Student fees/Student debts

Listening to the debate currently in the news concerning the level of student debts as our "Socialist" NuLabour Gauleiters try to drag more young people into university courses I am once more struck by the gap between the student reality and Whitehall/Westminster perceptions of reality. The Minister for Higher Education believes, because his puppet masters in the Civil Service tell him it is so, that student debt is reducing because although 43% are now taking up university places, only 58% are "in debt" and they claim this figure is down on previous years. Of course, you do have to look at how these figures are derived, and they are based on how many graduates are owing more than the Departments "average". Yet, in the Today programme on BBC Medical students and law students typically finish their courses owing the government or the banks more than £40,000 while a teacher may owe in the order of £25,000 (Around £2,000 above the average). Given that the "average" was, until recently, £15,000, this is a bit disingenuous.

Then there is the lottery of how much a family may get in support. Student grants are "Means tested" so that the poorest families may qualify for a full support grant (The student may still have only around £45 per week to live on) or a lesser amount if your parents combined incomes are below a "threshold" above which they are considered "wealthy". This is the trap that my family have always fallen into - my income and that of my ex-wife's have always been just above that threshold and some Whitehall W*nk*r has always taken great delight in simply rejecting every application and then billing us for everything they can - because we're supposed to be wealthy. So the Minister cheerfully announcing that "There are always those just above or just below the threshold who will win or lose ..." made my blood boil. Since the W*nk*rs that make up these rules and set the thresholds they are so rigid on are all able to send their children to private schools and the best universities at my expense because they are paid inflated salaries and - being the insiders to the rules, know exactly how to manipulate the system - make me pay again to support their childrens education by drawing the very support and benefits they deny my children. Someone somewhere needs to start asking how come some of the oiks now running Whitehall Departments can amass the sort of incomes that allow them to buy properties worth half a million or more in choice locations on what they claim are "average" salaries. Lies, damned lies and Civil Service statistics?

The government and the Civil Service argue that any student with a degree can earn "more than £100,000 more than someone without a degree - over their working lifetime. That last bit is the catch. As one architecture student said on the show yesterday, he would be looking to start work as an architect on £19,000 a year - assuming he could find a job - and unless he could set up his own practice or buy a partnership at some stage, would be unlikely to earn more than the equivalent of £50,000 a year by the end of his working life. In the meantime he had a debt of £40,000 to pay back and this meant, if he got a job, being unable to set aside anything for a pension until he earned considerably more.

On top of this universities in England are charging, at the government's behest (Remember that this Government is dominated by Scottish MP's whose dictats in Westminster have no impact on their constituencies in Scotland) Tuition Fees of up to £3,000 a year. Sounds OK until you learn that in Wales the Assembly subsidises this for Welsh students and in Scotland there is no such fee - unless you are a student from an English home. EU students are exempted by EU Law which states that they must be treated in the same manner and receive the same benefits as "nationals" - but apparently this does not extend to students who are "English" because the law in England says you can charge them .... Only a Civil Servant could create a system as unfair as this and only a socialist w*nk*r in NuLabour could ever argue that it is "fair" and a "matter of choice". And in the meantime the English taxpayers subsidise the Scottish students and the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Labour MPs constituents benefits.

The most amazing part of this entire debate is that almost all the politicians who have set up this system are the beneficiaries of the 1960's - 1980's free education system, which most of them abused horrendously. Now they are in the top jobs, in control of access and looking after their children and dynastic ambitions - they have pulled up the ladder behind them and locked everyone else into a debt trap.

Internet myths

An email is circulating again with some pretty gruesome appearing pictures showing a child apparently being punished for purportedly stealing bread in a market in Iran. It causes great offence in Iran where the pictures may originate and actually show a hustler who was using this set up scene to hustle money from bystanders. Snopes actually has the full set of the pictures which includes the final one showing the boy crying but otherwise uninjured.

I have done a bit more digging on this and have learned that under current Iranian law anyone doing this to a child would face a very stiff jail term themselves. It is believed in Iran that these pictures were made in Afghanistan where there are some very unpleasant practices involving children in some parts of the country. Iranian law actually forbids the awarding of severe punishments to children under the age of puberty which in Iran is set at 15 for boys and no Sharia court will award amputation or mutilation, both of which are "ultimate" sanctions, on a child or even on an adult for a minor offence. Yes, there have been some very harsh sentences handed down in Iran, usually on adults and usually for crimes which would make a splash in most of our "Red Top" tabloids.

I am not an apologist for the Iranian regime and I have good reason to know what it is like to work there and visit. I am not an apologist for Islam or the Sharia, the bulk of which is a sensible legal code along similar lines to the French Code Napoleon. What I do find distasteful is the presentation of something less than truthful and biased as "the truth" in an attempt to stir up passions against a group, nation or religion. This is the origin of the bulk of anti-Semitic scribblings and in Muslim countries it is the origin of almost all the anti-Christian propaganda. There is no excuse for Christians to respond in kind.

This is how wars originate. We in the West have to recognise that many of the cultures that we find difficult to grasp, find us equally baffling and in some instances totally unacceptable. Iran was civilised long before any western nation and has seen invaders come and invaders go. They are proud of their heritage and trying to find their own way forward while clinging to values we in the west do not share. But then we cling to values they find conflict with their understanding of the world. And I say again, I do not approve of much that I see there, but I also believe that there is no mileage and standing on the sidelines and accusing them of being uncivilised because they don't do things our way.

And less Goebbels style propaganda on all sides would be a good starting point to actually get some understanding between us!

Big bird

Residents in Cardiff have a problem. There is a big and potentially dangerous bird on the loose in the suburbs. It's a European Eagle Owl, one of the largest predatory birds around. No one knows where the bird has arrived from, though it's a fair bet it has escaped from somewhere as the Eagle Owl is not native to Britain. And these birds are big and hungry. In the wild they are known to take fawns, lambs, dogs and any small animal they fancy. The bird has a 2 metre wingspan and like all it's famillias - you don't hear it coming!

Warnings have gone out to residents about the danger to pets, but I wonder if anyone has thought this through. A bird big enough to take something the size of a fawn or a young goat and fly off with it for an alfresco supper - could take a child out of a perambulator - stroller to readers in the US.

These are magnificent birds, but Wales is sheep country and farmers there are not very tolerant of anything that eats lambs. OK, this ain't lambing season, but I'm willing to bet that as soon as it appears over a farm in the valleys - it's a goner. From the news I gather that several agencies are already at work o try and track it so it can be caught and moved to where it will be safe, probably somewhere like a bird park. Since the bird is not native, it is unlikely to be able to find a mate and it would be a shame to have such a magnificent bird waste itself in a brief existence alone in the Welsh capital or the valleys.

National Health?

The debate on Twitter and elsewhere about the merits and demerits of the UK's National Health Service and whether Mr Obama wants to impose it on the US is certainly attracting a wide range of opinions. I am a critic of the NHS. It is expensive, overly bureaucratic, run by Civil Servants (Which is, in itself, enough to make me skeptical of its ever achieving "value for money" or efficiency) and very selective. That said, I do believe that some form of "social" health service is needed.

The myth that the NHS is "Free at the point of delivery" is just that. A myth. It is an expensive myth too, and the older you get the more of a lottery it becomes, though one advantage of being over 60 is I now get my prescribed medicines (I suffer from Hayfever) free. The downside is that many expensive treatments are "rationed" and the older you are the less likely you are to be given them. The hospitals are an expensive part of the whole and used to be run by fearsome Matrons whose iron rule kept them spotlessly clean and efficient. Now they are run by "managers", frequently non-medical personnel who may have a "qualification" in some nebulous "Management" course whose focus is on some target set in that Palace of Waste, Whitehall, or on "cost", also determined in a Boardroom somewhere. The bulk of the money thrown at the NHS, some £70 billion last I heard, goes in paying the medical staff and the army of civil servants that "manage" them. Our hospitals are filthy, you have long waiting lists for appointments to see specialists and then you have to sit in filthy waiting rooms and if you are unlucky enough to need to spend time in hospital you have a good chance of having to stay in a mixed sex ward and of catching an antibiotic resistant bug. And it is most definitely NOT free.

OK, so you don't pay at the point of delivery, but you pay a premium every month out of your taxes and you also pay a "fee" for every prescription. If you need a dentist you have a job finding one on the NHS contract who will treat you on the NHS, so many of us have "Dental Insurance". Need glasses? Go private and pay for them yourself. Need an appointment with your GP? If you're lucky you might get one this month. Need an ambulance? We used to have the best service in the South West, but since that was merged with two other failing services you're lucky if there is one in the County - but the bureaucrats reckon that's an improvement. Of course, it does save money for the NHS, you're probably dead or past being resussitated when it finally reaches you.

Personally I believe that the NHS is generally a good idea but one that needs major reform and restructure. I believe that it could be made far more efficient and effective by being reshaped on the German model which has some "insurance" and some state provision. As the US debate hots up the one thing I would say is that the last model you want to adopt is the UK one. Look to Europe and particularly the German model and you'll probably find a better solution which will give fair and reasonable access to medicine to everyone in the US at the level and standard you are used to - assuming you can afford it on the present system in operation there!

The old Irish joke about the tourist lost in the west asking for directions applies. "If you want to go there, you can't start from here."

Humanity...

Watching History Channel this morning, the programme Battle 360 made me think about a number of things, most specifically, it made me think about the total lack of compassion shown by the Japanese toward prisoners and the populations they overran. But against this there was also the image of US forces machinegunning Japanese survivors in the water after the battles fought in and around Iron Bottom Sound. I can understand why this was done, I can even understand the hatred of an enemy that drives one to do it. After all, I grew up in a household headed by my father who had fought the Japanese at sea along the Burma Coast and among the Island chains and even into the Coral Sea itself. He had no love for the Japanese at all and the horrors he witnessed eventually consumed him.

What struck me most forcibly in watching this was the heroism displayed by individuals on both sides and the sheer scale of the tragedy unleashed in the battle between the West and the Empire Ambitions of the Japanese. Two very different philosophies underpin the two cultures and these met head on in the battles fought in the Pacific and the Far East. The west won, through sheer industrial strength and muscle, we out built, out resourced and eventually out scienced the Japanese.

Yes, by our lights they were savage and barbaric fighters who treated prisoners of war abominably and subject populations worse. Yes, we find their culture abhorrent, but there are aspects of ours that they find not only incomprehensible even now, but equally abhorrent to theirs. I will not forget my father's description - relayed one night when I was in my teens and he had taken on a lot more alcohol than was good for him - of the scenes in Rangoon after they had driven the Japanese out. Scenes of men buried to their necks in pits and forced to eat dry rice, then drink water, and the agonising deaths they suffered. Or of the emaciated prisoners they found who could not eat anything other than small quantities of soup and died if they were given too much at one time.

But then you also encounter men who having gone through this hell and worse, have sought out their former guards and made their peace with them. That, to me, shows humanity has some hope, for it is in the forgiving of enemies and the rendering of aid to an injured enemy that our true humanity is shown. Homo Sapiens is unique in the animal world in that regard, no other species indulge in that action. A defeated lion will be driven away to die or will be killed. The same happens among wolves and among the great apes. Humans alone, render aid to our injured enemies. Its one of the things that marks us out as humans and it is all the more tragic when we lose the desire or the will to do so.

I am proud of my father and of his fellow sailors, soldiers and airmen who fought for the world they believed in. I am even prouder of the fact that the vast majority of them never lost their humanity, never lost that urge to render aid to a wounded or dying enemy. Perhaps that is what makes the difference between the terrorist fanatic "dying" for a "cause" and the true service man. Once the shells stop falling and the bullets flying, the real service men and women of our armed forces will render assistance to all the wounded.

Perhaps that is what the fanatics on all sides need to remember. To do otherwise is to lose that most precious thing. Our humanity.

Climate science?

A new paper on the use of "statistical smoothing" in the merging of datasets and the interpretation of the findings by the "Global Warming is all the Fault of the West" are badly sewed in favour of their particular agenda. The article can be accessed at Watts up with that, a blog run by a scientist at Heriot Watts University who is a Global Warming skeptic. Reading the article by a guest blogger - a noted US Climate Scientist not in favour with Mr Obama's climate lobby. The basis of his paper is that far to many climate change "proofs" rely on data which is being biased by the "smoothing" of the data toward showing a higher rate of temperature rise than the data sets show if the bias is removed.

The problem is that there is a significant difference between datasets of suface temperatures and those taken by tropospheric satellites. The "smoothing" formula is biased toward the surface temperature sets and so shows a rise of temperature significantly higher than it is in reality if the bias is removed.

Any bets this will not get a mention at the Climate Change Conferences currently railroading ever more draconian restrictions on the west at the expense of jobs, life choices and our future?

Frustrating Blogroll ....

For some inexplicable reason my Blog Roll refuses to accept a new Blog. That new Blog is the home of a really thoughtful and rather funny cartoonist called Justin who is the creator of Mythtickle, a strange little world in which a mix of gods, goddesses and others intermingle and reflect on issues. The cast includes Boody, the dragon and ultimate innocent, currently being dragged off in chains by a laid back St George.....

Boody's Blog is the artists Blog. His cartoon is funny, thought provoking and beautifully drawn. Do give it and the Mythtickle world a visit.