Jose Mourinho

Chelsea football club manager Jose Mourinho has left the club. It's not a surprise. He was not allowed to run the club the way he wanted. He could not choose who to buy and, more importantly, who not to buy. Good luck to him. He was fun and a likeable and capable manager.

On the other hand this is superb news for fans of Chelsea F.C. (I don't support Chelsea). Mourinho is more suited to getting smaller clubs with average players to gel as a team and punch above their weight. His style of grinding results out didn't suit a team full of superstars. If I was Abramovich I would want to spend my money on a team of galacticos. A bit like Real Madrid from a few seasons back. They might not consistently win as much but they would be much better to watch. Which is what Chelsea are for Abramovich; entertainment.

The future for the club looks bright. They are in a far better position than in the bad old days of Ken Bates etc. And that is solely down to Abramovich and not Mourinho. It will be interesting to see who they get in to manage them and if they now go on to build a team around Ronaldinho and Shevchenko. Chelsea should be a team of galacticos. With Mourinho gone they might now go on to become this. Better to lose in style.

Migration Impacts Forum

Cambridgeshire police force has an £800'000 bill for translation services. It has to deal with 83'000 legal migrants (that are known about) and more than 100 languages. The immigrant population carry knives and drink drive back in their home countries so they think it is OK to do it here. This has put a massive burden on local public services.

This is just one example of the problems caused by the vast numbers of migrants into the UK. We are told that the UK economy is propped up by such workers. I'm pretty certain that the tax and council tax they pay (if they pay it at all in certain cases) does not cover the extra costs imposed upon schools and hospitals and the police.

What is the solution? A lot of the problems are caused by social differences. Like the Polish drivers in South Yorkshire who think it is OK to park on a roundabout while they retrieve something from the boot of their car. There are some incidents where the people bring problems from their own culture. Like the group of somalis who attacked an ambulance in Bristol in which a man dying of stab wounds was being treated. They dragged a paramedic out by her hair. This went unreported nationally for some reason (see my earlier posts about the liberal BBC). These violent somalis should have been deported to their civil war ravaged country. Maybe once they were back there they would realise how easy it would have been to stay in quiet peaceful Britain, a country where public services are in place to look after anyone. Even stab victims from within a violent immigrant population.

The government solution is to "set up the Migrant Impacts Forum so public services can help shape our tough points system which is introduced in around 150 days time." Yes, that's right. The government is going to invite everyone around for a chat. What about charging some of the factory owners and gang leaders to contribute to some of the costs their slave labour workforce imposes on society? How about immediate deportation (at their own expense, they managed to get here so they should be able to manage to get back) for anyone who commits a serious crime or a series of small ones? And before I get labelled as a Daily Mail reader I do have lots of friends who make up the law abiding immigrant population and who do contribute to society (in some cases more than I do).

Ritual

"I've been fascinated by the recent spate of books casting doubt on religious faith, as if religion meant believing six impossible things before breakfast. Well, religion is a matter of holding certain beliefs, but that's not the only or even the most important thing about it. Religion is also about ritual; and ritual is about taking certain beliefs and making them real in the way we behave."

Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks, Radio 4, Thought for the Day, 12 September 2007

In India a proposed shipping canal that will provide a continuous navigable sea route around the Indian peninsula has been held up. The canal may disturb or destroy a natural bridge formed by rocks and stones that Hindus beleieve was built by the god Ram and an army of monkeys. A report into the potential damage questioned the existence of the god in the first place and now the whole project has descended into uproar and argument. Presumably this bridge was built by a thousand monkeys with a thousand JCB diggers?

Electron beam heater

For the past two weeks I've been painstakingly rebuilding an electron beam heater. It's used to heat up materials that you can't pass current through. It works by dumping hot electrons onto the object. This all sounds very fancy but in reality it's just been fiddly. Like threading four needles at once in the dark. With an oncoming wind. Now it's fixed and you can see our material glowing hot in the chamber. We put the samples in the chamber so that we can pump all the air away and keep our samples clean. This particular chamber houses a scanning tunneling microscope, used to produce a topographic map of the electronic envelope surrounding the surface atoms - it takes a 'picture' of the atoms if you like. See my earlier post for an example of what it does.

Party Politics

"People became eclectic in their choice of stances on individual issues as they were in their choice of morning newspaper, building up a portfolio of attitudes which defied simple categorisation." All Must Have Prizes, Melanie Phillips.

Party politics is no longer valid. In the past the two parties had clear constituencies; Labour stood for the working class and fair treatment for all. The Conservatives were for supporting those who worked hard for themselves and prospered under their own steam. Labour and Conservatives, do-gooders and moralisers. The face of Britain has now changed beyond all recognition and the old battle lines have dissapeared. Voting Labour does not mean getting an ideologically consistent package of ideas in the way it used to.

What frustrates me is that I agree with party x on some issues and with party y on other issues but I do not agree with any party on all issues. How should I vote? Prioritise issues? We now have the ridiculous situation where most people don't vote and the ones that do vote get mostly ignored. Iraq stirred up a huge well of public opinion which was ignored. The party political system is the number one enemy of democracy in British politics today.

How can this be fixed? Get rid of political parties. For each issue (schools, prisons, police, NHS, immigration, economy etc) vote for one person every three years based on their proposed policies for each particular aspect of their department. If they fail, boot them out. A bit like the mayor of London. Local MPs could then be responsible for making sure the head of each major department did their job according to the especial preferences of their local constituency. Party and personality politics have destroyed democracy in this country and the electorate have switched off, bored and disillusioned by Thatcherite "tough medicine" and the squandered promise and spin of New Labour.

US foreign policy

"We have to fight the terrorists over there, so we don't have to fight them over here" George Bush

That's right. If you have to make an omelette it might as well be with Iraqi eggs. The defence of the success of the the troop surge in the US congress has pretty much said 'it's bad for Iraqis but it's the best thing for the safety of US citizens'. On the radio yesterday a former US diplomat was asked why they support Pakistani military dictator Colonel Musharraf. His answer was that the safety of US citizens was more important than the democratic rights of the Pakistani people. Cue the longest pause ever heard on the pm programme as presenter Eddie Mair was shocked into silence by the abrupt answer.

Radiohead LP7

For those of us who wait with baited breath for the next Radiohead album there is some good news. The latest album has been officially confirmed as completed, 4 years after the last one. Quite why it took so long will emerge in pre-release interviews, I assume. The new album probably won't be released until next year. Exactly when is anyones guess. The band have fulfilled their contract with EMI and they now have to negotiate with potential suitors to see which record company will give them the best all round deal. Then there is the marketing. Early next year is the earliest optimistic estimate for a release. Boo.

On a lighter note, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and the BBC composer in residence has done another film score. The last one, for the film Bodysong, was amazing. I'm really looking forward to seeing 'There will be blood'. Question is do I listen to the score first and then see how the film fits to it or do I watch the film first and have the music forever associated with the images on screen? It's a tough one, fit the music to my imagination or listen to it with the intended visual accompaniment?

Schools PFI

A programme to spend £45bn on rebuilding many schools took its first major step today. A new state of the art school has just opened in Bristol and it looks stunning. It came in on time and on budget. Other PFI initiatives across the public sector haven't worked so well. Like the classic case of the two hospitals in Coventry that needed refurbishing at a cost of £30 million pounds. To attract PFI money this plan was scrapped and a single new hospital was built at a final cost of £410 million pounds. The NHS trust is now in debt and owes the private sector partners loads of money. So Coventry swapped two hospitals for one that has less money and less beds and nurses and doctors for a total saving of -£380 million. By the same scale up of costs the schools rebuilding programme will cost £615bn, a debt that will have to be paid in future generations. Gordon Brown loves PFI because he doesn't have to raise taxes to get public service investment andhe passes the debt forward to a time when he won't be in power. Read Captive State by George Monbiot or talk to anyone who works for a privatised company or a joint venture or PFI initiative and share in the horror of what is to happen to our schools.

Darkness Falls

This weekend I watched a few episodes from season 1 of the X-Files for the first time since I was a young teenager. One episode caught my eye. Mulder and Scully go into the woods to investigate the dissappearance of some loggers. It turns out the loggers cut down some really old trees in which there were some dormant insects, a bit like small fireflies. These attacked the loggers, drained them of all usefull bodily fluids and cocooned them. Except not during daytime or under lights. It turns out that the bugs don't work under light. Cue tense scenes in the log cabin with the petrol for the generator running low. One thing struck me when I rewatched this episode; why didn't they just light a fire? When they made a run for it why not carry burning logs? They were in a forest full of wood, why not use some of it? I also listened to a 1992 interview with Douglas Adams this weekend. He said he didn't like the fact that the rational skeptic was always derided on the X-Files and always turned out to be wrong. I still love the show but some of the conpiracy episodes now look just dumb. The standalone episodes were great, movie quality, well written and filmed and these are the ones that will endure. Even Darkness Falls.