I blame the scapegoats Read Online Free PDF

get into trouble.
    'Okay, quick, quick; when shall we say this
happened?'
    'I dunno - five hundred million years ago?'
    'No, no - bigger numbers are more impressive.
Say four and a half billion.'
    'Okay,
and say it was really, really hot - that always sounds good.' 'Yeah, and make
sure we use the words "atoms", "gravity",
"unstable" and, er, "beta spine kernel".' 'What's beta
spine kernel?'
    'Three random words from the dictionary.
Don't worry - no one will question it.'
    Making things up about space has been a huge
industry ever since Richard Nixon decided that the moon landings were a
complete waste of money and that the same images could be produced far more
cheaply in a Hollywood back lot. The account of what really happened back in
1969 is only just coming out, but it was not much different to any other film
set.
    'Okay, Neil darling, you step off your ladder
and you say your line about the giant leap for mankind . . . and action!'
    'But what's my motivation for going down the
ladder? What's the back-story here?'
    'Cut! Oh no, not this again. Neil, love,
you're playing an astronaut. You're landing on the moon. It's a big day for
your character.'
    'Maybe I should drive around the moon in a
big car?'
    'No, darling - that's in the sequel, Apollo
12:
    'Or lose radio contact and nearly die.'
    'Apollo 13’
    And the guys from NASA were sulking in the
wings saying, 'It can't be that difficult to do this for real. After all, we've
put a man on the moon.'
    'No we haven't.'
    'Well, no, but it's not rocket science.' 'Yes
it is.'
    Before
science accounted for the creation of the Earth and the moon, it was explained
in the first chapter of the Bible. It didn't sound very believable but their
get-out clause was that you had to have faith. Now religion has been replaced
with science and we just have to take someone else's word for it instead. The
comforting thing is that at least we no longer live in fear of flaming thunderbolts
coming out of the sky if we question the word of the Almighty. Well, not until
they've got the Star Wars project up and running anyway.
     
     

What's
so bloody great about the private sector?
    31
August 2001
     
    In
twenty-first-century Britain there is a new super-hero that will apparently
come dashing to the rescue in any crisis. 'Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No,
it's private sector finance! Hurrah, we're all saved!' 'Look over there, a
hospital is collapsing; send for private sector finance man! And a tube train
is hurtling off the rails; only he can bring it under control. Thank you,
private sector finance man! And the best thing is that all you want in return
is to know that people are safe and well.' Apart from a generous dividend on
your investment, obviously, and a cut-price stake in a new market, and a
guarantee to be bailed out by the Treasury should profits dip slightly . . .
but apart from that you only think of serving others.
    Since the dark days when British Leyland gave
nationalized industries a bad name by losing money, having strikes and
producing the Austin Allegro, it has been the generally shared presumption that
the private sector does most things better than the public. But this is a
simplistic fallacy that has no right to be accepted as fact. Do we blame the
entire concept of private enterprise when the garage mechanic shakes his head
and says it's hardly worth his while? Imagine if the banks were a nationalized
industry; we'd blame state ownership every time we were overcharged, patronized
by our manager or made to wait on the phone listening to a tinny version of the Four Seasons. When the holiday
company dumps families at Majorca airport knowing their flights are delayed for
fourteen hours, are there calls for this private company to be taken into the
public sector? When privatized water companies pump raw sewage into the sea, do
we hear news reports of the unacceptable faeces of capitalism?
    And
yet despite all our experience, we are blithely assuming that the private
sector will