Welcom to A new US president

Today is the inauguration of President Elect Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America. Arguably one of the most powerful offices on the planet.

There is an incredible optimism associated with this particular inauguration. It is seen as a sea change in US politics and society. It is doubly poignant as it comes after Martin Luther King Jnr’s day and is in many respects the realisation of his dream.

Everyone speaks of a black president. As someone pointed out to me it is largely in people’s minds. Barak Obama is in fact 50% black and that somehow makes him just “black”. You could use the same logic to say he was “White”.

Whatever, many people have invested a huge amount of hope in him. Maybe they should dial back on that just a little? He is human, not a superman. He does not have a magic wand.

If people build him up unrealistically in their minds they are likely to be correspondingly unrealistically disappointed if he can’t deliver on their every wish.

So here is a hope that people don’t expect too much and too fast and then get annoyed if he can’t do miracles. Especially with all the troubles the world is beset with right now.

Between Memorial Bridge and Arlington Cemetery, there is an inscription on the memorial to the Seabees, the U.S. Navy Construction Battalions. It says:

“The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.”

Another New-Labour UK educational triumph - Not!

Well it looks like practically speaking New-Labour have, by fiddling the difficulty/pass marks in order to improve their figures, successfully destroyed the A-Levels, the old ‘gold standard’, as a properly functioning exam.

It is something parents and probably employers, have been quietly discussing for years. It is effectively official now.

Universities not only now need to do interviews, they need to set their own tests to see if candidates with A-Levels are actually able to manage real subjects at degree level.

How long before New-Labour set their sights on making degree courses ‘fair’ – in educational terms newspeak for; any one can get one, no actual ability or work necessary.

Lawyers batoned by Pakistani Police

The BBC are clearly shocked this morning about a Reuters report quoting Akhtar Hussain, a former president of the Sindh High Court Bar Association.

He is quoted as saying: "Police beat lawyers with batons as they came to the High Court in the morning” - "Many of them have been arrested."

This was because they were protesting outside the High Court in Karachi, Pakistan against the state of emergency, declared in the country over the weekend.

As I read it, the thought occurred to me. They are significantly more shocked than if this had happened to any other sorts of protestors. They expect their readers to be more shocked too. It is an almost subconscious assumption. As if lawyers should have been immune because they were lawyers. As if the rules that apply to the rest of humanity should not apply to them.

Then the black humour of the situation hit me and I thought. “It’s about time, they had it coming if anyone did”.

Now I am not commenting on the current situation in Pakistan here, or the rights and wrongs of it.

What I am commenting on, is that the BBC’s reaction tellingly reveals just how well the political elite have the public and the media conditioned.

The legal profession is, for want of a better word, the spawning ground of many politicians in the West and the Anglosphere, for some reason we do tend to think of them as untouchable, either in one sense of the word or the other ;-) No doubt they would prefer us to continue to think they should be viewed that way.

With the BBC projecting that unconscious assumption no doubt it will…