Bassingbourne55

Africa lurches from one humanitarian tragedy to another. Nobody has found the answer yet. People talk about causes – poverty, drought, disease, civil wars, debt….

What Africa needs is a continent-wide vision for the future, a framework for its nations to co-operate to tackle the problems listed above. The OAU, perhaps, tries to fulfil this…[Read more]

I am a straight man, 100% heterosexual. I generally prefer female company to male company socially too. If I was female I’m certain I would be a lesbian. There, can’t be more honest than that, can I?

Ah, but did the railway line look like a railway line?

The Highway Code carries the advice, when using unmanned level crossings, to “always give way to trains”. Good piece of advice, that.

Someone I once knew witnessed a car (mercifully unoccupied, parked on a crossing in a quayside area) being mangled by a train.

Cars damage people through accidents. That is the big damage they do. Whether man-made CO2 emissions damage the environment is still open to question as the recent TV programme showed (to me at any rate).

The big environmental crisis facing us is not global warming, which is probably a natural phenomenon related to sunspot activity, but the…[Read more]

There is also thought to be major oil reserves around the Falklands but again, the sea is so deep (1500-2000metres) that extraction would be difficult.

But even with extra oil discoveries we will run out or run low in a few decades so given that and the ‘jury-outness’ of the global warming debate it makes sense to push the renewable energy technology too.

The nuclear industry is totally safe. It has a 100% safety record, if one doesn’t count Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and a few leaks at Winscale / Sellafield. (LOL please!)

If building more nuclear power stations is necessary to meet growing demand, then I suppose we will have to have them. But if we can do without through using renewable…[Read more]

First ‘greenhouse gases’ were CFC’s used in aerosols and fridges. They were banned and so CO2 became the greenhouse gas. Now there is doubt as to whether CO2 has any part in global warming and rising CO2 levels might actually be a result of natural global warming which is largely related to sunspot activity. Funny old world!!

When the oil and…[Read more]

I have never heard of this and I don’t recall anyone at school playing games like this. I know some kids used to play ‘chicken’ by running in front of cars which is clearly so stupid that even a chicken wouldn’t try it except through ignorance!

I read this article too. I have read theories that in the past pieces of the Earth’s crust have collapsed into the mantle. This ‘open wound’ might be newly discovered but it’s not new, it’s probably thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of years old.

I don’t see how it challenges the theory of tectonic plates as it seems that it’s quite…[Read more]

I just watched this programme, belatedly, as it was recorded.

I would count myself as an environmentalist but I have never been convinced by the the CO2 scare story. As I understood we had a model for how increasing CO2 in the atmosphere would tend to assist in raising temperatures but now that even seems to be questionable, and in fact…[Read more]

Peter Hain – he was once an angry firebrand leftie and probably still holds left-wing views but unlike so many lefties he’s not afraid of laying into their sacred cows – he has been a fierce critic of radical islam.

All this reminds me of the ponderous American comedian George Burns, who had a big 100th birthday bash when he was 80 because he reckoned he wouldn’t live to be 100. The irony is that he did actually reach the age of 100, but presumably he couldn’t have had a big party as he’d already had the 20 years earlier!!!

Smiley accuses me of writing utter nonsense! Language changes, woit, wevva sad dinosaur’s like it or or not. If dat wernt da case wed all be sayn thee and thou, woont we?

Another case in point is Dutch, which has masculine, feminine and neuter nouns. But increasingly the genders are being ignored, so I read.

I’m all for good grammar and…[Read more]

If a driver can be shown to have used a misleading signal that had resulted in an accident, then I would think they would be at least partially to blame. But it would need an independent witness to establish the fact, I’d imagine.

Yes – a few £50’s and £100’s and one £500. Just luck I suppose – but I haven’t won anything for 3 or 4 years. (holding was about £600).

Yesterday saw another initiative to teach more ‘Britishness’ in schools, not only to migrants and people from ethnic minorities but to ‘indigenous’ British children.

I think it is particularly important that the Britishness message gets across in Scotland and Wales. English, Scots, Welsh, Cornish – we are all British first and foremost. And I…[Read more]

I am a Liberal Democrat supporter but when people talk about the Iraq war I can’t help thinking back to how Paddy Ashdown was the one who called for us, the rest of Europe and the USA to get more involved in the Balkans. That resulted in a NATO attack on Serbia. Clinton sent USAF bombers to bomb Belgrade and up to 12,000 Serbs died.

We all need…[Read more]

The last ice age only finished about 18,000 years ago, so there were definitely humans about. One school of thought is that we are still coming out of that ice age and that could account for why the planet is warming a little. The North Sea was mostly dry land 18,000 years ago. This was not because of some great geological change to the Earth’s…[Read more]

God says: “Look, all these people praying to me that their printers will work properly or their toenails never become ingrowing – look, I’m trying to stop two galaxies colliding on the other side of the universe, do they really think I’ve got time for their petty worries!

It is officially acceptable to use an apostrophe to denote te plural of abbreviated intitials such as CD’s, MOT’s etc. I heard this on Radio4, coming from the mouth of a language expert.

Language changes – the more so now with netspeak and texting language. How long before ‘U’ replaces ‘you’ in normal English. It is not just English where…[Read more]