Morning all,woke up and could not go back to sleep so catching up with posts. Spent Friday at my clydesider role training and yesterday morning at a local beach doing a clean up and survey for the MandS sponsored. Marine Conservancy Council beach clean up week. Truly astounding how little respect people and organisations have for the environment.
Somewhat relieved to hear your best man speech stories, I have only done one for my best mate and did not have a clue and felt really embarrassed about it.
Agree with that scully - all of my kids used to be involved with community clean-up activities organised by school - until they and others started asking "Why bother - the more we clean up, the more rubbish seems to appear." And these days, the risk of dirty needles is too great - I refuse to let my kids get involved and argue against involvement at schools. As far as I'm concerned, there are plenty of prisons full of people who should be doing that sort of thing as part of their 'rehabilitation', and even more with Community Service orders who should be doing the same - many of whom are partly responsible for the mess anyway.
Living in a farming community dirty needles are not a problem here, so the school children do go out with bags a couple of times a year and collect rubbish, mainly paper that the dustmen have allowed to escape when collecting. The real environmental issues here are the farmers who show total disregard for the surrounding area. They have been buying huge tractors that are too big to go down the lanes so removing the grass verges, entering the fields and creating huge depressions that now become water logged and mess up the ditches so creating flooding on the lanes, and taking out hedges to make the most of their new machines. They have now been jumping at the chance to have wind turbines on their land. It is proposed to build 22 of them in our area as a first stage of a project to provide green electricity. They have been offered €7,500 pa for every structure on their land. It is thought that they are not very efficient, but leaving that aside there are issues with peoples health. Other areas that have them report that people are suffering from the effects despite living a kilometer away. In the UK the government is moving them offshore recognizing that there are associated problems with people living too close to them, yet here where the state likes to be in control they are allowing private companies to go ahead with little more than lip service to listening to public opinion.
Potholes and blocked ditches and drains are problems in some of our lanes. While rubbish is not a big issue occasionally someone will dump a load of building rubble or old furniture and mattresses at the edge of roadside fields...but then I don't suppose they grasp five syllable concepts like consideration.
Dumped mattresses, sofas, TVs, fridges and God knows what else have become a regular feature round my way. What makes it all the more frustrating is that if the dumpers just called the council they'd take most of it free of charge anyway As Theo and Scullion in particular have pointed out th level of disrespect for the environment is frgihteneing. I doubt most of us would have got away with chucking our rubish in the street when we were kids!
I must admit to having never heard of any health issues associated with wind farms - any idea what problems are being reported? There seems to be a mix of both on & off shore farms up here, and both still being built. so maybe the Scottish Govt are more relaxed about them. I don't know of too many people who are against them - excepting, of course, the obnoxious Donald Trump. Since failing in his attempt to block the building of an off-shore farm within view of his golf course & hotel, he's taken his golf buggy and gone off to Ireland in a huff.
We have a couple of wind farms near our farm in Wales. I actually think at times they look quite majestic - but I am odd. They are not near our house so I have no experience of living closely with them but those that do complain of a constant noise - a drone or whine that they generate and some claim they give off magnetic waves which can make you feel dizzy or sick at times - not sure that is documented though.
Any experts on here who can explain what is 'racist' about this? This was an ad placed with Glasgow Underground by a pro-independence website - one that was pulled after a complaint by an 'anonymous' member of the public to the effect that it was "openly xenophobic, racist, transphobic and other such thoroughly nasty material." Not sure that I can see that myself....
You have thousands of people wandering about every day and watching telly, trying to pick up on the slightest thing that could be considered racist so they can complain. UKIP have millions of people trying to pick up on everything they say and trying to twist it into a racist comment. The three main parties all know that UKIP talk more sense than all three of them put together, so they need to do this to poison peoples minds and continue ruining the country which Tony Blair started by going into Europe.
Morning all from an overcast West West London....whilst I utterly detest Tony Blair as another of the political classes that have dragged this country downhill, I would struggle to blame him for going into Europe. Blame him for leading a government that took us into illegal wars and lied through his teeth to justify it and blame him for leading a government that lied over the scale of immigration from the Eastern European EU countries, but going into Europe? - that is really a stretch. Thanks in advance from the frothy AK