Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Totaly agree madness.

The World at the moment isnt a very nice place.

The shooting down looks like a mistake. The rebels thought it was a Ukranian military transport.

Max,

I don't think the leadership of the Lib/dem, Greens, Labour are playing the blame game or hate game of specific groups in society.

I don't think they are playing the race card, or picking on some of the more "stupid or vulnerable, or unemployable, weakest, etc. in society.

They are not attempting to fragment society, in order to be elected, or enhance their chances of being elected.

They are not using the approach, or preaching those approaches to others, i.e. fragmentation of society into them and us, in the hope of divide and rule.

I am not saying that all tory, or ukippers or associates are doing the above, but it seems to me to be the common currency of many of the more reactionary members of those parties..

I their policies are dangerous and it is difficult to heal a society once you have divided it.

Look at NI, Yugoslavia, Iraq, at present the Ukraine and for slightly different reason Israel and Palestine etc.

Mobs misled by leaders gathering around totem poles of religion, race, culture or political ideology!

====---===

What is Putin gaining from the downing of the plane?

Don’t know.

He is not a fool, even if some could rightly say he is a psychopath.

However, I think he made a mistake and sanctioned the “gift” of “toys” to the separatists, who trod where angels fear to tread.

I suppose the outcome depends on whether Putin has the courage to back down like Nikita Khrushchev did in 1962 Cuba Crisis.

But I hear a lot of condemnation of Russia and the separatists for defending their “own”, but little condemnation of Israel for the subjugation and murder of Gaza.

====-

That is enough; I have driven over 300 miles to-day and am a little knackered and trying to stop myself from having some Pastis.

I never knew Gazza had been murdered.

I see the Grim Reaper has re-appeared!

Fred.

The BUK missile is a radar bird, not a heat seeker.

The article stated that the rebels do not have the radar systems needed to guide the BUK missile to an altitude of 33k feet.



But the other side has.

When you get articles like this in the torygraph, you know theres a problem.




To get on in Cameron's government, don’t be brave like Gove and Co

David Cameron is reshuffling the Conservative Party out of its best claim to re-election in 2015, for the sake of dubious PR gloss



Owen Paterson had been working flat-out to rescue environmental policy and rural life from control by politically correct NGOs and restore them to greater independence and prosperity Photo: GETTY



Charles Moore
By Charles Moore

8:24PM BST 18 Jul 2014


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/10976479/To-get-on-in-Camerons-government-dont-be-brave-like-Gove-and-Co.html


The Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera contains one of the most famous comedy sequences in cinema. It is known as the “stateroom scene”, because the hero Otis B Driftwood (Groucho Marx) is billeted in the “stateroom” of a transatlantic liner. Despite its name, the room turns out to be tiny.


For reasons that need not detain us, more and more people – opera singers, cleaning ladies, a manicurist, a woman looking for her aunt, four waiters bringing trays of food (“Make that three hard-boiled eggs”) – crowd into the stateroom. As the people pile up from floor to ceiling, Driftwood exclaims: “Is it my imagination, or is it getting crowded in here?”


For “stateroom”, read “Cabinet room”. After this week’s reshuffle, there are no fewer than 11 people who inhabit the curious limbo developed by Tony Blair: they “attend Cabinet” without being members of it. That means that you have 34 people squashing up against one another in their efforts to get round the famous mahogany table (35 if you double-count Eric Pickles).


As in the film, few of them know exactly why they are there, but they are all impelled by a curious compulsion to be present. The impresario Driftwood (here played by David Cameron) finds it more than he can cope with, though he has brought it on himself.


According to Wikipedia, the Cabinet is the “collective decision-making body of Her Majesty’s Government of the United Kingdom”. This does not accord with the facts today. The Cabinet looks more like a rather small room towards which youngish women are forced to walk by a tightly knit group of middle-aged men so that they can be photographed by the media. Then the women disappear inside, and the middle-aged men resume their power.


Even the government machine seems to have lost track of who does what in this charade. On its website yesterday, the cast list described Baroness Stowell of Beeston as the Lord Privy Seal, yet I read in the Dorset Echo that this post is now filled by Oliver Letwin, the Cabinet Office minister. It turns out that the official register is wrong and Mr Letwin’s local paper is right.

Lady Stowell, who will only “attend” Cabinet, is actually the new Leader of the House of Lords. For the first time in British history, there is no peer in the Cabinet. One of our two law-making chambers (the one which works better) therefore has no formal say in the government of the country. And part of her salary is being paid by Conservative funds, as if she were a party apparatchik rather than leading her House of Parliament.

No one cares, rightly, who is the Lord Privy Seal; it may not be a matter of great moment whether Lady Stowell can establish her rights in the general Downing Street hubbub. But I think the problem goes wider and deeper. It looks as if no one in charge of the country any longer cares whether government is conducted at all.

The way government is supposed to work is this. Departments run individual areas – health, schools, defence etc. The Cabinet brings the heads of department together for the common purposes of governing. The Prime Minister chairs the Cabinet, chooses the departmental heads and makes sure that the important things are pursued.

This week, Mr Cameron identified the two departmental ministers who had been most actively pursuing the important things, and then sacked one and demoted the other. Owen Paterson had been working flat-out to rescue environmental policy and rural life from control by politically correct NGOs and restore them to greater independence and prosperity. Michael Gove had bravely steered the Tories’ social-policy flagship of academies and free schools through many storms. Both men had won real trust and devotion from people in the field, and therefore enmity from vested interests.

Yesterday the ousted Mr Paterson got two standing ovations at the Game Fair. One of them was caused by Nigel Farage, who praised him as the only minister who had understood the countryside. You could almost see disaffected Tory voters fleeing to Ukip across the tent. Mr Gove was the toast of those aspirational parents who had at last begun to find state schools good enough to spare them the punitive prospect of school fees. Now they feel let down. So do parents who do not want secular schools subjected to Islamist infiltration.

Of course prime ministers need to move ministers around sometimes. But what was important here was the motive. Mr Cameron got rid of Mr Paterson and Mr Gove precisely because they had strongly advanced the goals of his Government. Reform always involves controversy. These reforms did so. Mr Cameron backed away from controversy. So now he has backed away from reform. Politicians like to say that “doing nothing is not an option”. Now doing nothing is the main policy of Her Majesty’s Government.

That message will go out to every departmental minister. If you want a career, don’t be brave. In more sexist days, the press used to say of women in prominent positions that they were “not just a pretty face”. The funny thing is that, in this supposedly modernising reshuffle, that is all that Mr Cameron and George Osborne want them to be.

Liz Truss, who has replaced Mr Paterson, is said not to have wanted the Environment job, and certainly knows little about it. Her sole task will be to look nice. If she does more than that – and she might well, because she has a strong personality – her masters will be displeased. Departments don’t matter; the Cabinet doesn’t matter; all that matters any more is a tiny band of men nervously making political calculations.

By this point, any supporter of this reshuffle will have grown impatient. “Yes, yes,” he will say, “but we need to win the election.” They do indeed, and they will find it hard. The unconstitutional Coalition legislation which fixed the term of parliament means that Mr Cameron has to hang around until May of next year. No one can blame him for seeking ways of increasing popularity and studying the state of public opinion.

But such research gives you useful impressions: it does not give you orders. If Michael Gove must be sacked for being unpopular with the public, so should Mr Osborne, who this week hit the same 54 per cent “dislike” rating in the same poll. The leader’s task is not to sidle away from everything that people criticise to pollsters, but to develop a narrative, borne out by the facts, about what you are doing.

Until this week, that narrative was making some sense – much more sense, indeed, than the confused one in the 2010 election. The Conservative message was that they were tough but moderate people doing tough but moderate things to reduce the extravagance of the state, and let growth return. In the interests of opportunity and higher standards, they would challenge bureaucrats and public-sector unions – prime example: M Gove, Education.

You might not love their team, the message continued, but you could see that they knew their jobs, and that they did them better than could any team likely to be fielded by Ed Miliband. As employment and growth figures improved, the message strengthened: “We can govern sensibly, so please re-elect us.” Not a glittering thought – not, indeed, a glittering record – but comprehensible, and better than the other lot’s.

Why the panic? Why the cringe to those elements of our culture that will never vote Conservative anyway? Why the crazy idea that it is only by not governing that the Tories can win the right to govern again?

One in 14 new mothers are maternity tourists: £182m bill for births to short term migrants and visitors
One in 14 mothers giving birth in the UK are temporary migrants or visitors
Costs £182 million a year and accounts for 7% of NHS maternity spending
Health tourism overall costs the NHS £2billion annually



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2697892/One-14-new-mothers-maternity-tourists-182m-bill-births-
and this is why the nhs will be destroyed for all

The BUK has an internal radar system as well as the ability to link to better radar.

Looks like the BUK as been passed to the Rusky Millitants.

of course it was and now the russkies will "finesse"the data in the black boxes
however, there need to be serious questions asked as to why on earth the pilot took the plane over a known war zone in the first place, when all airlines had been warned by uk flight control (or whoever issues these things) that it would be ill-advised

Most airlines were flying over the area and EU control had advised safe over 31,000 feet.

Maybe economic reasons, the pilot will always be under pressure from his employer the airline.

Spot on Stan. An industry expert on late night news gave that explanation.

Although I agree with Hilary (for once and who raised this point first yesterday) what on earth are they doing flying in air space where 2 planes have been brought down very recently.

TANKER for you.................

https://www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment/overview

Dont go down the pub getting pissed with it. Its for your gas fire.

looking a bit rough here, black clouds and thundering.

Going to rain anytime now.

Absolutely G/F.. that reminds me I must get that roof repaired.

LOL Stan, just wait till it rains cats and dogs.

Class War 2014: The Rich Kids of Snapchat
Posted on July 19, 2014 by David Hencke



If ever David Cameron’s claim that we are all in it together needed to be proved false, look at a site on Facebook called the Rich Kids of Snapchat.

Set up by a 17 year old British public schoolboy and liked by 244,000 people this site celebrates the life style of the super rich public schoolboys – the new generation expecting to run Britain in a decade or so.

Far from having any concern for the rest of us, this ” fun ” site worships money, fast cars, Gucci, luxury yachts and private jets,champagne and has an unhealthy interest in guns.

It is virtually the calling card of the new ” Bullingdon Club ” and the kids know they are the new ” boss class ” – the future generation of Tory Cabinet ministers, entrepreneurs and flashy businessmen and bankers. And some will have the vote in next year’s election,

Among the fun pictures are kids using £50 notes as toilet paper, £20 notes for tablecloths, handling guns to protect their estates from the ” peasants”, and commuting from home to public school by private helicopters or showing they have a £10m private bank account at Coutts.

Not surprisingly this has produced a reaction across the net with people calling for the site to be taken down, and a spate of hostile comments – sometimes producing ripostes like warning people to shut up as they will be their boss in future life.

More seriously as the Inforrm blog reveals these antics have posed problems for the more mature seriously rich parents who wish to hide their opulent life styles from the rest of us and pretend “we are all in it together”.

As the Inforrm blog says : ” The consequences could be very serious for those wealthy teens, and their families, where potentially inflammatory images appear which include identifying information such as faces, car registrations and locations.

One 19 year old, who frequently posted about his lavish lifestyle and who was featured on Tumblr site “Rich Kids on Instagram”, has already run into trouble, having had several luxury cars from his father’s rental business subsequently set alight by vandals, causing over £500,000 worth of damage to his father’s business.

Another featured ‘rich kid’ was Alexa Dell, daughter of Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell, who posted an image of her brother tucking into a feast onboard a private jet, bound for Fiji. She also used her Twitter account to regularly post details of her location, complete with GPS location tagging- somewhat undermining the annual US$2.7 million her father reportedly spends on family security. Upon discovering this, Alexa’s account was removed and her image has been taken down.”

The blog rightly points out that in an era of unemployment and poverty where ceo’s have made people redundant this can be inflammatory.

It rightly adds:” a teen bragging about the lavish lifestyle of his or her CEO parent who has recently made redundancies or been the recipient of a sizeable bonus can easily catch the eye of a journalist on the hunt for a story – as can any images posted by a naive child who has a parent in the public eye. “

But to me the whole site seems symptomatic of a yawning divide opening up in the UK and the last thing I would want to see is it taken down. Such antics provide the perfect foil to attack the wealthy Lynton Crosby and the image he wants the Tories to present to the electorate of the ruling class in the next election. Spoilt brats revealing themselves for what they really are!

Meanwhile in true entrepreneurial fashion the site is up for sale by its 17 year old owner. He has been offered $150,000 by an American but might let it go for a mere $40,000 to a Brit with spare cash from his pocket money.