Practical Thoughts

Dear Reader, Last night I spent a longer amount of time than usual watching TV. But  it's invariably the case that if something is shown that has something profound to say about humanity, then I will try to watch it. Last night, ITV and More-4 showed two programmes about the Jewish Holocaust, 70 years on. The first was about a woman who, as a twin, was experimented upon by the infamous Dr. Mengale, and yet survived her ordeal. She was predicted by the Nazi doctor to have only a short time to live, but by willpower and providence she survived. If she hadn't, her twin sister would also have been killed for comparison of the two bodies at death. The most astonishing aspect is that the woman is willing to forgive all Nazis for their actions. Amazing. Yet the 94-year-old lady has many critics amongst her own people. The second (longer) program was entitled  Night Will Fall and was based upon the huge documentary film evidence that was put together from British, American an...

It has only just come to my attention that Derek Hathaway, OBE, my very old fellow Billesley Common, Billesley School and Tabernacle companion from our young years, has died after a sad illness. We were the same age. Derek went on to Moseley Grammar School, as did the likes of Professor Carl Chinn and Jasper Carrott (Bob Davis), both of whom have also played a sizeable part in my life. He lost his father at the age of 13 and had to leave school at the legal minimum of 15 to provide for his mother and siblings. After being successful in Birmingham Derek had been living in the USA for over 20 years and was a hugely successful businessman at Harsco as well as being a highly charitable man. He received his OBE (for charitable work) in 2008. It had been agreed for me to visit him in the USA in 2015 for the purpose of writing his biography, but he had contracted a severe cancer and was not well enough for the arrangement to take place. One of his stated pieces of wisdom was th...

Dear Reader, On TV the other night a bizarre situation occurred.  I had been watching a BBC report on the terrible conditions at Madaya, and after some time decided to switch to al Jazeera to see their take on the matter.  In fact,  al Jazeera    was not transmitting a news programme but a documentary on new technology - mostly about AI (artificial intelligence).  On the  al Jazeera    programme they were talking about how the new technologies were going to revolutionise matters - that we would see so much more in the form of robotics and self-drive cars etc. etc. But, yes, the introduction of all that would cost jobs. But, hey, they said, that's all happened before as technology has progressed. Now, don't you find all that bizarre? That we know full well that half the inhabitants of the world are suffering in the most alarming way and yet we have people suggesting that the new technologies are going to be the answer to everything. E...

Dear Reader, Firstly, I wish you well for this year and always. But secondly, and mainly, there is much room for concern - and hope - for what may transpire in 2016. Everywhere we hear of disaster and considerable suffering, and as if Climate Change and the world-wide flooding isn't enough, with terrorism and Daesh continuing to keep us occupied, we now have the news of the plight of 40,000 inhabitants of the Syrian village of Madaya in Syria. This village is under siege by allies of Sadat and its inhabitants are quietly dieing of hunger. They are surrounded by mines and also get shot if they try to leave. No-one - apparently - cares. We in the west (particularly those that are already materially well endowed) seem convinced that these are all temporary issues that will pass over so that we can just get on with what we've always been doing - making money and trying to be better off than the rest. Friends, that concept is one that should be consigned to the history boo...

Dear Reader, At a time of important festivities, my diary entry for this week is not going to be long. But because it's not long it doesn't mean to say that it's not something I feel strongly about: I do. It's about the UK banks. This week the news emerged that the banks have been avoiding the payment of their taxes. We also learnt recently that our financial wizard George Osborne has been getting friendly with the banks. Is his friendliness a roundabout way of trying to get the banks to pay their share? But, the banks being the banks, they will not play ball unless there's something in it for them. After all, Gordon Brown's quantitive easing (printing money) policy did not nothing but effectively give money to the banks to bolster their balance sheets as they refused to play ball by making that money available to the community. They got free money, and now they avoid paying their share of taxes, we hear. And it is the banking system that created the f...

Dear Reader, There is a story (said to be true) about a holy man of recent times who demonstrated that he could change plain water into oil. So convinced was an entrepreneur, he said to the holy man, "Why not convert the whole ocean, and then we can make a fortune?" It (surely) does not take too much savvy to work out that  such an idea is  foolish nonsense. It should not need explanation that the oceans help to balance the life on planet Earth, and greatly contribute to weather conditions. etc. etc. We don't apply this kind of idea as it would (most likely)  simply  and  quickly lead us to a doomsday situation. That being the case, can't the same kind of logic be applied to fracking? It seems to me that the fracking concept is also capable of bringing about a  doomsday situation. There is a great concern that our water supplies could be affected, and some have even suggested that water is a communications system in its own right; equivalent to the ...

Dear Reader, I can hear them from here; the thumps of self-congratulation on the backs of the participants of the Paris Climate Summit. Now I am not at all cynical about any attempt to address the Climate Change that patently exists (it's been a major concern of mine for 40 years), but when the sponsors of the Paris Summit are some of the world's largest energy creation companies, then you do wonder if there is more to the Summit meeting that we should worry about. One sponsor was Engie. As a single entity, Engie is a massive energy company — according to the Brand Finance Brandirectory, it is the most valuable utilities company in the world, bringing in more than $80 billion in annual revenue. Engie emitted as much greenhouse gases in 2014 as the entire country of Belgium. And Engie isn’t the only company with ties to fossil fuels to be included as a sponsor at the Paris talks — corporations like Électricité de France (EDF), which operates 16 major coal plan...

Dear Reader, In 1965, fifty years ago this year, two of the world's most renowned individuals of that era died, both of them at the age of 90. One was Sir Winston Churchill: the other was Dr. Albert Schweitzer. There are those reading this who will wonder why I bracket Schweitzer with Churchill as a great name, and I suspect the cause for that is down to the media attention that Churchill received over many years, particularly in both World War One and World War Two, which seem to place him high in the western mindset. In the latter period in particular he was constantly in the limelight, and then he was returned as prime minister of the UK between 1951 and 1955. He was greatly feted in both the UK and the USA. The two men were, in some ways, an antithesis of one another. Churchill had the reputation (somewhat unfairly, I believe) of being a 'warmonger', while Schweitzer (for all of his life) tried to find life-affirming positives in creation and to bring them to th...

Dear Reader, Yesterday's debate on Cameron's proposal for air strikes on Daesh made for compelling viewing - in parts. I didn't watch the whole thing - just the first hour and the last hour (of 10 hours) but what I did see and hear largely impressed me as committed parliamentary debate. A lot of people were definitely speaking from the heart - but therein perhaps lay the problem: too much emotion and lack of reason. A good deal of the Labour support for the motion was in support for the French. "If the atrocities had been committed in London [and not Paris] wouldn't we be upset if France didn't support our retaliation?" - was a main theme. Also, "strikes have done their part in Iraq, so why not Syria?" - another theme. The fact that Syria is such a complex and rich cocktail was largely ignored by the emotionalists. Perhaps the most telling speech was the penultimate one - by Hilary Benn (Labour shadow foreign sec). His speech has been lau...

Dear Reader, While our prime minister and the Tory media and some Labour-ites are bearing down on Jeremy Corbyn and his stance against further bombing by the UK, Mr. Corbyn himself today wrote a very appropriate piece in to-day's i newspaper - about global warming and the government's inaction in this vital area . Clearly a subject that Jeremy Corbyn takes more seriously - and with every good reason. Does the plight of this polar bear affect you? If so please go to this site to read more. And of course, it's not just polar bears but the whole of nature that's under threat. While the world goes on belching out the effluent (even in India they have no plans to reduce such emissions)  - and while the Western World throws its armaments anywhere so long as it's more than 1,000 miles away from our homelands - we cocooned Westerners are going into the Christmas period without (probably) little thought about all this.  For the poorest in the UK, that's ...