Be Back Soon

Hey all

I'm away for a week, doing stuff and things and won't have access to a computer. So no blog this week.

See you after the break

The Rules of Gentlemanly Conduct

We now know that John Terry is not a racist after he was acquitted of racial abuse charges, by Westminster Crown Court yesterday. However, this doesn’t change the fact that he may well have used offensive language, nor does it alter the fact that such language now seems to be accepted as a normal part of the world of football. 

If you ask most football commentators and experts they will tell you that what is known as “industrial language,” that is a constant and regular stream of expletives, is a recognised part of the culture of professional football. If you were to record what players say to each other during a match, and not just afterwards, you would be shocked by the things that you would hear. Yet this is apparently considered not at all odd or unusual. It was only when the issue of another’s players race was bought up that things got awkward for Mr Terry.

But should this be the case?

Footballers are in the public eye. They have whole sections of the news media devoted to them each and every day. Many thousands of people look up to them as heroes and idols. Children and young people look to them as examples of how to live their lives. If this is the case surely they should not only manage their personal lives better – though that is a grumble for another day – but should also be careful to moderate their language, both on and off the field?

However this failure to engage in what might be called “gentlemanly conduct” is not only a failure of the world of football, but also of politicians at Westminster, another group of people who should know better and act more appropriately. I’m not just talking about MPs getting drunk and attempting to head-butt each other – though one MP tried this recently– but the behaviour of certain senior politicians when things don’t go their way.

Supposedly after the Tory backbench rebellion over Lords’ reform this week, the Prime Minister caught up with Jesse Norman, the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire and the rebels’ ringleader, in the division lobby and according to eye witnesses, things got rather heated, with the PM accusing Mr Norman of acting dishonourably. Now if you ask me, an MP who has voted according to his principles and conscience and party loyalty be dammed has acted much more honourably than an MP who has simply blindly toed the party line.  It was then suggested by Tory whips that it might be better for Mr Norman to leave the Parliamentary estate. Though the reasons why differ, the general suggestion is that other Tory MPs might be out to get him and he would do better to stay out of their way until they had managed to calm down.

The media and the electorate don’t seem to have much respect for politicians at the moment, and behaviour like this is one of the reasons why. Because MPs have been entrusted by the electorate with the serious responsibility of managing the affairs of state we hold them to a much higher standard of conduct than ordinary members of the public and we expect them to hold themselves to this standard as well. Instead we find them acting like over excited school boys.

If footballers and politicians want our respect and admiration then they must earn it, by acting in an appropriate fashion, rather than simply assuming it will come automatically with their jobs.

What more is there to be said?

A quote by one of the attendees at Mitt Romney’s Hampton’s fundraiser set Twitter…well a twitter yesterday. According to the Los Angeles Times, the unnamed female donor said that,

“I don't think the common person is getting it….Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.  We've got the message, but my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the  right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't understand how it works, they don't understand how the systems work, they don't understand the impact."

This quote obviously says a lot about the woman in question. But it also says an awful lot about the type of people that the Romney campaign is mining for support and who they hope will help sweep him to victory come November. So let’s take the quote apart and see exactly what it says about Romney’s support network.

1: “I don't think the common person is getting it.”

The use of the word common says a lot on its own. Common is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning – among many other things – “without special rank or position,” something that this woman clearly considers herself to have.

It’s also telling that other than her child in college, the “common people” she mentions include her baby sitter and nail lady – or manicurist – people who provide her with a service. She is clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel for non-millionaires that she knows. I’m surprised that guy who cleans her pool doesn’t get a mention.

Of course this isn’t really surprising as she was on her way to Romney’s Hamptons’ Fundraiser. The price of admission to some of his recent events has been between $25,000 and $75,000. This is clearly not an event for “common” people.

2: “I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated”

The fact that in her mind your level of income equals your level of education is a sign that this woman is completely disconnected from regular life and not exactly firing on all cylinders. It is quite possible to be a well-educated person from a good background and not earn enough money to require a wheelbarrow to take it home.

Yale for an example – that’s an Ivy League University by the way – undoubtedly offers one of the best educations in the United States. If you graduate from there you are going to be extremely well educated. But if you graduate with, say, a degree in creative writing, or journalism, or music do you think you’re going to be earning six figures right off the bat? Of course you’re not.

Furthermore, someone attending somewhere other than a highly prestigious college is also capable of getting an exemplary education yet won’t be snapped up by a Fortune 500 company. Even if someone does not attend college, that does not stop them reading books and watching television and educating themselves to some degree. Linking the level of your income to the level of your education is ridiculous. Of course there is a connection between the two, but only a very loose one.

3: “They don't understand the impact."

This is – to my mind – her most ridiculous statement. She implies that the man on the street neither understands why Obama is a bad president who is hurting Americans, nor why Romney would do a much better job. This is of course complete bull. Unless of course the man on the street gets his information from Fox News.

He knows that Obama has attempted to rebuild the economy, helped the motor business start operating at a profit again, increased jobs, provided funding to renewable energy projects, secured equal pay for women, overhauled the healthcare system, is hoping to extend tax cuts to everyone, especially middle and low income families, and most importantly has overseen the death of Osama Bin Laden, despite cuts made to the military. All this in the face of opposition from a hostile Republican Congress.

He also knows that if Romney were to become President he would scrap Obamacare, cut Medicare, cut Social Security, cut Welfare and access to higher education, work to limit a woman’s access to contraception and abortions, balloon the size of the military’s budget and reintroduce the Bush tax cuts which would raise the amount of tax paid by the middle classes while slashing the amount paid by the top one percent.

If the man on the street chooses to vote for Romney over Obama, it’s not because he doesn’t understand the impact. He understands it very well as it is more likely to affect him than the woman who gave this quote. He understands the impact and honestly believes Romney is a better choice than Obama.

People on a  low income are not stupid. They know what is going on.

Dissecting this quote we can see that the Romney campaign has one main mission once the convention in Tampa has passed in August. He needs to get on the road and meet with normal people. Hobnobbing with the Hamptons’ set is fine as a fundraising strategy, but if he thinks it’s a decent way of ensuring his election, then he is sorely mistaken.

Romney and the Romney campaign are regularly painted as being out of touch with the needs of everyday Americans. Based on this quote, and the locations of his recent parties, this is a claim that seems very hard to deny.

The World's Longest Game of Hide and Seek

The scientific community – and other interested people besides – received some good news this week, when it was revealed that, after years of crashing particles together and trying to make it look like work, scientists working for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN) revealed that they may have found the elusive Higgs-Boson Particle. The so called God Particle.

Scientists at CERN were quick to point out that they are not yet 100% sure they have actually found it. They have found something that very much resembles the elusive particle, but as of yet they can’t be sure and still have some more work to do. But for most people that is enough. And enough to get scientists very excited indeed.

The Higgs-Boson has been the Holy Grail of Particle Physics for several decades, ever since Peter Higgs proposed its possible existence back in 1964. The search for the Higgs-Boson was one of the major reasons behind the construction of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, that thing which a lot of people were convinced would destroy the world.  The Higgs-Boson is important because it explains why other major particles in the so called ‘Standard Model’ of particle physics, - such as photons and quarks – have mass. It is the particle behind the particles. It is the particle that explains other particles. That is why it has been given the nickname the ‘God Particle.’

Despite not being a scientist I was excited by this news as well. Not only because I think the concept of the Higgs-Boson and being able to explain why the physical universe works the way it does is interesting, but because of what the search for the Higgs-Boson represented.

Firstly, in a multiply divided world the creation of the Large Hadron Collider was a collaborative effort. Just building it involved over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries working together for over a decade. Then once it was completed the scientists who manned it came from all over Europe. No one nation- save perhaps Switzerland which it sits under – can claim superiority where the Large Hadron Collider is concerned. It doesn’t belong to anyone. It is a place for people to come together and work together. It is where the best of the best from the scientific community come to work.

Secondly, people wanted to find the ‘God Particle’ simply because they wanted to know if it was there. All that comes from finding it is recognition. It doesn’t have a material use; it can’t be used to make money or turned into a weapon. All it does is explain why our world works the way it does.

In a world, and at a time, when it can increasingly feel like all people care about is making money, and the economic or industrial use of a new invention or discovery, when the news is filled with death, dishonesty and unhappiness, the concept of people coming together to search for something, simply for the sake of knowledge, so they can once and for all “yes this thing exists” is a little….comforting.

As I said above, they still have to do some work to prove that what they have found is definitely the Higgs-Boson, but for the moment they think they have found it. For the moment, that’s good enough for me.

This Sceptred Isle

It appears that I owe the BBC an apology. Last week I called them out for filling airtime with sport and treating it as if it is the only thing that matters, rather than publicising the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Well I’m sorry. This week BBC 2 begins airing the Hollow Crown. It seems they do care about more than sport after all.

The Hollow Crown is a series adapting four of Shakespeare’s Historical plays (Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II and Henry V). When I say adaptations I mean proper period adaptations. On top of that they star some of the best actors – Shakespearean or otherwise – in the country, including Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddleston, Ben Whishaw and Patrick Stewart.

Say what you like about the BBC, in-between all of the sport, soaps and reality television stuff they do still produce good quality television and entertainment, things that people wish to savour, and watch again and again after their initial airing. It’s what keeps the BBC shops in operation. But the fact they’ve chosen to do Shakespeare is no mistake.

One of the advantages of having the Olympics come to London is it gives us a chance to showcase what makes us great; what makes us unique.  Not just our sport, but our history, our art, the very country itself – the opening ceremony will do that at least – and, yes, our literature. And if the Cultural Olympiad is attempting to showcase those things, as it is supposed to, than the BBC could not have picked anything better to run alongside it than a series of plays by Shakespeare.

Yes he isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and yes at times his plays can seem boring, tedious, disconnected from everyday life – thanks every English lesson ever – but if you can dig through that you’ll find a gem. People forget how many every day phrases Shakespeare came up with. Sayings that we have always assumed have just existed, he plucked out of the ether, “You can’t have too much of a good thing,” “If music be the food of love play on,” and “All the world’s a stage” to name but a few. It takes a special kind of talent to be able to do that, to string words together as he did, to create something new.

What’s more he understood England. What it was, what it is and what it could be. And he understood people. How to make them laugh, how to make them cry. He was without a doubt one of the greatest writers we’ve ever had. Perhaps the only one worthy of the title ‘The Bard.’ Hopefully these new adaptations will help a new generation understand that too.

 This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,--
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.