Ploughing ahead with the new textbook

Progress with the new textbook for the Insititution of Fire Engineers is slow, but steady. Lot's of it is already there in a sort of framework, but there are a few gaps, moreexpansions of information and a lot of words still to be checked, edited, sometimes taken out and replaced and so on.

Deadline is early 2011...

Back to the grindstone.

Slow Progress.

My German lessons are progressing slowly. I seem to make progress only to get myself completely tangled in a simple sentence at the first opportunity to try out my language skill. Pronunciation, tenses, articles and the personal pronouns all get muddled as soon as I try to string them together. Still, most of those I deal with are understanding and try to help.

I'll get there, perhaps its just that patience has never been my strong suit.

Brilliant explanation of Climate Skepticism

Found a fascinating video of Climate Skeptic The guy is a young college and university graduate and a skeptic of the "Global Catastrophe" the Global Warming lobby are trying to promote.

I heartily recommend visiting his site and watching and listening to this explanation, particularly those who have young kids who may be being fed the Al Gore/ Mike Hansen version.

I wish guys like this could actually get aired on the mainstream media. Unfortunately, they are all controlled by the AGW propagandists.

Sleepless in the Taunus

Madam Paddy has a bladder problem and had a bad night. So did we.

This is a recurrence of a problem she had in January and we had a bout of it last week. Last night we noticed she seemed to be showing the same signs and sure enough, found she has a problem again. She is now 20 years old and I suppose is entitled to a few health problems. The bigger problem is the vet is in Bad Schwalbach and it needs a car to get there.

So this evening she has another visit scheduled. Hopefully this one will contain the problem.

Differing responses

I have watched with fascination, the different responses to the austerity measures being announced around Europe. The French Unions seem to be in open rebellion over their government's attempt to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the Greeks went wild over an attempt to move theirs from 55! With people in Britain having to work to 65 and in a few years to 66 to reach Pension age one does wonder how some of these State's expected to fund the early ages they originally set.

Perhaps the answer can be gleaned from a statement I caught earlier, from the spokewoman for the CGT in France. She declared that raising the retirement age of existing workers harmed the prospects of school and university leavers seeking work. Her argument seemed to be that by allowing older people to stay in employment meant that jobs would not become available for those starting out. This has echoes of the socialist pipe-dream of "Full Employment" so much trumpetted by the chattering classes who tried to seize the assets and investments of individuals in their "Nationalisation" programmes of the 1940 - 1970 period. The idea was that by centrally "managing" commerce and industry you could create job expansion programmes and ensure that there would always be jobs and everyone would be employed somewhere.

This is, of course, why they never allowed for investment of Pension Contributions and continually collected money for this and the health services which was then spent on social engineering schemes in all sorts of wasteful and now failed projects. And now that the population who paid for a pension would like to receive them, thank you very much, there is nothing in the bank.

Full Employment was a dream of the Communist planners and it works, assuming you can keep factories running on out of date machinery, producing goods no one wants to buy and which end up being recycled endlessly to make new appliances which end up being recycled... This is the sort of thinking which led, in the 1970's, to ports in the UK having to employ a "stevedore" to sit in the cab of every straddle carrier at container berths. He didn't do anything, there was nothing for him to do anyway, but why pay a man who could have retrained to do something economical? The same thing happened in the UK's shipyards, with demarcation between Unions which caused disruption and delays to new building and maintenance of ships to the extent that buyers went elsewhere. Apart from anything else, the Unions wouldn't allow the introduction of new building techniques - because these required fewer workers. One by one the Yards closed ...

The same happened in the mines culminating in the Thatcher years which saw mines, that had the ability to be viable and productive, closed, because the Union refused to allow any modernisation and the losers are still bitter and resentful - but they misdirect their resentment. It is the Union that destroyed thier jobs, not the government. Had the Miners Union allowed the modernisations and been less embedded in Soviet style thinking, many would now still be mining.

The French have evaded addressing these and other problems for several decades now. It may be too late, it may already be heading toward and fullscale civil war and that will be bad for the whole of Europe.

Trafalgar Day

Today is the day that Admiral Lord Nelson broke forever Napoleon's hope of invading and conquering England. As I write this, he lay dying in the orlop of HMS Victory. The battle itself set the Royal Navy as the dominant Navy for the next hundred years and even in 1914 it's fleets numbered more ships and spread across more oceans than any the world had seen before or since.

Nelson, Collingwood, Rodney, Howe, Hood and all those who made Britain great must be turning in their graves at what the nation they fought and, in Nelson's case, died for, has been reduced to.

As one Admiral is on record as saying, the Navy's greatest enemies have never been those they fought, but those at home in Westminster who will sell their soul's and everything the nation has, in order to hold onto power. They will discover soon that without the means to back it, it has a way of slipping out of their grasp.

It cannot escape the notice of those who study the great sweep of history of nations, rather than tiny segments, that Britain ruled a worldwide empire with half a million soldiers and sailors and just three thousand civil servants. They now have no Empire, no armed forces to speak of and five million civil servants.

Hefty cuts

It looks increasingly as if Mr Cameron is going to make some serious cuts to Whitehall, and many would say, not before time. Whitehall seriously needs pruning, one of the major problems in the UK is that, under Labour, the Civil Service has expanded to a size and been given powers it should never have reached or had. The UK Civil Service employs more than one fifth of the UK workforce. Since they are paid by the taxpayers, they are almost now reaching the point of being self employed.

The attempt to 'save' £83 billion will be unpopular, but is the inevitable result, as it was in 1974, of the Labour Party penchant for spending way beyond the National income. As one commentator has put it, the annual cost of debt repayments Gordon Brown has committed the UK to for the next generation, would pay for three aircraft carriers (Probably to be deleted in this review), several hundred schools, hospitals and even the teachers and medical professionals to staff them. It would fund some real growth and some real investment in the future of the country.

The problem I see coming for the UK from today's budget is that it will have been prepared in Whitehall by the same vested interests that created this mess and have a vested interest in protecting their power base. That means that the armed services, police, fire services, ambulance services and real jobs will be lost while the non-jobs such as Equalities Monitoring Units, bureaucrats shuffling paper and never accepting responsibility for their failures, more social engineering and more waste will continue unabated. Companies like KPMG will earn even bigger profits and even more senior civil servants will find comfy homes and offices in the KPMG, Price Waterhouse and other "consultancy" businesses.

Its all in the nature of the beast. Only one thing will stop it - kill it completely.