What makes a great athlete? Not just a very good one, but one for the ages?

Ability, sure. It will always get you in the door. But loads of talented players don’t last too long.

Intelligence? Curiousity? Thinking ahead? Yes, yes, and yes.

Desire? Pride? Yes and yes.

And these all take you to the same place. The place of preparation and hard work. No matter what you’re working at.

I’ve always had the highest respect for the now retired football player Jerry Rice, who had a long period of sustained greatness with the San Francisco 49ers.

Ages ago, I heard of his sprints up a two and half mile ” hill ” in the San Francisco Bay area. A routine so brutal that other pro athletes often tried it, only to collapse in exhaustion, as Rice raced to the top.

Thanks to these workouts ( and equally tough routines in the gym ), Rice stayed at the top for a really long time in the most savage of sports, despite not being as fast as some of his teammates.

I was recently surprised, and delighted, to hear that, seven years after retirement, Jerry Rice is still charging up that hill.

Nobody here is gonna be a world class athlete. But you have your ” hill “, something that would bring you closer to your personal greatness, even if it was something only you and yours knew about it, if you’d only do it. Well?

I see that Iran has shown how conciliatory it can be;

“The Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out the legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of its people. The doctrine includes wiping out Israeli assets and Jewish people worldwide. Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the conservative website Alef, with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material. It is a ‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

The article, written by Alireza Forghani, a conservative analyst and a strategy specialist in Khamenei’s camp, now is being run on most state-owned conservative sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine”

The debate should NOT be whether Iran needs defanfed. The debate should be why Iran has NOT been defanged. Only powerful military strikes will do – all the rest is a mere distraction. The Iranian people, who suffer under the Mullahs, deserve better. Israel, the target of this grotesque Holocaust-esque opprobrium, deserve better. America – the Great Satan of Iranian scorn – deserves better. It it time to send in the planes.

The media has been replete with demands that excessive salaries for Bankers be capped. So, how about a consideration of those earning substantial salaries in the Public sector, and in particular Local Councils..can we at least establish how much they are paid care of the taxpayer? Erm…NO! 

Councils have refused government demands to identify staff earning more than £58,200 a year because there are so many it would be an “onerous burden”.They added that they had so many well-paid staff the cost of listing them and their responsibilities could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. They also said staff safety would be at risk if the public knew how much they earned. Other councils claimed that taxpayers lacked the “evaluation skills” to decide whether spending was good value for money and would fall victim to “misunderstandings”. Several insisted there was little demand locally for information on how they spent public money.

This is one of the biggest scams of all. Here we see a bloated sector, living the high life compared to the wages of those who find them, and blankly refusing to offer up the most basic level of information to the taxpayer. I particularly liked the line that Council staff would be “at risk” if the public knew how much they are paid!

Wonder what you make of this story?

Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond has been urged to apologise after using a term linked to officials in Nazi Germany to describe a BBC adviser.

The SNP leadercriticised the corporation after his planned appearance on a sport show ahead of yesterday’s Six Nations Scotland-England rugby clash was cancelled on political grounds. Mr Salmond suggested BBC journalists were “in thrall to Downing Street” and likened it to “tin-pot dictatorships”.

He also compared one of the corporation’s advisers to a Gauleiter, the term given to provincial governors in Germany under Hitler. It also means someone in authority who behaves in an overbearing manner.

I suggest there is a certain shall we say irony in Salmond using this term given the overbearing boorish and bully boy attitude of the SNP. As this instance illustrates, when the tin-pot SNP do not get what they want, out comes the venom. The BBC deserve an apology from Salmond.

I have to declare that I also use the term “Gauleiter” but only when describing Greek PM Papademos and Italian PM Mario – both imposed on these Nations through the will of Angela Merkel. In that context, I think it fits perfectly.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens knew how to craft a sentence that grabbed your attention. The problem is that these days, despite our alleged soaring levels of academic qualification, young people don’t know how to even read such great literature;

CHILDREN do not have the concentration to read a Dickens novel, a leading writer claimed yesterday.As the country prepares to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the author’s birth, Claire Tomalin, acclaimed biographer of Dickens, said: “Very simply, he is, after Shakespeare, the greatest creator of characters in English.” And she decried the state of modern teaching for ill-equipping children with the attention span required to read his classic, but lengthy, books. “Today’s children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television pro grammes which are flickering away in the corner,” she said. “Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel, and I think that’s a pity.”

I would also put Dickens right up there, along with Orwell and De Vere and I DO think she has a point. As a youngster, I devoured Dickens – from David Copperfield to Oliver Twist, from Great Expectations to The Pickwick Papers. The plots were great, the language was fascinating and it was so easy to engage with it. Galloping through Dickens rich and often dark landscapes was a simple joy – but I suppose that was before MTV and the Playbox.

It’s a great shame that so many of our children do not have the capacity to enrich their lives by reading the works of Charles Dickens.

There have been some voices here in the UK raised in opposition to the huge amounts of taxpayer money lavished on the Foreign Aid budget – mine included. One of the most irritating aspects of this Aid programme is that relatively rich countries such as India enjoy hundreds of millions sent their way care of the British Government. When this is pointed out, Government Ministers and Leftist commentators dismiss such concerns, insisting that India desperately needs our cash. So, this news pops their bubble big-time;

David Cameron was under intense pressure last night to slash the £1billion in aid Britain gives to India after the country said it no longer wanted the money. India’s finance minister Pranab Mukherjee said the booming country should ‘voluntarily’ give up the £280million a year it receives from Britain. He told the Indian parliament: ‘We do not require the aid. It is a peanut in our total development spending.’

Well, it may be a peanut to him and his Government but the peanut brains in our political establishment will still try to waste our cash in order to produce that warm glowing feeling that only comes with dispensing someone else money!

How do you deal with militant Islam when even those imprisoned for Jihad turn prisons into recruiting stations?

President Barry is so out of his depth in every arena it’s ridiculous, as for the economy he believes it’s just one pie and he’s the only one that knows how it should be sliced, never mind an economy is a bakery and if done right the pies are limitless.

As for Syria the Chicoms and His Highness the Czar Putin are laughing their asses off. Why support sanctions when it’s not your problem. Not only is Syria going to hell in a hand basket not the Russian or the Chinese problem, it provides the U.S. a major one. The Middle East is strictly a U.S. and western nations nightmare, but primarily the U.S.’s.

So fuck Syria let it burn, they’re just the icing on the cake, that is Iran. You have a 19mile stretch of water with only a 2 mile wide  navigable corridor with a billion dollars worth of goods traveling through staring down Iranian artillery batteries that have those ships in point plank range for ten miles.

The mad little Persians are less than a year away from 12 warheads, and 3 years away from refining the delivery systems. That includes naval, planes, and missiles. They have moved 30% of their weapons grade uranium refining to underground fortified bunkers, several others are located in highly populated zones.

Their Navy is along with the ground base artillery capable of shutting down the straits for about two weeks worth of attacks, and depending on where and which ships got sunk how blocked they would be, and for how long.

The U.S. has 3 carrier groups in the area a campaign against Iranian assets, Naval, Air force, Fixed Batteries, Weapons development sites, Revolutionary guard command and control, and Oil production is a 6 month Air War no troops on the ground except the Special Forces targeting forces. We will lose a naval vessel or two.

By the Election it will be the U.N. and the Arab Leagues job to decide which direction it goes from there.

“I don’t think Israel has made a decision. I think they, like us, think Iran has to stand down their nuclear weapons program,” said Obama, speaking from the Blue Room of the White House. “Until they do, I think Israel is going to be very concerned, and we are as well.”

Israel is right to be concerned about Iran’s push to join the league of nations that possess nuclear weapons, but diplomacy – not military intervention – remains the “preferred solution” to averting a potential arms race in the Middle East, President Barack Obama said Sunday.

What a freaking moroon, the Iranians aren’t standing down shit, and the Jews aren’t going to wait for you to pull your head out of your ass.

“We’re not taking any options off the table,” Obama said. “Our preferred solution is diplomatic, we’re going to keep on pushing on that front … [but] I’ve been very clear that we’re going to do everything we can to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and creating an arms race, a nuclear arms race, in a volatile region.”

Sorry buddy you already screwed the pooch, you are weak, nobody trusts you, and were about to get caught in the middle of a shit storm.

I know, I know….you’re sitting there thinking what would make he perfect download for your Kindle, your IPAD or perhaps your smartphone. Rejoice – I bring good tidings. Unionism Decayed – my little canter through the uplands and valleys of the appeasement process - is now on Kindle. For the discerning reader only, of course.