Year: 2010

Political leanings!

A rather funny interpretation of political leanings as in the UK.

[Sent to me by John Lewis]

I asked my friend’s little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up.

She said she wanted to be Prime Minister some day.

Both her parents – staunch Labour supporters – were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were Prime Minister what would be the first thing you would do?’

She replied, ‘I would give food and houses to all the homeless people.’

Her parents beamed and said, ‘Welcome to the Labour Party!’

‘Wow!  What a worthy goal’  I told her.

I continued, ‘But you don’t have to wait until you are Prime Minister to do that. You can come over to my house, mow the lawn, pull the weeds, sweep my drive and I’ll pay you £25.  Then I can take you over to the shop where the homeless man sits outside, and you can give him the £25 to use towards food.’

She thought over this proposition for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘Why doesn’t the homeless man come over and do the work and you can just pay him the £25?’

I smiled and said, ‘Welcome to the Conservative Party.’

Her parents were dumbstruck.

The Madoff Link?

Anyone see any connection?

From the UK Newspaper The Independent:

Bernie Madoff was able to con thousands of extra investors by using a British bank which “looked the other way” and ignored repeated warnings that he was engaged in a sophisticated fraud, according to the man charged with recovering their losses.

HSBC and its staff were accused of receiving “kickbacks for looking the otherway while legitimising BLMIS (Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities) through their name and brand, making it attractive to investors”.

SNIP

“Had HSBC and the defendants reacted appropriately to such warnings and other obvious badges of fraud … the Madoff Ponzi scheme would have collapsed years, billions of dollars, and countless victims sooner,” said Mr Picard. “The defendants were wilfully and deliberately blind to the fraud, even after learning about numerous red flags surrounding Madoff.”

Mr Picard wants to recover the $9bn from HSBC and a network of international funds that acted as “feeders”, enticing investors to place money with Madoff’s investment company. It makes the bank the biggest defendant so far, eclipsing lawsuits already filed against the Swiss bank UBS and America’s JP Morgan. Other defendants named in the HSBC suit include the Italian bank UniCredit and Austria’s Bank Medici.

The accusations levelled against HSBC will come as a huge embarrassment to a company which has become increasingly controversial, having threatened to quit London for Hong Kong should the Government seek to impose too heavy a levy against banks or attempt to break it up after the Independent Commission on Banking, set up by the Chancellor, reports next year.

However, suits against more European banks are likely to follow. The lawsuit, filed in the US Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, is the latest move by Mr Picard who has filed more than 100 lawsuits over the last few days in a bid to recover funds from those institutions which he claims enabled the fraud or those who received “false profits” by getting their money out of the scheme before it collapsed. Mr Picard faces a deadline of Friday – the two-year anniversary of Madoff’s arrest – to file everything.

and from the BBC News:

Questions have been raised about police handling of tuition fee protests after a car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall was attacked.

A window was smashed and paint thrown at the vehicle as the royal couple made their way to a central London theatre.

Violent demonstrations spread after MPs voted to increase university tuition fees in England.

SNIP

The National Union of Students (NUS), meanwhile, said the violence had overshadowed the story it wanted to see in the newspapers.

Shane Chowen, vice-president of further education, said: “Not the headlines I wanted. I wanted to see the fact that the coalition government have just trebled tuition fees, sentencing a generation of students to record student debt.”

A more peaceful version from March 2010

By Paul Handover

Reflections on the Blog

To the many loyal readers of Learning from Dogs

This Blog has been running since July 15th 2009.  As of yesterday, there had been 777 posts – a nicely rounded number if nothing else.  It has been and continues to be a great way of communicating with the wider world.

However, both Jon and I are facing a number of challenges that make it very difficult to maintain a Post a day as it has been, more or less, since the start in 2009.

Jon is in the last few months of completing a Master’s degree with huge demands on his creative time.  I have volunteered to take a full US Pilot’s Licence and Instrument Rating with a great school down in Scottsdale, Phoenix, essentially building on my UK private flying experience that goes back to 1981.  This is going to keep me pretty well occupied until the end of February, 2011.  Both of us have private family lives that mustn’t be encroached upon (Jon does a much better job at this than me!).

On reflecting on this Blog, I have realised that the old salesman in me has tripped me up.  In the sense that we have developed a virtual relationship with many hundreds of readers that, I think, includes the expectation of a new Post every day.  But the reality is that any Blog that is written without a commercial angle, as with Learning from Dogs, should be more a reflection of what stimulates the Blog authors than trying to ‘serve’ a market – that’s the old salesman mistake!

So on the basis that this Blog is about integrity and why dogs set such a wonderful example of integrous behaviour, there is going to be a change of emphasis.

  • The Blog will continue to publish articles focussed close to the theme as expressed here.
  • We will continue to publish other pieces, including humorous items, if they are worth sharing (agreed a subjective measure).
  • We will continue to publish articles from Guest authors.
  • If pressures or circumstances conspire to mean that a Blog article isn’t published every single day, then that will be just the way it is – Jon and I are not going to beat ourselves up about it!

In the next few days, the Blog is going to pass the 100,000 readers mark since it started.  You have to realise how much that means to all the people who have written for Learning from Dogs.  Thank you!

Any ideas, comments or feedback to the above?  Please let us know.

Beauty of flight

There’s more to flying than many of us realise.

Thanks to Mike T who I have known for a few years now.  Mike is an air traffic controller as well as being a keen private pilot so if there is one person who can see through the telescope from both ends, it’s this man.

Anyway, GE Aviation are one of the big players in aviation.  Here’s a quote from the website that I am going to link you to in a moment.

GE Aviation designs engines, flightpaths, and advanced aircraft systems. And we wanted to share the intricate choreography of flying in all its glory.

 

Dancing in the air!

 

Here’s the video – just 1:48 long – it’s captivating.  This link takes you to the GE web page where there is much more of great interest other than the video.

If you only want to watch the video then, of course, there’s a copy on YouTube, as below.  Enjoy!

Thanks Mike.

By Paul Handover

More on silence, Concluding Part Three

From out of silence come all the answers we need.

To read the introduction to the first part, published yesterday, and watch video parts 1 to 4 go here.

To watch video parts 5 to 8 go here.

Part Nine

Part Ten

Part Eleven

Part Twelve

May you be in peace.

By Jon Lavin

 

 

More on silence, Part Two

From out of silence come all the answers we need.

To read the introduction to the first part, published yesterday, and watch video parts 1 to 4 go here.

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Parts nine to twelve tomorrow.

Enjoy.

By Jon Lavin

More on silence

From out of silence come all the answers we need.

On the 2nd November, I wrote an article speaking of the fabulous programme that had been aired on the BBC Two channel of BBC TV.  While it was available on the BBC’s iPlayer for viewers in the UK, this is not the perfect vehicle for all those who would have been interested in watching the three episodes.

Thus I am delighted to see that the full set of three programmes has been uploaded to YouTube.  They are broken down into twelve parts so to make the watching process more digestible, I propose to create three Posts with four segments in each Post.  The first four video segments are below.

But to recap what was written just over a month ago.

Like many others, I saw the first episode of the BBC2 television programme, The Big Silence. It clearly touched many people. (Useful links at the very end of this article.)

I wanted to throw a bit of light on this fascinating subject.  As the five people in the TV programme all readily admit, real silence is rather scary to them.

Why would something so wished for by so many – an hour doing absolutely nothing – be sufficiently scary that, in reality, the majority will do everything in their power to avoid silence?

We all have unhappy demons, OK some more than others.  We start to hear them when we gift our bodies and minds the grace of real silence.  I deliberately included the word ‘bodies’ even though silence is a ‘mind’ thing because resting our bodies with regular silence will also be very therapeutic for us.

What does coming to terms mean?  It means giving space to those inner thoughts so that one can clearly hear them.  You probably won’t make sense of them, indeed they may have a great unsettling effect, but they won’t hurt you.

Indeed, it’s when we try and stop those inner demons that they manifest themselves in many other ways: fidgeting, funny little unexplained aches, itchy skin, short-tempers, constant feeding of the ego, and on and on and on.

A good indication of what’s going on ‘under the bonnet’, so to speak, is to see if you can sit still in a relaxed manner for just 15 minutes.

Want more from that earlier Post?  Here’s the link.

Now to the first set of four YouTube videos:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Parts five to eight tomorrow.

Enjoy.

By Jon Lavin