18 August 2011
Today is my 77th birthday. It started well with two laughing jolly girls – Paula and Christine, (they very kindly brought me a birthday card) coming into get me up, give me a shower and dress me.
Miles and Kimberly came down from London and ‘my lovely’ generously took us all out to lunch at The Cricketers. Unfortunately, this extra ordinary summer weather turned against us . No longer where we settled outside and our food had been brought out but the heavens opened and we had to rush to cover. Fortunately by that time I had enjoyed a small cigar and a glass of champagne soaked it was not too bad..We had a lovely lunch together. We came back into the house and shortly after it was time for tea, birthday cards and presents. I did terribly well but it would be invidious on me to mention any one by name.’ My lovely’ produced a delicious chocolate cake with chocolate flowers and fruit decorating the top. Miles and Kimberly went back to London shortly afterwards and I must admit I felt a little weary but warmly content at the kindness shown by all my loved ones.
I was very sorry that my darling daughter clearly and family were not able to be with us but as they are on holiday in Wales and it would be totally unfair to expect them to break into that just in order to come down to lunch but their absence was compensated for by a telephone call in the middle of all our excite with the whole family standing round of the telephone singing Happy Birthday. It really was.
All of this after a somewhat frustrating morning on the laptop. Last evening I spoken to Dave of .Microlink who I thought was going to come here to sort out the problems with Dragon. However, having gone onto ‘ remote assist’ and made some changes to the default menus, he seemed to think that that any further problems will result from the way I am dictating- i.e. giving a command, before the machine has had an opportunity of reproducing all of my dictation. I am very doubtful about this particularly. as I have been using this voice activation system for over 20 years but I shall keep a completely open mind and have agreed that I would give it a week, perhaps slowing down on my commands, and then let him know how I am getting on. I also suggested that he contacted Rueben of Nuance (the makers of Dragon) to see how far he has managed to get with the people in America who wrote the software for this current version. In the meantime I’m keeping a daily record of any problems that I have with Dragon. (So far, I must admit, that whatever tweaking Dave did with the programme yesterday seems to be working-so we will see).
Dealing with far more important matters I ought to bring the reader up-to-date on the global problems. First of all the insurrections occurring in the Middle East. The only one that appears to be really active, at present, is in Libya. The ‘rebels’ or the anti-Gaddafi troops are currently fighting for control of Zawiya, a town 30 miles from Tripoli, which supplies it with oil and gas. I cannot help feeling that if they are successful in capturing this town and therefore controlling the supplies to the capital, it would not take too long before Gaddhafi accepts his defeat and gves up, clears off or commits suicide.
Not directly connected with the Middle East problems, but certainly influenced by them, the world’s stock markets are rising and falling daily like a dolphin or probably more truthfully tumbling with small corrections up and on the whole they are significantly lower than they were two or three weeks ago. As in the past we will just have to ride it out. We really had no option.. The main reason for this sudden loss of confidence in the stock market being the lack of growth, first of all in America, now in France and Germany were these economies are struggling to show any growth at all. As I have said previously, without being a Jonah, I believe the world is still very much on the edge of a precipice of a deep global depression. Pray God I am wrong.
The riots from which we have suffered in this country last week are now completely over and the restitution is being dished out by the British courts. The sentences are far harsher than previously no doubt to fire a warning shot across the bows of other young thugs who are considering ‘the fun’ of rioting. My own view is that in order to correct, what our Prime Minister Cameron calls, the ‘broken society’ is to get stuck in for the long haul and start with the generation of children at primary school. Many of the teenagers today come from such dysfunctional families that the odds of bringing them round to be courteous, polite and considerate to other people, sadly, I believe to be rather remote. It is also very sad when I hear some of these young people saying they have ‘nufimk to do’.
Clearly they have wasted their educational opportunities by probably bunking off from school every other day and in all probability find reading and writing a difficulty. I hate to say it and no young person likes to hear people of my age saying it, but, in all honesty, we used to amuse ourselves. Maybe kicking a ball about, playing a bit of cricket, cycling (I was a member of CTC. the cycling tourist club), I was a Scout and spent the odd weekends away, I also read a great deal, I played water polo (not very well) and all this in my middle teams. Most of these activities which cost little or nothing could still be done by today’s youth but frankly gang warfare and rioting is more fun and for that reason I say we are in for the long haul starting off with today’s toddlers and teaching them discipline and respect for others and going from there – or put more succinctly, ‘do as you would be done by’
I hate to finish such a happy day on a sour note but having received a copy of this American journalists view of Britain, it is too apposite not to reproduce it. It is rather long but is so much to the point that it is well worthwhile reading to the end.
ANN COULTER
THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE BRITISH WELFARE SYSTEM
August 10, 2011
Those of you following the barbaric rioting in Britain will not have failed to notice that a sizable proportion of the thugs are white, something not often seen in this country.
Not only that, but in a triumph of feminism, a lot of them are girls. Even the “disabled” (according to the British benefits system) seem tohave miraculously overcome their infirmities to dash out and steal a few TVs.
Congratulations, Britain! You’ve barbarized your citizenry, without egard to race, gender or physical handicap!
With a welfare system far more advanced than the United States, the British have achieved the remarkable result of turning entire communities of ancestral British people into tattooed, drunken brutes.
I guess we now have the proof of what conservatives have been saying since forever: Looting is a result of liberal welfare policies. And Britain is in the end stages of the welfare state.
In 2008, a 9-year-old British girl, Shannon Matthews, disappeared on her way home from a school trip. The media leapt on the case – only to discover that Shannon was one of seven children her mother, Karen, had produced with five different men.
The first of these serial sperm-donors explained: “Karen just goes from one bloke to the next, uses them to have a kid, grabs all the child benefits and moves on.”
Poor little Shannon eventually turned up at the home of one of her many step-uncles — whose ex-wife, by the way, was the mother of six children with three different fathers.
(Is Father’s Day celebrated in England? If so, how?)
The Daily Mail (London) traced the family’s proud Anglo ancestry of stable families back hundreds of years. The Nazi war machine couldn’t break the British, but the modern welfare state has.
A year earlier, in 2007, another product of the new order, Fiona MacKeown, took seven of her eight children (by five different fathers) and her then-boyfriend, on a drug-fueled, six-month vacation to the Indian island of Goa. The trip was paid for — like everything else inher life — with government benefits.
(When was the last time you had a free, six-month vacation? I’m drawing a blank, too.)
While in Goa, Fiona took her entourage on a side-trip, leaving her 15-year-old daughter, Scarlett Keeling, in the capable hands of a 25-year-old local whom Scarlett had begun sleeping with, perhaps
hoping to get a head-start on her own government benefits. A few weeks later, Scarlett turned up dead, full of drugs, raped and murdered.
Scarlett’s estranged stepfather later drank himself to death, while her brother Silas announced on his social networking page: “My name is Si, n I spend most my life either out wit mates get drunk or at
partys, playing rugby or going to da beach (pretty s**t really).”
It’s a wonder that someone like Silas, who has never worked, and belongs to a family in which no one has ever worked, can afford a cellphone for social networking. No, actually, it’s not.
Britain has a far more redistributive welfare system than France, which is why France’s crime problem is mostly a matter of Muslim immigrants, not French nationals. Meanwhile, England’s welfare state
is fast returning the native population to its violent 18th-century highwaymen roots.
Needless to say, Britain leads Europe in the proportion of single mothers and, as a consequence, also leads or co-leads the European Union in violent crime, alcohol and drug abuse, obesity and sexually
transmitted diseases.
But liberal elites here and in Britain will blame anything but the welfare state they adore. They drone on about the strict British class system or the lack of jobs or the nation’s history of racism.
None of that explains the sad lives of young Shannon Matthews and Scarlett Keeling, with their long English ancestry and perfect Anglo features.
Democrats (roughly equivalent, I understand, to our Liberal PartyLiberal Party) would be delighted if violent mobs like those in Britain arose here — perhaps in Wisconsin! That would allow them to introduce yet more government programs staffed by unionized public employees, as happened after the 1992 L.A. riots and the 1960s race riots, following the recommendations of the Kerner Commission.
MSNBC might even do the unthinkable and offer Al Sharpton his own TV show. (Excuse me someone’s trying to get my attention … WHAT?)
Inciting violent mobs is the essence of the left’s agenda: Promote class warfare, illegitimate children and an utterly debased citizenry.
Like the British riot girls interviewed by the BBC, the Democrats tell us “all of this happened because of the rich people.”
We’re beginning to see the final result of that idea in Britain. The welfare state creates a society of beasts. Meanwhile, non-judgmental elites don’t dare condemn the animals their programs have created.
Rioters in England are burning century-old family businesses to the ground, stealing from injured children lying on the sidewalks and forcing Britons to strip to their underwear on the street.
I keep reading that it’s because they don’t have jobs — which they’re obviously anxious to hold. Or someone called them a “kaffir.” Or their social services have been reduced. Or their Blackberries made them do t. Or they disapprove of a referee’s call in a Manchester United game.
A few well-placed rifle rounds, and the rioting would end in an instant. A more sustained attack on the rampaging mob might save England from itself, finally removing shaved-head, drunken parasites
from the benefits rolls that Britain can’t find the will to abolish on moral or utilitarian grounds. We can be sure there’s no danger of killing off the next Winston Churchill or Edmund Burke in these crowds.
But like Louis XVI, British authorities are paralyzed by their indifference to their own civilization. A half-century of berating themselves for the crime of being British has left them morally
defenseless. They see nothing about England worth saving, certainly not worth fighting for — which is fortunate since most of their cops don’t have guns.
This is how civilizations die. It can happen overnight, as it did in Revolutionary France. If Britain of 1939 were composed of the current British population, the entirety of Europe would today be doing the”Heil Hitler” salute and singing the “Horst Wessel Song.”
COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER
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Oh dear, I’m no better than the looters, reproducing this article without the author’s permission. However, it is set at the site to what I’ve been saying that I could not resist it and must therefore face the consequences. My readers might have to club together to bail me out!
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4 Comments
Rather belatedly but sincere nevertheless: Happy Birthday Prof.
how very kind of you Christine. I do hope you have sufficient time to read the extracts from the American journalists on 18th and 19th of August entries. I should be interested in your response. Best wishes
Mark
I have to confess to not having much time for Ann Coulter, her politics and agressive style BUT I thought the article you posted here was quite thought provoking and there was indeed a few grains of truth in it. Having been out of UK for the past 25 years I too have seen, read, talked to relatives and been back to see for myself the erosion of a good percentage of the population of the UK and sadly with the way the educational system is depriving the less fortunate of a good post-school education by removing the financial support needed, this situation can only get far worse in the coming times. It is going to be a long way back!!
dear Christine
I am so glad that at least one of my readers to trouble to read through this article (and hopefully the one on the 19th) as you say there are some grains of truth in it I must say that I’m very largely agree with what she says and it is about time that our politicians faced up to this stark truth. In any event, my path is in reproducing these two articles was merely to provoke thought and discussion and it seems that that is what I have done.
Best wishes
Markay