More miners please!

The rescue of Los 33 was one of the most heart-warming news items of the century so far - maybe of the last century too.  It would be interesting to see other people's nominations for Heart Warming News Story of the Decade for each decade, oh, let's say since I was born in 1944.  So more or less the end of WWII.

A knock-on benefit of the rescue was that it drove most other news stories off the screen.  When I say "News" I am using the term in the loose way that the BBC do.  I mean, the main news programmes are crammed with things that are expected to happen during the day - well that's not my definition of news, which should be something that has happened that I need or want to know about - and padded out with forecasters telling you what they expect to happen in economics, defence, politics, fashion, music, literature, travel, climate, you name it for years ahead. "By 2040 this will be the case..." There are two things you can say about these predictions.  First, they will prove to be somewhere on a scale between definitely inaccurate and wildly wrong. Second, what is predicted is on a scale from mildly unpleasant to disastrous.

Yesterday the main news item was to do with who or what we should expect to be attacked by and in what way.  Cyber-terrorists will explode our power stations with a computer virus that also disables all traffic lights and shuts down the banking system - that seems to be roughly the flavour of the moment.  And of course, to defend ourselves against these hidden aggressors we must renew our capacity for a nuclear counter-strike and double the number of battle ships.  Perhaps the best news today is that we won't have any aircraft carriers soon. The Foreign Secretary seemed to say that we need a nuclear arsenal in case someone - maybe a terrorist hidden we don't know where - tries to blackmail us with a nuclear threat.  Yup, I buy that. It's easy to see that in such a case we need to be able to obliterate all possible secret hiding places before they get us.

Why is it that non-nuclear nations like Sweden and Chile and Switzerland haven't been wiped off the face of the earth yet? I heard someone claim on the radio the other day that in Chile it is impossible to bribe a policeman, that new free care facilities for the impoverished elderly are being opened regularly, and I don't know how many other things we British can only dream of.  He didn't actually say that there are no corrupt politicians, that would have been totally unbelievable, but he made it sound as though it might be so. Anyway, they can certainly rescue miners, so almost anything is possible.

And to top is all, two sweet looking old ladies just called.  They wanted to warn me that I am going to eternal torment if I don't give my heart to Jesus.  I told them I had already promised it to medical research.