Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
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Friday, June 26, 2009
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Here and there I have scattered blog posts. Everything in the garden is lovely - Obamalove from Matt Frei at the BBC. The Historian-President - Obamalove from Ben Macintyre at the Times. Yes, the amount of Obama-worship around has been annoying me. Saturday, May 23, 2009
Bang! I had a burst of blogging activity here and there:
Furthermore I feel posterity demands that I record my reaction to the new Star Trek movie: [Spoiler coming up!] Monday, March 30, 2009
"We had to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety" Reported by Lucy Bannerman in today's Times: Fire kills child, 3, and parents as police prevent neighbours from trying to rescue themIn a previous post about loss of nerve in our public services I said, referring to instances in which firemen and policemen had "broken procedure" to save life, that despite their personal courage "institutional gutlessness surrounded them, was embarrassed by them, and will kill off their like eventually. Poisoned soil does not long give forth good fruit." Seems like the poison has worked its way well in. Note: I do not know whether the Colly family could have been saved had the attempt been made while Mrs Colly was still alive to scream for someone to save her kids. A spokeswoman for the South Yorkshire Police said, “The senior officer in charge is confident we handled this incident as professionally as possible. In a situation like that you could end up with more deceased bodies than you had in the first place.” One of the lesser known sights of London is the Watts Memorial in Postman's Park. I gather it featured in the film Closer, starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law. No, I am not being funny, suddenly veering off into a travelogue in the middle of a post about the deaths of a family. I wish there were something to laugh about. The memorial was set up by a Victorian artist, George Frederick Watts, to commemorate those who died saving others. It consists of hand made plaques each bearing the name of a person who sacrificed his or her life and a brief citation. Very quaint they are, with their crowded lettering with the extra-large initial capitals and little swirly plant motifs and curlicues in the corners. Even the names are quaint, laboriously given in full. Police Constables Percy Edwin Cook, Edward George Brown Greenoff, Harold Frank Ricketts and George Stephen Funnell are among them. I wonder what PC Percy Edwin Cook, for instance, who perished when he "Voluntarily descended high tension chamber at Kensington to rescue two workmen overcome by poisonous gas" would have made of his successors in the South Yorkshire force. Perhaps the police spokeswoman was right. Perhaps if health and safety had been less comprehensively assured and the Colly incident handled rather less professionally, we would have ended up with more than the three "deceased bodies" - no, make that four, when you count the child expected to be born in two weeks - that we did end up with. Still, more than four dead bodies is quite a lot and quite unlikely, I cannot help thinking. And I also cannot help thinking that there is more to this than just counting the dead under different scenarios. If the critically injured five year old girl does survive she will be burdened by more than just the fact that her family died. She will eventually have to know that those who might have answered her mother's last desperate appeal were held back on grounds of "health and safety." Not theirs, obviously. UPDATE: Other accounts give the spelling of the family name as "Colley". They confirm that the police actively prevented rescue attempts. FURTHER UPDATE: There is a thoughtful discussion in the comments regarding several moral and practical questions, and whether the press accounts are to be trusted. Quite possibly not. Yet I must add that if the South Yorkshire police are trying to convince me that they are not abdicating responsibility in order to follow rote "health and safety" procedure (as commenter "sjv" put it), then best not claim, as they appeared to in the Mail report linked to in the word "other", that the reason they will not tell us exactly how long elapsed between the arrival of the police and the arrival of the firemen is "'data protection' rules." (Cross-posted to Samizdata.) Friday, January 23, 2009
Spliced. TonyN of "Harmless Sky" caught the BBC splicing and rejoining separate parts of President Obama's speech in order to make it seem to take a stronger line on global warming than it did. This B-BBC post discusses what happened. Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Forgot to say that I had a B-BBC post up yesterday, too. I said the BBC was being unfair to President Obama. "Choose freedom?" That would be nice. I have written a post for Samizdata about those anti-smoking slogans on cigarette packets and about fake charities such as Action on Smoking and Health. Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Doubts not raised. I have a post at Biased BBC comparing the BBC's willingness to dig up dirt on two individuals who found sudden fame, namely Joe the Plumber and Dr Mads Gilbert. I also did a post about Rory Bremner misreprenting something said by George W Bush, not that that exactly qualifies as news. |