Whine With Those Grapes John?

Just a few days ago the IOC president was making a big speech about how it is not the winning, it is the taking part but the American swimming coach was obviously in the toilet at the time because after his girl got beat by Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen, he sucked up the sour grapes and accused her of drug cheating.
John Leonard described the 16-year-old's performance as 'suspicious', 'unbelievable' and 'disturbing' and said said Ye 'looks like superwoman and any time someone has looked like superwoman in the history of our sport they have later been found guilty of doping.'
The coach has been widely criticised for his whiny outburst with the Chinese calling him 'biased', the Australians calling the slur 'rubbish' and the British delegation saying his words were 'unwise'.
Not content with bitching about one Chinese swimmer, he then went on to upset the whole of China by explaining that they have a history of doping that should make us all suspicious.
True, one look at the list of Chinese athletes who have been caught doping at Olympics since testing started bear that out with China having..oh, 1 athlete caught.
Greece has had 9 athletes caught cheating which makes them the biggest Olympic drug cheaters and America are second with 8.
So Mr Leonard points the finger at China for suspected doping while his own countrymen are the second worst culprits in history. That's embarrassing.

Switching Sides

One of the most difficult things we can do is change our minds on a strong, long held belief so we seek out confirmation that supports our policies instead of looking for evidence that challenges what we believe.
That's why when someone does a complete u-turn they should either be applauded that they are brave enough to to hold up their hands and admit that they were wrong or welcomed with a 'took your time didn't you' comment.
That is the difference between science and religion, not many religious people study the evidence and think oh my, I've been wrong all this time and the whole God thing is a crock, what was i thinking?
Luckily for us scientists do which is why Prof Richard Muller, self described climate change sceptic, has looked at the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, and after a three year three-year study concluded that not only is the world warming but that it matches perfectly to the raised levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and 'it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases'.
So one of the thinning number of scientists left who kept up the argument that Global Warming is not happening has seen the light and as that affirms my beliefs so i like it.
Short of becoming a climate-scientist, all we can do is accept these things on authority and bow to the knowledge of people who are climate scientists and if the mainstream scientific opinion of places like the Royal Society, the Royal Institution, NASA, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey and the IPCC say the Globe is warming and it is due to mans actions, you have to be a glutton for punishment to continue to argue against them, especially if you are not a climate expert yourself.

Let The Games Begin

A few people mentioned to me yesterday that they were nervous about the Olympic opening ceremony because they feared something was going to go horribly wrong and we would end up looking embarrassed.
All the must-be-included traditions were there, the athletes parade, raising of the Olympic flag, the speeches and the cauldron lighting which were all observed dutifully which left us to play with the rest of it as we liked.
I may have grumped since we got given the Olympics about the cost, the sponsors, VIP traffic lanes, security and the G4S security fiasco but the opening ceremony made me temporarily mislay my cynical position.
Not all of it worked but a lot of it was bonkers filled with references to things only Brits would understand. I can imagine viewers in every other country asking who the hell Michael Fish is and why is he going on about viewers phone calls but that was what made it so special. We could have had all the British standards that the viewers outside the UK expected to see but the opening ceremony is meant to celebrate the host country and Danny Boyle did that, especially the bit about the NHS which must have made the Conservatives in the crowd a bit uncomfortable.

Apparently the section about British soaps and the lesbian kiss from Brookside was broadcast on Saudi Arabian TV, the first time lesbianism has ever appeared on its screens. Ooops.
Other classic moments were the cameras catching the German dignitary seig heiling his team as they paraded by, the woman who was only supposed to walk with the Indian Team to the mouth of the tunnel and then stop but decided to hell with that and carried on with them around the stadium which led to the commentators stumbling over just who the woman was.
The inspired idea of getting unknown young athletes who's glory days are yet to arrive light the flame and the amazing idea of the flame itself comprising of many smaller flames which lifted up to make one large one.
Wheeling out Macca at the end was a mistake and obviously there were some bits that didn't quite work but that just sums up Britain perfectly, a mixture of the brilliant and inspired and the downright awful.

National Anthem Second Verse

Anyone watching the woman's Olympic football yesterday would have been treated to a shocking piece of oversight that sent jaws dropping to the floor and stunned a nation. No, not the South Korean flag being used to introduce North Korean players (although it was hilarious), the news that throughout the Olympics we will be using the first and second verses of the National Anthem.
After the first verse was sung with lung-bursting enthusiasm, the second verse saw mumbling, miming and humming breaking out across the crowd as the cameras panned around the stadium.
So obviously nobody knows the second verse of God Save The Queen but to confuse it even more, the second verse is actually the third verse because the real second verse is deemed not politically correct as it calls on God to scatter our enemies but not as offensive as the sixth that sees rebellious Scots being crushed.
Anyway, the official second verse that the organisers want the crowd and athletes to sing is:

Thy choicest gifts in store
On her be pleased to pour
Long may she reign
May she defend our laws
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice
God save the Queen

No fellow Brits being crushed or enemies being scattered, just a safe verse about pouring gifts on her as the backdrop to the stirring sight of the national flag of France rising slowly up the flagpole.
Makes me proud and we still have Boris Johnson at the opening ceremony to look forward to tomorrow and you just know he is going to set someone s hair on fire.

From The Notepad Of Dave

Dear people of the UK

As you may have heard today, Britain is in its longest double-dip recession ever with the Office for National Statistics confirming a GDP drop of 0.7% in the second quarter.

As your Prime Minister, I feel obliged to remind you that the Chancellor, George Osbourne, the man charged with turning around the fortunes of the country and who holds all our futures in the palm of his hand, is a History graduate who's only job before joining the Conservative Party was folding towels in Selfridges.

Please be kind to him, he is still learning and he isn't the brightest.

Your Friend

D Cameron

PS..It's all Labours fault.

All Time Olympic Medal Table

One of the highlights of the Olympics is seeing where your country is in the medal table and it is no surprise to see the USA sitting at the top of the all time Olympic medal table with 2296 medals from 25 Games.
What is surprising is that the Soviet Union which hasn't even existed since 1991 is in second place with 1010 medals from only 9 Olympics.
Great Britain have competed in all 26 Olympics and have 715 medals which sees them 4th behind Germany.
Australia only just about squeak in front of another country that has driven off into the sunset, East Germany, who are 10th with 409 medals from 5 Olympics while China have only taken part in 8 Olympics and have 385 medals and Russia have taken part in 4 and have 317.
At the other end of the table there is a large amount of countries that have never been on the rostrum to receive a medal of any colour, countries such as Bolivia who have no medals from 12 Olympics and Malta who have returned empty handed from 14 of the games and Burma who have zip from 15.
So as it stands, the USA is the Worlds greatest Olympic nation, or so you would think but if you average it out between medals won and games taken part in, America walk away with 91 medals from each Olympics but the Soviet Union on average made off with a back pocket full of 112 medals from the 9 Olympics they showed their faces at.
So the Soviet Union are, or where, the Worlds greatest athletes followed by USA and then East Germany so maybe there is something in this Communism thing when it comes to developing top athletes. Or more likely something to say about the poor drug testing before 1991.

What Has Changed In America Since 60s?

During a debate on American gun laws on an earlier post, a fellow blogger stated that he didn't recall any mass killings in the 60's and everyone he knew in Texas back then had guns. Then he posed the question what had changed in America between then and now?
Reading expert opinion on just why America has so many mass killings like the one in the Colorado cinema at the weekend nobody seems to be able to come up with a reason why young men, and it is usually young men, arm themselves and go on a murder rampage.
There does not seem to be a link between the shooters but some theories put forward are poor parenting, a 24-7 news cycle that brings instant 'fame', copycats, a culture that glamorises violence, a gun culture, violent films & video games, Americas involvement in wars, single mums, women working, divorce, lack of religion, pop culture, godless liberalism and right-wing hate-mongering.
Some of those theories may have a contributing factor but what most professionals do agree on is that the killer is mentally unstable and to answer q, the rise of mental illness is one of the things that has happened since the America he knew in the 60s.
The National Institute of Mental Health has some alarming statistics of the state of Americas state of mind, the most shocking being that an estimated 26.2 percent of Americans adults suffer from a mental disorder, a six-fold increase since 1955.
Obviously there were mentally unbalanced people back in the 1960s but the only mass killing i can find note of that decade was in 1966 and the University of Texas tower sniper. I found 5 single-incident mass killings in the 1980s, 13 in the 1990s and 13 from 2000 to 2010.
Looking at the NIMH website, the U.S. mental illness disability rate in 1987 was 1 in every 184 Americans, by 2007 the mental illness disability rate was 1 in every 76 Americans.
So the experts agree that mental illness is one of the major causes of these mass killings and the rate of these has risen along with the rate of mental illness so what has caused the rise in mental illness?
The NIMH site shows that the overwhelmingly treated mental illness in the 26.2% is depression which is described as a mental state or chronic mental disorder characterized by feelings of sadness, loneliness, despair, low self-esteem, and self-reproach.
Life today is fast paced and the younger generation do have pressures that we never faced in our youth. The pressure to do well at school, to gain a hatful of qualifications to improve their chances of landing a good job in a world where jobs are vanishing fast. The easy credit that can see debts spiral out of control, the constant fear of redundancy, the ongoing battle of being able to afford to just live in the World today and the line of rejection letters from employers for job hunters.
It is no wonder that depression is a major part of our lives and growing as populations expand and the recession continues to bite. The feeling of worthlessness and despair that must fester inside large swathes of the youth of today and you can maybe start to understand the mind set of someone who has given up on life.
The constant images of anti-heroes on our television and cinema screens and the edges begin to blur between reality and fantasy and if just one of those kids who has decided they have no future walks into a gun shop and walks out with an assault rifle as James Holmes did then you end up with yet another slaughter.
Modern life is not going to slow down, if anything the pace will get faster and the competition more fierce but the mix of mental illness, the stress of living in the modern world and easy access to guns is a lethal mix.
How to solve it is not an easy question, reducing the ease of how people can get hold of guns is the obvious answer to stop the gruesome conclusion but treating the symptom is not going to be easy because it calls for a wholesale change of our priorities and the way we live our lives and the pressure we put on our children that getting a good job and making a lot of money is the only measure of success.

Naming & Shaming Tax Evaders

Something that really got my back up about the austerity measures was the way that the Government attempted to demonise everyone but the people who were really conning the Government out of money.
We went through Civil Servants, students and the disabled sucking us all dry but it turns out that the richest 1% are stashing £13 trillion in secret offshore accounts to avoid tax. That makes the few million saved by removing the £30 a week living allowance received by student look like peanuts.
So now we know about it, what can we do about it because apparently tax evasion is legal, morally wrong but just a clever use of financial loopholes.
One Government idea, not the obvious one of closing the loopholes, is to name and shame them much the same way as comedian Jimmy Carr was outed as a tax avoider, paying 1% on his £3m annual income, and was fighting for his career which must have put the wind up a few people who saw what Carr was going through and wondered if they would face the same fate if outed.
My fear is that as Tory baiter Jimmy Carr was being hung out to dry, Gary Barlow, who was outed at the same time, was ignored by the Conservative Party, of who Barlow is a donor.
Would we just face a barrage of opposition donors who have evaded tax while the elite who slip a few pound to the Government slip under the radar? Every chance they would because no political party would volunteer to ostracise the people who pay their wages.
Still, the threat of being labelled a tax avoider would be toxic to any celebrity especially one that charge their fans a small fortune to see them in concert or play sport and live in splendour while not doing there share to dig us out of a hole just because they can afford fancy agents.
Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Gabby Logan, Guy Ritchie and Chris Hoy have all recently been forced to defend their tax arrangements.
About time the anger was directed at the right people but i can't see why tax has to be so complicated that people can tie the taxman up in knots, why not just fix a percentage for everybody so everyone pays the same percentage of tax on their income earned in the country?
No schemes that expand the base rate so more of your income is taxed at the lower rate, no write off's or carrying back losses to a previous years, just a standard flat rate for everyone with a massive financial penalty of 50% if you try to evade it. Why is that so difficult?

Welcome To England

England, where those feet in ancient time walked upon England's green and pleasant land according to William Blake but the only feet here over the next few weeks will be guests visiting our shores for the Olympics.
Just as Frenchman wear striped shirts and berets and Germans exist on a diet of beer and sausage, what can our visitors expect from the English and are the stereotypes even close? Allow me to give you a heads up on us English so you are prepared.
The most obvious one is that we drink tea by the gallon and that's true. I am drinking one now as i type this actually so expect to see us with a mug or a cup and saucer under our nose at all times.
The second obvious one is we apologise all the time and that's another true one but sorry doesn't always mean sorry when we say it. It could mean i apologise for spilling you tea but it could mean could you repeat that or then again it could mean i don't have a clue what you are talking about which leads us to number three, slang language.
The English have a perfectly good language but we do tend to use other words to mean something so for example a dog is a phone, Alan is knickers and plates are your feet. Don't worry, you will pick it up.
England is driven by class from the snobs to the chavs. If you have a big flash car you may think you will be applauded for working hard to afford such a delightful machine but not here, you will be called a flash git and someone will try and nick your wheels the second you stop at a traffic light.
Do mention the Second World War, we won that one so ignore the 'don't mention the War' mantra, mention it at every opportunity because we do.
There is usually confusion about what is Britain and what is England with most foreign people considering it the same thing. It isn't but it really annoys the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish and that's not a bad thing.
Finally you will see a lot of flags around, the English St George Cross and the Union Flag which you may think is very patriotic but in fairness, we have just not taken them down from the Queen's Jubilee.
So basically, to integrate yourself with the English while you are here, drink lots of tea and throw your empty cups at anyone in a big car while talking about the War and how much your plates ache and you will be fine.

What the...?

I have never really paid much attention to the idea of 3d printing, it all sounded a bit too star trek for me but once the nuts and bolts have been explained it all sounds quite plausible.
Strangely, for such a future technology, the story starts 13 billion years ago when the Earth was formed and all the elements were created. Everything, i am led to believe, is created from a mix of these 92 elements in the periodic table such as water which is what you get if you mix 2 parts of hydrogen and 1 part of oxygen. If you get distracted halfway through and only put in one part Hydrogen with your one part Oxygen you get a metal called Holmium, that's how exact the whole thing is but all we need to know is that everything, from the chair i am sat on to the apple sat in my fruit bowl is made up from the 92 elements in a different mix.
So far so good, so the 3d printer inventors say, why can't we not have a printer that instead of holding ink, why not have it hold elements such as Oxygen, Helium or Hydrogen which can build up whatever we want.Wiki answers show for example that my apple is made up of calcium, Copper, iron, Magnesium, Manganese, Phosphorus, Potassium, Selenium, Sodium and Zinc so put all them together in the right mix and you have yourself an apple.
Armed with this knowledge i looked up the periodic table that i had avoided so skillfully at school and found there was 118 elements. Had Prof Brian Cox lied to me?? He said there was 92 and everything was made from those 92 and here there are 118 and some of those towards the end have names like Americium, Berkelium, Californium and Einsteinium.
Scientists, deliberately confusing things and that's why we end up with planets called Uranus.