One mystery of 2005 was solved just before the end of the year. I couldn’t figure out how a dysfunctional, dirty, traffic-strangled, graffiti-ridden city like London could “win” the 2012 Olympics over beautiful places like Paris or Madrid.  I had presumed that the blacked out windows in the limos worked both ways when the International Olympic Committee delegates were being shuttled around London. The corrupt moneygrubbers of the IOC couldn’t see just how awful London was. Or maybe their brains were addled by the supply of champagne and cocaine supplied by their equally corrupt hosts.

    Now we have the answer – the dreaded fat finger syndrome. A delegate pressed the wrong button during the voting in Singapore last July, and let London in on the “prize”, otherwise known as the huge debt, disruption and chaos that the 2012 Olympics will inevitably bring.

    After a poor unfortunate in Tokyo inadvertently cost his employees hundreds of millions of dollars by pressing the wrong button on a stock market trade, the chairman of the stock exchange took the honourable course and resigned. Don’t hold your breathe waiting for anyone on the IOC to do anything honourable to rectify this mistake. The whole Olympic business is a tribute to corruption. The IOC’s selection process every 4 years is an open invitation, gratefully accepted, for graft and payola.

    That’s not really surprising really when you consider just how corrupt international athletics is too. Cheating in the form of drug taking is rampant. The events that are not despoiled by drugs are just too mind-numbingly boring to care about. Why would anyone hop, skip and jump? Or skip, jump and hop? Why train for years to perform in a handicapped swimming event like the backstroke or breast-stroke? Why bother to swim an event using the third fastest or second fastest method? It’s like running the 100 metres sprint, then doing it backwards, then on all fours.

    All those “nuffinks” and somefinks” followed by “them things” and “he’s took it well”.

    Given that they earn so much money and have so much time on their hands, couldn’t footballers be persuaded to forego one game of golf a week and take a grammar class to put this right? The grating shamelessness of these ignoramuses lowers the tone, and gives a poor example to children, who not surprisingly must think it is good to appear ill-educated.

    Why won’t Talk Sport radio or Sky Sports TV insist that any commentator would be fired if he uttered a single nuffink or somefink? That would provide the incentive. This would also have the joyous result of seeing the odious, pride-free, motor mouth Ian Wright in the dole queue, instantly. Isn’t it an affront to the civilised world every time Wright appears on your TV screen?      

    Why do they talk so loosely about “terrorism”. President Bush always, not to mention Prime Minister Blair or any other western political leader I ever listen too, never delineate what they mean by terrorism, leaving just that all encompassing but vague term to fight for itself.

    Bush tried once to change this, when after the September 11, 2001 crime against humanity, he launched a campaign to fight  “international terrorism”. Presumably, somebody on his staff had pointed out that the IRA would be included in his campaign if he didn’t figure out a definition that would exclude them.

    We are not fighting “terrorism”. We are fighting Islamic terrorism; or Fundamentalist Muslim terrorism. Why not call it like it is?

    The state-controlled BBC is especially egregious in the cowardly way it describes terrorism. The BBC is so frightened of causing offence (in itself a quality in a “news” organisation that ought to have it closed down or reformed from top to bottom; but it’s ok for a propaganda arm of government) that in its reporting of the reasons why so many were killed in the Beslam School Number 1 massacre, the uninitiated might have thought that the Russian police were solely responsible, not the cowardly, ruthless, uncivilised Muslims who used innocent children as a tool to pursue their ludicrous ambitions. 

    Not once was the word “Muslim” used in the reporting on BBC Radio or TV news that I listened to. Once, these cruel, despicable and twisted cowards were called Chechen separatists. That’s it. It is as though these maniacal Muslims actually went to the school carrying gifts and flowers rather than bombs, booby traps and guns, and the only reason 331 innocents died was because of action by the authorities to persuade them to go.

    In 2006 let’s demand of our political leaders and “news” organisations that they tell it like it is. The terrorism we are fighting is traditional, unreformed Islamic terrorism. Unreformed Islam is incompatible with western values of freedom and democracy. That’s why they terrorise us and why we must fight them. It serves no useful purpose to try and pretend that some bland, vague power out there is sending its people to terrorise us for reasons nobody can quite explain.

    How many times must we read and hear about a system that clearly can’t cater for people’s needs. But this never happens. It doesn’t matter how basic the failure, the British conventional wisdom can’t bring itself to question the underlying problem – health care can never work if it is provided by the state.

    Some of us, (are we especially gifted souls who are aware that the NHS stinks?) know that if health care is provided and controlled by the state, standards will continue to slide towards the third world. Drugs will not be available to the deserving if they live in the wrong postal code. Wards will continue to be mixed; it’s not just that we have mixed wards in Britain, but the people here are so easily satisfied, that they accept the idea of wards at all.

    How medieval is this? It’s like going to a hotel and paying money to sleep in a room full of strangers. It certainly doesn’t happen in the U.S., a land where according to the BBC and the tame British media, only the super-rich ever get decent health care, and everybody else either begs or dies.

    Let’s have some realism in the debate on health care in 2006. Otherwise standards will soon be as good as Zimbabwe’s.

    I know he is a liar, a man-on-the-make, someone without principle who just wants fame and fortune for himself and his miserable wife.

    He, like Bill Clinton, has the power to convince people who normally appear to be too intelligent to believe bollox served up as truth. Everything he does is designed to further his own personal cause; everything is undertaken to prolong his days in office, to keep that limo and all the trappings for as long as possible.

    Even the controversy over Europe falls into that category. His apparent cave-in over Britain’ rebate in return for nothing was designed to ingratiate himself with his fellow Europeans so that one day they might offer him a warm sinecure in Brussels when he is finally prised, kicking and screaming, out of Downing Street.

    So why does Blair go out on a limb over Iraq? On the face of it this takes guts and principle. Despite the fellow-travellers in the Labour party, Blair has allied himself with President Bush in the cause of freedom and democracy for Iraqis. Blair has steadfastly backed the move to remove the bloodthirsty dictator Saddam and try to open the way to freedom in Iraq. This is a brave, worthy and honourable course of action if ever there was one.

    Corrupt mental cases like Menzies (pronounced men…..ziz, otherwise shy spell it like that?) Campbell and Charles Kennedy of the Liberal Democrats are shills for Saddam, and it is truly nauseating to hear them and their fellow lefties in the Labour party siding with Muslim extremists who want dictatorship not freedom in Iraq. Campbell’s oft repeated mantra that the London bombings were caused by Britain’s involvement in Iraq only convince this fool that somehow we should have turned a blind eye to Saddam and his violent regime.

    So why is Blair so brave and right about Iraq? I can’t see any profit in it for him politically. It can’t possibly be down to political principle can it? I’d like to clear that enigma up in 2006.