Thursday, January 28, 2010

Wheels of life roll on

Been on Ynys Mon today. For the last three years, I've chaired the National Advisory Board for Wales of the European Care Group, an expanding, international care provider. It was a regular Board Meeting. Time flies past so quickly. Today, I handed over my responsibilities to my deputy, Eurig Wyn - at least for the next three months. I'm going to be otherwise occupied. Drove home feeling quite dejected about it - but I have to give the General Election a real crack. Too many people have climbed aboard the team bus whom I cannot let down. During my stint with European Care, I've developed a deep and lasting interest in how we care for the elderly, particularly those who suffer from dementia. I've posted before that were I to be elected an MP on May 6th, this issue would become a dominating interest.

Discussion at today's meeting drifted into how care for the elderly is going to be paid for in the future. We are facing a terrifying prospect. We invest so much national resource into extending life, and so little into ensuring that this extension is a worthwhile existence. The fees that local authority commissioners provide barely cover the cost of good provision. Even then, it depends on an occupancy rate of over 90%, and cross subsidy from self-funding residents. And people are living longer, resulting in ever more dementia sufferers. Must admit to pessimism about this issue. Cannot see how the demand for extra resource is going to be met. An increasing number of the elderly are going to be just left to cope (or not) on their own.

Back up to Bangor tomorrow morning for a RESEC (Research into Specialist Elderly Care)Conference. I'm chairing the second half. Ieuan Wyn Jones is coming along to open the event, and there's a good field of speakers. Ieuan's been good to us in that he opened our last conference as well. Depressingly, tomorrow will be my last involvement with RESEC for at least three months as well. Ah well. The wheel of life rolls on.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Good to know you are concerned with the situation of those in their 60's looking forward to the next 30 years!

sughotsy said...

"Wheels of life roll on"

Not much from you Glyn (re: Tony Blair's appearance before the Chilcott committee).

Sorry to say this, but Tony Blair's comments concerning Iran are 100% spot on. I realize that the Conservative Party want to be seen as the party of peace and lay it on the Labour party as the party of illegal wars, but I wonder if this is going too far when the interests of the West demand action In re Iran.

We are, absent Iran regaining common sense, heading for war with Iran.

The recent multilayered anti-missile shield exercises in/around Israel, and the recent placement of 'special ships' of the US Navy off Iran's coast, and now with other Arab nations on board (willing to have anti-ballistic missiles systems deployed on their soil). All this to counter the growing Iranian ballistic missile threat, and as a stage in the build up to targeted strikes on facilities run by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards/Quds forces.

Sorry, but for a while, no one listened to Winston Churchill, and right now people are stuffing their ears with cotton-wool rather than listen to the common-sense emanating from Tony Blair.

I'm no fan of the man (even though I went out of my way to get my then boss to see him (he was/is a deep blue Democrat and loves everything "England" having served in the UK during WWII).

But Tony is right - and those who want to bury their heads in the proverbial sand are dead wrong.

Question: does DC (David Cameron) have the balls of Blair (and Brown, to be fair) to stand with the USA next time round?

There's going to be "a next time round" ... and it's probably coming after November 2010 state-side elections. Maybe just post 2012 November elections - but not much longer than that.

Isn't "2012" supposed to be a special year in some Americas calendar?

Glyn Davies said...

sughotsy - I intend to blog on this issue tonight.

Defcon/bladder me this said...

PS – a logical prediction made some weeks ago – that terrorists seeking destruction of airliners will use internally placed “bladders” – and it will not be long before Al Qaeda/affiliates learn how to use binary bladders – one with explosive and one with trigger.

This does not appear to be rocket science once the facts are known, but we really need to be ahead of the terrorist-curve ball, think like they think and we can do that with logic predictions based on an interdisciplinary ‘data-set’, which if combined with some ‘fuzzy logic’ would put us ahead of said curve-ball.

I did suggest a few weeks ago that airport security will have problems detecting binary setups but that ‘fuzzy logic’ offers a way of spotting (essentially intercepting) such suicide bombers from the ‘get go’. Again not rocket science, but for some strange reason ignored by our security services. Do they want a few outrages to suit some political purpose/pending-war scenario?

Well, a British Sunday newspaper has run an article, “Britain is facing a new Al Qaeda terror threat from suicide ‘body bombers’ with explosives surgically inserted inside them.”

A well known explosive in one ‘bladder’ and a syringe containing a liquid chemical trigger to inject through the skin into the bladder to set off the explosive therein.

“It is understood MI5 became aware of the threat after observing increasingly vocal internet ‘chatter’ on Arab websites this year (2010).” Well, I warned of this threat last year (2009) on Glyn’s blog and I warned of the ‘binary bladder’ threat as a logical outcome last year on Glyn’s blog. The article did not mention MI5 has picked up on a ‘binary bladder’ threat – but I assure you this is a logical outcome/prediction based on an “interdisciplinary data-set”. Which in combination with a ‘fuzzy-logic’ algorithm (which actually I could write and more importantly maintain (i.e., keep ahead of the terrorist curve-ball – as I have done repeatedly on Glyn’s blog).

If surgeons are used to insert the first “bladder”, it is only a short step to internalizing the syringe – i.e., a binary bladder setup as predicted/outlined on Glyn’s blog a few weeks ago.

Is anyone in MIX reading Glyn’s blog?

Probably!

sughotsy said...

PS - another determinant factor is the final roll out of "Iron Dome" - to counter expected rocket attacks on Israel should the US and/or Israel attack Iran's nuke infra-structure. Hezbollah has long range rockets (c/o Iran c/o Syria) in its arsenal and recently started to pull them further back from the Israeli/Lebanon border – Hezbollah was concerned in part that the IAF had too much intelligence (from Hezbollah’s perspective) on their long range rockets. Also, the UN presence in southern Lebanon was also a factor that went into the computation. Hezbollah is under orders from Iran – this moving of their long range rockets is a bit worrying – certainly the stage is being set for a major new confrontation.

Peter Williams said...

Important Dementia Report today, on BBC R4 Today, 03.02.10.