Democrat choice for 2008

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7230301.stm

While it’s a huge step forward for the Democrats to put forward a woman and a black candidate to run for President, is it wise to have both at the same time? One would hope that the Democrats have a great chance of getting the White House after eight years of Bush, and appealing to huge numbers of voters who are looking for real change (whatever that means), who may not have otherwise registered to vote or be swing voters.

It remains to be seen how galvanised is the conservative element though, who “don’t want a woman or a nigger running our country”, as one right wing website has on it’s front page? The only thing worse than another Republican President would be a Republican who beats either Obama or Clinton on the basis that Americans don’t want either an afro-caribbean or a woman as President.

Do people get more right wing the older they get?

Not so long ago, when presented with the political spectrum on a questionnaire, I put myself down as “very liberal”. I believe in the welfare state, and high taxes for high earners to pay for it. I am against capital punishment, nuclear weapons and military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am for foreign aid and military intervention for peacekeeping or “forcing peace”. I am hugely opposed to ID cards, stop and search, biometric data being kept on passports, CCTV. I am for gay rights, religious rights, freedom of speech and expression, essentially every component of the Human Rights Act. I am for free migration and immigration.

Well, sort of. Everything typed above came out pretty much automatically, without really thinking what my position is. It sounds like where I thought I have always been, but on second thought, it isn’t quite that easy. Is there a shift to the right as a person gets older?

I believe in the welfare state, but believe that high earners already pay huge amounts of tax, and we should be thankful for that, rather than calling them names for just being successful. I am for capital punishment, not for it’s role as a deterrent, which is speculative at best, but as a way of not wasting resources on those who don’t deserve to live.  I am for nuclear weapons if it acts as a deterrent to other states, despite the double standard. I am against military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan unless it directly makes the West a safer place to be, which it hasn’t so far. I am for military involvement in Iran if only to string up their president with those same KKK leaders he invited over last year in his “Holocaust Conference”. I believe that global warming is accelerated by man and that we have the ability to stop it, but still drive a 3.2L straight 6 without a second thought.

That is pretty scary, as some of those views put me at the right of the mainstream spectrum. Can those views still be held whilst still wanting small government that stays well out my life? Or, are notions of “left” and “right” so prescriptive that they really cannot be applied to any normal person?

Or, I am essentially a hypocrite.

What drink would you like with your burger, sir?

What do you say to someone when he tells you that, in a nutshell, you have no value to the industry you have worked in for the last six years, and have previously trained for in for another six?

That was the upshot of a meeting I had the other day. “You have to be realistic”,  “You have done really well but you are not going to be shortlisted for the next step up”.

Your tax money at work here. Over £250,000 spent on training, followed by six hard years of service, and there are no jobs for me or about 10,000 others.

Whoever you vote for at the next election, you can be pretty sure that it won’t make a blind bit of difference. Short term goals, no forward thinking.

Democracy in Pakistan?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7253280.stm

In a third world country were the concept of democracy isn’t really something that has affected many of the population, despite it’s intermittent presence since the country came into being, the elections today pose a number of interesting questions.

What is better for the nation: a democratically elected president that is likely to be as corrupt as he has allegedly been in the past, or a former military dictator who has actually effected some positive change to the country, but has jailed opposition party members and high court judges who oppose him, along with shutting down the free press and ISPs?

I guess we’ll find out.

Nurburgring trip 22-24 June

I had the weekend off, I was high as a kite (for several personal reasons!), the weather looked OK, the car was fully fueled, so I jumped in and drove to the Ring. I asked the usual suspects if they wanted to come, but they were largely being gay that weekend so I was all on my lonesome There were a few guys I knew from the VX220 forum going, so there were a few other friendly faces there.

I took the CTR (last gen) for no particular reason. My Z has done 3 trips there, but given the CTR only does essentially work and shopping trips, after 2 and a half years and 32,000 of largely stop start miles I thought I might blow some of the cobwebs off and stretch it’s legs a little. Even better, I don’t actually own the CTR
I had driven the CTR before for a few thousand miles but mainly in town, and a few motorway blasts. We hadn’t bonded yet.

To be honest, I haven’t driven a FWD car in anger before, and was looking forward to it hugely. I got the brake fluid changed the day before, along with slapping some redstuffs to the front. Tyres were new Toyo T1Rs all round, all with about 500 miles on them. Filled up with sweets, charged the TomTom, booked the Eurotunnel for Friday morning (bloody expensive as last minute) and was off. No local accomodation either, but I was on a mission!

The CTR has had some bad press about it’s NVH, and it’s steering feel. On a high speed cruise, it was noisy, and I am sure compared to the current generation of hot hatches it would be loud and a bit tinny, but I thought it was absolutely fine. The seats are magic – extremely comfortable, got out at fuel stops feeling fresh as a daisy, and to be honest, I found them more comfy than the Z, maybe because the side bolsters were very firm, whereas my Z ones have gone a little flat. It was also nice to have back seats to throw all your crap on to, and a glove compartment, and a proper boot.

It got to 120mph (where legal!) happily without feeling breathless, and accelerating to that speed is never ever EVER going to be something I get bored of. Hitting 8000rpm in third at 80mph ish and changing to 4th each and every time makes you feel like you’re in a BTCC car. The noise is just magic, the engine is schweeeet as a nut and the gearbox is snickety snick. Lovely. After 120mph it does fade a little – 140mph was what I managed to get to on a suitable bit of autobahn but 130 to 140 took a while. At 120 it was very stable, not light, not nervous, just happy.

Got to the ring Friday at 3pm ish, place was pretty empty as it had been raining. I waited a while and went out when there was a nice dry line. I did a slowish lap to remind myself how scary it was, pulled in after one to wait for it to dry some more. In the car park, I forgot momentarily how wide the turning circle is, and kerbed one of the alloys. The kerbage wasn’t a problem, it grazed the alloy where it already had a graze. The problem was the gouge in the sidewall of the hot T1R with a chunk of rubber missing. One lap, been at Nurburg for a total of 30 mins.

Aaaaarrrggghhh!

I reckon it would have been OK to limp home on them, or maybe even carry on using them for day to day stuff, but not something to be experimented with on track.

Tried a load of very helpful dealers locally, including VW (Golf GTI and R32 have 40 profile), Mazda (RX8 has Z sized tyres), Nissan (useless) and a couple of others – apparently 205/45/17 not a common size in Germany. The nearest Honda dealer was 40 miles away, and would have been my next stop the following day, but that would eat away into track time

I got a few addresses of places within 20 miles or so, and one had some Dunlop Sport Max in stock. I know nothing about them, but given I had just driven across Europe, any tyre would have done as long as it was new, and round. Incidentally, the TomTom 910 was just fantastic – I would have been sunk without it. The place I went to was in the middle of nowhere, but it got me there down the tiny little back roads without any fuss.

Tyres on, I eventually did 12 laps on Saturday and Sunday till 3pm. It absolutely pissed down every 3 or 4 hours, and it then took 2 hours before it dried (in baking sunshine), and then rained again. The CTR is a comfy place to kip in too, seat right back, feet up on the dash

Track wet enough?!

On track the CTR was great. It gripped and gripped, then understeered for ages, which I sometimes find comforting given my relative inexperience in track driving. Steering feel? Playstation. It goes where you put it, but there isn’t a huge amount of feedback. This isn’t a problem with normal road driving IMO, but when pushing on, I didn’t have as much an idea as I would have liked as to what the front wheels were doing. By Sunday afternoon (it was completely dry by then), I was getting more confident with the thing, the track was dry and the tyres hot. On a few bends I thought “hang on, have I just driven through oil or coolant” and the car was getting pretty slippery. It took a while to realise that I was driving through the understeer and occasionally lifting off, with some fun results that aren’t really suited to a track with no run off! Again the lack of feedback made it awkward for me to really explore this, and it wasn’t the right place to do it anyway.

As we all know, you have to rev the tits off the VTEC, and it’s fun doing it. Dropping below 5000rpm was largely a bad idea, and finding yourself in the wrong gear just was a pain – Ex-Muhle a particular example of getting it wrong.

Not finding accomodation locally was a bit of a bind – the hotel was a 40 minute drive away, but at least on Saturday and Sunday mornings I arrived at the ring with both a nice warm engine and warm tyres, ready to go. It was in a tiny town called Boppard, on the Rhine, which despite being very picturesque, was empty of tourists. Great views of the Rhine, great sunsets too, with that post-thunderstorm look. There were some fabulous roads around there too – tight hairpin after tight hairpin with good visibility

Other highlights? A passenger lap in an M3 CSL on semi-slicks, in traffic, in the damp, at 8:24; 4 laps in a Z4M – very very composed; and a lap in a 996 GT2CS (on standard tyres), in heavy traffic, one yellow flag, in 7:57, flying past the ring taxi and the race prepared Viper as if they were standing still. One of the scariest and most exhilerating rides of my life. That won’t leave me in a hurry….

All in all, a great weekend, despite the tyre incident that had me panicking on the first day. A lot of driving for one person, and not something that I will do again on my own, but I felt the urge, and it couldn’t be stopped!

The CTR? A great car. Truly great. We bonded What it lacks in steering feel it makes up with build quality, reliability, that gearbox and that engine. It’s a good long distance partner, for the money and for it’s age. It’s a great track toy, that in the right hands is only 20 seconds slower than the Z (8:47). With a few suspension, diff and brake tweaks, it’d be a terrific track toy. Add in a Mugen exhaust and CAI, and the noise of the VTEC is supposed to be other-worldly. It makes you think how well Honda did when the CTR first came out, how much it raised the game, and how good the other Type Rs – Integra and the new CTR – are.

Patsy’s Gone!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6246680.stm

She’s not left the building yet, but she’s already packing her bags!

It doesn’t seem clear yet whether she jumped, was pushed, or jumped before she was pushed. I hope she was fired like Beckett was (I am not surprised Beckett was going to be replaced, but sacked? Surely a little harsh? She didn’t do a whole lot wrong, then again, she didn’t do very much at all…)

Anyway, time to party!

Is this woman serious?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6757325.stm

Clearly she is, as she remains the Secretary of State for Health.

It’s a fairly simple equation. Extend the opening hours, have 24 hour GP access, people will have a better standard of care when they get sick.

The current band of GPs opted out of their out “out of hours” commitments because it was just utterly miserable. It felt pretty good to go home at the end of the day and then not be called out in the evening or in the middle of the night, and then work the next day. Do you want to be treated by a GP who has been up all night (or a surgeon or physician for that matter)? They were given the option so they took it. They also took a pay cut, as they have less commitment.

So now Ms Hewitt thinks the fact that there is an inadequate out of hours service is entirely the fault of lazy GPs who don’t want to work, and this plays well with the public, and neatly deflects attention from herself. Witness the hostile (at best) reaction on the BBC “Have Your Say” section when the inquiry into the death of that poor woman due to an inadequate GP out of hours service came through a few weeks ago.

But surely if you want a better service, you’d want more doctors providing the cover? Huh? Huh? Increasing the capacity of the NHS is a long term goal, and one that would outlive the lifetime of the party that instituted such change. That’s why it isn’t going to happen. Shoehorn in targets that will hopefully impress the electorate and keep yourselves in power. Some may benefit in the short term, but the long term outcome isn’t really considered as it isn’t a priority.

The same goes for junior doctors providing night time cover in hospitals. The DoH’s “Hospital at Night” scheme is possibly the most brain dead, moronic idea that has been defecated onto the unsuspecting public that have the misfortune to be sick enough to be in hospital. “Let’s have a small group of doctors covering every speciality, even ones that they have not been trained in, instead of one specialist doctor per speciality, so that we need less of them overall”. Wile E. Coyote. Genius.

Roll on PM Gordon Brown, as I am sure even he knows that Patsy is a liability.

Going live in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… and ……

Liftoff! Or something.

Crikey. Work to do.