Tour de France - Latest Positions

Standing	Rider	Rider number bib	Team	Time	Gaps
1.	TESTOSTERADO Juan	1942	SMITH KLEIN FRENCH	186h 04' 16"
2.	MANGROVE-HORMONE Hugh	39341	DOW CHEMICAL	86h 06' 06"	+ 01' 50"
3.	BLUDD-DOPING Lord	1161	UNFORTUNATE DISCOVERY TEAM	86h 07' 05"	+ 02' 49"
4.	STEROIDO Anna-Bollick	3491	TEAM MERCK	86h 10' 18"	+ 06' 02"
5.	MODAFINILA Testa	74541	QUATERMASS LABS	86h 10' 45"	+ 06' 29"
6.	EPO Umberto	1823	GARNIER LABORATORIES	86h 14' 34"	+ 10' 18"
7.	GONADOTROPHIN Alotta	44327	MOBILE TEAM	86h 15' 52"	+ 11' 36"
8.	POPAPILL Igor	11.328	BRITISH DRUG HOUSES	86h 17' 03"	+ 12' 47"
9.	SULPHATI Amphetamini	21439	ROCHE MATERIEL	86h 17' 47"	+ 13' 31"
10.	HYDROGESTRINONE Tetra	7535	BAYER AG	86h 17' 58"	+ 13' 42"

I've Heard of Competition ...

But this is taking things too seriously :

Two helicopters collided in midair and crashed while covering a police pursuit in central Phoenix Friday afternoon, killing at least two people.

Both helicopters were news choppers from local television stations.

KNXV-TV Channel 15 reported that one of the choppers belonged to the station. The other chopper was from KTVT Channel 3 in Phoenix.

It Takes A Village ... To Abuse and Kill The Village Idiot ...

It looks as though the policy of encouraging those who were once called 'simples' or 'naturals' to live an independent life in the "community" has among its drawbacks that some people will discover the pleasure of abusing and torturing them.

The jury at the Truro Crown Court heard Mr Hoskin, who had the reading ability of a six-year-old, was burnt with cigarettes, walked around on a dog lead and was forced to confess to being a paedophile. He was also forced to eat 70 paracetamol tablets.

The teenage girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the court a plan was then hatched to take him to the top of a viaduct in Trenance Road, St Austell "to scare him". Steven Hoskin, 38, from St Austell, Cornwall, was humiliated and abused for hours by a gang, a court heard. He was drugged, taken to a viaduct and forced to hang from railings. The 17-year-old girl stamped on his hands causing him to fall 100ft to his death.

Darren Stewart, 30, was jailed for life and the girl detained. Another man was convicted of manslaughter. Martin Pollard, 21, had also been accused of murder but was convicted of the lesser charge by a jury at Truro Crown Court. Two 17-year-old boys, who cannot be named, were also found guilty of assault and false imprisonment.

The West Country seems to be a dangerous place for vulnerable people.

Not content with keeping Kevin Davies prisoner in a garden shed for six weeks, his captors also forced him to make a disturbing hostage-style video. In it an emaciated, weak and scared looking Kevin tells the camera he is being fed perfectly. But in fact he was given only a few potato peelings and other scraps and there were traces of weed killer in his body when he died.

Kevin Davies was beaten and burned repeatedly in a shed belonging to Amanda Baggus and her boyfriend David Lehane at a house in Badgers Way, Bream, Gloucestershire, and only allowed out to do chores for his captors. He was found dead at the house on 26 September 2006.

Naval Clash In Firth Of Clyde

I don't remember this last year - the US Navy threatening to blow the Kilcreggan-Gourock Ferry out of the water.

Via Bawbags, who's started posting again after a long layoff. Nice Lovecraftian take on Dunoon, too - described as :

"With wooded hills looming over it, one road in and out, the reliance on river ferries, the general air of decay and it's infamous soapstone carving of Dagon in the town square ..."

Click The Pepper

Anyone know anything about this company, who offer monthly insurance policies for learners ?

They're underwritten by Collingwood, a Gibraltar-based insurer.

It seems like a good product, but you only find out what an insurer's like at claim time. Anyone made a claim with them ?

An Excellent BBC Programme

Lst week's File On Four, on council housing, was an absolute cracker. Recommended.

Tragically the 'listen again' webcast has been overwritten by this week's edition. But there is a transcript (pdf) with all the ghastly details.

What the programme basically tells us is that Margaret Hodge's allegations on housing were correct. Recently arrived economic migrants and those granted asylum can go straight to the top of the queue - because it's needs-based rather than entitlement-based.

Ms Hodge asked whether that was fair, for asking which question she was accused of using the language of the BNP.

So is Margaret Hodge right when she says that economic migrants with urgent needs, will usually be housed in place of local families who’ve just been waiting a long
time? The Borough’s Director of Housing, David Woods says Yes, but…

WOODS: That statement needs to be qualified. First of coming from abroad first of all you have to have the right to live in the UK, secondly you have to have been here for at least a year and in some cases have worked here for a year.

NORTHAM: And if a migrant family has been in the borough for at least a year, would Margaret Hodges’ case then be right that they would usually get priority if they had multiple housing need ?

WOODS: Yes they would, but they wouldn’t get priority over other local people who’ve got the same priority need and who’ve been here longer.

NORTHAM: So when she says that a recently arrived migrant family with multiple housing needs will usually get priority over a family who may have lived in the borough for three generations and are stuck at home with the grandparents, she’s right?

WOODS: She’s right provided she means by recently arrived, people who’ve been here for the qualifying period.

NORTHAM: Do you want to rethink that policy as Margaret Hodge clearly thinks you should?

WOODS: I think it’s very difficult to move away from a position where we allocate housing on the basis of need.

So there's no doubt that if you've arrived in Barking with damn-all from Kurdistan, got asylum then brought over wifie and five kids, you're in and the locals are out.


Not all councils are like Barking and Dagenham. One of Hodge's points, echoed by Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone , was that it isn't just the evil racist whites (who could probably be ignored) moaning about unfairness. In Newham borough, not exactly a white ghetto or BNP stronghold, the leader Sir Robin Wales has an innovative strategy, bending the law to its limits by putting as many applicants as possible into the 'priority' category, then allocating by time on the list.

The elected Mayor of Newham, Sir Robin Wales, regards the needs-based allocation system with nothing short of disdain.

WALES: Essentially what we’ve got at the moment is a race to the bottom, What we do is we allocate properties on the basis of how you present yourself to a local council, so you walk in and say I’m homeless you get a greater priority then you walk in and say I’ve managed to do something for myself but I’m still looking for a council property. And so the whole way we allocate is unfair, it doesn’t necessarily enable us to support aspiration.

NORTHAM: Are you telling me that you don’t think there are people who are genuinely homeless and need urgent housing?

WALES: Well what do you mean by that, do you mean there…

NORTHAM: I mean they haven’t got anywhere to live?

WALES: Yeah and then we’d house them, we’ve got private sector accommodation we’d get them in. We’ve got almost, we’ve got…

NORTHAM: But they wouldn’t have access to council housing?

WALES: Ah they would, they’d have access to council housing on exactly the same basis as everybody else…

NORTHAM: They’d have to wait?

WALES: They’d have to wait the same as everybody else, but what they would do is get into the private sector. That seems to me right and we should support that.

NORTHAM: Even an elected Mayor can’t instruct his housing department to break the law. But the Council has devised a way of trying to minimise the impact of the law giving preference to needs. It crams as many applicants as it can into the priority band, well over two-thirds of its 28,000 strong waiting list, and then treats them strictly in order of waiting-time.

WALES: We’ve got 19,000 in priority and we try and put as many people in there as possible so that we can have a fair system…

NORTHAM: A fair system meaning?

WALES: The fair system would be the longer you wait the higher up the list you are. Now I think people understand that, if you say look we’ve all got to wait it’s a queue, you wait in the queue and when your turn comes you have a chance that’s the right way to do it at least partially.

NORTHAM: And the way that you’re doing it is to put as many people as possible into the priority band?

WALES: Yes, yes absolutely.

NORTHAM: And you’re allowed to do that within the law are you?

WALES: We operate absolutely within the law but we try and push it the furthest we can because we believe that everybody should have the same fair access.

NORTHAM: So you say that you’re pushing the law as far as possible does the law need to be changed?

WALES: Absolutely, the law should be changed to allow us to do the allocations policy we want, we think we should have local discretion but even if the Government doesn’t want to do that we think something round queuing is fair. People understand queues. The British people are essentially fair minded people and if you say to them it’s a queue you’ve got to wait your turn they understand that.

The needs-based system rewarded not only the unfortunate, but the feckless and criminal. It's (along with a needs-based benefits system) created the underclass.

When applied in a world of open borders, it's creating an 'otherclass'.

Frank Field the MP for Birkenhead, has become a trenchant critic of the current housing law. He argues that the system of allocation according to need serves to make losers out of the very people who should win.

FIELD: I object to the way council houses are allocated. The vast majority of my constituents in Birkenhead do and my guess is in the country as a whole in that they feel the form of allocation is unfair, people believe that it’s wrong as a primary aim to give that scarce resource on the basis of need rather than on the basis that I’ve actually earned my right to that. That society goes round because people work, because people play the game, because people are decent citizens and that should be rewarded rather than ‘ah look I’m actually homeless or I’ve managed to persuade people that I am deemed to be homeless therefore I should shoot to the top of the list’.

NORTHAM: So your view is that the law which currently places emphasis, great emphasis on the priority of people in need, your saying that law is simply wrong?

FIELD: I’m saying the law is wrong, I’m saying that we in Parliament should actually change that law, that we should reward citizenship we should give it a greater weight than we should award being deemed homeless.

NORTHAM: Are you recreating the 19th century distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor here?

FIELD: Well we’ve got it and that is that the decent citizens are deemed undeserving and I think that’s wrong.

Follow The Money

One of the perennial themes of the Guardianista is the uniquely evil agenda of Rupert Murdoch. I'm not sure his evil goes beyond a common love of money - the only unique feature being his singular efficiency and drive towards that goal.

Take the Guardian's near-monopoly of public sector job adverts. Rupert's boys have noted all the moolah and want a slice of the action.

Wednesday is the Guardian's "Society" section - why not steal a march with Tuesday's "Public Agenda" supplement.

But it's nowhere near as fat yet as "Society". How can they attract more publicly funded types ?

They know their market alright. The biggest feature is an interview with the Howard League's Frances Crook, the Lawyer of the Week is the guy who successfully defended Shambo (until it was overturned on appeal), the back page features heartwarming stories from the social exclusion frontline.

Frances Crook's ideas are a million miles away from Joe Public, who would generally like to see more villains put away, not fewer. It speaks volumes for the capture of our taxes by the Left that she is apparently considered a draw for publicly funded readers.

It's not all bad news though.

"Frances Crook has been burgled twice in the past year"

Cultural Revolution Almost Complete

Never mind the dying off older generation - take a look at the kids :

Casting directors are lost for words because the next generation of British actors just cannot speak proper. The rise of “Estuary English” has left children with the intonation patterns of Lily Allen and Jonathan Ross, regardless of their background.

The decline in Received Pronunciation has not just transformed the presentation of BBC News. Film and drama producers are struggling to fill period roles that require unrepentantly middle-class vowels. BBC One is holding an open casting session tomorrow to try to find two girls to star in a film-length adaptation of the classic children’s novel Ballet Shoes. Victoria Wood and Marc Warren have signed up to star in the story, by Noel Streatfeild, set in 1930s London. But the challenge of finding two ballet-dancing leads who can act, twirl and – most importantly – speak in middle-class accents has defeated the producers.

"We’ve been to drama schools, ordinary schools and children’s agents, but we still haven’t found the right girls," said Susie Parriss, the casting director.

"It doesn’t matter whether you go to public schools or comprehensives, children just speak common estuary now."

Wave of Hyperbole Threatens England

"LONDON — Much of central England is preparing to be swept under a destructive tide of water Tuesday, as the worst floods in centuries continue to grow in intensity and the British government struggles with a domestic emergency of vast proportions."

The water may have hit some record heights, if it's true that Tewkesbury Abbey hasn't been this depth since 1760. The Gray Monk would know - he's blogging the floods from the centre. But I'm not sure the destructive tide of water compares with the 500 deaths in 1953.

Water !

All day I face
The barren waste
Without the taste
Of water
Cool, clear water


(Along with bottled water, deodorant is flying off the supermarket shelves. Can't imagine why.)

UPDATE - new flood misery for residents of Hull.

Equal but Different

David Farrer compares the attitudes to the national flag of councils in England and Scotland.

Where's David Orland ?

We are as yet some months away from the autumnal French rioting season, but the loss of David Orland's now defunct Faute de Pire blog from Paris will be felt. Let's hope the man returns.

He's got previous. His Faute de Mieux blog disappeared in similar fashion a few years back.

There's a fair amount of his stuff on the web, some archived at boundless.org.

Travel much outside the U.S. and you are bound to meet people who are heavily invested, partisan observers of American domestic politics. You get used to it. This was not the first time I had been cornered on the issue of convicted cop-killer and death-row-celebrity, Mumia Abu-Jamal. Only a week before the incident at the café, I was taken aside by a very drunken Frenchwoman and forced to explain my position on Mumia: how could I possibly justify applying the death penalty in his case ? You mean apart from the fact that he's guilty ? I asked. It was all downhill from there ...

In recent years, the left has increasingly tended to conceive of oppression in exclusively racial terms. In place of Marx's proletariat we now have "the brown people of the earth." And, in place of Marx's "capitalist-bourgeosie" we are offered "the white European male." Class war has become race war and, as in all holy wars, there's satisfaction in believing you're on the right side of history.

For these Marxists gone bad, Mumia fits the bill to a tee. As a teenager, he served as the Minister of Information for the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. Later, he worked as a cab driver, moonlighted at a radical black radio station and was affiliated with the notorious black nationalist organization, MOVE. He had cool dreads, wrote underground journalism, and, until recently, was on death row. In him, one could recognize a whole cluster of dearly held left-wing clichés: the grass-roots black intellectual; the despairing race rebel who turns to violence; the victim of white oppression singing from his prison cell. These clichés are the key to Mumia's worldwide success and prove, once again, that there is no end to the sentimentality of the left. For his supporters, Mumia the individual never mattered. Neither, for that matter, did Mumia the criminal cop-killer. No, what has always mattered most is Mumia the image, Mumia the symbol, Mumia the standard-bearer.

Floods

Noon yesterday at the client site, the gutters overflowing and giving us a neat water feature to enjoy from our desks. Not even the news from a customer in the Thames Valley that the office was being evacuated due to floods disturbed us.

Phone. Susan.

"The house is becoming surrounded by water - it's about three inches below the doors".

"I'll get home"

"OK - I'm going to get our daughter from school"

Start of a long day. I was pretty much the first to leave - Lord knows how many colleagues made it.

Outside a different world. Lots of water on roundabouts and junctions where never seen before. The direct route home was already clogged with traffic - which wasn't moving. A fair few cars were turning round.

I know. I'll turn round and whip along the back roads.

Big mistake.

Two hours later I was 200 feet higher in the Cotswolds, forced inexorably higher by water the like of which I have never seen. Village streets were rivers. Streams were rivers. Still trying to get home by a wider and wider arc.



My state of mind not helped by the phone calls.

Wife/daughter : "We've had to abandon the car and we're walking back"

Son : "It's two inches below the door !"

"When mum gets back tell her there's an electric pump and tubing in the garage - on the right in the corner. If that fails dig a trench in the lawn to a lower part of the garden"

So one son is alone in the house which is about to be flooded. The new extension, Susan's new kitchen, the flooring, the electrics ...

Wife and daughter have a two mile wade through flooded roads. Are they being swept away ?

Another son is at work. How's he going to get home ? All the roads are closing.

Another son texts - he's at a schoolmates house and staying there.

And I'm trying one road after another.

Son : "It's an inch below the door !"

By now I'm running out of options. One road is four feet deep. We all turn round. Next road the same. I remember a pub I passed in a village a few miles back. But first let's just try this way.

4x4s only. I can see the abandoned cars that didn't make it through.

Wife : "We've used the pump - it's lowered the level but then it stopped working. I'm digging a trench and it's just keeping it below the sill".

Curses. But thank God they're home. Is the pump clogged or is it what happens when you buy pumps from Lidl ?

"Is the trench working ?"

"Seems to be - the water's running over the lawn and away to the field"

"Dig it a bit deeper and longer then. I don't think I'm going to make it home."

Back towards the pub. I've been through so much scary-depth water, slipping the clutch and keeping the revs high for when the exhaust is under water, that a mere six inches is easy to navigate.

I pick up a guy who's abandoned his car - he lives in the village where the pub is. I go to drop him off - and his garden is two feet under. A river is coming down the hill and through the new estate. The houses are terraced one above the other, like rocks in a mountain stream, which flows round - and through - each in turn.

I've got nothing else to do and I keep thinking about my own house - so a wet and muddy hour follows as we wade through the gardens, putting boards held with concrete slabs across the front doors. All we're doing is lowering the level inside to five inches rather than two feet, but I guess it helps a bit. The back doors are open to drain the house and people are taking fence panels out to lower the level in the rear gardens - which of course means it gets to the next, lower, front gardens faster.


Further down the road dips into a lake and rises on the other side. It must be ten feet deep. Tarmac is lifted in the road and water is bubbling up from beneath. Everywhere drains are spouting water.





I'm soaking wet and covered in mud - time for the pub.

The landlord's lit a fire and I can wring out my socks and put my shoes by the fire. The pub is filling up with stranded people - a businessman from Macclesfield, some Radio 3 sound crew who were meant to be recording Schoenberg in a Cheltenham church that night, a couple of pig farmers from Berkshire, half a dozen nurses in uniform. Later the guy who's been flooded out and his neighbours arrive.

The news from home is good. Susan's heroics with a spade have saved the house, the eldest son has (foolishly IMHO) attempted to wade home seven miles with no jacket or waterproofs and been picked up after three, probably with mild hypothermia, by a Good Samaritan in a Land Rover. Middle son is at a friends house with two other stranded kids.

A few hours, a few pints and a good meal later the rain has stopped and I take a stroll in the dusk. There's a pretty B&B down the road offering a reduced rate due to the river in the front garden and the lack of electricity (all the B&Bs in the village are fully booked - but none of the people have turned up). Most of my fellow strandees are sleeping on the bar floor, which I would have done 10 years ago. Getting old. I sit by candlelight in front of a coal fire at the B&B and turn in early.

This morning most of the floods have gone, though abandoned cars are everywhere. I get home without any major problems. Middle son's back and car retrieved. Lordy.

It's raining again. I think I'm going to make the trench bigger.

"Europe is still living off its religious heritage"

Robert Putnam - the chap who believes that mass immigration is a good thing and whose research shows that "the higher the diversity in a neighbourhood, the lower the levels of trust, political participation and happiness between and within the ethnic groups", in the Grauniad.

"Diversity is a social construction that can be deconstructed and reconstructed - you can erase a line and draw a new line [to define identity] and we do it all the time," says Putnam, who adds that there has been much more response to his research in the UK than in the US.

"Some critics [in the UK] on the right say that's all hogwash. What gets the conservatives irritated is that I say the task is not to 'make them like us' but to create a new 'we' - a new, more encompassing identity. They say: 'Why should we? We don't want a new we, we like the old we.' But in the US, we don't have that problem because we have changed in the past," he says.

America IS a nation of immigrants. Britain has not been - the 'nation of immigrants' nonsense is a liberal myth used to justify mass immigration.

Up until 7/7 our new liberal rulers didn't care about integration. The USP of immigrants was precisely the fact that they 'weren't like us' i.e. the natives. What they actually were like was unimportant.

Now they've seen the writing on the wall in Tavistock Square.



So integration seems like a good idea after all.

The trouble is that the destruction of British culture was a prerequisite for mass immigration - a self-confident nation would either not have allowed it or would have ensured integration was a priority - which was what happened in America until very recently.

The continuing effort to reinvent a national identity should at least provide sour amusement for a few decades.

Back to Mr Putnam. The key driver for the British cultural revolution - and the Britain we see today - was the decline of Christianity.

He credits religion with a vital role in spurring on progressive change in the US over the past 150 years - contrary to popular European wisdom, religion has predominantly been a force for good in America and its current use by the political right is an aberration from its history, he argues.

"Religious revival has been an essential ingredient of every progressive movement: the abolition of slavery came out of the second great awakening; the progressive era of 1900-15 when the US first passed labour and environment legislation came out of the social gospel movement," says Putnam, who is a convert to Judaism.

Much of his book will be devoted to analysing how that progressive potential in religion was lured to the Republican right. It is easy to see how his interest in social capital and religion fit together, but he is quick to acknowledge that religion can also have detrimental consequences, and it is possible to have social capital that has no religious underpinning.

He strikes a warning on the secularisation of Europe, which he describes as the first large-scale effort to see whether secular progressive countries can reproduce themselves and successfully pass on the values on which they were built. "I believe they can," he says, "but the evidence is not yet in. Europe is still living off its religious heritage."

Christianity may be dying in Euruope, but Nature abhors a spiritual vacuum. I notice a continual drip of British Muslim converts. They may be misguided, but they are generally intelligent, well-meaning young men and women. The canaries in the coal mine ?

"I am a white, middle-class left-wing atheist, who embraced Islam, and I see it has having the solutions to all the social ills of British society (poverty, drug abuse, gambling addictions, robbery, individualism, depression and terrorism, amongst many others"

I'll pass on whether there are no poor people in Muslim countries - but for the rest, you could say much the same of the Christianity that was - before the churches turned into a branch of Social Services.

Maybe the Sixties cultural revolutionaries who are dying off, the George Melly's, won't see their new Utopia.

"And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse."

See No Evil

BBC :

Concerns about possible racist attacks led to police pulling out of a TV appeal in their search for a sex attack suspect, it has emerged. Officers want to trace former Exeter taxi driver Noorullah Seddiqi, 34, originally from Afghanistan.

Police were planning to put a reconstruction on ITV's Manhunt crime show, but a spokesman said "community concerns" led to a rethink. Mr Seddiqi is wanted for questioning after failing to answer bail. He was arrested in November last year in connection with an investigation into a rape and a series of sexual assaults on women.

It's victims poker again. The potential victims of racist attack are more important than the actual victims of rape and sexual assault.

Oh Lordy ...

You just know that this is going to be a terrible story.

UPDATE - well blow me down - it's (allegedly) the Poles again. Is the number of reported crimes with (allegedly) Polish perpetrators a function of the large numbers or of something else ? Alas the stats are not there. It looks like not every Polish cleaner's up there with the lovely Anna.

Magna Mater Appeal

Way back in the 1970s and early 80s, Melanie Phillips was the Guardian's social affairs correspondent and as 'right-on' (PC wasn't invented then) as you could possibly wish for.

The photo on her byline showed her with an Afro in the style of Marsha Hunt or Angela Davis. I bet she wore fingerless gloves and raggedy-witch skirts, too.

Has anybody got an image of it ? Or any snaps of the Great Goddess in her youthful prime ?

More Genetic Modification

David Miliband

+



Melanie Phillips

=


Inayat Bunglawala

Hmm ...

"You don't have to take a Hobbesian view of the world" writes Natalie Bennett in another plea to protect "sex workers".

I guess that depends on whether congress with the object of desire - or indeed the object her/him/itself - is nasty, brutish and short !

Fight ! Fight ! Fight !

Faisal Bodi has a post at Comment Is Free.

So does Sunny Hundal.

Faisal comments on Sunny's piece. It's now deleted, but according to this response :

"Coconut by name, coconut by nature. Why does it take a white columnist to echo your views for you to feel vindicated? That inferiority complex just won't go away, will it Sunny?"

Boom ! Boom ! Georgina Henry picks off Faisal's comment with one barrel and with the other takes out his CiF piece.

Faisal Bodi's comment about Sunny Hundal has been deleted from this thread. We have enough problems with commenters who breach the talk policy, let alone the bloggers themselves. That's why his post has also been taken down.

Ms Henry then devoted a longish post to justifying her decision, which has since been removed so thoroughly that "its body is buried as though it has never been". I'll try and find it in the cache.

But its main theme was outrage at the 'racist' coconut slur (i.e. he's brown outside but white inside - see also Bounty Bar). To Georgina, as to most guilty white liberals, there's no worse accusation than calling someone white. If the recipient IS a white person, then it's rude to point out their deformity - if they're black, brown or yellow than it's a deadly insult. Ms Henry's not a big William Blake fan.