Cyclists, Speed Cameras, Parenthood and The England Cricket Team.

Diversity (not the dance troupe) in the blog today.

Driving down what we of a certain age would call a 'B' Road to my house today, I was yet again confronted by a group of cyclists 3 abreast across the road, freewheeling, chatting and having no intention of falling into single file and letting me past. This happens every day of every week to me unless it happens to snow! I reluctantly, begrudgingly and increasingly angrily admit they have a right to be on the road, even allowing for the fact that they do not pay any form of road tax or levy for it's use. However they should be subject to the rules of the road and ride in a considerate manner not deliberately impede car drivers' progress or create potentially dangerous situations for other road users. The worst part of it is that it is the so called organised clubs that are the worst perpetrators, in my neighbourhood the lycra clad fools causing me the most grief belong to the Solihull Cycling Club. Surely the purpose of an organised club would be to teach it's members to treat other road users with respect as much as every cyclist I have ever listened to demands respect from us. My judicial use of the horn to remind the riders that it was not actually a Velodrome but a public highway was met with derision and a number of hand signals that I do not believe are used in the Highway Code. #epicfail as I passed them eventually and stopped a few hundred yards further down the road and awaited their arrival, they all stopped shouted obscenities from a distance, turned round and fled in the other direction! I don't need tight Lycra to tell me that they have obviously got no bollocks!!

Speed cameras have failed to cut accidents on many roads and have actually led to a rise in casualties on some routes, official figures show today. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/8719263/Speed-cameras-fail-to-cut-accidents.html

Who knew??? Motorists have been persecuted for years by governments, councils and law 'enforcers' as useful cash cows. The arguments have raged for years so there is no point gloating over the fact that we have been proved right, however the principle of speed cameras was always sound, it was just the strategic implementation that was fatally flawed. I would welcome speed cameras outside my daughters' (2 of them so the apostrophe is correct) school for instance, preferably with a 20 mph speed limit, but no, mysteriously the majority of cameras around here are on straight stretches of dual carriageway notable by their absence of crossing pedestrians or sharp corners. Maybe to not completely waste the investment they could move the cameras to areas where speed prevention is paramount. #neverhappen #wishfulthinking

Took my girls back to their mother's house today after a morning of making wholemeal pancakes with strawberries and blazing rows about the pointlessness of computer games. When a 9 and 11 year old are reduced to tears because they cannot finish a certain level on a Nancy Drew game, I begin to wonder about the standard of my parenting. My first reaction has been to ban every game that causes such a reaction until they learn that it is not real and that it means nothing. However on reflection it obviously does, I have had tears of frustration with them in sports and seen that as a positive thing as long as they persevered and eventually overcame (which they mainly do) so how is an animated mystery any different? I constantly question my skills as a parent and worry that I have got it all wrong, then I'm rewarded with 2 girls finishing top of their classes academically, achieving in sports, glowing school reports, healthy, gifted, popular and generally happy. I sometimes wonder who is teaching who here. #smartkids #roundtheirlittlefingers

To finish, heartfelt congratulations to the England Cricket team for mashing India 4-0 and rising to the top of the world rankings by hard work, determination, talent and team spirit. Only in this country would we be the first to criticise and say that the opposition weren't good enough, home advantage etc..etc..I have felt the pain of being an England supporterthroughout the West Indies dominance and more recently Australia, no one questioned the quality of their opposition, just revelled in the quality of their performance. Well done Team England, keep it going.

 

Conspiracies and New World Orders

Unashamedly the bulk of today's blog encompasses a number of exchanges I shared on Facebook with a good friend of mine today. Some would call him a conspiracy theorist, he has strong beliefs regarding 9/11, The New World Order, chemtrails, flouride in the water supply, blue beam, HAARP, MMR jabs, vaccinations and pretty much any of the issues that are debated at length on the internet and increasingly on lightweight investigative TV shows where the surface is barely scratched. (Whatever happened to investigative journalism?)

He is intelligent, well researched, opinionated, articulate and willing to listen to counter arguments or opinions, so why are so many people like this dismissed as crackpots?

I am in partial agreement with some of these ideas, admittedly not to the same extent as him, but enough for us to understand each other and have a balanced debate. However there are some people who automatically attach every single bad event in the world to some mythical 'THEY' that control every single action, this is where their credibility takes a bashing and causes issues for intelligent 'questioners' as I like to call them.


There is a great deal of compelling evidence that points to an overall ruling class/club that manipulates politics and economic situations for overall gain, call them elitists, the new world order, Rothschild, Freemasons etc etc..Profiteering from conflict and unrest is nothing new, just maybe the scale and intricacy of the manipulation.

I don't believe in the whole 9/11 conspiracy but would certainly agree that many behaviours of politicians and intelligence services leading upto and following the tragic events show that not everything was done to comprehensively prevent the attacks and provided a convenient platform for the invasions that followed.

Also as with all these theories and conjectures it is simply not possible to cover up every one of these so called new world order activities or conspiracies, it is human nature to share a secret and you cannot perpetuate such a massive pulling of wool over the eyes without scores of casualties amongst whistleblowers. 

This all makes a great novel but these arguments will not hold water until people get a balance and produce a rational and balanced point of view regarding some of these undoubted truths that are lost in the mire of misinformation and conjecture. 


I welcome the questioners and the debates they provoke, I firmly believe that the more we ask and challenge the better our society will be, but extremism has no part in this and people like my friend are the victims of extremists who believe in every theory and refuse to even listen to a counter argument or a logical explanation. This is when every questioner gets labelled a conspiracy theorist, crackpot or UFO chaser.


Don't dismiss everything you hear by questioners as crap or become a sheep that takes everything corporate journalism throws at you as right, somewhere in the middle is the truth.