Monthly Archive

The Telegraph:

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone…

Fine . . . but (to reiterate) only if all of those denied can also opt subsequently not to contribute — through their very heavy taxes — to the salaries of doctors and hospital administrators who force them to go untreated.  Also, former payers should receive a pro-rata rebate for all the decades of unrecouped taxes they had paid that went towards the NHS, but which they had never used.  That’ll make things really “fair”, no?

Indeed, yesterday while driving past a north London hospital, this writer witnessed a truly appalling sight: at least half a dozen NHS employees smoking on the street just outside the hospital gates.

It would seem that the NHS should at least lead by example: all staff should be forced to be youthful, non-smoking, non-drinking, and of the ideal weight.  (In fact, those who don’t need doctoring much.)  Presumably those NHS staff who are NOT will be the first to be barred from NHS treatment?  After all, working daily in a health care environment makes them even more aware than the general public of the skyrocketing financial burden the health service faces owing to such obscene vices.  No?

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That was the other day.  Now, a new priority had arisen:

• [Cough, cough]
• (Thank you for calling your NHS for an appointment on our new 0845 number. Billions have been invested in the last decade. We appreciate your support. You are number . . . sixteen . . . in the queue.)
• [Cough, cough]
• (36 minutes later. . .)
• Hello. How may I help?
• I’d like an appointment. I’m feeling dreadful. My head is clogged and I . . .
• Very good. Just a few questions, first, you understand. So we can serve you better. Your name?
• Mr Smith. [Cough] John.
• One moment while I pull your records up. Ah, yes, here you are. Have you lost those 2 stone?
• Oh, yes. Yes.
• Indeed, I can see.  If you could, would you walk into your living room . . .
• Wait? Can you see me?  How?
• Just another example of how your NHS is there with you, always, all the time.  And I notice there are no ashtrays about.  Good.
• Gave it up. Haven’t wanted one in ages.
• Great. Units drunk per week?
• I’m not sure, but very low. Just like I was told.
• Uh, huh. Now, please blow into the phone receiver, in one long continuous puff.
• Phwwwwwwwuuuuuu.
• One moment. Ah, good. Your blood alcohol level is satisfactory. Next, have you paid your TV license?
• Huh? Why, uh, yes. As always.
• And I see that parking fine has been paid also.
• Parking fine? I haven’t? Oh, wait, that was in 2003?
• And you’ve done your Self-Assessment tax online for the last year, just before the HMRC site crashed, too. Very good.
• Oh, thanks.
• Almost done. I see your road tax is up to date and you are working on that Hip for the sale of your house, that hedge dispute with your left side neighbour has been resolved, and you checked the immigration status of those men who changed your guttering last week.  And I see you have cut back on short haul air travel.  Excellent.
• Huh?
• Oh, my goodness! Mr Smith, don’t you know that climate change is now a bigger threat to the NHS than even obesity!? And yet what did you go and buy last summer? A patio heater.  I’m sorry, but the doctor can’t see you until you get your environmental priorities in order.
• But? . . .
• However, the NHS does thank you for your continuing support. Especially in not requiring us to send out police to collect your share of the bill towards our continuing to provide desperately needed maternity care for immigrants.  Goodbye.
• Oh, uh, your welcome, I guess.  Eh. ‘ang on a minute!  What about my appoint…
• (This call is ended.  Please hang up.  Goodbye.)

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Also in The Telegraph:

…In parts of London, seven out of 10 babies are now delivered to mothers born overseas. London’s chief nurse, Trish Morris-Thompson, admitted the NHS had not realised how immigration would affect maternity services.

“The timing of the impact is much quicker than we had anticipated“, she said.

Funny, one would have thought the NHS would know it takes only about 9 months?

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Taking advantage of the ability still to be able to travel faster than sailing ship (before it is outlawed), we flew from Heathrow yesterday afternoon and reached NY yesterday evening. We’ll be here for the next two weeks. (Family matters.)

I have to try to get caught up locally.  So Newsday beckons.  To the letters page . . .

[Posted 4 PM, NY time]

If an aging playwright, who’d as a child been pushed down stairs and knifed in a state school, survived to grow up and never alter his view that “danger-filled” state schools should be abolished and replaced by “home schooling” modeled on where home schooling “is the best” — say, Utah — one wouldn’t expect the BBC to be too impressed.  Naturally, such abolishment is never going to happen, regardless of his personal pains.  And, undoubtedly, they’d consider him something of a crackpot.

However, have a playwright air his personal foibles as the basis for championing abolition of private schooling (which, even if taxation turns against it, will also never happen), the replacement of the current state school system with an educational system modeled on that of France, and unsurprisingly the broadcaster simply can’t contain itself:

Alan Bennett, author of award-winning play The History Boys, has called for private schools to be banned…

…Mr Bennett’s successful play, which tells the story of a group of grammar school boys trying to get into Oxford and Cambridge, has reopened in London’s West End.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Bennett described the abolition of fee-paying schools as the “elephant in the room” that no-one would talk about…

…He said he had first formed his views when he went to Cambridge in 1951 to take an entrance exam…

Also in 1951, Clement Attlee started the year as prime minister, and 77 year old Winston Churchill finished it. George VI was king. One John Winston Lennon was an unknown Liverpool kid, age 10-11. Fewer than 1 in 7 British homes owned a TV set. Humphrey Bogart “chain-smoked through The African Queen“. Dinah Shore had a big hit with “Sweet Violets“. And the world’s first scheduled passenger jet journey didn’t take place until the next year.

He said: “It was the first time I ever came across boys from public school. They were so confident. We were timid grammar school boys but they were very much at ease.

As fascinating as it is to hear of how Mr Bennett attended a now absolutely reviled as exclusionist grammar school — meaning a state school that selects on an educational achievement basis — it’s curious how that factoid is allowed to slide past readers.  However that’s probably not too shocking, given that making too much of that evidently didn’t fit the envisioned plotline for “this play”.  In this one from the BBC and Mr Bennett, “grammar school boys” are now suddenly “timid” and composed of society’s meek and downtrodden.

“They hogged the bread and slurped the soup - things were very much still rationed in those days.

“They were just louts, but I also realised that they had been better taught than I had. I thought that was unfair when I was 17, and that view has never changed.”

He said he admired the education system in France, where “state education is the best.”…

Readers may already know that while some aspects of the French state educational system are, yes, very good, France’s system is in many respects also far more ultimately “excluding” than Britain’s.  For while Britain’s university system is still in generally in good shape and attracts students from all over the world, most French 18 year olds do not pursue — let alone complete — higher education.  Indeed, aside from the academically rigorous, fee-collecting, grandes écoles (which, presumably, Mr Bennett would not be enamored with were they instead in Britain), French universities are, essentially, falling apart.

Mr Bennett probably just hasn’t noticed, since he can’t see over his own shoulder.  Much is said as we know, about the American “Vietnam syndrome”.  Less well known is the British “public school syndrome”: when someone who has subsequently otherwise done well in life, but didn’t attend a private, fee-paying school (called here a public school, as you probably know — as in the supposedly “training for public service” sense), is traumatized by that “failure”, and spends the rest of his life nursing a chip the size of an . . . elephant, not so much “in the room” as prominently on his shoulder.

To point out what has changed, even if Mr Bennett’s view has not, today’s fee-paying schools have in attendance some young children whose not just parents, but grandparents, were not even alive in 1951.  That for hundreds of thousands, they fill a role not for the “loutish”, idle “upper crust” of Mr Bennett’s Eton and Harrow 1951 nightmares, but as an escape valve for children of hard-working parents who are so desperate as to be willing even to pay twice (fees, and also taxes towards state schools their children don’t attend) in order to find some way to grapple with the educational meltdown in far too many localities.

Although for someone constantly reliving his 1951 late teen trauma, it may seem childhood never ends.  But in reality parents never have the luxury of waiting a decade or two or three for “improvements” in education; their children have only one lifetime, and it is being lived now.  No matter: owing to Mr Bennett’s 1951-rooted knowledge base, parents carrying a heavy financial burden so their children may obtain a real education, in a school where they may not need to be skilled in the use of personal cutlery in the hallways?  The unmitigated gall of them.

Because Mr Bennett thinks parents shouldn’t have that escape valve available.  Yet while his personal pathologies are certainly his privilege, of substantive concern is how — because he writes plays? — the BBC actually believes he has a valid right to inflict them on everyone else policywise.  Clearly, it is irrelevant to the Beeb that what we have here is a playwright whose “storyline” on this matter stems from an experience of nearly 60 years ago.  Indeed, that Mr Bennett’s educational prescriptions might therefore nowadays be decidedly dated and ill-informed?  And that they might be about as relevant to today’s world as a 78 record? (Remember those?)  None of that even enters a fertile BBC mind.

And thus the BBC’s “public service” continues . . .

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Understand, the BBC is not alone.  The Torygraph Telegraph gave Mr Bennett a whole page to expound upon his ramblings views in its January 28th print edition (which translates into three pages on the net).  There is little reason to read the entire thing, though.  However, one is particularly intrigued at the number of times in this speech at Wyndham’s Theatre to “Telegraph” readers, he manages — modestly — directly to plug his own work by name.  By one count . . .

…my first play, Forty Years On…

…Nearly 40 years separate The History Boys from Forty Years On…

…one criticism that could be made of The History Boys…

…I feel easier talking about The History Boys…

…My first play, Forty Years On…

…The History Boys came out of being in two minds about education and my experience of education and examinations when I was young…

…This is why it’s a mistake to imagine The History Boys as some kind of tract…

…Still I can see there is a tenuous connection between History Boys and The Uncommon Reader…

…Since writing The History Boys I have had to talk and write a good deal about schools…

. . . some nine times, on just three pages.  

That, of course, doesn’t mean that naked self-interest in promoting his own work in any way motivates Mr Bennett’s national educational assessment.  In fact, one might well think his anti-privatization school stance could be extended happily to other areas.  For instance, it would seem the State could also pass out “the soup” far more equitably to ALL playwrights and aspiring playwrights (regardless of level of talent), through banning all private composition and production of stage presentations.  

A first such State stage production could likely benefit from Mr Bennett’s input, given that this biographical subject died only 3 years before Mr Bennett’s pivotal 1951:  “Sergei Eisenstein: A Life“.

As the sun comes up this morning, you probably feel safer about going outside.  GMTV tells us:

After yet another violent weekend in our cities, Britons are afraid to walk near their homes alone at night, according to a survey

More than half of British women (56%) and more than a third of men (36%) are afraid to walk alone at night in their own neighbourhoods, according to a survey published today.

The study was carried out for ITV1’s Tonight programme following comments made by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith about feeling unsafe walking the streets of London at night…

It was once said that Moscow was one of the world’s safest cities.  But it was mostly because the government itself was the criminal, so you had no fear of being robbed or beaten up by street thugs; the thugs were truly frightened of “the police”.  However, now, after chaos surrounding the collapse of the communist regime in the early 1990s, no one any longer says Moscow is safe at night.

But we don’t want to live in a “police state” to get “safety”.  We just want to be able to walk after dark from the Tube to our front door, or to the corner shop, or by the pub, without getting knocked over the head — or worse.  We say we should be able to do so because we “used to be able to”.  We harken to ”back when”, to a time we are sure people could walk streets with impunity. 

But did our grandparents and great-grandparents really do that?  How regularly did people “go out” in London 150 years ago?  Especially before streetlighting, Western cities were not exactly “safe” places at night either (that’s one reason why streetlighting was brought in as it became technologically feasible — safety); lower Manhattan, for example, was a frightening place once the sun had set.

We know certain social norms are different now of course.  (Did most women even think to walk streets alone after dark 150 years ago?)  Still, “cities” have changed dramatically not just because of various social changes, but because they are bigger geographically.  The central location is not more crowded, but because transportation has made it easier for people to live greater distances from work, “cities” that were once found only in tight geographic areas, have spread.  

So what were once “rural areas” aren’t any longer.  As populations spread outwards from central cities in the last century, many rural areas became parts of ever-expanding cities. (Manhattan’s population thinned out to the northwards up the island with the building of the NYC subway; workers no longer needed to be walking distance to jobs. Now, “Manhattan” might even be said to start in parts of Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk and northern New Jersey. “London” has spread outwards similarly in a circle in every direction. Hertfordshire was another rural planet 150 years ago; today it is London commuter belt country.)  Naturally, though, one tends to be “safer” at night in rural areas because — as a general rule — where there are no other people roaming around, it is less likely one will be robbed or beaten up. 

Given that those changes are near universal in the West and are unlikely to be reversed anytime soon, to get to some solution the first thing we should probably do is ask: in what major Western city, in any country, is one able currently to carefree meander streets, late at night?  Honestly?  Is there one? 

Also, how much of our fears today are media-driven by reports like that GMTV piece?  One hears about danger so stays in, and then, when asked tells media, “I’m afraid to walk the streets”, which media then dutifully reports, and so more people become fearful.  And so it goes?

The BBC reports:

…The National Association for Small Schools claims more than 100 in England and Wales have already been earmarked for closure and many more will follow.

It blames government targets for new services such as out-of-hours tuition, which smaller schools cannot provide.

The government has denied it has a policy of closing small schools.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families says the decision on whether or not to shut a school rests with the local authority.

A spokesman added that the government was providing unprecedented levels of funding to help local authorities face what it calls the “challenges and opportunities” caused by a falling birth rate…

…Last week, there were major protests in Shropshire over the council’s plans to shut 22 primary schools.

Most are small village schools with fewer than 90 pupils. Sixteen other schools are recommended for merger as part of the major reorganisation…

Yes, decree national requirements that may be physically impossible to meet (soon it will be cooking classes; and next it will probably be what? that all schools nationally must have a minimum 100 student orchestra?), and then claim problems which arise in the implementation of such are “challenges and opportunities“, but ultimately are “not our fault”.  Yet another tiresome example of the “not invented here” — “Nih!” — mantra that is endemic with this Government. 

In a different aspect of life, but which springs from much the same meddlesome, “if it ain’t broke, break it” mentality:

The government has launched a review of the private rental sector in England, which it hopes will improve conditions for landlords and tenants…

Again, heaven help us, for what does this Government actually know about the private rental market?  We’ll soon find out exactly how little, once they get their claws into ”improve conditions” in that area, just as they did with the long established — and up until then, well-understood by all involved — housebuying process.  The semi-chaos that now reigns in homebuying in England and Wales, and will likely continue for some time to come — at least until a Conservative Government sweeps up the wreckage — was not only “not invented here”, but has, as we know, brought “benefits to consumers“. 

Likely topping both of those, this, in The Times:

THE image of Britannia, which has featured on British coins for hundreds of years, is to be retired from this April. In her place will be representations of modern Britain submitted by contemporary artists.

Gordon Brown personally approved the change in one of his last decisions as chancellor of the exchequer…

…A spokesman for the Treasury confirmed: “As people will see when the new mint run is issued, the chosen designs represent the best traditions of British coinage and are totally in line with the government’s desire to celebrate our British heritage, including our historic national and heraldic emblems.”…

…The Royal Mint launched a competition in 2005 to find designs for British coins. More than 4,000 designs have been submitted, but the Royal Mint would not say which images would replace Britannia in the spring…

Imagine mostly removing ”E Pluribus Unum” from American currency, multiplied by, say, a cultural factor of 100?  True, one should take a healthy ”wait and see” attitude.  Yet when “contemporary artists” and “celebrate” are linked in that manner by government, one grows strangely uneasy at what is likely to emerge on the business end.

Meaning, one might well remember three words:  “British Airways Tailfins“.  Of course, altering those from the Union Jack to a myriad of interpretations by “contemporary artists” was merely a single business’s foolish re-branding decision; they weren’t a national symbol that is nearly 2,000 years old.  So, on this latter, a Government spokesman will have a much tougher time, a year or two hence, trying to cry, “Nih! Nih!“ 

Agence France-Presse tells us:

…”We would expect that a slowdown in the world economy is going to affect China quite a bit,” said Louis Kuijs, an economist with the World Bank in Beijing…

However, as we are told in The Telegraph:

…Mervyn Davies, chairman of Standard Chartered, a bank based in Britain which focuses on the Far East, claims: “There is a seismic change going on. There are emerging powers which are much richer and more powerful than people have realised.”…

Also, in the same piece, according to The Telegraph:

…Bob Diamond, president of Barclays, says America’s forceful moves to shore up its economy - including a proposed presidential stimulus package worth $150 billion - will keep a recession at bay. “If you and I sat together six months from today,” he says, “we would be talking about a US economy in better shape than six months earlier, not one shifting further into trouble, because they’ve acted so boldly.”…

However, separately, also in The Telegraph:

The United States is sliding towards a dangerous 1930s-style “liquidity trap” that cannot easily be stopped by drastic cuts in interest rates, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned…

In addition, according to the Small Business Times:

The U.S. economy will be saddled with some burdensome obstacles in 2008, according to economist Michael Knetter, dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Business in Madison…

And, in The Advocate:

…”Recessions are a part of life,” said Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist and director of research for DataCore Partners in New Haven and a strategic partner with TD Banknorth. “Recessions are the cleansing mechanisms that balance our economy. Now is the time to start planning for the next upturn.”…

But, in The Edmonton Sun:

…A month ago, National Bank Financial chief economist Clement Gignac was predicting a strong recession in the U.S. which could drag down Canada’s economy. But speaking at the Edmonton Petroleum Club at a breakfast meeting yesterday, he was singing a different tune.

“Rather than my concerns I had a month ago or six months ago that it (a recession) would be deep because politicians were asleep at the switch, now they have woken up this week and my comfort zone has raised and I am happy.”…

And, as Harry Truman is quoted as having famously said:

…if all the economists were laid end-to-end they would still point in all directions…

Yet one suspects one inclination might be more trusted than some others. According to The New York Times:

Back in his mid-1980s heyday, when he was America’s most famous investor, managing America’s most famous mutual fund, Peter Lynch used to hate Mondays. Monday, you see, was the day the market was most likely to go down…

…Mr. Lynch, who for 12 years ran Fidelity’s Magellan Fund, had a simple theory as to why this was the case: negative thinking. “The reason for the Monday decline,” he once told me, “is that on the weekend everyone becomes an amateur economist.” Investors, he believed, would read the weekend newspapers, filled with their articles of doom and gloom, and become filled with doom and gloom themselves. Naturally, their first instinct was to sell when the market opened on Monday…

Thus, beware Mondays.  But, somehow, I think we all already knew that.

Here’s a new one: Sen John McCain is even worse than President George W. Bush.  Yes, you did actually just read that.  It’s an interpretation that comes to us courtesy of The Independent’s “crusader under the table” identification expert, Johann Hari:

…McCain is the candidate we should most fear. Not only is he to the right of Bush on a whole range of subjects, he is also the Republican candidate most likely to dispense with Hillary or Barack…

Apparently, it doesn’t take much to scare Mr Hari.  To better face his fears, he might try to develop something of a better sense of political perspective.  For instance, after considering his synopsis on Sen McCain’s “life story”, consider also this even briefer one of this president:

• A son of “Christian fundamentalists”
• fascinated by cowboys and Indians Native Americans and the American West
• too old to get into Annapolis, he passed the entrance exam to get into West Point (a young man with no connections, who was nevertheless recommended by a senator)
• possessor of an explosive temper
• a boxer, sportsman and, in his youth, a “brawler”
• a heavy smoker 
• married well above “his station”
• respected by his son, who decades later said he was terrified of “Dad”
• dreaded missing out on what he was sure would be “his” war
• stationed at times in various “colonial” outposts, such as the Philippines and Panama
• as president didn’t fear to face global adversaries, while also realizing when change was afoot at home
• questioned by many about lacking clear political principles
• upon leaving office, had warned about the growing influence of a corrupting military-industrial cosiness which as president he had inadvertently helped bring about — at least partly because as a career soldier he had experienced years of parsimonious administrations and Congresses that had spent so little on the military not only could the military not be everywhere it might have been needed, but it really could hardly have been anywhere; then virtually overnight to his horror he learned also that liberating a world required having on hand not just rifles, troops, tanks, aircraft carriers, planes, food and fuel, but something called landing craft . . . in assembly line thousands.  (And why the heck hadn’t anyone thought of procuring those also in 1940?  Well, they didn’t even have rifles.)

Given such traits in that president, and what Mr Hari and his Indy so fear now, it’s hard to believe that Mr Hari or his paper wouldn’t work themselves into night terrors even at the second coming of that president: Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Nonetheless, Mr Hari concludes, worriedly:

…If we don’t start warning that the Real McCain is not the Real McCoy, we might sleepwalk into four more years of Republicanism.

But with all of his many similar “faults”, if a President McCain were to prove anywhere nearly as capable as a Dwight Eisenhower, America could only consider itself lucky.  However, Mr Hari and the Indy will then just have to manage somehow without much sleep for at least four years. 

Then again, this Indy “commentary” must be accurate, given that it is apparently mostly based on a single “biography”, a book that, Mr Hari tells us, offers this interesting TR “foreign policy” finding:

…His most thorough biographer – and recent supporter – Matt Welch concludes: “McCain’s programme for fighting foreign wars would be the most openly militaristic and interventionist platform in the White House since Teddy Roosevelt…

Except for the small fact, of course, that President Theodore Roosevelt never actually presided over a major foreign war.  Unlike many of his successors, that is.  (The Philippine insurrection was rooted in the Spanish-American war commenced under William McKinley.)  So while Mr Hari (and Mr Welch) might be riddled with various worries about another possible Mr Roosevelt, again, should Sen McCain somewhat resemble him, another TR seems unlikely to be the end of the world.

The BBC reports:

Two British girls were sent to an orphanage for 30 hours and strip searched after their mother became ill during a holiday in the US.

Gemma Bray, 15, and her 13-year-old sister Katie also had their clothes taken off them and were asked if they had been abused or were suicidal.

Their mother Yvonne Bray of Appledore, Devon, says their human rights were infringed by the authorities.

She was hospitalised with pneumonia during a trip to New York.

The Administration for Children’s Services in New York has declined to comment on the matter…

Interesting, on the reporting:  the use of the word “orphanage” without quotes; but that’s probably because Ms Bray used that word.  But nowhere on the NYC Children’s Services department’s web site does that word appear.  That’s probably because, in NYC, there are no orphanages; there are, however, ”group homes”.

…The family flew out to New York on 27 December. When Ms Bray began coughing later that day, she initially put it down to her asthma and the air conditioning on the flight.

The following night, she became more unwell with laboured breathing and was admitted to the Queen’s Medical Centre in Harlem.

Harlem? Actually, according to the New York Daily News, they were in Elmhurst Medical Center, in Queens.  That sort of sloppy reporting merely also reveals the need for anyone to be aware of what the BBC chooses not to mention.  Especially so, given that even the BBC apparently doesn’t know the difference between Queens and Manhattan.

But Ms Bray was told her daughters could not stay with her at the hospital as they were minors.

“A doctor told me they would make the arrangements, then a few hours later a social worker arrived and said they’d try to find a foster family for the girls,” she said…

Stop. Right. There. That’s where it all began to go wrong. 

When travelling abroad, regardless of where, one should — at least when conscious — keep one’s head clear.  And definitely so when travelling alone with children.  With a sudden illness that required immediate, unexpected hospitalization, but it also being one that didn’t totally incapacitate her and given that her children were about to come under the “care” of local authorities, Ms Bray should have known to tell that doctor to get a staffer immediately to call . . . the British consulate in Manhattan for assistance.

No mention is made of any such call ever being placed, or even requested.  Yet that call should have been made before any other “arrangements” were made, particularly any contact with NYC Children’s Services.  For that’s what consular officers are employed for — to look out for the interests of nationals in distress in situations just like these.  

However, by Ms Bray’s having failed to make that call, her children invariably were sucked into “the system”.  Scooped up due to a parental hospitalization that initially no one knew how long might last, foster famillies do not just appear out of the blue; it can take more than 30 hours to find one capable of immediately taking in two teenage girls.  So amidst the typical nightmare of officialist paper-shuffling, the girls were bureaucratically inertia-ed through an agency tasked with daily trying to cope with a litany of often familial horrors — abused and abandoned children, drug-addicted teens, suicidal teens, dangerous and violent to others teens (hence the “strip search” and “questioning”), and so on.

…Ms Bray has now received a letter from the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) to say she is now being investigated.

“I’m not guilty of anything other than getting ill in a country without family or friends.”…

No one is saying she is.  But from the BBC report one might well believe she is being criminally investigated.  That would seem unlikely, though, given that she was allowed to take her girls and leave the country. 

And it turns out that, unsurprisingly, she isn’t.  The Daily News notes also:

…”Children’s Services assisted a mother whose children could not remain safe by themselves,” the spokeswoman said.

Okay, right . . . now moving on from spokeswoman-speak:

The letter Yvonne Bray received was a form letter and she will get another one closing the case, the spokeswoman said.

So that seems that.  Although the BBC chooses not to mention that.  Also the News tries to find an upside:

In the end, things weren’t too bad at the group home. They made friends with some of the other girls, who peppered them with questions about their homeland.

“They were like, ‘Oh, so you have tea with the queen,’” Gemma said…

Regardless, if only Ms Bray had had someone at Elmhurst ring the British consulate.  At 845 Third Avenue, while it’s over a bridge or through a tunnel, physically it wasn’t that far away.  And the intervention of someone from there might have helped prevent loads of trouble for everyone.

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UPDATE: The New York Post:

…British tabloids reported that the girls were strip searched, but ACS spokeswoman Sheila Stainback said that was not true.

Hmmm. Whatever. Apparently, to the Post, the BBC also qualifies as a “British tabloid”.

“Children’s Services assisted a mother whose children could not remain safe by themselves in a country that was strange to them,” she said. “Our procedures at the Children’s Center are respectful of all youth who are brought there.”…

Incidentally, is that “Shelia Stainback” of TV newsreader fame? If so, things have obviously gone downhill for her careerwise.

The BBC reports, July 2006:

…The US energy giant [Enron] went bankrupt in 2001 with debts of $31.8bn (£18bn)…

That was achieved by just one company.  And it was hardly a shock.  After all, one would have expected no less from the land of lawless, savage capitalism.

Agence France-Presse, January 2008: 

Societe Generale said Thursday that a single rogue trader carried out a massive 4.9-billion-euro (7.15-billion-dollar) fraud at the French banking giant…

Now, that was achieved by just one man.  Who says individual initiative is dead on the continent?

Currently, just coming up to 3 PM UK time (4 PM, in France), France 24’s “breaking news” tells us also:

They don’t know his whereabouts?  Why might that be?  Because his body’s been dumped into the Seine?

Having apparently been unimpressed by the political acumen of a Channel 5 sports reporter, Spiegel Online’s Gabor Steingart thinks the race — in two meanings of the expression, as we will see — is just about finished:

…[Obama] hasn’t managed to attract a strong following among older people and blue-collar workers. The majority of women find him interesting, but they support Hillary Clinton. The overwhelming majority of Hispanics are opposed to Obama, partly because he is black. Even African-Americans are not united in their support for Obama…

Mr Steingart is probably correct: Sen Obama is behind because he has not yet made a clear breakthough where the nomination is secured — among traditional Democratic voters.  And he’s right also in that here is where it isn’t:

…The Illinois senator’s strongest advocates are young people and graduates, both groups where enthusiasm for Obama runs high. He is the candidate of the affluent and of society’s winners. His message of hope and change seems to thrive in environments where people drink latte macchiatos and read the New York Times.

None of that above is particularly new or newsworthy, of course.  Most interesting, though, may be this admission from Mr Steingart:

Obama also happens to be the candidate of choice for the foreign press, which explains why European correspondents tend to greatly amplify American voters’ enthusiasm for him in their dispatches. Many in Europe would like nothing more than a “European” America. A former community organizer from Chicago seems to be the ideal candidate for all countries, especially Germany, in which public servants shape politics. Obama personifies Europe’s hopes for a modern America: black, socially minded and gentle.

But, of course, don’t you dare call them biased. 

But this isn’t what America looks like. And the evidence from the primaries so far suggests that it won’t be what it looks like after the elections in November…

Or, for that matter, sexist.  Even if their preferred Sen Obama is trailing (in the polls and in delegates) another senator . . . who happens to be a woman.  However, on the one hand, that election projection appears reasonable: Sen Obama does not seem on the road to the nomination (at least for the moment). 

On that other: huh?  Obviously, Mr Steingart is not entirely familiar with what German socialist — and not exactly an unabashed admirer of the U.S. — Willy Brandt had penned nearly twenty years ago:

…I will readily admit that commonplaces were what struck me on that first visit [in 1954].  Seeing that America was a whole continent, something one realized even more from the air than when travelling by rail or road; understanding that its resources were not even all tapped yet, let alone exhausted; meeting many people who were mostly friendly and ready to help, not concealing an inquisitive naivety.  One soon realized that while the Old World had its charm and its value, European arrogance was out of place.  The average American — quite likely to ask ‘Who’s Kaiser in Germany now?’ — does not know much about our part of the world.  Do we Europeans know much more about the USA?

Obviously, many Europeans still don’t know much — not even in this age of the internet.

The knowledge of America I had gleaned from books was not extensive.  It took me many visits to realize how little its political structures could be assessed by European standards.  I have been deeply impressed, and always fascinated anew, by the change in relations between black Americans and the white-skinned majority of their fellow countrymen, culminating in equal civil rights…

…During the 1988 campaign … there has been talk of a “rainbow coalition”, including reference to progressive “Latin-Americanization.”  Emigrants from South America and the Caribbean are changing the face of the United States.  Spanish has become an everyday language in New York as well as in the South and the West (where there is also a large Asiatic ethnic group).  A European of my background, remembering the excesses of a murderous racism, can only applaud this modern revolution.  Once again, America had done better than we did…

Thus many a perceptive European is evidently still waiting on an American “social revolution” that Mr Brandt had two decades ago told Europeans had already happened . . . two decades before that.  And that America had — even back then — done better than “Europe”.  Once again. 

So it should not be a surprise that long after Mr Brandt shared those views with us, one still hears some Europeans share variations on the “bloodline nationality” observation, ”Just because you may be born in a barn, that doesn’t make you a horse.”  Essentially, an Irishman born in England isn’t “English”; or an Italian born in Germany isn’t “German”.  And let’s not even get started on where that leaves those of non-European parentage.  

That’s not to say that everyone has adequately addressed what makes for a “nationality”, including the U.S.  But supposed “European” “hopes” for “a modern America” might actually wield serious moral weight if those modern, wannabe-Tocquevilles had, before defining their “hopes”, actually also bothered to notice that the U.S. is already far more “black” “universalist” (which is why there is a serious Obama campaign) than is their own “Europe“.  Yet, that said, the U.S. is obviously nonetheless in desperate need of guidance elsewhere, particularly given that those of that same “barnyard” mentality clearly are more than capable of tutoring legions of backwoods, rough and tumble Americans on how to be far more “pompously proud to be detached from reality” “socially minded and gentle.”

The BBC’s Steve Rosenberg has noticed, and is obviously smitten:

…For half-an-hour or so, it sits there at the top of the mast, not doing a great deal.

Wind power is a wonderful thing, but you do actually need some wind to make it all work - and there is not very much at this particular moment…

Half-an-hour later, though, the wind has picked up and the kite is flying hundreds of metres in the air - and helping to tug the ship along…

Gives one chills, doesn’t it?  What will they think of next, eh?  Word is clearly spreading quickly on this invention:  the sail.

Sky reports:

Gordon Brown’s authority over Labour backbenchers will face a severe test today when MPs vote on whether to back his demands for a curb on their pay…

Unlike police, unfortunately there seems no talk of MPs threatening to strike.

The BBC reports:

An estimated 22,500 police officers have marched in central London in a protest over pay…

…One protester, Pc Michael Ramsden of Thames Valley Police, said of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith: “I feel we have been lied to. We have no confidence in her at all.”…

The PC feels this Government “lies”?  Well, the spirit of Sherlock Holmes isn’t dead after all.  Unfortunately, he hadn’t evidently noticed that millions of Britons have for years had no confidence in the current Government.

…Tony Metcalfe, of Greater Manchester Police, added: “They keep comparing us to teachers but I don’t see any teachers rolling around in the street in someone else’s blood on Saturday nights sorting people’s lives out.”…

Apparently PC Metcalfe hasn’t been around very many schools lately.  And, interestingly, while we’re comparing, most of the public probably doesn’t think teachers . . . seek their jobs in order to battle knife crime.  Presumably, the PC himself didn’t seek his for that reason either?

Detective Constable Emma Chapman, from the Metropolitan Police, said she hoped the protest had made the government “sit up and take notice” and repeated calls for the home secretary to resign…

Even if one agrees with these officers (and many of us do: police deserve fair pay before any public money is wasted on even a solitary “climate change officer“) and also loathes the current home secretary, this repeated resignation demand is becoming increasingly grating.  For consider this: since when did police come to believe they had a right to wield a veto on who serves in any given elected post?  It’s astonishing.

All things considered, there seems little need to debate the latest EU treaty.  Police in the streets, stating themselves to be “at war” with a Government (that was elected — at some point, if not recently enough, I grant you)?  Britain, too, appears to be getting more happily “continental” all the time.

The Guardian:

Compulsory cooking lessons for teenagers at schools in England are on the menu today as the government seeks to counter childhood obesity…

…The emphasis will be on making sure pupils can master simple, healthy recipes using fresh ingredients, the Department for Children, Schools and Families said…

…Ed Balls, the schools secretary, is asking the public to come up with ideas for the classic English dishes and international cuisine that children should learn to cook…

He told the Daily Mirror: “Teaching kids to cook healthy meals is an important way schools can help produce healthy adults. My mum was passionate about all this and bought me my first Delia Smith book.”…

Mr Balls was born nearly 41 years ago.  Ms Smith’s first cookbook was published in 1972.  Entitled “How To Cheat At Cooking”, it is, Ms Smith says, about . . .

…not how to cook. It’s how to cook when you’re busy. How to discover and use ready-prepared ingredients, how to sometimes short-circuit the accepted rules of cooking, and how, at the same time, to eat really well…

Presumably, that isn’t the book which the schools secretary — …cheating “will not be tolerated“… — is wistfully recalling.

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But if you think cooking classes might not be exactly the right emphasis in state education, you aren’t alone.  As The Daily Hysteria’s Mail’s Melanie Phillips noted back in December:

…according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, British teenagers have now fallen out of the top ten in international league tables for reading, mathematics and science.

British pupils were ranked 17th in reading compared to seventh in 2000. In maths, they fell from eighth to 24th - below the international average - and in science they slumped from fourth to 14th…

Ah, but they will soon be able to cook.  Well, meaning perhaps make something.  We look forward to this debate on “culinary competence” leading not just to children having access to “knives in the classroom”, but also to the sad reality of which one Times commenter reminds us:

With the proliferation of scare stories on foods - you can only probably legally teach kids how to prepare Lettuce suprise or face being sued in 30 years time…

Indeed, just imagine the lawsuits that could emanate from, for instance [shudder], a chicken dish?

The Independent:

He must have felt safe. For his first ever official portrait, Tony Blair agreed to be painted by Jonathan Yeo, the son of a Conservative MP – hardly a radical, so unlikely to mention the war. Mr Blair had recently spent his final days as Prime Minister trying to ensure he would be remembered for something – anything – other than the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

But he was wearing a poppy, because the sitting was around the time of Remembrance Sunday. And when the portrait was unveiled last week, it showed the red flower burning bright against the washed-out colours of his suit – looking like a strong comment on the war. “I very slightly exaggerated it through colour,” said the artist, who had been looking for a way to comment on Iraq…

If so, it’s not much of a “comment”.  However, the words “Imperialist Invading Thug” emblazened on the poppy would have certainly made “a statement”.  Yet one would think it unlikely Mr Blair would have happily acquiesed to that appearing on his portrait. 

Indeed, this artist offspring of a Conservative MP who had voted for the overthrow of the Hussein regime might have had some difficulty, had he chosen that “way to comment on Iraq” and still consider himself worth being taken even half-seriously.  (Lest we forget, to undertake that campaign required vast additional “non-offset” Co2 emissions in terms not just of tank journeys and missiles, but air sorties; however, that thoughtful MP has since moved to make amends, obviously, due to his now spending most of his time decrying UK internal civilian air travel.) 

Thus the brave “artistic” half-solution:  pronounce the poppy to be a “statement on Iraq” (whatever that means), when most people would merely see Mr Blair as painted by the artist, wearing a poppy, which is commonly worn by millions also in remembrance.  

That is probably best for The Indy too, considering it might not have been able even to spell “Imperialist Invading Thug” correctly, or might have omitted a word or two.  Yet assuming the paper could have managed correctly placing the phrase, why stop at Iraq anyway?  Why not a poppy as representing, say, ”the millions who will be lost due to climate change”?  Or “failure to halt knife crime”? 

Bless the Indy.  While we are prone to snicker, one has to remember also that it isn’t easy.  It takes years of practiced sloppiness to produce good, convoluted paragraphs like those. 

The Telegraph’s (and Catholic Herald’s) Damian Thompson often makes excellent points.  But this is definitely not one of them: 

…Mitt Romney … belongs to the only world religion built on a foundation of pure counterknowledge: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To be sure, all religions make claims that the outside world believes to be false. But the Book of Mormon is unique.

Why? Because, unlike the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Koran, nothing in it actually happened. Nothing.

The “Jaredites” from the Middle East did not travel to America 2,000 years ago and found a civilisation that Mormon “historians” have the nerve to identify as the Olmecs. In fact, the Jaredites never existed.

Israelites did not arrive in the New World in 600 BC and split into Nephites and Lamanites; this is total fiction, devised by young Joseph Smith from New York in the 1820s. And – do I really need to point this out? – Jesus of Nazareth never set foot in America.

Mormonism is the only religion whose major claims (solemnly discussed in Mormon academic journals that have all the credibility of Star Trek fanzines) have been officially declared to be untrue by the Smithsonian Institution…

Nice try.  But most of us were unaware that acceptable religion is officially referreed even by the Smithsonian.  In fact, Mr Thompson is being extremely disingenuous with that provocative — even nasty — post, for as the Smithsonian link he provides tells us, point blank:

…The Book of Mormon is a religious document and not a scientific guide…

Also speaking of a religious document, just as it is a Roman Catholic priest’s absolute right to assert — with an entirely straight face — that it appears in the New Testament how Christ rose from the dead and appeared to his followers, despite that “major claim” of Christian “faith” not sounding very scientifically plausible.  And despite its not appearing in any contemporary Roman history and there being no archeological evidence to support it.  And as we know, it took some 300 years after Christ’s crucifixion for the mass of Romans to begin to accept that occurrence on “faith”.

Indeed, the Catholic church is always investigating (and sometimes accepting as “fact”) all sorts of other ”appearances” far more recent than Christ’s resurrection.  For example, the Church accepts that Mary, St. Joseph, and St. John “appeared at the south gable end of the local small parish church, the Church of St. John the Baptist,” in Knock, Ireland in 1879.  That event one presumes Mr Thompson agrees to be “fact” . . . because the Catholic church says it is. 

But lots of other Christians consider it absolute bunk.  Meaning “untrue”.  Yet most also have the courtesy to respect the belief.

It is disgraceful — and I don’t use that word lightly — that Mr Thompson is unwilling to grant what he demands for his own Catholicism.  Mormons could believe Jesus Christ had appeared as a 6 ft apricot, snowboarding near Lake Placid, and that would be entirely their right.  Bottom line: if Mr Thompson wants wholesale understanding of his own Catholicism, he might start by at least showing some for the faith of others. 

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UPDATE: Full disclosure (should you be new to this blog): I am a church-attending Roman Catholic.

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UPDATE 2, January 23: Greeting to those who’ve come this way via Article 6 and Utah Policy.

Sky reports:

He may not be known as the most modern of men, but his concern for the environment has catapulted the Prince of Wales straight into the 21st Century.

His Royal Highness Prince Charles will be transformed into His Royal Hologram when he delivers a virtual speech today at a green energy conference in Abu Dhabi…

Leaving aside the appeal that having a “virtual king” rather than a real one might have for many British, Sky curiously doesn’t comment at all on how amusing it is to have a “green” conference in Abu Dhabi.  It does note the happiness of some, however:

…While airlines may not be thrilled at the prospect of virtual appearances slashing the air miles travelled by celebrities and business bosses, environmentalists are.

Trewin Restorick, of the energy saving charity Global Action Plan, told Sky News: “Flying is a real environmental problem…

Why just be thrilled over celebrities and business bosses curtailing travel, when total victory seems ”virtually” in sight?  For consider this:

• Gordon Brown: departed London, January 17, 2008. Arrived China, January 18, 2008. Arrived India, January 20, 2008. Projected return to London, January 21/22, 2008.

And that is clearly unacceptable.  But while holograms might work for such “conferencing”, they certainly can’t replace actually powered travel when being there is truly necessary.  How to deal with that?  This method is much more “environmentally friendly”:

…In 1260 two Venetian merchants arrived at Sudak, the Crimean port. The brothers Maffeo and Niccilo Polo went on to Surai, on the Volga river, where they traded for a year… Shortly after a civil war broke out … to avoid the war … found themselves stranded for 3 years at Bukhara...

…The Mongol ambassador persuaded the brothers that Great Khan would be delighted to meet them for he had never seen any Latin and very much wanted to meet one … they finally reached the new capital of the Great Khan, Bejing in 1266…

…One year later, the Great Khan sent them on their way…

…It took the Polos three full years to return home, in April 1269…

It’s called mostly “walking” there . . . and back.  Now, that’s more like it.  Far more “natural”, and therefore “environmentally friendly”.

Clearly, he doesn’t realize it.  But Mr Restorick’s group’s cynical attempt to hide its obviously monocultural wishes under the name “global” has just inadvertently seeped out.  Yet why fear such, when a true holistic approach to “climate change” and to particularly, polluting global air travel, might well help unite those who had previously failed to see what they had had so wonderfully in common?  

The hyper anti-immigration right and the “environmental left” could actually “walk” in harmony.  For once ALL of humanity thankfully forfeits the ability to travel any quicker and farther than can be accomplished by walking or sailing ship, global migration will largely cease, and, as a consequence, multiculturalism will wither away also. 

And Mr Restorick’s group may in the future also be able to bring back its “aspirational and cool” ERGO magazine.  NOTSA — ”Nothing Out There to See Anyway” — might be a new name with a degree of relevance.  That’s assuming there’s still some means actually to publish a magazine, of course.