A Lost Age Of Innocence

TV and Radio companies apparently are ideal places for sex offenders to hide in plain sight ....

 

A BBC Picture - In A More Innocent Age

 

..... at least that seems to be the lesson we are slowly learning.

World Gone Nuts

If there was anything that drives me more nuts than anything else in the crazy world we now live in, then its the collapse of common sense in favour of a litigious blame someone else (anyone else) culture. This of course has been driven by ambulance chasing legal weasels, for whom there is always someone to sue (even with no case), because the hardship of litigation may make the innocent pay up, and in any case, with 'no win, no fee' lawyers, there's hardly any cost to making a claim these days.

It's an illness that's infected us as fully as the US, with adverts on UK TV offering no fee claims on every night. I would close 75% of the law courses in the UK to stop these cockroaches breeding in numbers .....

All this has led to ridiculous disclaimers and warnings everywhere you look, as personal responsibility is diminished in public life ..... Here's an example from my local pub .....

A Packet Of Peanuts - Salted

A simple packet of salted peanuts .... it even comes with a picture of the expected contents.

Two Wongs Still Make A Wong

My favourite story for a long time has just come along .....

 

Beijing Police With Advice For The Ladies

.... I say 'favourite' for a number of reasons, but principally because it allowed me to pun horrendously in the post title. Still the story has some merits, as it concerns a part of the world where political correctness has yet to get even a fingernail, and as its a very ancient culture, it may never do so.

A Forgotten Man

Had you ever heard of Sean Lester? No, well neither had I.

In fact like most people, I have hardly heard of the ‘League of Nations’, the precursor to the modern 'United Nations'. It was set up after World War I in 1919 and was largely the dream of the US President Woodrow Wilson, but was probably doomed from the start (it had no armed forces, or commitment from ‘the great powers’ to back its resolutions with armed force) – its maximum membership was just 58 member nations.

By the 1930’s, the Axis powers; Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain and others, started leaving and the organization collapsed as the world geared up for WWII.

So who was Sean Lester? Well amongst other things, he was the last Secretary General of the League of Nations, and probably the last person to tell Adolf Hitler ‘No’  in Germany, while he was 'High Commissioner' in the Baltic port of Danzig (which the Germans wanted back under German control) … he opposed Nazi attempts to limit freedom of speech, and he criticised moves by Hitler to silence his political opponents. He was eventually removed from his post as 'High Commissioner' by a combination of events and the Nazis, and spent the war years in Geneva, where he was installed as the last Secretary-General of the League of Nations, before the United Nations was created in 1945.

Sean Lester Last Secretary General League of Nations

Western history never completely forgets these figures, and there are moves afoot to commemorate this Ulsterman’s life with a street name or plaque, here and there ….

Lost Generation

The political cowardice of earlier UK governments, particularly that of Tony Blair, who had to make the decision in the mid 1990's, but kicked the can down the road, in not committing the UK to a generation of Nuclear power station renewal, has not only cost us our national pride - we have had to ask the French with Chinese backing, to build the next one, after all our world expertise was lost, with a generation of non building .....

UKs Fuel and Power Sources

 
but its also lead to the almost certain fact that the UK could be facing power blackouts in any bad winter in the next decade or so.