andrewlighten.com

There was a fatal accident just out of town yesterday. It was a single vehicle accident. A car left the road and collided with a tree.

I was in the first of the two SES trucks that responded. As we left the depot the latest information we had was that one person was trapped. En route we got a second pager message indicating that the casualty was out of the vehicle but had passed away at the scene.

When we arrived at the accident we found that it was the son of a senior member of our SES unit. It’s distressing enough having to attend a fatal accident but when it’s one of your own extended SES family it’s just awful.

The SES quickly activated a group they call ‘peer support’ which is an internal counseling service that help members get over tragedies like this. It was a fairly subdued afternoon and evening, but it did help having all the members who attended get together and discuss what happened, what we were thinking about, etc.

Although they’re unlikely to read my meaningless little blog, my sincere sympathies go out to the family. The SES member involved has done an enormous amount of work for the SES (and therefore the community) over the years, and is someone I have an tremendous amount of respect for. That this has happened to them is just terrible.

This is very funny. A literal version of a classic 80′s video.

Interesting times.

The political philosopher John Gray, who recently retired as a professor at the London School of Economics, wrote in the London paper The Observer: “Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably.

“The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over… The American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated.”

“In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

“How symbolic that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.”

More here.