AIRSTRIP ONE

That great British institution, the NHS, has two basic components; hospitals and GPs’ Practices. Patients in hospitals are there because they are too sick to be anywhere else. If this were not the case they quite simply would not be admitted. Undoubtedly many of the people who use hospitals are there through no fault of their own as becoming ill in life is something that can rarely be avoided. A large number of those in hospital are there as a direct result of bad living, which might have been avoided. We are all human however and when, for example, a person becomes a smoker or long-term drinker they do so for social reasons rather than  to deliberately tie up medical resources; an unfortunate consequence of their action is that years after having started abusing their bodies and against their aspirations, they become sick.

There is a third kind of patient. One who drinks a whole bottle of vodka in one evening and then tries to take on the world. These patients can be found abusing the staff of any A & E department on any evening and usually after the pubs have closed. They sit with bloody noses in waiting rooms up and down the country and they swear and curse at anyone in their vicinity. Some just sit there crying and getting on everyone’s nerves. Numbers of this type of patient are undoubtedly on the increase and I suspect that this is down to the loutish British drink-to-get-drunk culture as well as longer opening hours. This behaviour can only be changed with education. This is made obvious by the fact that those with a better education such as public school boys although often over-indulging do not tend to suffer anything more than a hang-over as a result. It is the intellectually challenged, the uncouth and the increasing numbers of uneducated morons who stretch NHS resources on a Saturday evening.

The problem of time-wasters in GPs’ practices is another kettle of fish and one close to my heart; I work part-time in a practice and have seen first-hand what is going on.

Many practice patients have serious problems and need to see their GP but the vast majority have the common cold and many have stomach viruses and mild forms of influenza. These patients with lesser problems are wasting NHS resources by visiting their GPs. A cold can not be treated and anyone with a cold, no matter how bad they feel, should just stay away from other people and wallow in their own misery. They make things so much worse by walking into waiting rooms and infecting others who are genuinely sick. The last thing a cancer patient needs is some asshole with a cold sitting nearby and coughing and spluttering all over them.

I worked an afternoon shift in my practice yesterday and had just such an experience. Some bloody stupid woman coughed all over me and I woke up with a cold this morning. Why oh why didn’t she keep it to herself? There was nothing we could do for her and she should have just stayed at home. Stupid bitch!

What worries me much more that my own petty health problems is the vast NHS resources that are being wasted on these people who can not be cured. My estimate is that 60-70 percent of those who come into my own practice are time-wasters. I used to be much more sympathetic towards these people but I’ve learned to despise them. It is hard to feel any kind of sympathy for anyone who walks around spreading their own misery to others. The best that doctors can do for these idiots is prescribe cough medicine that can easily be bought over the counter and tell them to wrap up warmly. Even the cough medicine that is prescribed is prov-en to have no better effect that a teaspoon of honey would have.

Another example is the noro virus widely in circulation last Christmas. Even BBC newscasters was telling people that they should just stay at home and keep their vomiting and dihoria to themselves as there was nothing that they could do except ride it out for the two days that it stays in the system. So why did we get streams of people coming into the practice to infect others? It was just pathetic.

Yes, NHS resources are stretched but this is largely as a result of people’s own stupidity and over-inflated expectations. I even had to make an appointment for a woman a short while ago who thought that her children should see a doctor because the family dog had been afflicted with fleas and she was worried that the children had been bitten by them. I felt like giving her a piece of my mind but instead had to smile sweetly and make a triple appointment for herself and her two future-trash sponges thus clogging up 45 minutes of the doctor’s time that could easily have been filled by more deserving cases.

In my own lifetime I’ve seen my country and in particular London, the city where I live, change in ways that would not have been thought possible forty years ago and whilst some of that change has been for the better much of it is responsible for having redefined British culture and values into something that is alien to me now. I feel as though my own country has been stolen from me.

Whilst the causes of the change are complex and hard to define a big factor has undoubtedly been the swamping of one culture by influences from so many others. Because of the way in which I was brought up I am experiencing a mild sense of guilt even as I write these words and I’m fully aware that I must tread carefully to avoid being automatically dismissed as a racist by my readers.

When I was about ten years old my mother explained to me with pride that Britain was a free country and that the British people gave a home to so many people from all over the world who were oppressed in their own countries. In those days we called these people “refugees”, never realising that before long it would become a dirty word. I remember collecting milk bottle tops enthusiastically for one of the Blue Peter appeals to help Chinese boat people and thought of Britain as a safe haven; an island jewel of sanity in a messed-up world.

We are now living in a looking-glass world. One where the flood-gates have been opened for economic migrants who could perfectly well carve out a safe lives for themselves in their own countries without fear of persecution if they wanted to and one where genuine refugees are sent back to their own countries to face prison and certain death. A government prediction that Eastern Europeans numbering in the many hundreds of thousands would return home after a short stint of harvesting has turned out to be wrong. It now transpires that the numbers were wildly deflated in the first place and that most of these people now want to stay in Britain. It also looks as if a very large proportion of them are fit, young and rapidly procreating. We have school classrooms full with kids that do not speak English and a large proportion of many PCT budgets is now spent on translating services needed to facilitate communications between doctors and their patients at GPs’ surgeries.

The influx of people from India and Pakistan is constant and many are given homes and full British citizenship after only a few years simply on the basis that they know someone who knows someone who lives in Britain whilst at the same time Gurkhas who fought for Britain in the Falkland War and who have in many instances served with the British army for over twenty years are now being deported.

Melanie Phillips has touched upon some of  these home truths in her latest article entitled “Britain’s Broken Heart“. It is well worth the read but although her usual plain-speech analysis is both entertaining and enlightening I feel that her naive conclusion that Cameron and the Tory Party might be able to save Britain if they put their minds to it is surprising for a woman of her calibre. I just don’t have that sort of faith.

Call me a cynic but I see all Britain’s political parties as much of a sameness. All seem to see increased control as a mechanism with which to instigate change and I’m afraid I just don’t believe this. I see the database state mentality as a large part of the problem rather than any part of a possible solution.

I have nothing against a move towards a more pluralist and essentially a coffee-coloured world. All men are created equal and all peoples have certain inalienable rights. This truth is intelligently described in the American Constitution as “self-evident”. Any other view is pure foolishness. However, the sum of a people is more than the colour of its members’ skin. A group of people is defined by its culture and values and if these are lost or changed beyond recognition then that group of people changes.

Britain’s multicultural experiment has gone very askew and it is not hard to predict her future now. In twenty years time we will be a broken nation with pockets or “tribes” of people who share little in common with their neighbours. The recent suggestion by the Archbishop of Canterbury that parts of Sharia law might be comfortably incorporated into British law is frightening and that the subject can be seriously debated is disturbing.

True British values have traditionally come about as a result of a naturally progressive historical development. It has taken hundreds of years for this to happen and the point reached by a process of gradual movement from a partitive chaos towards an organised unity is now under threat. To throw away all that now by committing Cultural suicide is not only madness, it is no way to pay homage to all those who, throughout the centuries, have argued, fought and won the freedoms that we now enjoy.

Myth 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
Fact: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures.
Average ground station readings do show a mild warming over the last 100 years, but well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas (”heat islands”) which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas (”land use effects”).

Myth 2: The “hockey stick” graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature increase for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.
Fact: Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the “average” global temperature has been rising at a rate of 0.6 to 0.8 degrees Celsius per 100 years; although from 1940–1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare. The “hockey stick”, a poster boy of both the UN’s IPCC and Canada’s Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well.

Myth 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.
Fact: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. The CO2 increase was only 0.4% over the last 50 years, rather than the 5% per 100 years quoted by Kyoto. However, as measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this. There is solid evidence that as temperatures rise naturally and cyclically, the earth’s oceans expel more CO2 as a result.

Myth 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.
Fact: Water vapour or clouds, which makes up on average about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and — according to several researchers — about 60% by effect, is the major greenhouse gas. 97% of greenhouse gases are water vapour by volume. Moreover, because of its molecular weight and absorptive capacity, water vapour is 3000 times more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention this important fact.

Myth 5: Computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming.
Fact: Unfortunately, computer models predicting global warming are incapable of including the effects of the sun and the clouds. Further, the main cause of temperature variation is the sun. Its radiation changes all the time, partly in cyclical fashion. The number of sunspots can be correlated very closely with average temperatures on earth, e.g. the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. Varying intensity of solar heat radiation affects the surface temperature of the oceans and the currents. Warmer ocean water expels gases, some of which is CO2.

Myth 6: The UN proved that man-made CO2 causes global warming.
Fact: In a 1996 report by the UN on global warming, two statements were deleted from the final draft. Here they are:
1) “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases.”
2) “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to….man-made causes.”
There is simply no scientific proof that man-made CO2 causes significant global warming.

Myth 7: CO2 is a pollutant.
Fact: This is absolutely not true. Nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere. We could not live in 100% nitrogen either. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is. However, CO2 is essential to life on earth. It is necessary for plant growth since increased CO2 intake as a result of increased atmospheric concentration causes many trees and other plants to grow more vigorously.

Myth 8: Global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes.
Fact: There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that supports such claims. Growing insurance and infrastructure repair costs, particularly in coastal areas, are sometimes claimed to be the result of increasing frequency and severity of storms, whereas in reality they are a function of increasing population density, escalating development value, and ever more media reporting.

Myth 9: Receding glaciers and the calving of ice shelves are proof of global warming.
Fact: Glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for hundreds of years. Recent glacier melting is a consequence of coming out of the very cool period of the Little Ice Age. Ice shelves have been breaking off for centuries. Scientists know of at least 33 periods of glaciers growing and then retreating.
It’s normal.

Myth 10: The earth’s poles are warming; polar ice caps are breaking up and melting and the sea level rising.
Fact: The earth is variable. The western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer, due to unrelated cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling.

I loved the film but from a sheer quantity p.o.v. M*A*S*H (the TV series) kicks the Lama’s Ass.

I watched every episode I could watch every morning after working a 10-hour night shift in a restaurant in Toronto from 1980 to 1983. Since then I must have seen the whole lot at least three times. It is quite simply the best American sit-com ever made.

So a big thank you to the whole cast, writers and crew for adding so much to my life. I’d just like to say that I love the result of all the hard work that all of you put into the making of this great show. An extra-special thank-you goes out to Marcia Strassman who is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever had the pleasure to see as well as so many of the 50s-styled short-haired and well-built nurses who added a good dose of sex (which is never a bad thing) to a very funny show. Funny and beautiful. How can you go wrong?

With 256 episodes in all, I must have spent at least 16 days of my life laughing at the show.

There is so much to be said about the greatness of MASH but it has all been said before so I’m just going to shut-up and move on to the next subject now.

Oh dear. I like Newsnight but I’m having to give this week’s show a miss.

I made a vow to switch off or turn over whenever I see George Galoway on the telly. I refuse to listen to that arsehole.

New Labour citizen Jacqui Smith has updated the Newspeak Dictionary again. “Islamic Terrorism” will now be known as “Anti-Islamic Activity“.

Ms. Smith said that making any link between Islam and terrorism was unfounded and could be “inflammatory”. She said that there was “no evidence” that following the religion of Islam meant that one was any more or less likely to become interested in the murder of innocent people for political gain.

Coffee in hand, I switched on BBC News 24 today and was dismayed to see yet another cog in the NHS spin-job in motion.

According to the BBC News, the country is losing 175m working days each year due to sickness and our Health Secretary Alan Johnson (AKA Obersturmbannführer) is now setting out plans for changing what he calls “the sick-note culture” and plans to urge GPs to issue “well notes” setting out what tasks a worker can perform instead of certificates automatically signing them off.

According to the CIA’s World Fact Book, the UK has a total population of 60.7 million and a labour force of 30.7 million. The maths isn’t difficult and from these figures we can deduce that on average each working person takes off six working days each year as a result of sickness. Is this really so much?

It is about six years since I last worked in an office job and when I was doing that I was in constant fear of getting sick. When I got a cold or flu I’d try at all costs to be at work. I’d take my sickness into work and spread it around. Other people the office where I worked would get sick and they too would come into work sick. This was the norm and I suspect that it still is amongst office workers in the UK. If I did need to take days off sick I would usually take them as holidays as my boss simply didn’t tolerate sickness. I am self-employed now and have never looked back.

Once I got laryngitis and as my job involved being on the phone all day I was forced to take time off work to let my non-existent voice repair itself. After a few days, I was able to speak, allbeit in a whisper, so I returned to work and promptly lost my voice again answering the phones. I suggested that I be given other tasks but my greedy little shit of a boss didn’t care. He just let me loose my voice again and I had to take more days off as part of my holiday allowance. To add insult to injury when I had finally made a full recovery I was hauled into his office for a lecture about the inconvenience of taking holidays at short notice.

I suspect that my boss was not a special case and that this is the normal attitude of many businesses.

Alan Johnson has recently been trying to persuade GPs to open-up their surgeries in the evenings and at weekends to accommodate working people but GPs are having none of it and why should they? GPs and reception staff are people too. Why should they be forced to work out-of-hours if they don’t want to?

This attempt to shift blame onto the shoulders of those who are sick and those who work very hard in the NHS service curing the sick is frankly pathetic. Why isn’t Mr Johnson having a go at employers for their intolerance? Why isn’t he re-enforcing the idea of a “duty of care” that employers have for their employees? The rot starts here. Surely the idea that an employee can be treated as a social leper just for being sick should be unacceptable in any civilised society.

Workers in the UK get fewer bank holidays than their European counterparts and according to the BBC’s news website:-

Europe averages 11 bank holidays each year, compared to eight in England and Wales and 10 in Northern Ireland. Only the Netherlands has fewer public holidays than the UK, but Dutch workers have more annual leave.

In March 2005, Tony Blair pledged to ensure workers get bank holidays on top of paid leave if Labour wins the next general election. Does anyone believe that this will really be the case?

New Labour is quietly rolling out a “master-plan” to force genuinely sick people back to work by paying US companies like ATOS loads of money to “re-assess” disability claims. They are forcing doctors to break their Hippocratic oath of “doing no harm” by making them police their patients and effectively turning them into Agents of The State.
The fact is that UK workers have longer hours than other European workers for a lower standard of living. They are punished for being sick and have fewer holidays. Alan Johnson is just another New Labour toadie spouting crap. New Labour = Brave New Bullshit.

I logged on to the TFL website this morning and saw that I had 3 quid pay-as-you-go on my Oyster Card. I thought, right, enough for my bus fares today, put on my coat and perhaps somewhat foolishly left my visa card and wallet behind; it was a simple journey and I didn’t think I’d need any money so I didn’t take any with me.

Three miles from home and three buses later I feel like a lepper.

It turns out that information from each bus has to be downloaded via hard-wire and this can take time. When I logged on to the website this morning at six o’clock, seventy pence had yet to be deducted from the information from a bus that I took yesterday evening. You’d have thought that by that time they would have added this information. You’d have thought that they’d use wi-fi. No - I’m guessing that the Oyster machines are powered by newts running around tread-mills.

The upshot is that I’ve just had to walk two miles home with my back in great pain (I have spondylolisthesis).

So to anybody who doesn’t presently hold the office of the Mayor of London, I apologise for my bad language in advance.

Fuck you Livingstone! I’m waiting with champagne and flute glass in hand, ready for the day you go.

My new Lenovo laptop arrived a day early with no dead pixles and fighting fit. The extra 2 Gigs of ram was easy to fit and I’d uninstalled all the rubbish in about fifteen minutes.

I can highly recommend laptopsdirect.co.uk to anyone who wants to buy a laptop. The rep was friendly and informative when I called and the laptop arrived earlier than expected. The price was lower than at other outlets and the “no dead pixels guarantee” was well worth the extra £25 I paid.

Both Sony and DABS mucked me about and I’ve now added them to my list of companies that I neither use nor recommend to clients.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw has ordered an inquiry into claims police bugged an Islamic Terrorist when  he was visited in jail by a friend who happened to be an MP.

Suspected Islamic terrorist Babar Ahmad and Tooting MP Sadiq Khan were recorded twice in Milton Keynes’s Woodhill Prison, the Sunday Times says.

In a statement on Sunday, Mr Straw said “It is a terrorists right to fraternise with MPs should he wish to do so”.

He went on to say that it was not yet clear who the target of the bugging had been and that although bugging an MP would be completely acceptable, if any investigation finds that the main target was Mr Ahmed there would be grave consequences concerning the human rights of terrorists in British custody.