No PC Views

African Freedom

2012-01-29T09:33:00.000Z

The BBC ran an article on whether Africa (by which they presumably meant 'sub-Saharan Africa', aka 'Black Africa', as of course the 'Arab Spring' was also in Africa), needed an 'Arab Spring' .... oddly they didn't mean the whole continent coming under the thrall of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is whats happened in Arab Africa.

No they were suddenly implying that all is not perfect in sub-Saharan Africa, which must be something of a first for the BBC's usual PC reporting of this part of the world .... but my interest was taken more by the map supplied by 'Freedom House' of which parts of Africa they call as 'free'.

Africa - Free or Not Free?

Because strangely this map doesn't seem to equate the results of the 'Arab Spring' with 'freedom', as both Libya and Egypt for example are still marked as 'Not free' .... which kind of answers the question as to whether an 'arab spring' in sub-Saharan Africa would be any use?

Because if the 'Freedom House' organisation still classifies the results of the 'Arab Spring', as 'Not Free', then the answer to the BBC question 'Does Africa need an Arab Spring?' is obviously 'No'.

The Freedom House reports are here:

Freedom House report on Sub-Saharan Africa

Freedom House report on the Middle East and North Africa

Growth And Decay

2012-01-29T08:37:00.000Z

According to the International Monetary Fund, Asia and the Sub Continent are the growth engines of the new world economy. However even there, some are performing better than others. For instance Pakistan's economy grew last year by 2.4% last year according to the IMF. These are figures that the moribund economies of the UK and other European countries would do anything for.

But, and there's always a 'butt' (hah ha!) in Pakistan, the required rate to keep unemployment from rising is at least 7% pa. As it is, 2.4% is actually one of the lowest in the region with the other 'players' India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh all performing far better.

2011 Real GDP growth (projected):

China: 9.5%
India: 7.8%
Sri Lanka: 7.0%
Bangladesh: 6.3%
Pakistan: 2.4%*

Source: IMF World Economic Outlook
*Actual growth taken from Pakistan Economic Survey

Even with this growth rate, Pakistan's political and economic problems continue, with its structural problems just increasing - for instance in a country of 180 million, less than 1% of people pay income tax. Out of even that low benchmark, billions of rupees of the government tax revenue never even make it into the treasury coffers because of waste and corruption. Industrial production and exports are hampered by crippling bureaucracy, bribery, and energy shortages, often leading to violent protests.

Pakistanis - Up To Their Necks In It - As Usual

If anything the state sector is hampered even more by these and other issues, and the flagship public sector enterprises such as Pakistan International Airlines and Pakistan Railways, are all failing due to chronic mismanagement and blatant inefficiencies .... cronyism in job distribution is rife.

When you add in the political chaos with disputes between the civilian government and the armed forces, the continual rise of the Taliban (aided by the military intelligence ISI), and rapid and uncontrolled population growth, and it appears that even the signs of economic growth, just can't hide the whiff of continued political and social decay.

Equal Pay For Equal Effort

2012-01-27T20:07:00.000Z

With all the talk of fair pay and equitable payments, especially for the bankers who just won't stop taking large amounts from the company profits, or adding to the company losses, in order to give themselves large annual bonuses, my attention was taken by another group of chancers. Women's tennis players .....

They campaigned for "Equal Pay" with male players in the 1980's and 1990's, and eventually achieved this, although outside of the 'four majors' of Wimbledon, US, French and the Australian opens, the earnings on the women's and men's tours don't actually match, because women's tennis doesn't generate the same interest from sponsors or the crowds.

But in the majors, they get equal money for the semifinalists and finalists, and this week saw the semifinals in the Australian Open .... In the men's draw these semifinals were between Novak Djokovic of Serbia and Andy Murray of Great Britain in one semifinal, and Roger Federer of Switzerland and Rafael Nadal ESP in the other. In the women's draw they were between Kim Clijsters of Belgium and Victoria Azarenka of Belarus in one semifinal, and Maria Sharapova of Russia and Petra Kvitova of the Czech Republic in the other.

Half the work but the same prize money - Worth every Penny?

Now bearing in mind that the women claim to be worth 'equal pay, despite evidence that commercially they generate far less money than the men when they have their own tournaments, and therefore are demonstrably living of the back of men's tennis in the majors, how much tennis do this weeks semifinal winners play in order to get to the final? Equal amounts? No.

Kim Clijsters (11) was beaten by Victoria Azarenka (3) by 2 sets to 1 in a match totalling 132 minutes, and Maria Sharapova (4) beat Petra Kvitova (2) by 2 sets to 1 in a match also totalling 132 minutes. 264 minutes of tennis in all .... whereas in the mens two semifinals:

Novak Djokovic (1) beat Andy Murray (4) by 3 sets to 2 in a match totalling 290 minutes, and Roger Federer (3) was beaten by Rafael Nadal (2) by 3 sets to 1 in a match totalling 222 minutes. 512 minutes of tennis in all, with one match lasting longer than both of the womens semifinals combined, and the other nearly matching them (had it gone to five sets, it would also have surpassed the combined womens match time).

The womens final was won by Victoria Azarenka in two sets, in just 82 minutes play time.

The mens final was won by Novak Djokovic 3 -2 in long sets, taking 352 minutes of play time ..... thats over four times the length of play in the womens final .... all for the same money.

So how can this be classed as equality or equitable? Cos some 'wimmin' say it is.

And the moral of this story? Always follow the money when someone says they want 'Equality'.

Scotland Cries "Freedom"

2012-01-25T13:26:00.001Z

The cat is well and truly out of the bag, and fevered debate (marked by a fair bit of cross border vitriol) is now underway about Scotland's proposed referendum on 'Independence'. I have no way of knowing what the decision will be, and in truth no particular preference. My personal belief is that in the long term, both Scotland and the UK will both ultimately become smaller places if a split occurs, but that in the short term, Scotland may prosper.

I do however have a view about the proposed referendum, which is that while I am English and also British, and I do believe we are better and stronger together, I also respect the right of the Scottish people to have a vote on independence. However, being independent should mean being independent, and not simply picking and choosing which parts of the union you want to keep if you lose the main vote (aka 'Devo Max') .

You just can't have it both ways .... it must be all or nothing. Not 'oh, lets just have a fall back of even more devolution', and then ask about full a full split again in five years or so. Just make a decision and live with it.

Alex Salmond plays hardball like Drake.

However, there are some other consequences that will make me laugh. The main one is that the real architects of 'Scottish devolution' and the fact that its ended in a referendum, the Labour Party (See Brown and the Scottish Claim of Right), is likely to be a two time loser.

In Scotland, they will be the biggest losers in future polls, despised by unionists, and swamped by the 'victorious' SNP who will likely hold power for a generation.
In England they will be the biggest losers in future polls, despised by unionists, and swamped by the Tories who will likely hold power for a generation (Labour has only once won a majority in England).

It would be ironic if Tony Blair's gut feeling that this would end in tears if he allowed devolution was proved right, and all those 'Scots Labour strategists' who said it was never going to be anything but a Labour Party stronghold forever, were wrong. Generations in the wilderness would be the least punishment they would deserve for the destruction of the United Kingdom and the Labour Party..

US Electoral Processes

2012-01-22T13:58:00.001Z

Its beginning to look as thought Pres. Barack Obama will win November's US Presidential elections. The Republican opposition is seemingly hopelessly split between the possibly electable but flawed Mitt Romney, and the equally flawed, but probably unelectable (and last champion of the far right), Newt Gingrich.

In the latest round of voting for the Republican ticket in South Carolina, the primary winner was Newt Gingrich, who convincingly beat Mitt Romney in a spate of negative campaigning, and the scene is now apparently set for a long, hard, and bloody fight this spring. It seems unlikely that the winner of this will be in any state to seriously challenge Obama, who will even have been shown all his opponents weaknesses. Unless there's a serious downtown in the US economy and employment figures, then the general easing of the recession and 'green shoots' of recovery will also be in the incumbents favour.

US Presidential Contestants 2012

I am by and large a big admirer of the USA and its institutions, but I think that the process of electing a US President is hopelessly archaic and actually damages democracy there:

It occupies the top politicians of the worlds most powerful democracy for up to two years out of every four, and
Allows for absolutely no long-term policies to be put in place.

Even at the end of the process, the President may only have two years in which to try and 'bribe' the Congress and Senate into backing a few major pieces of legislation before the regime becomes paralysed by local politics (often governed by 'pork barrel' considerations). In some cases, the President may be hog tied from the start if his party fails to control either house.

I understand that historically this system was meant to encourage consensus politics and national polices arrived at via negotiation, but increasingly in the US, the politics has become confrontational, with both parties unwilling to give any concession to the other. This leaves the executive in deadlock for long periods, or for bad legislation being passed through, which is worse than no legislation at all.

I have no idea what would cause the US to consider amending the political process, but its obvious that after two hundred years, the current system is not really fit for the 21st century and needs at least a major overhaul, if not a complete replacement.

Maybe the economic, military, and political challenge posed by the Chinese in this century may act as a spur. The Chinese are playing a long game of decades, or even centuries in order to gain their geopolitical goals, while US policy is only consistent for four or five years.

In the long-term there will only ever be one winner in that contest unless the US can start setting long-term economic , foreign and domestic political goals.

The Rich Get Richer

2012-01-20T20:55:00.000Z

The US (and presumably UK and other Western countries) have been following ever more capitalist tax policies over the last 40 odd years. This follows an earlier trend in the first half of the 20th century (which lasted up until the mid 1970's on both sides of the Atlantic), for the wealthiest 1% of societies to be expected to pay more in taxes i.e. For the differential between them and us to gradually decrease. But on the advent of Thatcherism and Reaganism in the late 1970's and 1980's this trend was reversed. Since then, there has been an ever increasing widening of the gap between the top of the top 1% of the wealthy, and everyone else (including the rest of the top 1% of the wealthy).

If you believe in cycles, then its probable that this wealth gap has now passed the limit of what Western democratic societies will generally accept, and there is now increasingly louder calls for the very rich to be reined in, and for them and the large corporations to be forced to stop dodging the tax bullet (some large American Corporations have been paying the same level of taxes as small family firms), and to pay all their tax dues.

There is no denying that when millions are facing tough times, and some are even facing malnutrition or even starvation in southern Europe and elsewhere, then its hardly equitable to still believe that making the super rich, even richer, and then trickling the wealth down via their purchases of cars, will work (it never did, it was a massive morally blind alley for the Right to go down this path). In the US there are still proponents of this kind of social wealth distribution, but even there its doubtful if this sort of argument can be made into a vote winner anymore.

The figures collated by the US Congressional Budget Office suggest the the very rich have increased their wealth by as much as 275% in the last few decades (partly by tax avoidance). Over the 28 years covered by this CBO study, US incomes had increased overall by 62%, allowing for tax and inflation, BUT the lowest paid fifth of Americans got only a small share of that: their incomes had grown by a modest 18%. Those in the middle income households were also well below the overall average increase with modest gains of just 37%, and even the majority of America's richest households saw gains of barely above the overall average at 67%.

However the vast majority of the income gains over the past 30 years had gone to the top 1% of US households. Their incomes had almost quadrupled, with rises of 275%!!

The UK has also seen much the same situation, where a longer term study of the distribution share of national income going to the richest 1% since 1918, which has show that we are reverting to the sort of societal wealth imbalances not seen since the days of the late Edwardian era "Upstairs Downstairs", with the same fall and rise of the proportion of the wealth owned by the richest as seen in the US. The top 1% are now on course to return to the relative wealth gap as it was in 1918.

The UKs Wealth Gap mirrors that seen in the US

No societies in the modern age can survive this sort of blatant wealth grab by the wealthy robber barons (aka Oligarchs), and the same social equality pressures that drove the urge to redistribute wealth more equitably in the first seventy years of the last century, are likely to emerge again. The greed that has caused the wealthy to keep on grabbing, is likely to be the cause of their own downfall, because even the US is unlikely to be quite the safe haven for the extremely wealthy that it has been in the past.

If I was a betting man, I would suggest that tax compliance and redistribution of wealth will become a bigger issue over the next decade, especially if the austerity measures being taken now, turn into decades of stagnation.

Justice For All?

2012-01-20T19:59:00.003Z

Sharia Law is being increasingly used by Muslim communities in the UK and other countries, often by those immigrants who have little in common, either linguistically or culturally with Britain. It is a system of law derived from a combination of sources including the Quran, the Hadith (which are a collection of stories based on the life of the prophet Muhammad), and Fatwas, which are rulings of Islamic 'scholars'.

However there are a number of issues with this as the basis of fair laws:

Women are not considered the equal of men in both the Koran and Sharia Law (Quran 4:34 – ‘Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient’).
The Hadith were only collated long after his death (around 200 years later) and were maintained in just oral tradition, and many seem to have been created decades or centuries after the events. Turkish scholars have acknowledged that these have been much added to over the centuries, and many stories were added to suit local leaders (religious or otherwise) needs at the time of their creation, so are not a safe source. Interestingly the Sunni and Shia have many different stories in their Hadith which makes them even more problematic.
The Hadith includes such things as the basis for men taking child brides (Muhammad married Aisha when she was aged 9 or 10 and he was a man in late middle age).
Fatwas have not prominence over each other and therefore can be and often are contradictory - anyone who is deemed a religious leader locally can pass them as long as they have been 'trained' in Islamic law (which can mean many things) and unlike for example the Catholic Pope, there is no overarching authority on the rulings. Fatwas are not universally binding; which makes Sharia law non universal or consistent. An example of a fatwa was the Sudanese Teddy Bear name Muhammad story, when a Fatwa by a local cleric decided to punish a foreign teacher for the fact that her kindergarten kids named a Teddy bear 'Mohammed'.

Men Demonstrating For Sharia Law - they cover their faces.

Just today, three Muslim men (Ihjaz Ali, Kabir Ahmed and Razwan Javed) have been found guilty of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation when they handed out leaflets entitled "Death Penalty?", "Gay - an acronym for God Abhors You" or "Turn Or Burn" at a mosque and through local letterboxes in Derby, calling for homosexual people to be given the death sentence. In the leaflets they quoted the same Islamic texts which would also be used in Sharia laws and jurisprudence. They said this themselves in their defence .... they claimed they were simply following and quoting what their religion taught them about homosexuality and did not intend to threaten anyone.

And in case you think that these Sharia laws are never applied, and don't 'threaten anyone' ... on December the 12th in 2011 (a month ago) the Saudi Courts executed a woman for practising "witchcraft and sorcery" and in October 2011 a Sudanese man was publicly beheaded in a car park in the city of Medina for "witchcraft and sorcery".

Sharia Executions are public

These are not isolated cases, and this is not a theoretical discussion. An ICM opinion poll in 2006 showed that 40% of Muslims in the UK wanted Sharia Law in parts of Britain. In Pakistan in 2009, a poll showed the following levels of support for aspects of Sharia ....

Pakistani Opinion Supports Sharia Punishments

... and whats opinion in Pakistan today, arrives in Britain tomorrow.

Finally, the Muslims in the UK actively benefit by the UK having 'secular' laws that protect them, while they reject the idea of the host society having any jurisprudence over them. Sadly this just another example of the vast majority being asked to bow to the demands of a 'special' minority, who just refuse to try to fit in with the host society. "Justice for all" should be same for both men and women, and for all religions or the non religious ... not one law for us, and another set of laws for a religious group.

ET Don't Come

2012-01-15T10:24:00.000Z

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence better known as 'Seti' for short, has always been on the outer edges of scientific endeavour, with many scientists considering it a waste of money. As a result, the Seti project has always been struggling for funds and computer time to analyse its results. It offset the computer time by harnessing the power of people home computers by asking supporters to download the Seti Screen Saver which used spare time on their PC's to download, process and upload small sections of their signals. The prize to participants is that their name is attached to that data, so if they're the lucky one that finds ET, they get the Nobel prize!

Sadly, this lack of funds has reached crisis point, and last April, there wasn't even enough money in the Seti coffers to pay the staff, and the facility shut down. There was an emergency fund raising drive and it re-opened again, but despite support from such luminaries as former astronaut Bill Anders, sci-fi author Larry Niven, and even Hollywood actress Jodie Foster, these funds were only enough for a few months of operations.

Aliens like these from Petrozavodsk Siberia and Irkutsk Russia wont be asked back.

Its not clear if the program will be able to keep going long-term, it needs about $2m (£1.3m) or so a year to keep going, and it would be rather sad if in an age when we are discovering planets around every star, and have better technology than ever before, funding couldn't be found to secure the projects long-term future.

Space Projects you can help with are:

The Seti Org.
The Milky Way Project.
The Galaxy Zoo Project.

Good News Bad News

2012-01-15T09:13:00.000Z

First the 'Good News'. We are not going to have a new 'Ice Age' within the next 1,500 years, which is when it was due to have started. The last one ended about 11,500 years ago and they cycle through every 12,000 years or so according to scientists (its all to do with Earths orbital cycles known as 'Milankovitch cycles' - subtle variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun). So probably we can all be grateful for this bit of information, and granny can stop knitting the Woolly Mammoth jumpers.

Not In The Neighbourhood Soon

Now for the 'Bad News'. The reason why there isn't going to be a new 'Ice Age' next week or even next millennium, is that 'Global Warming' is preventing the conditions that triggers the start of the next 'Ice Age' from starting up. This because scientists believe that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would have to fall below about 240 parts per million (ppm) before the glaciation could begin, and as they are currently about 390 ppm, then obviously it won't be happening soon.

Incidentally, before we all started worrying about 'Global Warming', I can remember newspapers discussing how we were overdue for the next 'Ice Age' .... even with the warming up, unless we get a runaway 'Greenhouse Effect' (like the planet Venus), we will still have another 'Ice Age', its just a matter of when, not if.

The Future Of Things

2012-01-14T12:58:00.002Z

While we are still talking of making predictions, we can now add a new name to those of the great seers ..... American engineer John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. who in the December 1900 edition of the Ladies Home Journal wrote an entitled “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years ”, with 29 predictions ..... some, where right, and in fact his hit rate was better than your average savant.

Included in his predictions of 100 years of progress were the following:

Prediction #1: There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century.

Actual, there are in fact 313,000,000 million US citizens.

Prediction #2: The American will be taller by from one to two inches.

Actual, this is exactly the current average height increase in US males.

Prediction #5: Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour between New York and San Francisco.

Actual, Amtrak's flagship high-speed rail line, the Acela Express, opened between Boston and Washington, DC. It reaches top speeds of 150mph (it should be pointed out that this was not the average, and is slower that fast trains in China, Japan, France, and in fact anywhere else, except of course the UK, who can't even manage that).

Prediction #6: Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today.

Actual, well cheap second hand cars are about the price of a good hacking horse, and a good race horse can be more or less the price of an average new car.

Prediction #8: Aerial War-Ships and Forts on Wheels. Giant guns will shoot twenty-five miles or more, and will hurl anywhere within such a radius shells exploding and destroying whole cities.

Actual, fighter planes, tanks, and nuclear shells/missiles could be covered by this prediction.

Prediction #9: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance and Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colours. Prediction #10: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. Prediction #18: Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world.

Actual, Phones, TV, Internet, PC's, WiFi and satellites have allowed colour media content to transmitted in seconds and communication to every part of the globe.

Prediction #12: Peas as Large as Beets. Peas and beans will be as large as beets are to-day, and Prediction #13: Strawberries as Large as Apples!

Actual, well fruit and vegetables are often larger than in his time, and certainly plants are more productive so in essence he's right. But we haven't tried to produce extra large produce, mainly for reasons of taste and utility.

Prediction #15: No Foods will be exposed .... to air ..... Liquid-air refrigerators will keep great quantities of food fresh for long intervals.

Actual, mass tinning and sealed packaging is the norm, with refrigerated food making up the other 95% of shop produce.

There Are Many Visions Of The Future

Prediction #17: A university education will be free to every man and woman. Several great national universities will have been established. Medical inspectors regularly visiting the public schools will furnish poor children free eyeglasses, free dentistry and free medical attention of every kind.

Actual, in the UK and US, we have the great national universities, but they were not free in the US and are not free anymore in the UK (excluding Scotland where its still free). The UK has 'free' health care for the poor, and very cheap provision for most. The US has some provision for the very poor, although maybe not as generous as in Europe or Canada.

Prediction #21: Hot and Cold Air from Spigots will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house.

Actual, Central heating and Air Conditioning are the norm in the developed world.

Prediction #23: Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking. The food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile waggons.

Actual, supermarket ready meals, takeaways and home deliveries are all common place now.

Prediction #27: Few drugs will be swallowed or taken into the stomach unless needed for the direct treatment of that organ itself. Drugs needed by the lungs, for instance, will be applied directly to those organs through the skin and flesh.

Actual, this is not quite the case but we are heading this way with drugs that target genes or organs, and skin injections via pressurised air bursts are also more common.

Prediction #28: There will be no wild animals except in menageries.

Actual, not yet but by 3000 AD we will probably have driven many species to extinction in the wild.

Prediction #29: To England in Two Days.

Actual, he didn't predict air planes (he thought airships would remain slow because of winds), so he thought super fast passenger liners would sail the seas ... so we have exceeded his predictions with airliners.

So who was this far-sighted man? Well he was a railroad engineer who lived from 1852 to 1903. He suffered a "disabling" accident in 1873 and became a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He then took a job as curator at the transport section of the US National Museum in 1885, where he also became a writer for the Ladies Home Journal's sister magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, based in Indianapolis.

His job at the museum allowed him access to many scientists and he used this access to make his predictions. "These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible". He said that that he had consulted the country's "greatest institutions of science and learning" for their opinions on 29 topics.

A reproduction of the full list is here (or on the links above) ... you will have to save to your PC to read this image because of blogspot limits on sizes.

Food For Thought

2012-01-14T11:01:00.000Z

Quote of the week ..... "Human rights do not prescribe national suicide".

The actual context of this quote from Israeli Judge, Asher Grunis, was in a ruling upholding the right of the Israeli state to stop arab Israeli's marrying non Israeli arabs, and then these spouses being automatically granted Israeli citizenship. This practise was banned on both security grounds, and because it was starting to affect the demographics of Israel and would if continued, have led to the Jews becoming a minority in their own state. Predictably arab 'human rights' groups (if that's not an oxymoron?), who had been championing the rights of arabs to swamp Israel via this backdoor immigration, are unhappy at this eminently sensible decision.

4.6 million Arabs want to get into Israel

But just imagine the fuss if 3 or 4 million 'Christians' or Jews emigrated to a small arab state, then demanded it stop being 'Muslim' ... would those same arab 'human rights' groups support that? .... they didn't when Israel was founded this way. Incidentally, one the Palestinian key demands is that around *4.6 million palestinian 'refugees' living in surrounding states, be allowed to live in Palestine and Israel ... a move which would effectively wipe Israel off the map.

However, I am not so interested in the arab belief that they can use immigration via marriage to undermine Israel. No, I think that the ruling, and the logic behind it, is so profound, that a few UK and European judges, who often perversely use 'human rights' considerations to stop the deportations of suspected terrorists, illegal immigrants, failed asylum seekers, and foreign criminals (including rapists, paedophiles, and murderers), might occasionally stop and think about its implications.

*in January 2010, UNRWA cited there being 1,396,368 registered refugees in camps, and a further 3,370,302 registered refugees not in camps

Strange But True Stories

2012-01-08T10:23:00.000Z

In one of those strange tales that the media love to close the news with so much, Lena Paahlsson in Sweden found her wedding ring, lost in her farm kitchen sixteen years ago, now on the loving body of a carrot growing in her garden.

Lena Paahlsson's Wedding Ring

This is yet another variant on the lost ring found in a fish tale that crops up every so often. The latest of these tales that I can recall is that of Joe Richardson's graduating class ring, which he lost fishing in lake Sam Rayburn Texas in 1987, and which turned up in a fish caught in the same lake in November 2008 by another fisherman, who tracked him down and returned it.

Joe Richardson's graduating class ring

File them both under the 'strange but true' category.

Sacrifice To The Gods

2012-01-08T09:30:00.000Z

Sometimes we at PC towers wonder what the world is coming to. In India, the police are looking for the villagers who killed a seven-year-old girl in a case of tribal sacrifice. The little girl, Lalita Tanti, was apparently kidnapped from her school and her body was found two days later.

The police in Chhattisgarh state said that the sacrifice was carried out to ensure a bumper crop. According to reports there are many cases of human sacrifice thought to be carried out in the tribal belt of eastern and central India, in Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and parts of Andhra Pradesh bordering Chhattisgarh.

Some Gods Want Sacrifices

Last time we discussed this subject a rather lively debate ensued, but its hard to ignore the fact that in the 21st century, and in an age of modern media communications, in a country that's claiming to be one of the coming centuries next 'social and economic giants', there are people so backward that they murder little children to appease their gods .... if this (and Chinese imperialism), is what is to replace western civilisation in the coming century, then god(s) help us all.

Predictions 2012

2012-01-07T19:19:00.000Z

Like seers throughout the ages, from Old Mother Shipton, to Nostradamus, blog commentators always feel impelled to have a stab at the coming years events .... its a chance to look stupid within months, weeks or even days.

Nosterdamus And Mother Shipton

But what the heck, here we go for 2012:

Iran will test fire a Nuclear Bomb sometime this year, with all that this implies.
All the 'Arab Spring' states will end up with Islamist parties in power, with all that this implies.
Nigeria will move closer towards a civil war based upon the Islamic Christian splits that already exist.
North Korea will attack South Korean forces in another calculated gamble that they can force more aid from them.
Pakistan will continue to slide backwards, and the army will take over again (that's if they ever really let go).
Greece will pull out of the Euro, and at least one other state will follow suite.

Oh and one last one ..... the Mayan Apocalypse of 2012 will not be the end of the world .... well not unless the world reacts badly to one of the above, in which case maybe it will be. And that's my thoughts for the year ahead .....

Racial Sterotyping

2012-01-07T18:51:00.001Z

Diane Abbott, the left wing, member of the Labour Party's shadow cabinet has featured on these posts before. Whether she is really fit for a top job is somewhat doubtful in many commentators opinions.

She once again has been seen to hold views that would get a white politician the sack. Her latest outburst was in stating that ''White people love playing 'divide & rule'. We should not play their games". This caused the predictable outrage, but as is usual with the Labour Party, she didn't resign (they didn't have many, if any resignations, in thirteen years of power, despite several cases of ministers abuses being exposed). However what was missed was that she also stated that "Ethnic communities that show more public solidarity & unity than black people do much better" .... which is something of a condemnation of the black community as well .... predictably, they didn't notice this slight.

Abbot and Stereotyping

She then followed this up by saying that she was “Dubious of black people claiming they’ve never experienced racism. Ever tried hailing a taxi I always wonder?” .... this begs a few questions about the advisability of taxis picking black males late at night, which we would be in trouble for asking, so I'll just point out that black comedian Chris Rock said that "It's not 'the media' that's giving black folks a bad name. When I go to the ATM I ain't looking over my shoulder for "the media", I'm looking for the ....." I can't use the word he used next, but he was pointing out that theres a difference between 'Black folks' and other 'Blacks' that everyone is aware of.

She has some previous form on these sort of 'race ' comments .... she was of course the Race Relations Officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties from 1978 to 1980, but her ideas on race equality seem to have something of a slant to them:

She once apparently argued that white teachers, especially white women teachers, couldn't deal with black boys who needed a black male role model to control them (presumably because they had no male role models at home ... she is a single black mother herself after her divorce) - So she sent her son to a private school to be taught by a largely white teaching staff.
She upset some in the black community when she said that "when it comes to corruption, Nigerians make Jamaicans, and every other nationality in the world, look like mere amateurs".
In 1988, at a conference in the United States of America, she made a speech in which she said that "the British invented racism".
In 1996, Abbot commented that at her local hospital "blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls" were unsuitable as nurses because they had "never met a black person before".
She referred to Politicians David Cameron and Nick Clegg as "two posh white boys" in May 2010

A fellow Hackney Labour MP Brian Sedgemore suggested that Abbott would "never be taken seriously again" after the private school episode of hypocrisy, but he forgot that Race Politics play big in Labour Party politics, as does tokenism, so she is back in the Labour Executive, losing them votes again.

Storm In A 'D' Cup

2012-01-07T17:18:00.000Z

Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh, has warned the kingdoms shop owners that employing women is a "crime and prohibited by Islamic sharia law" .... but the King has apparently decided that on this issue he will bow to pressure from women's rights campaigners. So from this week, certain shops will not be allowed to employ men.

Of course this being an Islamic paradise on earth, all is not as it seems .... the King has only legislated that male employees be removed from 'lingerie shops', where conservative women were 'embarrassed' by having to give their bra and knicker sizes to male employees. He has also said that the ban is due to be extended to cosmetics shops from July 2012.

Praying To Mecca or M&S?

Even funnier is that in their efforts to stop women working (Shock, Horror!) so that they wouldn't develop any independence, Saudi men were happy for the majority of the male employees in these lingerie departments to be foreign men. These men were not even guaranteed to be Muslim. The decree is expected to cause 40,000 jobs to be lost to these men, but not necessarily create the same number for Saudi women as its likely that it will be foreign women who take around half of these jobs because Saudi women wont be able to take the jobs (can't drive cars, need male chaperone, need male permission etc etc).

QURAN 4:34 – ‘Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient ’

However even this small 'victory' for women could be somewhat pyrrhic as it reinforces other aspects of the separation between women and men, and even the King is powerless to stop there being opposition from the religious police, and their backers .... one step forward, two steps back?

Who Watches The Watchmen?

2012-01-02T20:30:00.001Z

The British Police have not had a good year in 2011. Firstly there was the complete collapse of law on the streets, when the police failed to tackle the street scum of London and other cities, while they looted, robbed, mugged and burnt out the law abiding ..... even an internal report has condemned the poor responses of the London and other police forces.

There have even been suggestions that in Manchester it was a 'societal issue' and was caused by 'deprivation', and therefore it was somehow 'inevitable' that rioters and looters would succeed. Not the fact that the policing was very poor, or that its the congregation of criminals in certain postcodes that creates the deprived areas in the first place.

London Riot - A 100 yr old business, gone forever.

Then there was the mindless killing of an Indian man in Salford, in which his parents only found out via his "Facebook" page, and for which the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) suddenly stumped up a £50,000 reward because it was classified as a 'hate' aka 'race crime'. Now considering the fact that there are hundreds of murders in the UK each year, this begs the simple question, if it had been a white victim of a black attacker (of course that never happens in a multicultural paradise, where only one group are ever capable of 'racist' crimes ...), would a reward of £50,000 have been offered?

I don't remember any murder, even the much publicised hunt for the killers of Stephen Lawrence, or the Boxing day shops 'gang' (black on black) murder of Seydou Diarrassouba, ever having prompted the offer of such a large amount, but then they aren't perhaps as 'politically sensitive' as the Labour funded GMP.

But to cap a bad year, the politically correct policing of the UK has seemingly produced police forces who can't even apparently prevent robberies in their own police stations ..... a report issued today, shows that hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment and personal belongings have been stolen from police stations across Britain .... the worst hit in 2011 were the following forces;

Greater Manchester - £86,910
Strathclyde - £22,524
Northumbria - £19,858
Essex - £15,406
Surrey - £9,657

But every force had examples, from a £10,000 patrol car and £30,000 private vehicle stolen from GMP, through, police cars, computers, warrant cards, bikes, riot shields, a battering ram, breathalysers, a small fridge, CCTV footage and a TV, to a packet of crumpets from Priory Road police station in Hull.

The Taxpayers' Alliance director Emma Boon said that "The list of stolen items is truly astonishing and taxpayers will worry that police giving out crime prevention advice can't seem to avoid being robbed themselves," and called for an investigation.

Maybe if the police and courts in Britain actually concentrated of police work, and the sentencing of criminals of any racial aspect, and not on political policing, in which some crimes are racially 'high profile' and given maximum resources, while the bread and butter policing, such as upholding law and order on the streets of our 'deprived estates' or on the shopping high-streets are allowed to fail. Then maybe we would all have more confidence that our society isn't simply breaking down on the margins.

UK Police are looking for their stolen items.

A Roman poet Juvenal once asked in his 'Satires', "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", which can be translated loosely as 'Who polices the police?' ..... I suspect he didn't realise that in the UK it would be read as 'who protects the police from the thieves!'

Monsters Inc Two

2011-12-31T14:47:00.002Z

Finally as its the dawn of another New Year, I spotted another couple of those web stories that promote the stranger beliefs out there .... the first was that the 'Loch Ness Monster' had been spotted on Google Earth and can be seen by entering the co-ordinates Latitude 5712'52.13" N, Longitude 434'14.16" W.

'Loch Ness' Monster?

Actually it looks more like a squid, or even the 'Queen Alien' than 'Nessie' ....

Alien Swimming - Loch Ness Monster?

The second site, seems to be a creationist religious site, but has on it what it suggests are genuine pictures of dinosaurs that are or were still alive until recently ..... I have cleaned all the pictures up (just backgrounds, not main figures), because they were torn or marked, but the originals can be seen here and here.

'Pterodactyl' shot down by Confederate soldiers during the Civil war

Man Holding a 'Rhamphorhynchus'

Again, its on faith that these are 'genuine' .... the first and second both show what I believe is also sometimes referred to as the "thunderbird", but look fake to me. For instance in that second picture, that could just be a spade behind the man. not a tail, and the bird, some kind of vulture.

And the first picture, looks remarkably like this one of another bunch of civil war soldiers shooting yet another large creature or thunderbird (which must have been filling the North American skies at the time! ) ... this has also been declared as a fake (See this post for faking pictures).

US Soldiers Kill 'Thunderbird' or 'Roc'

Ah well, as I have said before, the world wide web is a wonderful invention, and its sites and photo's like these that make it such fun.

Happy New Year for 2012!

North Korean Portends

2011-12-31T13:14:00.000Z

I have been following events in North Korea with some interest .... after all the 'Demigods' that are the royal ruling family of the Communist, Democratic Republic of North Korea, are a rarity in the world.

So after all the talk of 'portends' on the death of one heredity ruler and succession of another, it was with some glee that my attention was caught by news that the North Koreans have apparently recruited giants into their armed forces ....

One Big Korean

Sadly all the speculation is that this isn't a fake, but is in fact the 7’ 8” tall North Korean basketball star Ri Myung Hun.

Hackers In Space

2011-12-31T12:52:00.000Z

A rock band once entitled one of their albums "Italians From Outer Space" in a bit of a joke .... so when I saw in the news last August that hackers wanted to set up their own satellite system, I laughed, thinking it a joke.

Italians From Outer Space

But the laugh is on me, because in a sign of the times that we now live in, that's exactly what they are proposing to do. The news from the hackers at the 'Chaos Communication Congress' in Berlin is that they are proposing put a 'Hackerspace Global Grid' of satellites into orbit, and tracking stations on the ground to take the Internet beyond the reach of censors. They even have plans in the long term, to help put an amateur astronaut on the moon!

The reason why they consider that this is necessary is because they believe that governments such as China and the USA, are increasingly trying to censor or own the world wide web ... acts such as the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in the United States, they consider to be threats to online freedom. If passed, the act would allow for some sites to be blocked on copyright grounds, and of course China is implicated in numerous state hacking and censorship activities, such as the infamous "Great Firewall of China".

One of the future battlegrounds of the human race could be 'freedom of thought' versus 'censorship or control '.... I know which side I will be on.

Man and Machines

2011-12-31T12:22:00.000Z

Modern Man has been around for about 50,000 years, and since then as busy little beavers we have been remaking the planet and all it contains to reflect our requirements. The ultimate end product of which is likely to be a disaster for us and all the other creatures sharing this earth although once we have gone, another evolutionary round will probably repopulate the planet eventually.

Our first tool was fire, and evidence of how our fore-bearers used it to shape their environment is just emerging with suggestions that early humans could have had the ability to start fires about 300,000 years ago, but the real impact was from about 70,000 years ago as human populations became more widespread, and really taking hold about 50 - 40,000 years ago.

However, here we are and the full impact of mans use of tools can now be seen from space .... this series of stunning photographs illustrate exactly how much we have shaped the planet. They illustrate the major road rail, transmission line, underwater cables, overlaid on top of the cities illuminated at night, as seen from space.

Mans Impact - Africa

Mans Impact - Asia

Mans Impact - Australasia

Mans Impact - Europe

Mans Impact - South America

Mans Impact - North America

Interesting side note, we came out of Africa, and yet that's the least developed continent.

A Shot In The Dark

2011-12-27T14:18:00.000Z

There are some faces that you see far too often .....

Chief Supt Kevin Mulligan -
Heading yet another murder enquiry.

and this is one of them .... Yes its our old friend, Chief Supt Kevin Mulligan of that socialist voting paradise known as Salford. We last heard from him in June this year, when one of those not so 'rare' violent deaths that occurred so often on his watch, was in the news.

Well yet again there has been another senseless killing in Salford, this time of an Indian Student 'executed' in the streets in the early hours, and in front of eight other students. Two men just approached the nine students, all Indians, said something to them that's not been reported, then one pulled out a gun and shot the student in the head, killing him.

As usual, the Chief Supt had some platitudes to reel out. "This appears to be an unprovoked attack and we can't establish a motive at this time. We are investigating every possible aspect and we are in the early stages of the investigation, but we are not ruling anything out." .... he bit that struck me was 'appears to be unprovoked'? What, there could possibly be a reasonable 'motive' for a 'provoked attack'? A man was shot dead in the street - we don't need to know why the killer did it, or if the attack was 'unprovoked', we need to know that they have been caught.

At least he recognises that its the denizens of his crime ridden patch who perpetrate these crimes "I believe the answers to who did this will lie in our community", which is something of an improvement on his statement following an earlier murder/shooting in salford, that he "would like to reassure residents that there is no general threat to them as a result of what happened".

As Inspector Clouseau once said "Yes, well, life is not all shoot-shoot, bang-bang, you know" which thought must be a source of comfort to the residents of the gun alleys of Salford.

Update: Rather strangely the police have so far arrested four people in connection with this murder - two men and two boys, aged 16 and 17.

Rescuing Santa

2011-12-23T13:48:00.002Z

When we introduced a Freedom of Information in the UK (a watered down version of the US model), who knew what it would throw up, well a list of the strangest request for information in 2011 has thrown up at least one request to Cheltenham Borough Council for them to explain:

What preparations has the council made for an emergency landing of Santa's sleigh this Christmas?
Who would be responsible for rescuing Santa?
Who would be responsible for rounding up the reindeer, and
Who would have to tidy the crash site?

With reports that in the US dozens of US congressmen have pledged to protect Christmas from attempts to undermine it, especially the the nativity scenes, maybe this isn't as daft a question as it may seem.

Cheltenham Borough Council - Plans To Rescue Santa

Some of the other strange items the councils were asked about are:

How does the council plan to help the brave soldiers of our infantry if and when Napoleon and his marauding hordes invade the district? (West Devon District Council)
What plans are in place to deal with an alien invasion? (Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service)
How many drawing pins are in the building and what percentage are currently stuck in a pin board? (Hampshire County Council)
How many *holes in privacy walls between toilet cubicles have been found in public lavatories and council buildings? (Cornwall Council) *aka 'Glory Holes' in Gay Communities.

Its a funny old world, with some no longer able to tell the difference between fact and fiction ....

Happy Christmas Everyone!

Vaclav Havel - A Hero For Our Times

2011-12-23T12:43:00.001Z

Our age in the West has stopped producing heroes, when banality and mediocrity are the benchmarks .... so this blog is open in its admiration of the few that are produced. So its with sadness that we mark the passing away of Vaclav Havel - a hero for our times.

I won't detail his life story, there will be millions of biographies that do that, but suffice it to say that he gave the world the 989 Velvet Revolution in the then Czechoslovakia that was peaceful, and along with the Solidarity movement in Poland showed that even the most oppressive of regimes can be defeated by simple protest, as long as they are not monsters (sadly, China, Libya and Syria, show that where the regime has no conscience, then peaceful measures will fail).

Vaclav Havel - A Rolling Stone President

He is rightly remembered in the modern components of the old Czechoslovakia (Slovakia and the Czech Republic) for his role in as the playwright of the Czech Spring of 1968, the Charter 77 group and after the 1989 Velvet Revolution he became the first democratically elected President of Czechoslovakia since the Nazi and Communist occupations from 1939 onwards.

Sadly he oversaw the break up of Czechoslovakia into the Slovakian and the Czech Republic states, but was then elected the president of the new Czech Republic a few months later in January 1993. After stepping down at the end of his second term as president in 2003, he devoted time to supporting human rights activists around the world.

He deserves all the plaudits ....

Demigod Kim Jong-il

2011-12-23T11:47:00.001Z

Whenever any Demigod passes away there are strange portends and phenomena., And so its with no surprise that the reports from the mad house that is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea aka North Korea (why are states that call themselves 'Democratic' invariably not?), are claiming that the very heavens are in mourning for the departure of mini me tyrant Kim Jong-il.

State TV reported that ice cracked on the famous lake Chon "so loud, it seemed to shake the Heavens and the Earth".
A snowstorm hit as Mr Kim died.
Following the storm's sudden end at dawn, a message was seen carved in to the rock - "Mount Paektu, holy mountain of revolution. Kim Jong-il" - it glowed brightly and there until sunset .... its gone now if you thinking of going to see this phenomena.
On the same say, a Manchurian crane also apparently adopted a posture of grief at a statue of the late leader's father in the northern city of Hamhung.

Demigod Kim Jong-il

Now all this heavenly activity for the death of an aetheist heredity communist leader shouldn't come as a surprise, when you consider that according to his official biographers, his birth at Baekdu Mountain was 'foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain, and a new star in the very heavens' ... so he was hardly going to pass away quietly either.

He now presumably joins his god like father Kim Il-sung in ruling the very heavens. The designated god heir and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, is already being called the "Great Successor" and they are now being told that the junior Kim is "a great person born of heaven on (sacred) Mount Paektu" ..... another fifty years of being ruled by a god must be daunting.

Entente Uncordiale

2011-12-23T11:03:00.002Z

As its Christmas week I thought I would post a bit early and the first item had to be the verbal assault of the UK by the 'Europeans' which shows exactly what a lie the European Union really is.

The reason for this was that we had the temerity to block an attempt by the French and Germans to cripple the UK economy by imposing whats known as a Tobin tax (a tax on every city financial transaction) on the City of London. As the Americans have no such tax, then all the trade would simply go to them, thus probably defeating the alleged purpose of the tax, which was to make the UK pay for the euro zone economic collapse (even though we are not in the zone). Obviously the removal of 10% of Government finances in the UK would have brought Britain to its knees, and reduced us to the level of Greece, and so our Prime Minister blocked the moves.

The UK Stands Alone Against Federalism

Then came the assault .... Germany and France were the two main protagonists Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, head of the Germany's FDP group, part of the European Liberals, said it was "a mistake to let the British into the EU".Daniel Cohen-Bendit, joint leader of the Greens in the European Parliament has labelled Mr Cameron "a weakling".

Le Figaro the French newspaper stated that "No sooner did David Cameron cross the entrance to the council, on the occasion of the 8 December summit, than the sky over the negotiations darkened. He had one aim: to protect British interests." This from a nation where De Gaulle set the terms for the UK's entry as so steep that we have distrusted the institution ever since.

The French prime minister, Mr Fillon, French finance minister Francois Baroin, and Christian Noyer Chairman of the French central bank all suggested that Britain was a better candidate for a downgrade of its triple-A rating ahead of France, amid fears in Paris that France might lose its triple-A rating.

"When I look at our British friends, who are even more indebted than us and carrying a bigger deficit, what I see is that the ratings agencies so far don't seem to have noticed", " ... you'd rather be French than British in economic terms" about sums up the sentiments

The rest of Europe joined in the attacks to one degree or another .... so much for European Unity. Apparently, stopping the Euro zone from robbing £80bn from the UK economy to pay for the Euro zone badly formulated collapse is apparently selfish on our part. The fact that it was Germany (along with Italy), which was the first Euro zone country to break the 3% cap on borrowing, which was set in to the first Euro treaty, at the insistence of the then German finance minister Leo Waigal. France immediately did the same. Oddly Spain was the only country to stick to the rules, and look what happened to them. Somehow, this is all Britain's fault.

The sooner we have a referendum on getting out of this corrupt grouping the better, they never wanted us, just our our money. Even taking into account the rebate, the UK is one of the largest net contributors to the EU budget. Had it not been for the rebate, its net contribution would have been even bigger than Germany's in 2007 and all the years since we joined. Note that the French actually pay far less than the UK or even the Netherlands in 'Net' terms.

Just for the record:

Who pays the piper should call the tune

We are still the second highest net contributors to EU coffers, but its the Germans and French who call the tune .... time to end this farce.

Start Of The Arab Winter?

2011-12-16T21:08:00.000Z

We at PC towers always wondered if the Arab Spring might turn, without any summer, into a long winter, and maybe, just maybe, we are seeing the first signs of things turning sour. In Egypt, the ultraconservative Islamists, known as Salafists, have emerged from the first stage of Egypt's parliamentary election as a powerful political force. These are violent men who attack Christians, and believe in the 'Mad Mullah' school of politics.

The Salafists In Egypt Are Democrats -
Who Believe In The Civil Society!!

They took 24% of the party-list vote in Egypt, second only to the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) which took 36%. The core of their support comes from the illiterate and poor, who identify strongly with conservative religious values, and leaves the Islamists with 60% of the votes.

Time will tell, but we may be seeing the end of the middle class dreams in Egypt and elsewhere, and the start of a Sunni Theocracy like the Shia's in Iran. The Second Caliphate may be taking its first faltering steps.

Justice or Vengeance?

2011-12-16T20:45:00.001Z

I know I shouldn't be, but I can't help feeling sorry for ex Panama Strongman (and then friend of the US) General Manuel Noriega - I mean, as Dictators go he was small fry, which doesn't of course lessen his crimes (drug running, murder, corruption and embezzlement are some of the charges), but in the scheme of these things he was more Presidenti Mustachio rather than Saddam Hussein.

General Manuel Noriega US Prison

However, he just goes from jail to jail, and sentence to sentence, while others of a similar ilk have just lived in exile. Now aged 77 he has already spent more than 20 years in prisons in France and the United States, and has now been returned to Panama where hes expected to stay in prison until he dies.

77 yr old Gen Noriega

He has never once been sentenced to death, but the culmination of all these prison terms effectively means that he will die in prison ... probably not undeserved, but justice has to always be seen to be done, and this can start to look less like 'justice' and more like 'vengeance'.

Voter Fraud or Anti Immigrant?

2011-12-16T20:25:00.000Z

Apparently in Texas and other US States, in an effort to combat possible electoral fraud, the electoral board have passed new rules where voters are required to show state identification at the polls when voting. Seems sensible enough, but cue the Democrats complaints.

Electoral fraud comes in many guises

Now what they wanted to say was .... "but that will hurt our vote because we have illegal immigrants vote for us" .... but they can't. So they have to say that 'the poor and elderly may struggle to secure that documentation' .... in fact Democratic Attorney General Eric Holder managed to square the circle in this statement "we need election systems that are free from fraud, discrimination and partisan influence - and that are more, not less, accessible to the citizens of this country".... but he added that "The most recent census data indicated that Texas has gained more than four million new residents - the vast majority of whom are Hispanic".

The Democrats are trying to find some way to declare the rules 'unconstitutional', but have to be careful how this plays with the white community because as Walter Scott said ..... 'Oh what tangled webs we weave when we first practise to deceive' .... as most of those new Hispanic residents of Texas are alleged to be illegal immigrants, and therefore shouldn't be able to vote, and won't be able to if forced to produce state papers.

Why Are Polar Bears Still Here?

2011-12-11T18:35:00.001Z

I was watching David Attenborough's excellent "Frozen Planet" and a post programme discussion in which he said that if warming continued unabated the Polar bear would be extinct. Now on the face of it that makes sense but there are a couple of nagging questions that always bug me about this.

According to both fossil and DNA evidence, the polar bear (Ursus Maritimus) diverged from the brown bear (Ursus Arctos), roughly 150,000 years ago and the oldest known polar bear fossil is a 130,000 to 110,000-year-old jaw bone. However when they evolved, during what geologists describe as the Pleistocene or Ice Age, the ice sheets were more or less permanent from Canada and Russia through to the North Pole. In fact over the vast time span of the Pleistocene (from 2,000,000 - 12,000 B.C), large glacial ice sheets covered much of North America, Europe, and Asia for extended periods of time.

But since the start of the current geological period about 12,000 BC (known as the Holocene epoch), the retreat of the glacial ice has been more or less continuous. So the polar bear has had at least 14,000 years to adapt to the gradual but constant changes caused by warming and ice retreat. Even during the Ice Age the extent of the glacier ice cover was not static, and there were periods when the glaciers retreated (known as the interglacial), because of warmer temperatures, and advanced because of colder temperatures (glacial).

Climatic indicators for the last 400,000 years.

The last ice cover peakage is known as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) approximately 20,000 years ago, when the north and south of the planets saw vast ice sheets for the last time.

Earth At The Last Glacial Maximum

But there were periods in that two million year epoch when the ice retreat during an interglacial would have been at least the equivalent of the current retreat. So why were polar bears not wiped out the first time the ice broke up and left open sea between the the north pole ice pack and the land?

I have no idea if this is a valid question or not, but I always suspect that someone should be able to answer this before saying that they will be made extinct this time round, when they have so obviously not done so on other occasions ..... maybe the answer to where the polar bears go when conditions no longer suit their lifestyles, lies in a hybrid between grizzly and polar bears? These hybrids, some times called a pizzly bear or prizzly bear, or grolar bear would have all the DNA and characteristics to quickly evolve back into polar bear types when and if the ice cover ever came back.

A female hybrid, male hybrid, brown bear and polar bear

Its just an idle bit of speculation on one of those imponderables we come across in our lives .... I was just diverted by the notion, and now you have been as well.

Where There's Muck There's Brass

2011-12-10T14:27:00.001Z

There is a saying in the north of England "Where there's muck there's brass", meaning where there are dirty jobs to be done there is money to be made. Well there's nothing more mucky than dog poo, but even in that unlikely object there's apparently money to be made, well in Taiwan at least ....

"All That Glitters" Isn't The Only Gold

..... they have a reward system which hands out lottery tickets for bags of dog waste scooped from the streets of New Taipei City. The prizes for this social activity range from the top prize of a gold ingot worth $2,200 (£1,400), down through smaller gold ingots worth hundreds of dollars, to small household appliances. This cunning scheme has been credited with halving the amount of dog mess on the city streets, but despite the scheme being extended, it can't go on forever, with many saying that the city simply cannot afford to keep exchanging dog poo for gold.

However I seem to recall that in the Terry Prachett 'Disc World' series of fantasy books, the reclamation czar of Ankh-Morpork Harry King (aka as 'Piss Harry' behind his back), the man sometimes called the 'King of the Golden River', had a soft spot for what he called 'White Gold' i.e. dried dog waste, because tanners would pay extra for it ...... maybe the councillors of New Taipei City are missing a source of revenue here?

Biggest Bulgars

2011-12-09T20:29:00.001Z

Bulgaria Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who is a casual football player for Bulgarian third division side Vitosha Bistritsa was named the country's player-of-the-year in an annual poll. He collected 44% of the votes in the fans' poll, placing him well ahead of Dimitar Berbatov of Manchester United.

Boyko Borisov and Dimitar Berbatov
Bulgarias No1 and No2 Footballers.

Whilst no doubting that he was surprised and honoured by this perverse result, the Prime Minister was anxious not to actually accept the award .... "It is a signal that Bulgarian football needs reforms and a new policy. Organisers should annul the vote" he said. The amateur player Vasil Lukaev, from amateur team Shipka Dragor, came third.

Internet Freedom In India

2011-12-09T19:47:00.001Z

In a bad move for free speech and democracy in India, communications Minister Kapil Sibal has vowed to crack down on offensive Internet content .... they have decided that they will introduce guidelines to ensure that "blasphemous material" did not appear on Internet.

This Upset The Indian Government

The reason for this sudden Chinese style censorship? Apparently 'doctored' photos of the Indian PM Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi are on the Internet and have angered the Indian government. They should be glad that they don't have satirical magazines such as the UK's Private Eye, or Frances 'Charlie Hebdo' .... this would look like tame stuff indeed.

British History, BBC Version

2011-12-09T19:06:00.001Z

The BBC likes to set the social agenda in the UK ... it largely takes a left leaning PC agenda on social issues, and without being asked or invited, generally acts as an extension of the labour parties polices.

Nothing illustrates this more than when it rewrites British history or myth to fit its agenda. e.g. TV adaptations of the 'Merlin', 'King Arthur' or 'Robin Hood' stories, which now routinely feature African characters, despite their complete absence from the original stories. Even the "Black Knight" wasn't black in the stories I read.

The Arthurian Age was very Multicultural according the BBC

Of course if you attempted to rewrite the myths of Africans, and put in white characters where none had existed before, then there would be an outcry, not least the from the BBC itself, so immigrants are left with their culture and traditions intact. Its only the British (sorry English) history, culture or myths that can be changed to fit the BBC world view, because now that I think of it, William Wallace and Owen Glendower would never be rewritten either, as the Scots and Welsh are also minorities in the BBC world view as well.

Its frightening how so very little that the BBC does in support of its unelected agenda, is ever challenged anymore. Its almost as if the last thirty or forty years of left wing agenda being daily beamed out, has dulled the sensibilities of those who should be challenging the BBC.

Oh for a Mrs Mary Whitehouse to ride out like a modern day Don Quixote to tilt at the giant that is the BBC.

Ice Sculpture

2011-12-04T19:36:00.001Z

While I was at Edinburgh Castle I took this picture of the creation of the winter ice sculptures. The winter has been so mild to-date that they are constantly creating more ..... Its rare that you capture moments like this and I was so pleased with the effect, that I thought I would share it in a post of its own.

Ice Sculpture - Late Afternoon, Edinburgh Castle

Edinburgh In Winter

2011-12-04T19:14:00.001Z

Edinburgh in winter is a beautiful city ...... I took these pictures from the top of Edinburgh castle - sweeping out to the Firth of Forth ..... I created a panorama out of the three pictures (not a true one, but close enough), to give you a feel of the majesty of the view.

Edinburgh From The Top of Edinburgh Castle

It should be noted before you all rush to the castle, that most of the time, the clouds and or rain, prevent you seeing quite as much as I was lucky enough to capture on this visit ... just a warning LOL

Mad Mullahs

2011-12-03T10:59:00.001Z

I can never resist highlighting the pronouncements on women by Muslim clerics ..... they are often as mad as hatters, but because they are listened to by the men of Islam, they are also incredibly dangerous.

So from the land that brought us such gems as 'The One Eyed Veil proposed for shameless women' we now have the logical reasons why women can't be allows to drive cars. These were drawn together in an official report to be presented to the legislative assembly by another of those 'well known' academic mullahs, Kamal Subhi, who are so beloved of BBC reports.

His report apparently clams that if women drive cars:

It would increase prostitution.
Increase pornography.
Increase homosexuality (which is illegal in that part of the world anyway).
Increase the number of divorces.
And the clincher, bring on the end of 'Virginity' in the country.

An unnamed (for obvious reasons) Saudi woman, who has campaigned for women drivers said that the report was 'completely mad'.

Saudi Clerics Debate On Womens Issues

This is of course not the only such pronouncement made by a cleric, how about this. Sheikh Al Obeikan, an adviser to the royal court and consultant to the Ministry of Justice, last year said that women who come into regular contact with men, who are not their relatives, should 'give them their breast milk' in order to make them their relatives. This after Saudi cleric Abi Ishaq Al Huwaini, asked women to allow the men to 'suckle the milk directly from their breasts'.

However one of the reasons why we should watch these idiotic pronouncements is because this is exactly what 61% of Muslims in the UK want to be brought in here as well. If nothing else, this highlights what passes for 'academic' in current Islamic thought .....

End of the World ... Not

2011-12-02T21:21:00.001Z

Recently there have been many reports of the end of the world ... many have been wrong, but the banker for all these nutcases has been the Mayan Calendar cycles which many believed meant the universe, or at least our little bit of it was going to come to an end next year (maybe in 30 days ... but more likely at some point towards the end of 2012 ).

Now however, archaeologists have had another look at this and said, oops, we read it all wrong. Its not a prediction for the end of a universe cycle, but rather according to these new readings of the Mayan text carved into stone 1,300 years ago, its the expected time for Bolon Yokte' K'uh (the god of creation and war), to return to influence.

Bolon Yokte' K'uh - Mayan God Of War. Due back next year.

Even the National Autonomous University of Mexico has joined in the fun .... "There is no prophecy for 2012. It is a marketing fallacy".

Still if you think of it, it may not be a cataclysmic end for the universe or even the solar system, but the return of the God of War after a 400 years absence ( the last time he was about was when the Conquistadors overthrew the Aztecs!) may end up with the end of the world as we know expect it. ... just a thought!

Backward Afghanistan

2011-12-02T21:04:00.001Z

Our soldiers are fighting in Afghanistan, purportedly to bring some sort of civilisation to this benighted land - An Afghan woman is arrested by the police after being raped, she was charged with 'Adultery' and jailed - she had the child of her rapist in prison. The rapist of course faced no sanctions.

"At first my sentence was two years," she said. "When I appealed it became 12 years. I didn't do anything. Why should I be sentenced for so long?" ..... her sentence was reduced to three years on appeal.

Afghan women have few rights but many wrongs

She can leave prison on a Presidential pardon if she agrees to marry her rapist .... why do we bother to be there? Our soldiers are dying for nothing ..... They are a socially backward people, and think that Sharia is superior to all other systems. In fact as US and Allied troops 'handover' to Afghans, everything reverts back to the same miserable state as it was before we invaded. The whole experiment in 'democratisation' in Afghanistan was doomed from the start ... they are proud to be the most backward nation in Islam (and thats saying something given the competition for that position).

Tiger Can't Change Stripes

2011-12-02T20:39:00.001Z

When I was doing history studies, I was told that when there were one party states, the way to tell if they were Communist or Fascist was who owned the means of production - if it was the state then they were Communists e.g. USSR and it it was in private hands, then it was Fascist like National Socialist Germany.

In the 1970's 100% of all the means of production in China was in state hands - now 80% is in private hands and its still a one party state ..... by this logic is China now a Fascist state? I ask because a story on the BBC states that the Chinese are going to try and crack down on private police and 'black jails', where opponents to the regime are taken and tortured or even killed.

In a story that reminds one of Hitlers Germany, local government ministers and officials hire private thugs to dress as police, drive cars marked like the police, and then stop people who travel to Beijing to voice grievances about perceived injustices in their areas. In Beijing alone, there are estimated to be about 300,000 private security guards in the city. When a tourist was mistakenly for a petitioner, and was kidnapped, tortured and killed in error, the officials appear to have merely been reprimanded for the mistake of killing a tourist instead of a petitioner, not for kidnapping four people in the first place.

Tibetan Monks Leading Resistance

In Tibet, reports suggest that passive resistance in Tibet and Tibetan areas is spreading, with monks setting fire to themselves in increasing numbers ..... reports suggest that 11 monks and former monks have set themselves on fire so far this year, but all the incidents have all taken place in Tibetan areas of China proper. Latest reports suggest that a monk in Tibet itself has just killed himself in this manner this week.

Anders Behring Breivik Mad?

2011-11-30T19:04:00.001Z

When Anders Behring Breivik was arrested, I mused over that fact that he faced a maximum of just twenty one years imprisonment for this mass murder in liberal Norway .... which I also said didn't seem enough.

Well it appears that the Norwegian establishment feel exactly the same way, because when faced with making the decision over his mental state and whether he is fit to stand trial and go to prison, they have to the surprise of many in both Norway and abroad, determined that he is insane and had "developed the mental disorder of paranoid schizophrenia". A Swedish psychiatrist expressed disbelief in the diagnosis in a local Norwegian newspaper, stating that Breivik does not appear to have been hallucinating at any point during the attack, which would mean he was in control of his actions and thoughts during the killing.

Face Of A Madman, or Clinical Killer?

The point that many will miss in all this is that if he had been found as sane enough to go to prison, then by 2032 under the current law, Breivik would be walking free on to the streets, into a much changed Norway, where maybe sentiment towards Islam may also have hardened. However under current Norwegian law, he can be 'sectioned' and locked away in a secure mental institution, until he is deemed as both 'cured', and no danger to the public. Its inconceivable that he will be let out inside thirty years if found as insane, and very probably never. Needless to say he has launched an appeal against this finding.

I am not much of a believer in 'conspiracy theories (too messy, and too many people involved), but this diagnosis neatly solves the problem of a liberal justice system coming up against a mass murder, and also lets Norwegian society ignore the rather awkward questions of how decades liberal socialism and 'multiculturalism' produced a mass murderer, after all he was mad wasn't he?

Zombie Walks

2011-11-29T20:37:00.000Z

Good to see that despite their terrible problems, the citizens of Mexio, and more particularly the residents of Mexico City have managed to set a new record for the "Zombie Walk"..... this is a craze that is sweeping that part of the world where you can't be denounced and killed for having a laugh, where people dressed as zombies shuffle and moan about a city centre in their thousands.

The Zombie Craze is World Wide

In Mexico a new 'world record' for the 'undead' was claimed when the organisors claimed that nearly 10,000 people have paraded in Mexico City ..... the previous current official Guinness world record was held by Asbury Park in the US, where 4,093 zombies marched in 2010, with Brisbane in Australia claiming have massed 8,000 zombies last month.

Zombie Scenes in Mexico City

Still with the "Day of the Dead" being a national celebration in Mexico, it would be rather fitting if this record was held by Mexico.

In The Heart Of Darkness

2011-11-29T20:13:00.001Z

Talking of failed democratic states and elections, the ironically named 'Democratic Republic of Congo' prepares for just its second general elections in four decades - when the citizens of this ever failing state come out with statements such as "the state is dying but not yet dead" or "the state is ever present but completely useless", or "when you are rock bottom, you can still dig deeper", you realise that not much is expected in this exercise of 'democracy'.

This country is two thirds the size of Western Europe, with all the resources in land, mineral wealth and natural resources than you can point a pointy stick at, yet the Failed States Index lists it as fourth in the list of the critically failed category of states. When you read that Zoe Kabila, the current President's brother, ordered his Republican Guard escort to beat up two police traffic officers because they did not give his 4x4 priority, you can see that the words "free and fair" are not going to apply here ..... to elections or anything else.

DR Congo - Compared with Europe.

Given its size and resources the DR Congo should be a very prosperous country, but decades of war, military incompetence and brutality, corruption and absolute economic mismanagement have left it desperately poor.

This state truly is "The Heart Of Darkness"

Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

2011-11-29T19:28:00.001Z

In the way that these things happen, there were two stories from Russia that caught my eye in the last few days. The first was that the Russians will hold Parliamentary elections on Sunday the 4th December, and there are allegations and fears that this will be the least 'free and fair' election since the fall of communism appeared to usher in 'democracy' in 1991.

During Stalin's, and the later Red Tzar's rule, there were 'elections' in the USSR, but there was only one party ever standing. In the region of Tambov for example, some residents can remember attending elections in the 1930's and voting for the cowherd to become a deputy to the local council. Now, in an irony that can't escape anyone, its the rump of the old Communist party that challenges the results in elections, in an effort to defend the weakening democracy in the Russian successor to the USSR.

In the Tambov region they have evidence of the United Russian Party being given extra votes and of ballot stuffing ..... and what with Putin and Medvedev seemingly about to swap the roles of President and Prime Minister again, some things it seems never change.

Svetlana and Stalin

Which brings me to the other story, Svetlana Stalin (Svetlana Alliluyeva, aka Lana Peters), daughter of Josef Stalin died this week. She holds a fairly unique position by first denouncing Communism and her father, following her defection and Asylum in the USA in 1967, and then calling her father "a moral and spiritual monster".... and she lived to tell the tale!

Then later she returned to the Soviet Union and denounced the USA (although she actually returned to live there in 1986 until the end of her life) .... she must have wondered in the end what the difference was supposed to be between the USSR of her father, and the Russia of today?

No Justice For Walter Patterson

2011-11-20T08:31:00.001Z

George Wright is an American Citizen who acquired Portuguese citizenship. He graduated from High School in Halifax, Virginia .... and turned immediately to a life of crime. When he was 19, he and some friends robbed the Sands Motel in Englishtown Virginia of $200. They then made their way to the Collingswood Esso gasoline station on eastbound Route 33 in Wall, One of the accomplices fatally wounded Walter Patterson, a 42-year-old World War II veteran and Bronze Star recipient, who was a father of two teenage daughters. Patterson died from the gunshot wound two days later.

The criminal gang were convicted for the crimes and murder in 1962 and Wright was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. He would have been freed in 1992 at the latest, but probably considerably earlier given that he wasn't the gunman .... but in 1970 he escaped from a prison farm and went on the run to Detroit, then a hotbed of radicalism, where he and a fellow escapee became affiliated with the Black Liberation Army.

George Wright, Criminal Fugitive, Plane Hijacker,

On Monday July 31, 1972, Wright, then 29, and four accomplices (plus two of their children) hijacked a Delta Airlines flight in 1972 .... Wright, who was later described as the leader of the gang, was allegedly dressed as a priest and, using the alias the Rev. Larry Darnell Burgess, he had smuggled a handgun aboard the flight in a hollowed-out Bible, which he held to a stewardesses head. They demanded that FBI agents (dressed only in bathing suits) deliver $1 million ransom to the plane; the FBI complied. The hijackers allowed the 86 hostage passengers to leave the plane in Miami, but kept the flight crew and ordered that the plane be flown to Algiers, the capital of Algeria, where they sought political asylum as that government had previously supported those 'struggling for liberation'.

The Captain of the plane said afterwards “They said they were revolutionaries, that America is a decadent society and they didn't want to live here anymore.” Upon arrival in Algeria, one of the gang told the pilot: "We're famous," he said, "Send us a copy of your paper."

They were granted asylum, but at the request of the U.S. government, the Algerian government confiscated and returned the $1 million in ransom money to the U.S. After the hijackers' calls to have the ransom money restored to them were ignored by the Algerian government, Wright and his associates disappeared. Apparently sometime in early 1973, the group traveled by ship to France and lived and worked there with new identities.

His accomplices were captured by the French in 1976, they successfully resisted extradition to the US but the French convicted them to five year sentences for the Hijacking. Wright remained on the run (as he was also wanted for the prison break, and murder), and went to Guinea-Bissau (a former Portuguese colony) and finally to Portugal. While living in Guinea-Bissau in the 1980's, Wright allegedly used his real name and worked as logistics manager of the Belgium-based nonprofit Iles de Paix .... he married a Portuguese woman and took the name Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos. This new identity was given to him by Guinea-Bissau, but was recognised by Portugal when Wright was granted political asylum there in the 1980s.

On September 26, 2011, he was arrested in Portugal. The FBI requested Wright's extradition from Portugal to the United States, but was denied on the grounds that Wright is a Portuguese citizen. "The Lisbon appeals court ruled that he had Portuguese citizenship and will not be extradited." Wright, praised the court's ruling .... "I am very pleased and I want to thank the Portuguese courts for having made the right decision", he said, adding that he had a "clear conscience".

He might have a "clear conscience", and the Portuguese judges may feel all warm and snuggly, but this decision must leave the family of Walter Patterson pretty cold. As usual in these legal games, the victims and their families are just ignored.

Walter Patterson, Bronze Star recipient

Walter Patterson, unlike Wright, had done something for his country, been brave in battle, and was a hard working family man whose life was ended violently after being shot while resisting a robbery by a gang of street punks. His family lost a wage earner, father, husband, grandfather, and they were left struggling for the next few decades. Where are their rights in all of this?

Not once in the coverage of the story are the Portuguese judges asked to explain why the murder of Mr Patterson can simply be ignored ... claims that the statute of limitations have run out on his many crimes just don't wash, as he was serving a sentence when he broke from prison, and should surely serve the remainder of the time (even if in a Portuguese prison) ... its not clear that Wright will serve any further time at all for his part in the murder of William Patterson.

Just another sad example of how the justice system world wide serves the criminals, and not the law abiding.

Tough Pasta

2011-11-19T10:21:00.001Z

Salvatore Riina, aka 'The Beast' ('La Belva'), was known to have ordered the murders of magistrates, policemen and scores of rivals (numbering several hundred) throughout the two decades he was the head of the Corleonesi faction of the Sicilian Mafia ..... he was alleged to have personally killed 40 men. He was captured after 23 years on the run near Palermo in May 1993.

Salvatore Riina aka 'The Beast'

This capture left the Italian Government with the problem of what to do all the land and properties he had accumulated in 23 years at the top of the corruption chain in Italy. They eventually seized the property under a law passed in 1996 .... but all was not well. The locals refused to have anything to do with the seized the properties."We all still know who the local bosses are right now," says one local. "They're just not the brutal gangster types of the olden days".

So people from the north were invited to come and turn the properties into 'Ethical "Mafia-free") businesses' ... the locals still won't go in to them, and so its left to tourists who book via a new brand of Sicilian travel agency offering Mafia-free holidays at establishments that refuse to pay protection money, or "pizzo".

Bernardo Provenzano, aka 'The Tractor'

Typical of these new mafia free businesses is the former home of Bernardo Provenzano, aka 'The Tractor' for his ruthless trait of mowing people down, which is now a co-operative shop known as "Bottega della Legalita" or "Shop of Legality".... local custom is sparse "because it's absolutely impossible to shop here unseen," although it sells pasta, sauces and wine produced by co-operatives now farming former Mafia land.

"Bottega della Legalita"

Most goods are sold in the North of Italy .... ah well, as a wise man once said "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" ... Big changes start with small steps.

The Seeds of Anger

2011-11-19T07:19:00.001Z

One of the noticeable aspects of the latest financial crisis is that the super rich are comparatively unaffected .... no bankers jumping out of windows in this collapse. Oh no, in this crash, the rich have carried on getting richer. For example in 1979 the top 1% of Americans took just 8% of the nation's wealth but now take 25%. .... I hate to say it, but that is a direct result of 'Reagonomics' (backed up by Pres.Bush jnr), 'Trickle Down' economics is just so much bullshine, that just makes the rich richer, the rest of us poorer.

Steinbeck's 'The Grapes Of Wrath'

As the rich take an ever greater slice of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) pie, there is less pie for the rest of us to share around - that's the thing about pies. The squeeze on well paid jobs in the West, where outsourcing under the guise of 'Globalisation', to places such India or Mexico, or even just mechanisation, have reduced the career areas where people may start rising up the wealth ladder, will eventually feed down into a reduction of taxes and in the funding for welfare state. If the basis of class mobility in the Western post war society -i.e. "free" education, health and welfare, that allowed the poor to get their first leg up the ladder (if they chose to) - is eroding, then social issues will soon start rising.

Inequalities In The 1930's Led To Dictatorships

Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar et al, were children of the 'Great Depression', and the social inequalities it produced. So with global unemployment the highest its been since the 1930's, surely if this continues for any time, then this is a recipe for revolution?

Historic American Flag

2011-11-18T18:48:00.001Z

I didn't know that the US flag had no set design until 1912, and I suspect that most US citizens didn't either. You kind of assume that the US flag design was set in 1777, and has only increased the number of stars as new states joined the Union. Of course us Brits have had quite and influence on the design ..... obviously, the rebellion (aka Independence) set the first design ...

US flag design 1777

Then in 1812/13, as we were showing you that we could still exert some force in North America, the flag that the Americans raised over Fort McHenry at the request of the commanding officer who wanted "a flag so large that the British would have no difficulty seeing it from a distance", was the one described as "The Star Spangled Banner" .... this was the 42-foot (12.8m) flag he ended up with.

1813 - Star Spangled Banner

Then of course there was the Civil War, when the US flag temporarily lost some stars.

Some regiments removed the renegade states from the flag

And the Confederates had a flag

Virginian Confederate Flag

Then there was the version from 1912 until 1959

The US Flag 1912 - 1959

And now the current version.

Current US Flag

Every flag tells a story ..... these pictures tell the history of the United States.

Arrivederci Roma

2011-11-13T16:37:00.001Z

So its a wave goodbye to Europe's equivalent to the late (and unlamented) 'Gadfather', Silvio Berlusconi. Italians for the most part, seem relieved (despite the fact that they kept voting for him in large numbers), but for us at PC Towers, this is a sad loss, as we cast around for a new political figure of fun.

Silvio Berlusconi - Last Roman Emperor?

Now Italian politics as they are, there is a chance that Silvio will be back, but his age is against him, and now his enemies will feel free to pursue him through the courts, so it seems unlikely that he will be back. However like an old lion, he may have lost his teeth, but he can still give a nasty suck .... so don't expect him to go down without a fight.

Still with Silvio gone, the pickings for political fun at the high table are thin indeed ..... so its not goodbye, its just 'Arrivederci' Silvio, you'll be missed here.

Friend To The Stars

2011-11-12T08:40:00.001Z

Every one's got to have a hobby or at least an interest, and Louis Schlamowitz is no exception. His 'hobby' started while he was serving in the US army in Korea in 1953, and after handing out Christmas cards to his unit, and having a spare Christmas card left over, a friend suggested he use the spare card to write to President Harry Truman, on the off chance the American leader would write back. Apart from the fact that as he was Jewish, and it was rather odd that he had Christmas cards, nothing else too strange about this .....

.... Fifty eight years later, and the former florist has one of the largest contemporary autograph collections in the world ... amongst his 60 albums of many treasures, are a signed photograph from President John F Kennedy, President Obama signed a photo, President Harry Truman wrote back, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a photograph, and he had a collection of signed Marilyn Monroe memorabilia.

Louis Schlamowitz and part of his vast collection - the envy of many collectors.

He also has a black gallery which includes President Richard Nixon, Gen Manuel Noriega of Panama who sent an 'action shot' signed with best wishes, lengthy letters railing against US and Israeli policy signed by Col Muammar Gaddafi, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, former PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who sent Christmas wishes from Cairo ... some of these latter ones earned Mr Schlamowitz visits from the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security

Regrets? Well he always wanted the Queen Elizabeth's, but as he wistfully says "The Queen only writes to people she's met," still she did send him a photograph. But he doesn't regret the obsession ..."I feel good when they write back. I'm nothing special, just an ordinary guy, and now I'm part of history".

The Cruelest Cut Of All

2011-11-12T07:30:00.001Z

There are credible reports coming out today, that the number of defence cuts in the British Armed forces will actually be 25% higher than has previously been admitted ... a national newspaper has seen a memo suggesting that instead of the announced 12,500 cut in size, the figure will actually be 16,500.

And in a further cruel twist of the knife, many of these additional cuts will fall on those soldiers who have been wounded in action in Afghanistan or Iraq and been able to remain in the forces ..... it seems that what the German Army couldn't do in two World Wars, the Conservative Party is doing with a few bits of paper.

What I don't understand is why the cuts must fall on active service personnel, and not amongst the thousands of civil servants who are apparently required to run our tiny armed forces. It surely is madness when the number of civil servants in the ministry of defence, outnumber the total of soldiers, sailors and airmen in the British Armed Forces.

The UK Has Four Civil Servants For Every Soldier

What sort of armed forces are planned for at the end of this latest "Defence Review", and what it will be able to actually do, is beyond me. I guess I'll have to look at the Dutch Armed forces, because we appear to be heading to something of a similar usefulness .... and with the news that we are pulling all our troops from Germany (after over 60 years), which was something that has always been considered as not an economy in previous decades, its the end of Britain as a military first rate power.

There must be an increasingly large number of Tory Party supporters and people who voted for them, who now regret voting for them, and who certainly will think long and hard before doing so again.

Crime and Punishment

2011-11-11T19:43:00.001Z

Crime does pay .... or at least if you are a Mexican prisoner. It appears that a surprise inspection in a prison in Acapulco Mexico,uncovered the fact that there were 19 prostitutes in the cells (more or less in residence), a 100 plasma televisions, two sacks of Marijuana, and over 100 cockerels for cock fighting. On top of this, it appeared that six female inmates were living in the male section of the prison along with two peacocks!

In July, prisoners in a jail in Sonora state were found to be running a lottery to raffle off a luxury cell they'd equipped with a fridge, DVD player and air conditioning. Its no wonder that Mexico is losing the fight against the drug cartels, when the prisons are just Rest & Recreation stations for those arrested.

All the Creature Comforts Available (for a price) in Mexican Jails

Crime doesn't pay in the long run .... or at least if you are a British criminal, where a recent study suggests that a life of crime appears to damage offenders' health, but sadly only once they reach their late 40's. After that point they found that career offenders were more likely to be hospitalised, and were a whopping 13 times more likely to be disabled (or at least claiming to be disabled, which ain't the same thing). Also out of the total test group created in 1961 (aged eight or nine yr old white males), 17 of them had died, and 13 of those 17 had a criminal conviction.

Up until the age of forty, criminals actually appeared to have better health in their late teens and late 20's than those who had not offended when they were young .... must be the out door lifestyle!

Thankful Villages

2011-11-11T18:59:00.001Z

While I was thinking about the fact that it was "Remembrance Day", when I stumbled across a small story about an aspect of the remembrance day events that I had never heard of before. There are villages and communities in Britain and France that were known as "Thankful Villages" because despite sending many men to fight in the first world war, every man jack of them came back alive, albeit missing the odd limb. In Britain fifty two such villages have been identified, and all are in England (none in Scotland, Wales or Ireland).

There are an even smaller of these villages, just fourteen, like Upper Slaughter in England, that have come to be known as 'doubly thankful' for also losing no-one from WWII as well (24 men and one woman joined the services in WWI and a further 36 men in WWII) .... the original term "Thankful Villages" was first coined by the writer Arthur Mee in 1930's.

Upper Slaughter, one of a handful of 'Doubly Thankful' villages.

In contrast to these lucky few, there were over 16,000 British communities which paid the highest sacrifice during those wars, such as Wadhurst, in East Sussex, which with a population of just over 3,500 people, which lost 649 men in WWI. On a single day in 1915 at the Battle of Aubers, twenty five men from Wadhurst were killed, nearly 80% of all those who went forward into no-man's land, and almost certainly the heaviest per capita casualties of any community in the UK for one day's battle .... the majority of those killed had no known grave.

In France, there is a similar tale, but there is one village, Thierville in Normandy that has not lost any soldiers (in any arm of the services), in any of France's last five national wars (the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, World Wars I and II, Indochina, and Algeria).

If anyone is interested in more on this story, a good starting point is the lengthy BBC story that I based this post on, which is here.

At The 11th Hour of the 11th Day

2011-11-11T18:38:00.001Z

Today is the most sombre day of the year in the European and Anglo Saxon world. At the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month, we shall remember them ....

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

The two minutes silence was impeccably observed at my place of work .....

WE ARE ALONE!

2011-11-08T20:21:00.003Z

Its official, there is no 'Area 51'. No back engineering of alien spacecraft. No 'Greys' (aka 'Zetas') are buzzing the planet, in fact, 'No E.T.'s' full stop! The 'Xenu' never brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling 'Douglas DC-8 airliners', the 'Reptilians' haven't scuttled across our lands, and the 'Space Brothers' (aka 'Nordic Aliens') will likely never visit Earth.

And the reason I know this to be true?

Well the White House has issued an official statement in which it formally denied that it has any knowledge of contact with extraterrestrial life. It did so after more than 5,000 signatories signed each of the two petitions on the White House 'We The People website', which promises to address any petitions that get more than that number of signatures. In fact more than 17,000 citizens joined the two petitions on this subject, so they have now changed the figure to 25,000 signatures, but this still compares well with the 100,000 signatures required in the UK before the Parliament discusses, then instantly dismisses the UK citizens concerns.

These Girls Could Be Blowing That Trumpet in Vain

The exact response was:

"The US government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye".

Anyway, so far, so party line ..... but the statement authored by Phil Larson of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, then added that;

"Many scientists and mathematicians have looked... at the question of whether life likely exists beyond Earth, and have come to the conclusion that the odds are pretty high that somewhere among the trillions and trillions of stars in the Universe there is a planet other than ours that is home to life. Many have also noted, however, that the odds of us making contact with any of them - especially any intelligent ones - are extremely small, given the distances involved."

Now I wonder what the fundamentalist Christians, who often push the disingenuous "Intelligent Design" theory (that proposes only we exist in a universe created by he who can't be named), think of this? They are a powerful lobby in the Mid West and Southern States come election time, and who are usually no friend to any politician who suggests that intelligent life exists outside of the Earth.

Anyway, whatever the politics of the statement, its still a pity ... many of my schoolboy daydreams are now lying shattered on the rocks of reality.

European Union: Democratic or Despotic?

2011-11-06T20:17:00.001Z

Today, sometime tonight in fact, the democratically elected majority government of Greece will be dissolved and replaced by a 'national unity coalition' .... the reason for this change is that the EU rescue package terms are so opposed by the Greek public, that the Greek government had called for a 'referendum' to get a public endorsement of the bail out terms.

Now the referendum is off the table, and the Greeks were told to either take the money and implement the plan in full, or leave the Euro-zone (or even the EU itself if Pres. Sarkozy of France had his way) .... they vote tonight to create a 'stable' government, and then to fulfil all the bail out plan terms laid down by Germany and France. Italy, is in much the same boat with their government have to agree to EU inspectors looking at the state books, even though it has had no bail out funds so far. Of course in Greece this 'national unity coalition' isn't likely to last more than a few weeks at best, so this could all be just another sticking plaster, and Greece just leaves the Euro-zone after the new year (as most people expect).

So, this raises the question of whether this is actually the first stage of the death of national independent democratic governments in Europe, with the small Euro-zone countries being forced to do what the big two Euro-zone economies want inside a federal straight jacket? There are many in Greece who believe that they are being sacrificed to bring in a 'Federal Europe', which their political leaders will benefit from, but they will suffer for.

Will this be how the EU enforces the bail out in Greece?

Interestingly, late on Tuesday the Greek government replaced the heads of the army, navy and air force and the chief of joint chiefs of staff in what officials described as a long-planned move largely unrelated to political turmoil ..... this has raised fears that they were preempting a coup attempt. Memories of the rule of 'The Colonels' in a military junta between 1967 and 1974 still run deep in the Greek psyche.

As the imaginary Chinese adage can be said .... "we live in interesting times".

Update: The BBC has just run an article on the 9th November, which includes the lines:

"These are disturbing days for European democracy. The euro-zone crisis is driving out elected leaders. European officials are telling elected governments what to do".

They agree with the idea that there's now a risk that democracy is being replaced by a EU unelected technocracy, it just takes them three days longer than us to reach that conclusion.

Of Women and Toads

2011-11-06T12:49:00.001Z

John Steinbeck made an animal connection for mens behaviours in 'Of Mice and Men', so the question is 'What do the Cane toads of Australia and the women pioneer settlers of the old Canadian and American frontiers have in common?'

I'll bet you haven't guessed, so I'll tell you its the fertility (or fecundity) of each wave of settlers ... yes apparently scientists and researchers have managed to link these two apparently disparate topics, with some detailed analysis of the well kept marriage and birth records of the French settlers of Canada (which go back to the 17th century), to show that women who were first to settle in a new land had more children and grandchildren than those who followed later.

French Candian Settlers with high birth rates

Now why this is a surprise to anyone beats me, anyone in Europe watching immigrants arrive in the last 35 yrs will have noted that they have larger families than the natives, and similarly in the US, the Latino immigrants into the USA have larger families than the natives, but in most cases their children have smaller families as each generation reproduces until they reach the norm for that area.

The main difference between this casual observation, and the research findings, is that they managed to show that woman who arrived as part of the first wave of immigration into an area had 15% more children than those who arrived a generation later ..... apparently pioneering woman married younger and benefited from scooping up the best local resources, and their daughters inherited their mother's higher rate of fertility. They then showed that women who came with the later immigration wave that arrived 30 years afterwards, did not exhibit the same fertility rates as the first wave and their offspring.

The Hatfields were a fertile pioneer settler clan in the Tug valley.
Who famously clashed with the similar McCoy clan.

So how have they managed to link this analysis, with the menace of the outback (I have posted on these creatures on more than one occasion), the cane toad, and thus allowed me to also link this post with them?

Well apparently, scientists have observed that the cane toads at the edge of their range have bigger front legs and stronger back legs; making it easier for them to invade new areas. Then when these pioneer cane toads at the frontiers breed, their offspring also inherit these bigger and stronger limbs. However, other cane toads who migrate into these areas after the first wave, don't exhibit these physical attributes.

Fertile Cane Toads - doing what they do best

Apparently this effect was not unexpected, but no one until now had been able to show this phenomenon operating in human populations .... the point of all this research (if there is one) is that families at the front of the wave of migration contributed more to the contemporary gene pool, than those that were slower to arrive and this explains why pockets of certain rare genetic diseases carried by the first settlers still exhibit in some areas to this day (so now you know!).

Butt of all Jokes

2011-11-05T13:27:00.002Z

Once again, to the surprise of no one apart from Pakistani cricket fans, the corruption of its favourite sport, and the blindness of it sports institutions has been exposed to the world. This time (and there have been numerous other occasions), it was the fact that bookies had corrupted their cricketer's to the extent that they were bowling 'no balls', and performing other activities to order, during test matches.

I have posted before on these events, and I even predicted that 'The Pakistani cricket team are poison to the world game, but such is the fear of 'losing the subcontinent's' money in a split, that I won't be surprised if they bury this event, and after some bans (which will be overturned a few months later), business as usual will resume' .... and I wasn't far wrong.

The sentences were not long, with former Pakistan cricket captain Salman Butt jailed for 30 months, Mohammad Asif, 28, was jailed for one year and bowler Mohammad Amir, 19, was been sentenced to six months. And all of them got a 'five year bans' from cricket by the International Cricket Council, and all three are appealing against their suspensions. The families claim that they are all innocent .... as you might expect (although Amir admitted his guilt).

The guilty Three - but there were others implicated

But the Pakistan Cricket Board said the conviction of the players was "a sad day for Pakistan cricket".... they forgot to add the word 'again' . Sadly as usual, most of the Pakistani fans blame everyone except their own society (they couldn't blame the US, Zionists and Israel) so they blamed India and 'the West'.Here's one typical comment reported by the BBC .... Zahim, a 'cricket fan' who was eating outside Lahore's 'Gaddafi Stadium' , said "The West just wants to destroy the image of Pakistan" and he went on to add for good measure that " I think the Indians are involved too. We need to get to the real truth" (yes really, 'Gaddafi Stadium' ), a statement which tells you a lot about Pakistan, and its disengagement from reality. By 'real truth' Zahim means that its all a 'conspiracy' by everyone, but the Pakistani's involved.

The Usual Violent Response

The sad thing from my point of view is that for some reason, all this has to be played out in the UK and at the expense of the UK taxpayers, because Pakistan is too corrupt to even be able to bring the trials, let alone get to the truth .... there are 100 million Zahim's in the land of the pure.

Freedom of Speech v Freedom of Religion

2011-11-05T12:28:00.001Z

The petrol bombing of the French satirical magazine 'Charlie Hebdo' in Paris, for daring to portray the creator of the self-styled 'religion of peace' (or 'religion of surrender' as it should be properly described in English), on its covers, says all you need to know about its followers.

Different Countries, Different Targets, Same Intended Result - Intimidation

The important point about this event was made by the editor-in-chief of the magazine, Stephane Charbonnier, who said Islam should not be excluded from 'freedom of the press' to comment in the West. He said: "If we can poke fun at everything in France, if we can talk about anything in France apart from Islam, or the consequences of Islamism, that is annoying."

He bravely added that "This is the first time we have been physically attacked, but we won't let it get to us". We shall wait and see .....

China's Economy

2011-11-05T08:22:00.003Z

With all the talk of the Euro powers (Germany and France), asking for the Chinese to bail out the Euro, we need to look more closely at the Chinese economy and to put things in perspective. For all China's dramatic economic rise, its economy still accounts for less than 10% of global GDP at present, while the developed nations of Europe and America make up nearly 50%. It is Europe - even in a time of crisis - that does much to power China's rise, rather than the other way round.

Super Economy or Trade Dependent?

Europe, is China's biggest export market. Last year it bought 280bn euros of Chinese goods, while China isn't investing much in Europe, in fact less than 1bn euros last year. That was little more than 1% of foreign investment in Europe, which pumped five times as much into China (and could move it elsewhere if the economics worked that way e.g. Vietnam).

Before China started to really decline in the late 17th Century, it accounted for approx 25% of the worlds GDP (in line with its approx 25% of the world population). This was why it felt no need to open up or take new ideas from the West .... now it accounts for about 17% of the worlds population, and about 10% of GDP. We can expect that its share of world GDP will probably flat-line at about 20% in the next decade or so and with India set to reach levels of about 15% of world GDP, they will be a powerful block.

However when GDP is divided by population, the position is a lot weaker. GDP (PPP) per capita places both nations very low down the league tables. They have to feed and clothe billions of people, or risk rebellions, and this where the money ultimately will have to go.

The US position of the mid 1960's, made them dominant in both GDP and GDP (PPP) per capita, a position which the Chinese will never attain, nor will they or India be likely to catch European life standards for several decades (if ever).

The "Yankee" Dollar

2011-11-05T07:49:00.005Z

Its a sign of the strange times that we live in, that the US dollar is still weak against the crumbling Euro. I only remark on this because when I was kid, we used to think of the British "Pound" as worth four US dollars and we even used the term a "half dollar" for a 'half crown' and the crown was sometimes called a "dollar" ... this was obviously pre-decimal days in the UK, when there were 20 Shillings to the Pound, a Crown was 5 Shillings, and therefore a Half Crown was 'Half a Dollar' .....

"Half A Dollar" in slang terms

So why does this even matter, well it means that countries such as Japan and the UK are finding that the cost of their exports to the US are going up, relative to the cost of US imports, despite their poor economies, and they are all having to 'sell money' (or buy dollars) to try and push their currencies down again. This raises the threat of inflation not just in the United States, but also elsewhere in the world, and with most of the world's major commodities still priced in dollars, it is noticeable that any major decline in the value of the US currency has usually coincided with sky-rocketing commodity prices.

Dollar and yuan's

The US wants China to allow its currency the Yuan to rise to allow US exports to China to be relatively cheaper, but while the Chinese won't do this (for their own economic reasons), then the US believes that letting the US Dollar slide, boosts their exports abroad and lowers imports at home. So until it finally starts to believe that having 'cheap money' is starting to hurt its own economy, then it appears that we are all stuck with the problem.

Sikhism's Lost Masters

2011-10-30T20:03:00.002Z

Our modern world is based upon 'Globalisation' - which is the idea that peoples and ideas are travelling the world, and mixing up all cultures into one global one. But unfortunately this idea is apparently not taking the best of humanities ideas and philosphies and promoting those in to those areas, where backwardness and medievalism still prevail, but rather its corrupting the socially advanced societies, with the worst of the worlds ideas.

However, aside from this drawback, there is another victim of this seemingly unstoppable change, and that's local cultures and traditions. One such tradition under threat that was highlighted recently, was the Sikh tradition of 'Shastar Vidya' or “science of weapons” .... a warrior fighting technique very much of its time i.e. late 17th century India. In the intervening centuries it has been taught to Sikhs by masters of the technique, but these masters, like the followers of these techniques, have slowly diminished over the intervening centuries.

Fighting Sikhs - Akali Nihang

This has now reached the stage where as far as is known, there is only one 'master' left to pass on the knowledge, and rather funnily, he lives in in the Wolverhampton area of the English Midlands. Nidar Singh Nihang considers himself in the tenth generation of an unbroken master-student tradition, deriving from the tradition of Guru Gobind Singh. He now travels the world teaching the archaic skills but, he has no one to follow him as the master (it takes at least ten years to get the basic skills), but fears that unless he does get an apprentice before its too late, then he will be the last true master in the full tradition of the elite warrior caste called the Akali Nihang ("the immortal crocodiles").

By the turn of the last century the Akali Nihang dress tradition
was getting a bit extreme.

It's always sad when a tradition dies out .... although it has to be said that some Sikh's think he's wrong, and there are forums discussing his brand of Sikhism. The beliefs of the small Nihang sect, are not mainstream to Sikhism and the Nihangs still maintain some tenets of the Hindu faith, they have three scriptures rather than one and these extra books contain influences from Hinduism. Also many Nihangs also eat meat and drink alcohol, which fundamentalist Sikhs disagree with. Traditionally they also drank bhang, an infusion of cannabis, to get closer to God (sort of Rastafarian Sikhs) .

Still, despite the opposition, and he admits to over 84 death threats from other Sikhs in his first two years as a teacher alone, (sadly many Sikhs are just as violent as the other religions that currently believe in heresy ... ), the publicity he has got from the media will no doubt turn up at least one apprentice to carry on the work. But judging from the extreme forms the Akali Nihang dress code has gone to in India he may be too late ....

There's always one who doesn't really
understand the dress code

Clock The Hypocrisy

2011-10-28T20:39:00.002+01:00

British Government Ministers are writing to their counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to seek a UK-wide consensus on a trial of moving the UK clocks permanently forward. In a very European mode, the UK would adopt Central European Time, with BST plus one hour in summer and GMT plus one in winter. However there is a catch, our increasingly weak Lib/Con alliance government has said that each of these small component parts of the disunited Kingdom, will have the right to block any English desire to move to more acceptable times for the fifty five million living there.

Now you might think that a Scottish Government that wants to be at the 'Heart of Europe', and that is proposing a referendum on breaking away from Britain inside three years, would be keen on such a move. Especially as their leader Alex Salmon has gone on record saying that Scotland would be at the centre of Europe, and that England should be able to manage its own internal affairs, without interference from the Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh regional governments .... hmm.

Scottish Farmers and friends, "nervous" about the potential impact.

But no, with all the hypocrisy that only a bunch of nationalist rascals can muster, the Scottish government has said that its "established position" was that there was "no case for a change to existing arrangements". SNP MP Angus MacNeil said any change would have "massive implications for the safety and well being of everyone living north of Manchester" ... utter tosh.

I live in the North of England, and its dark when I get up even now, and inside a few days it will be dark when I get home as well ... I also lived in Edinburgh for over five years, and I would be getting up and coming home in the dark right now! So what gain me by the clocks going back, nothing. It should be noted that Russia has just decided not to put its clocks back, and although they accept that it means darker in the mornings, they think the compensation for this is the lighter afternoons and evenings.

So just for once will the hypocrites in the SNP, let England have its way, after all they can just keep the old times, and accentuate the differences between Scotland and England, which is surely want they really want?

Voting Rights and Wrongs

2011-10-28T19:30:00.004+01:00

There are two essential parts to any democratic system and those are that

(a) The people can vote for whomever they want (within some limitations on parties advocating violence against other citizens), and

(b) People who exercise their vote, do so with the knowledge that they are responsible for the end results.

Tunisia is the first of the "Arab Spring" countries to vote for a new government and has just voted for the Islamist party 'Ennahda' as the biggest party in its constitutional assembly, how this turns out will become clear in the coming months. It may be a mistake that just leads to Sharia law and an Iranian style regime.

The people of Gaza voted for Hamas, and then complained that because they had democratically elected an terrorist organisation as its government, then the rest of the world should accept that this legitimised them and their policies .... wrong.

Voting For These, Is Hard For Democracies To Digest

If Hitler, or Stalin were 'democratically' voted into office today, would this mean that we should all accept that the 'holocaust', or 'the Purges' were legitimate policy goals, or treat them as pariah states? Well most Hamas supporters believe in much the same policies towards the Jews as Hitler (who is popular in the Muslim world) ....

As discussed earlier, having a democracy make you responsible for the standard of the government you have voted to represent you. The Tunisians are responsible for what they may end up getting by dabbling with Islamic politics, and the people of the Gaza strip have to live with the results of voting for a terrorist group as their government.

Too many of the deluded apologists for these nasty little regimes in the West forget this second responsibility when they bleat on about the democratically elected groups of the Middle East, and it might be better if responsible democracy rather than oil supplies governed US and Western policies in the Middle East.

Little Thief Loses Assets

2011-10-27T12:53:00.001+01:00

Teodoro (or Teodrin) Nguema Obiang Mangue is the son of the corrupt President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. As discussed in the past, he's as corrupt as his father and has amassed a huge fortune in monies stolen from his poor countrymen.

Corruption Buys A Lot Of House

Well maybe his time has run out .... the US government says it is seeking to recover assets worth more $70m (£44m) from this 'playboy' thief, and last month France finally acted, and seized 11 luxury cars belonging to Mr Obiang. They had acted because as the US Attorney General stated ... Mr Obiang had amassed wealth of more than $100m "on a modest government salary".

"We are sending the message loud and clear: the United States will not be a hiding place for the ill-gotten riches of the world's corrupt leaders," Mr Breuer said .... well about time is what most of us are thinking.

It has always smelt bad that thieves could bankrupt their countries by stealing all the money, force them to have to beg for loans from the West, and then retire with millions or billions of stolen cash in France or the US. It's estimated for example that in Nigeria alone, more than $400 billion was stolen from the treasury by Nigeria's leaders between 1960 and 1999 .... its never been recovered.

Of course if we weren't paying bribes in the first place it might help stamp this out ... President Obiang's family have allegedly received huge payments from US oil companies such as Exxon Mobil and Amerada Hess.

Empires End

2011-10-22T22:02:00.002+01:00

The 'American Empire' seems to be drawing to an end after about seventy years of total economic and political dominance, and as the economy falls into a deep recession which is mirrored by the other *western economies retracting with it, there are some strange stories popping up .... not least of these are the rust belt towns in Europe and the USA, and now these are spreading into previously prosperous suburbs.

In Europe, the old cotton mill, coal mining and iron smelting towns represent this decline, and in the US its very similar, where the North and North East is littered with similar towns. But this week the tale of the decline of a company town in the Black Rock Desert, in remote north-western Nevada encapsulated the collapse of the western world economies in this latest recession .... its name somewhat ironically is 'Empire'.

Empire Nevada, modern ghost town.

Empire is, or rather was a company mining town, that last year boasted a population of more than 300 people in a bustling community, that also had two churches, a golf course, swimming pool and a small desert airstrip. Its population worked in a gypsum mine that has now closed because the building trade that it had serviced since the 1920's has dramatically declined. The town has closed, the residents been made redundant, and told to leave the company housing, with just a small maintenance crew left behind .... Ninety years of western industry gone.

There is some talk of re-opening when economic conditions are better, but most of the former residents think the town is now dead for good ..... the knock on of this closure is that the other small desert communities are also facing economic meltdown, as the money from Empire has vanished from the economy. In the small town of Gerlach, which provided the school for all the small local communities, including Empire, the high school has gone from eighty students and twenty five staff, to nine children and three teachers. No viable school means that this town will die as well ......

Empire Store Closed For Ever

The so called 'investment bankers' who brought us to our economic knees, should think about the end of Empire, and the broken livelihoods that it represents. There are many more such communities across the western world who face as bleak a future, and its these victims who politicians should be helping, and not propping up a banking system that has basically failed us all, in its all out of pursuit of quick excess profits.

*Actually there is nothing inevitable about this, but the will power to turn ourselves into viable manufacturing economies again, seems to be beyond us, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. At the very least we are going to have to share economic power with the Chinese .....

Jailbreaking iPhones

2011-10-22T08:06:00.002+01:00

"Jailbreaking" was a term that I reserved for 'Jessie James' and the 'Hole in the wall Gang', and to be honest, it was only when I read a BBC article on it, did I realised that for anyone under the age of thirty, the term actually means unlocking the manufacturers operating systems on electronic items such as iPhones, XBoxes, DVD player, iPods, Android phones etc .... in other words 'hacking'.

'Jailbreaking' was tougher in those days

Once it clicked, I was able to relate it to such innocent activities as making your DVD player 'zone free' by using certain control button codes (something lots of us have done), to rooting your ROM on an Android phone and replacing the stock operating system (OS) with a customised one (warning can go wrong, and voids phone warranties). At a hardcore level this involves breaking into the products and directly altering the programming to perform functions that it wasn't designed to do, and the borders of legality and illegality are a bit blurry at some points, but eventually it is clearly illegal (damaging the systems of other people via 'Malware'), however its hard to police, as in the main its a one machine change.

The funny part of this is that in the main, these jailbreakers are young (15 - 17), and go mainstream when they get to their early twenty's .... in fact so much are they in demand by I.T. companies that some of the most infamous of the jailbreakers now work at companies such as Facebook, and Apple, or have opened their own software companies. And when the 'Jailbreakers' converged on London last month to talk about their activities at a conference called MyGreatFest, they were being headhunted by the same companies whose OS's they break free.

'Poacher turned Gamekeeper' is still as valid an adage as it ever was .....

NB: If you came here looking for a hack tip, well I don't like to disappoint so here's a genuine jailbreak code change:

If you want to enable your iPhones and iPads panoramic camera's i.e. allow the camera to take a series of images, and then merge them into a panoramic view (only for devices with iOS5 firmware). Then this secret functionality can be unlocked by you switching the 'EnableFirebreak' in the file 'com.apple.mobileslideshow.plist' value to 'yes' ..... of course this requires you to 'jailbreak' which as discussed above most definitely voids your product warranty.

Gaddafi - A Rat Caught In A Hole

2011-10-20T13:05:00.001+01:00

Col Gaddafi has been killed .... he didn't fight to the death as he vowed, choosing instead to fight to other peoples deaths .... he was found in the town of Sirte (his birthplace), and according to initial reports was discovered cowering in a hole shouting "don't shoot, don't shoot" (This is much like how Saddam Hussein was found). He is alleged to have been wounded in the legs, while running away from a NATO bomb attack on his convoy.

'Like A Rat In The Sewers' .... Gaddafi Captured Here.

It appears from news reports that his captors bundled him in to an ambulance, wounded, but very much alive, but that whatever he said to them proved too much for at least one of them, because when they got to hospital, Gaddafi had gained a new wound, namely a fatal bullet wound in the head. He was now dead, killed in the same way that his secret police killed thousands over the years, with a single bullet, and will never get his chance for grandstanding in a trial ..... probably for the best, no matter what the chattering class liberals in the West may think.

Lets hope that's the end of the bloodshed and that Libya ends up a happier and better place.

Israel's Blood Price

2011-10-16T19:10:00.001+01:00

Israel is apparently on the point of swapping one thousand and twenty seven Palestinian terrorists and criminals (including murderers and rapists), from its jails, in return for the handing over of one of its soldiers captured by Hamas in 2006 ....

Obviously the family of the soldier Gilad Shalit think that this is a price worth paying, but surely this has now set a hostage value of around 1,000 to 1, for every Israeli citizen captured by Palestinians?

Gilad Shalit - Worth Freeing A Thousand Terrorists?

According the BBC report, included in the 1,000 to be released are the following:

Nasser Iteima: Helped bomb Netanya hotel in 2002 - 30 people killed.
Walid Anjes: Helped bomb Moment cafe in Jerusalem in 2002 - 11 people killed.
Yehia Sanwar: A founder of Hamas militant wing. Serving multiple life sentences.
Jihad Yaghmour: Took part in execution of Israeli solder Nachson Waxman in 1994.
Mohammed al-Sharatha: A leader of the elite Hamas 101 unit. Multiple life terms.
Nael Barguti: Arrested in April 1978 and convicted of role in death of Israeli soldier.
Rawhi al-Mushtaha: Senior Hamas leader. Multiple life sentences.
Amna Muna: Serving life for luring an Israeli teenager to his death.

And in an indication that these are not reformed characters, Ahlam Tamimi an assistant suicide bomber who
is being released said when asked, that she had no remorse for her action .... "No, why should I?" Her actions killed fifteen people, and maimed many more.

1000 Terrorists Will Soon Be Free Again

However, there is one thing that the Palestinian terrorists may not have calculated and its this, if one live Israeli 'hostage' is worth a thousand terrorists freedom, then every dead Israeli citizen must be worth a revenge of 1,000 'dead terrorists', or does the maths only work one way in Hamas minds?

I can't help thinking that there will be a lot of innocent blood flowing as a result of this decision ....

Lord's Resistance Army

2011-10-15T13:58:00.000+01:00

At last someone in the West's conscience has got the better of them, and after Libya, where the US took more of a support role, the US President, Barack Obama, has finally decided that the scandal of the Uganda bandits known as the 'Lord's Resistance Army' must be ended. This genocidal group is led by Joseph Kony, a man who is probably technically insane (and who is is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court), but who leads his rag bag bunch on murderous across a swathe of central Africa.

"I have authorised a small number of combat-equipped US forces to deploy to central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces that are working toward the removal of (LRA leader) Joseph Kony from the battlefield" .... in other words "Wanted Dead or Alive" (preferably dead ... in this case few liberals would quibble with that).

Lords Resistance Army - Rag Tag Bandits

The LRA are guilty of mass murder, rape, looting, and kidnappings in several nations, and appear to be able to survive being attacked by soldiers of several nations (Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Central Africa Republic), across whose borders they roam. About 30,000 have people died and mant thousands horribly maimed, as the LRA has spread terror in northern Uganda for more than 20 years, displacing some two million people in that country alone.

The US is sending about 100 soldiers to Uganda to help regional forces battle the notorious Lord's Resistance Army. All the troops will be combat-equipped, but primarily would be providing information and advice .... whats so sad about this is that as little as 1,000 combat troops, and a handful of helicopter,s would destroy this group inside a couple of months.

Stiil, hats off to Pres. Obama, some action is better than nothing.

Catholicisms Dirty Open Secret

2011-10-15T08:13:00.000+01:00

"Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God" ......

Now the Catholic church over the millennium has suffered one or two scandals, and in fact it was the corruption of the medieval popes that finally led to the last major schism, and the split into Protestantism and Catholicism. But it cannot be doubted that in modern times in Europe (and to a lesser extent the USA), with all religion on the retreat (except where immigrants are importing their own versions of Christianity, or foreign religions such as the socially regressive Islam), that the damage done to the Catholic church by the 'child abuse scandals' of the last decade or so, is immense.

I haven't posted on it before, because its inherently a very sad tale of a minority of Catholic priests, using their position to sexually abuse young children (usually, but not exclusively boys), and the attempts of a large number of Bishops to cover these crimes up, by not reporting the offences to the police. The real shocking part of it, was that rather than at least take these priests out of circulation by sticking them in closed monasteries to protect children, they merely shipped the priests from diocese to diocese, which only spread the crime further, and placed more and more children at risk of sexual abuse and misery.

Too many little children betrayed by Catholic church?

Now, finally, the civil authorities are catching up with these criminals, and both the perpetrators and those who covered up the crimes, are being actively investigated by the police, and criminal charges are being laid in many countries. Bishop Robert Finn, of Kansas City in Missouri USA, has been charged yesterday with failing to alert police to a priest who allegedly kept graphic computer images of minors (some as young as two, and though to have been taken by the priest).

What was really surprising was that despite all the publicity and statements by the Catholic hierarchy, that they had finally learnt the lessons, and would not cover these crimes up in future, when the criminal behaviour by reverend Shawn Ratigan was reported to the Bishop in May 2010, instead of a call to the police, the Bishop, along with other senior colleagues at the church, is alleged to have tried to conceal the evidence, by returning the laptop to the brother of Reverend Ratigan.

The Catholic church is just not getting it .... the damage they are doing to themselves by this continued attempt to cover up child abuse and pedophilia is immense, and the church may well be tipping the balance against any future recovery in support in many Western societies, by just not being honest about these criminals and getting them out of the priesthood.

Rev Shawn Ratigan was charged with 'producing and possessing child pornography' earlier this year, and his Bishop has now been charged with 'aiding and abetting the distribution of child pornography'. Good, about time, and maybe the imprisonment of a few Bishops will finally get the Vatican to understand that this is the biggest crisis of the last century, and how it tackles it now, may decide the future of the church for the next ...... as I quoted at the start of the article, surely these pedophile priests are breaking one of the most basic tenets of Christianity?

Jewish Taliban

2011-10-09T14:24:00.002+01:00

They are an extremist religious group who we don't hear so much about in the West, but who are prepared to: Kill Arabs, Defame Doctors, Abuse Women, Threaten Children, and Ethnically Cleanse areas of secular or non religious Jews, by driving them out of their areas.

In fact all the things that we accuse Muslim groups of doing throughout the world. They have great influence over a nuclear power, and operate in one of the most sensitive racial and religious flash points in the world. They occasionally come to the wider worlds consciousness and then disappear again, but they continue to work towards their greater aims, regardless of bad publicity.

I have blogged on these groups, who we can classify under the umbrella of 'Ultra-Orthodox Judaism' before, but then they slip from the wider world news, and I forget about them. They came before my sight again, because of a radio report on the BBC on their latest activities, as groups of ultra-orthodox Jews have been shouting and abusing children and their mothers on their way to the Orot school for girls in Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem. They feel no shame in frightening little girls and women, who have to run the gauntlet of pushing, shouting in Yiddish "Sluts, and immoral" and then throwing objects, including stones and even human faeces at them (in babies diapers). They have even followed the girls home and smeared faeces on the stairwells of their homes.

Haradi Ultra Orthodox Jews Block Girls School

Its a little hard to understand their motives for doing this (but as its religious, its doesn't have to make any sense), but apparently its something to do with girls being unclean, or not dressing modestly enough, or, well I am not sure what, I know that they advocate segregation of women on buses for example (this was ruled as illegal by Israel’s Supreme Court, but is illegally 'enforced' in ultra areas). They have also said that as the school was on the edge of one of their council estates (they have state housing as well), that they therefore wanted the school to be only for their ultra orthodox children (The mayor is Haradi and backs them in this matter), so now they are apparently trying to drive non ultra orthodox children from the school .i.e. cleanse it of their presence.

Bearded Jewish Zealots - Orot girls school

Frankly they are cowards, and as low as men can get to do this, but the Israeli state does nothing much to arrest and imprison them .... why? Well because they have large families, and the numbers of fundamentalists is rapidly growing (they are about 10% of the Israeli population, but expected to be 20% inside the next two decades), as are the percentage of the men that "will do almost anything to get what they want". .... but in the meantime their political parties already often hold the balance of power in Israels proportional representation electoral system ...(are you watching liberal children?).

The men are all chauvinistic layabouts, and either their women work, or they all live on state welfare payments .... the men claim that they should never work because they are spending their time in 'prayerful contemplation' when not threatening women and children. How they expect to survive when they become the majority of the population as they plan, isn't clear, because obviously welfare would cease, but they think that god will provide ....

The radio report can be heard here, and there is a video from the JPost to be seen here.

One Less Miracle

2011-10-06T20:44:00.000+01:00

Smokey Robinson and The Miracles were a Motown Band, who greatly influenced later musicians both black and white .... yesterday they lost Marv Tarplin, one of their original sound to old age ..... he co-wrote several of their hits including Tracks of My Tears, which was released in 1965 and helped set them on their way.

Marv Tarplin (centre) And The Miracles

Billy Wilson of the Motown Alumni Association paid this tribute .... "His creative backbeat rhythms on guitar allowed the powers that be to find the creative juices to formulate what would become major classic hits for Motown."

No flowers on the streets of major cities, nor world headlines, but in its own way, a loss equally as tragic as that of a computer designer.

Tarnished Rainbow

2011-10-06T20:25:00.002+01:00

South Africa, the self styled 'Rainbow Nation' has a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but its for Chinese investors. Its they who pull the strings in most of sub saharan africa these days.

What makes this subservience to Chinese investment all the odder, is that the Chinese take all the mineral resources back to China, they use their own companies to extract and transport the resources, and they use Chinese companies with their supervisors to do any infrastructure work (leaving africans to do the dangerous shovelling jobs), and in short make Africa 'pay for the aid' to a far higher degree than Western aid donors ever do.

Also the amounts the Chinese 'pledge' in trade credits is far less than the West, and yet the African states will tow the political line for them, while taking Western aid for granted, and ignoring any democratic governance rules we would want followed.

If the Chinese wanted Mugabe out, the South African government would do it, and not bat an eyelid ...

No Meeting For Two Old Friends

As we have just seen with the shameful blocking of the award of a travel visa to the Dalai Lama, and the open attack on this decision by Desmond Tutu. If its still a rainbow nation, its a very tawdry little rainbow ....

A Life Well Led, A Job Well Done

2011-10-06T19:52:00.006+01:00

Steve Jobs, one of the co-founders of Apple, and a one time owner of Pixar Animation (bought for $10m in 1986), died of cancer yesterday. A sad loss for his family and friends no doubt, but not the death of Mother Teresa, Gandhi, or Mandela. But judging from the hysterical response to the news in some quarters you would think the world had ended (similar to the nonsense when the child loving 'Wacko Jacko' died).

Candles in London

The flowers, apples, cards, vigils and candles being placed outside Apple stores are the signs of a ridiculously sentimental society in the West ...

Fans leave Apples in London

He helped invent a type of Phone, a type of Computer and a type of portable Music Player .... none were strictly speaking new ideas, but they were well packaged and promoted. But they haven't changed the world, despite all the hysterics, and the sun will still rise tomorrow.