nor dies the strain of praise away.
The sun that bids us rest is waking
our brethren 'neath the western sky,
and hour by hour fresh lips are making
thy wondrous doings heard on high.
So be it, Lord, thy throne shall never,
like earth's proud empires, pass away;
thy kingdom stands, and grows for ever,
till all thy creatures own thy sway.
John Ellerton (1826-1893)
Saturday, 1 August 2009
Organ Recital
For all those of you who have wondered what it was I was talking about in various posts about the Grove or the Glorious Grove, take a click on the link and you will hear and see a little of what we had last Wednesday evening when Carleton Etherington gave his recital on the Milton and the Grove. Both organs are magnificent in their range and in the "voicing" of the various pipes that make up the "Stops". The Grove is unique in one respect, having no Case everything speaks in the oipne - hence the power of a relatively small instrument.
The piece on this recording on YouTube is the "Toccata de la Liberation" by Leonce de Saint-Martin (1886 - 1954). The recording is superb, the Grove growls, roars and makes "merrie noise" throughout. Oh, and the BIG growl on the bass is the Bombard stop. All 16 foot of it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
