The Irresistible Cane Toads (Conquerers of the Outback).

The Problem: The Cane Toad (Bufo Marinus) is Australia’s greatest ever threat to native fauna since man arrived.

The History: Introduced as a pest control in the sugar cane fields in the 1930’s it spread quickly and finding no predators, has now reached approx 200 million spread over Northern Australia, and because the are

• Very poisonous (they have a toxic skin), and kill predators that eat or bite them, and
• Voracious predators and will eat anything that they can get their mouths round e.g. Small mammals, insects, fish, Chihuahuas etc etc.
• The breed like hell, and with no predators the young survive in massive numbers.

 

They are a very real threat to native species diversity. They have few predators in their native Hawaii and are controlled by illness, rather than Hawaiians species. Introducing new bacteria’s would be risky and in any case their range is too great now.

Recent projections (which currently exclude Global Warming effects) show that their range could double in the next few decades, and so far there has been no successful method devised to counteract this spread.

Nature fights back:

There is some evidence that some species are showing increased toleration of the toxin in small amounts and that natural selection is favouring predators that can’t attack the larger Toads. E.g. Smaller mouth sizes on snakes. They can survive biting smaller Cane Toads.

However this is very slow, not proven and reversing millennium of adaptation to normal conditions so may still result in the wipe out of the native species.

Possible Controls:

Poisoning: Obviously this would also kill native species of amphibian and other creatures – would only be possible if the Cane Toad has wiped out all native life anyway. This is the drastic solution.

Introducing a Predator: As this is how the problem originally started it’s not likely to be adopted, especially as there are no suitable candidates around.

Genetic Engineering: This takes two possible forms:

1. Genetically altering predator species to withstand the poisonous toxins of the Cane Toads skins – Dr Thomas Madsen believes he has found the gene that confers resistance to toad toxin, and is advocating the idea of creating toad resistant Quolls, Goannas (Small rodents and Lizards etc).
2. Genetically altering the Cane Toads to only produce “male” toads. The hope being that over a few years they would breed themselves out of existence. Professor Peter Koopman, from The University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience, is developing a strain of “daughter less” cane toads - toads that can give birth only to sons.“We hope to transplant a ‘gene’ into toads that will cause any female tadpoles they produce to change course and become males,” he said. “All of the offspring of this genetically engineered toad would thus be male, and they would all be carrying the daughter less gene. "It’s probably the greenest and safest solution to manage the cane toad problem – it doesn’t involve any toxins or pathogens, so the toads cannot develop immunity against it, and there is no risk to native frog species that we want to protect.”

This “Magic Bullet” approach has its critics, in that it is not proven, and very expensive to develop, and slow to deploy. It also raises concerns about genetic diversity. If you made a Goanna that could eat toads, it would be so successful relative to all other Goanna's that its genes would be the only ones left in the population after a while. The problem with this is that then you have a population of very close relatives (inbreeding etc) which leaves the population open to later threats like disease.

These objections could maybe be tackled by;

• Taking as wide a range of subjects for manipulation as possible from the wild population (reintroduced into the areas they were taken from), to ensure that the successful pools were still as diverse as before, but shared that one altered gene, along with the hundreds that they must already share in common (or they wouldn't be 'Quolls' in the first place if you follow my drift).
• A limited introduction from external wild sources (after the toads have gone). They may not be entirely similar to the native versions but better than nothing and would introduce diversity.
• A controlled release of some captive stock (I am aware that these stocks have often been manipulated by breeders, so this really would have to be controlled e.g. aggressive males are a good wild breeding trait, but have been bred out of captive stocks etc). However there are reserve wild stocks being set up that could assist in this.

Some humans are taking matters into their own hands, by organizing sweeps for Cane Toads and manually killing them. However, as the toads out number the humans by 5 to 1, and rising, this a somewhat problematic approach.

So far nothing has been deployed that has had any real effect, and until it is, the inexorable rise of the Cane Toad continues unchecked by human efforts to control them.
 

Movie Link:
Cane Toads eating habits.

Malthus and the Four Horsemen

All the signs are that we are heading to a depressing future.

Visions Of Disaster - With the Four Horsemen Riding Forth

.... the signs of this are all around us. Overpopulation, Pandemics, Freak Weather and War.

The End of History or a New World Order?

When Soviet style “Communism” collapsed in Russia in the early 1990’s (but not in China), a historian (Francis Fukuyama), made a few bucks, with a statement (pamphlet and later a book), claiming that history had ended, and that Liberal Democratic Capitalism had won.

 

The End Of History Was Wrong

 

He further stated that from then on, Democracy and Free Trading would spread round the globe, and all our problems would be over.

Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown, the UK’s self styled “Iron Chancellor”, has been accused of acting with a "Stalinist ruthlessness" as well as going awol whenever a hard decision has to be made, or one of his policies hits the fan. E.g. His Pension raids have brought a personal pension disaster to the UK but he refuses to talk about it. Also it has just been announced that Mr Brown won't need an election to become the next Prime Minister, if no one challenges him for leadership of the New Labour party, something Stalin would surely have approved of :-)

Mr Brown is allegedly not really put out by this comparison, and in fact Charlie Whelan, his old spin doctor, thought it could be taken as a form of praise for a “strong .. ruthless .. and determined" leader. Interestingly the US Ambassador to the USSR in 1941 described Germany and the USSR with the terms “Both are strong and ruthless in their methods” (Joseph Davies - Journal entry, July 7, 1941).

This got me thinking as to why being likened to a Communist mass murderer was OK, but being labelled a “Fascist” wasn’t.

So why is being likened to "Stalin", OK, and not considered pejorative? I mean, Stalin murdered more people than Hitler, and ruined large sections of his countries economy and environment. Margaret Thatcher was often called a ‘fascist’ by socialists in the 80’s, and that was an insult. Gordon Brown is likened to Stalin and is able to joke about it. From a historical perspective, the genocide of ethnic groups inside Russia is not much different in end result, to the genocide of groups under the Nazi's, so the insult should be the same.

All very strange, and a distinctly UK phenomenon of political insult and praise.

Oddly, when I knew people on the left splinter groups in the 1980’s, they reserved the term “Maoists” as an insult for all their opponents on the left, I never could fathom the arcane mystery of why a Maoist was an insult, I have come to think that anyone not following the mainstream Marxism was a "Splitter", as they would have called them in the "Life of Brian".

Before anyone thinks I am not aware of the difference between National Socialism and Communism, I realise that Hitler advocated open genocide against certain groups, from the Jews, Handicapped, and Slavs, to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Ostensibly Communism said that all men were of equal worth, irrespective of colour or previous creed. The key is the word ‘previous’, they weren’t keen on any creed except communism after they got into power.

In practise, the policies used in order to achieve either National Socialism, or Communism, were identical. Genocides, forced movements of all suspected groups to resettlement areas, Slave labour camps and arbitrary executions without the rule of law.

Incidentally, whether being likened to a Stalinist, or a Maoist, it should still be a term of insult for anyone, because using almost any scholarly tabulations (and even official Communist pronouncements), the governments of the USSR and China murdered more non-combatants than any other in the 20th-century.

Out of the top *ten most murderous regimes in the last century, five were Communist, according to the ranking provided by R.J. Rummel in his Death By Government (Communist regimes indicated in bold):

1. Soviet Union
2. Communist China
3. Nazi Germany (**National Socialist)
4. Nationalist China
5. Imperial Japan
6. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge
7. Turkey under the Young Turks
8. Communist Vietnam
9. Communist Poland
10. Pakistan under Yahya Khan

Why any democratic politician would wish to be associated with any of these regimes is a mystery to me, the fact that they can laugh and revel in it is shameful.

*Some have taken issue with some of Rummel's calculations, but not with his basic conclusions. For a reproduction of Rummel's tabulations, go to Freedom's Nest).
** It’s often forgotten that both the fascists and communists, considered themselves to be “Socialists” e.g. Until 1914, Benito Mussolini was the leader of the Socialist Party of Italy and Hitler said “There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it”, he allowed converts from Communist parties to join the Nazi party because they could do so with little mental effort.

Oddly, like my left wing friends of the 1980’s, they reserved their worst vitriol and hatred for those who were closest to them …. An important factor, that many overlook when considering the 2nd World War, and the political relationship between Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia. This is something the Left prefers not to discuss much, for obvious reasons. 

Real Black Heroes

This month is “Black History Month” in the UK, and as I feared, it’s become a chance for the Afro-centric” mythologists to get plenty of air time on radio and TV, in which to spout arrant nonsense as “historical fact”.

This morning a man who “intervenes in schools to promote black historical awareness” said on BBC Radio 5 that “I ask kids to name one thing that Black Africa has given to world civilisation and I get nothing” …. “Then I tell them that it’s 'undisputed fact' that ‘Africans’ taught the Greeks everything they knew”. He then went onto other areas of dubious fact that Afro-centric’s use to make themselves feel good. The problems with this is that:

• It’s largely rubbish, and any professor of ancient history would tell you this if they weren’t so scared of being deemed “racists” or “white imperialist”.
• The “Africans” in this case were Egyptians, not Black Africans.
• The speaker kept swapping between ‘Black’ and ‘African’, after a while it was apparent that he was nearly always talking about Egypt, and not Black Africa when he was talking about the past.
• There was no challenge to this nonsense from the presenter, nor was there any counter view from a proper historian. The guy spouting off was some sort of “teacher in Afro studies” and appeared to be basing much of what he said on the book “Black Athena” by Martin Bernal.
• Most frightening of all was that he is visiting our schools and teaching “Myth” and “wishful thinking” as fact. If we taught that “King Arthur” was real and that the story proved something, it would be about the same.

As I posted on http://nopcthoughtshere.blogspot.com/2007/03/revisionist-history.html this black revisionist history is gaining ground because no one dares point out that it fits no facts, and has been developed in the US where it’s allowed to go unchallenged because everyone fears to say anything to refute the nonsense for fear of being sacked.

GW Carver ... Celebrated in a stamp

The worst of it is that there are Real Black Heroes who could be promoted without trying to “steal from the European culture”. Here’s a list of people and empires that could be promoted in Black History Month without having to take credit for anyone else’s culture.

1. The Queen of Sheba (circa 700 BC) – she worshipped the Sun but was also a believer in one god and had a child by Solomon (Old testament). She ruled over “Punt” (or Melkat Sabaa as the Muslims call it in the Quran ‘Sura 27’) which covered parts of the modern Yemen and Ethiopia when incense was the most precious thing on Earth.
2. Mary Seacole (1805-1881) – a Victorian heroine of nursing in the Crimea and whose funeral was a time of national mourning attended by thousands.
3. Benin Empire or Edo Empire (1470-1897) which ruled a glittering empire in West Africa for centuries.
4. Great Zimbabwe – A southern African Empire founded around 1000AD. The history of this empire is only now being uncovered.
5. The Kush or Nubian Kingdom – circa 1100 BC – 300 AD (?) Which for periods of time controlled upper Egypt and had Black Pharaohs (sometimes it was in turn controlled by Egypt). Mostly they never controlled lower Egypt, so in effect there were two Pharaohs at the same time for a hundred years, but under King Piye they briefly (752 – 695 BC) controlled all Egypt. Eventually they were driven out of Egypt but the Romans had diplomatic relations (Pliny the Elder,) with Kush (now called Meroe) under Emperor Nero.
6. Lewis Howard Latimer - In 1881, he supervised installation of electric light in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London. Latimer was the original draftsman for Thomas Edison. He had many interests. He was a draftsman, engineer, author, poet, musician, and, at the same time, a devoted family man and philanthropist.
7. Granville T. Woods – the “Black Edison” invented more than a dozen devices to improve electric railway cars and many more for controlling the flow of electricity. His most noted invention was systems for letting the engineer of a train know how close his train was to others.
8. Dr. Meridith Groudine - built a multi-million dollar corporation that is based on his ideas in the field of electrogasdynamics (EGD). Using the principles of EGD, Gourdine successfully converted natural gas to electricity for everyday use. Applications of EGD include refrigeration, desalination of sea water, and reducing the pollutants in smoke. He holds more than 40 patents for various inventions. In 1964, he served on the President’s Panel on Energy.
9. George Washington Carver - Born into slavery, freed as a child, curious throughout life, Carver profoundly affected the lives of people throughout the nation. He successfully shifted Southern farming away from risky cotton, which depletes soil of its nutrients, to nitrate-producing crops such as peanuts, peas, sweet potatoes, pecans, and soybeans. Farmers began rotating crops of cotton one year with peanuts the next. Other Carver innovations include synthetic marble from sawdust, plastics from wood shavings, and writing paper from wisteria vines.
10. Madame Walker - revolutionized the hair care and cosmetics industry early in the 20th century and became a Multi Millionairess.
11. Finally, although this list is not exhaustive, Elijah McCoy – “The real McCoy” - He earned more than 50 patents. The most famous was for a metal or glass cup that fed oil to bearings through a small bore tube. Machinists and engineers who wanted genuine McCoy lubricators may well have originated the term, "the real McCoy."

Mary Seacole - Heroine To All Races.

I found these real people and large "Black" kingdoms, with only five minutes searching. So why do our educationalists find it so hard to run a course that is not revisionist claptrap, and that praises real Black achievements?

I can only assume, that once again it's because the PC fascism that appears to have infected the western culture, means that only Black "educators" can put forward an agenda for students, and this means that we end up with "Black Socrates, or Egypt was a black state" etc etc because there is a hidden "agenda" to this nonsense, rather than praising real black role models, most of whom would likely have nothing to do with that "agenda" if they were around to be asked.

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Zimbabwe

There is a Zimbabwe exiles blog that calls on Britain to invade Zimbabwe. Its actually rather a sad blog because its largely exiles planning for a day that’s maybe never going to come, but this blog reminded me that some many years ago I met a Ugandan who was driving an illegal taxi in Manchester (UK). We got chatting about African politics and Uganda as he drove me home, and he suddenly said something that has stuck with me over the years. He said that “It was wrong of the whites to leave so early, we weren’t ready”.

When I asked what he meant, he said that there should have been “A longer run up to independence in Uganda, with more skilled Africans trained into the Judiciary, Civil Service, Police and Military”. He went on to expand on this, he was obviously keen to get things off his chest, and said that “The interim government should have been five years or more, with the first two elections, supervised whilst still under British overall control, to ensure the rules were stuck to”.

He then added “But most of all, the police should have remained under British control, and we should have been told we didn’t need an army as the British Army was staying to ”protect” Uganda, not that we needed an army, or protecting from any one except our own army”.

I forget which African strong man was in charge of Uganda at the time, it could have been Idi Amin, or Milton Obotoe, or one of the others, but his charge was that they had all squandered and stolen the resources that had been there upon independence, and let down the hopes of a nation.

His basic argument was that with no native Military, and the Police and Judiciary supervised by the UK, democracy would have stuck from the start, and the constitution obeyed by all parties. And, that by not wasting money on unneeded armies; money would have been spent on education, medicine and infrastructure.

In reality this wasn’t practicable, especially given the anti-colonial sentiments in both Africa and the West at the time. But when you look at the mess that the vast majority of African nations got into after independence, maybe he had a point for all of the new states and not just Uganda.

I haven’t thought about this conversation for some years, and I am afraid that like many I have just written the whole continent off as a basket case, with Zimbabwe just being the latest example, but I wonder how it would have all turned out “if only..” Britain and France had come up with a joint plan for correcting inappropriate borders (those that split tribes), and insisting on acting as military guarantors of the constitution for each newly independent states?

It’s too late now, and asking for any white military force to go in and correct an abhorrent African regime is just whistling into the wind. There is still an Anti colonial lobby on the left wing of the UK, who would bring down the New Labour regime if Blair tried to use military force, so even if he has thought about it, he has not dared risk it.

I am afraid that the Zimbabweans are stuck with the old dictators club aka the African Union or the UN, aka the Chinese oil exploration authority, for any hope in Zimbabwe. In reality this means that nothing will happen, and until and unless South Africa feels threatened, nothing will be allowed to happen. With the news that Mugabe intends to run for election until he dies, that is the only hope they have, that he dies of old age.

It will be a very long time, if ever, before Zimbabwe fully recovers from the damage. All the farm infrastructure has been destroyed, the farmers dispersed, and capital goods (tractors etc) gone, and livestock diseased or eaten. Even just repairing the broken fences will cost millions.

Their country has effectively been destroyed, and will never regain the chances lost, because even if Mugabe’s regime collapses, all the squatters, veterans, activists etc will still be there, and no one will be able to control them. It would need a military government just to protect people, let alone enforce the courts orders.

I guess I am being ultra pessimistic, but I suspect that when Mugabe’s party lose power, they will revert back to guerrilla violence to get it back, and this brings us back to “if only ….”

Update: TuTu calls for action on Zimbabwe - yep its got worse and guess who got a hero's welcome at the latest meeting of the African Union? Yes our 'hero' and yours Robert Mugabe!

The 300 and Iranian Censorship

There have been calls in Iran and amongst Iranian exiles (or diaspora) to ban screenings of the film “300” which is currently raking in money in the US.

 

The Film 300 Upset Iran

Their complaint, it’s not historically accurate, and portrays Persians in a bad light…. Hmm.

Revisionist History

Posthumous Knighthoods were being demanded by web poll for two dead football managers, by supporters of Liverpool, and Glasgow Celtic, football clubs. 

 

Victorian Generals - All Should Lose Their Honours?

 

Obviously the supporters of Everton and Glasgow Rangers, will now demand knighthoods for one of their ex managers in order to keep the tribal balance. 

Man Made Global Warming Myth??

Global Warming Myths??

Fact: There is Global Warming. No disputing It. 

 

Global Warming Debate

 

The Myth?: It's caused wholly mainly by human CO2 emissions?

There is currently much argument about the extent of human involvement in the global warming that we are currently experiencing. Arguments for and counter views for it not being caused by humans are being put forward.

 

Google Fame

“Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me” .....

 

Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar

 

Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar in “Carry on Cleo” … So who is the most Famous or Infamous character or person who has ever lived?

Jesus Tomb

Amazing, Astounding, Incredible! …. A film maker, James Cameron (Titanic, Alien, and Terminator) claims to have found the tomb (well the ossuary … bone box to you and I) of Jesus of Nazareth. On top of this, evidence that he was married to Miriam (Mary) Magdalene, and that they had a son called Judah! …

Hmm, I seem to have heard this story before .. err yes, I have heard the story before, but it was different then. In fact it made barely a ripple when it came out, because it was speculative archaeology at best and irresponsible tripe at worst. It disappeared for five years and re-emerges as a “new” story with a multimillion pound film budget!

Ah ha, I hear the cynics say, another “Da Vinci Code” or maybe the Santilli/Shoefield “Alien Autopsy” film, or just an amalgam of both … still it’s shameful that a well known film maker would associate himself with this sort of money making. There are enough conspiracy theorists, Muslim fundamentalists, and complete idiots out there, without adding to the numbers.

So here are the facts that you won’t get on the idiot sites around the world.

1. There have always been stories that “Jesus” didn’t die, but went elsewhere … common locations for these other places include India, Japan, Britain and France.

2. Some of these stories are quite old, (Middle Ages, but still over a thousand years after the events), but most of these stories only emerge in the 19th & 20th Century, and are based upon wishful thinking e.g. “And did those feet, in ancient times walk upon England’s mountains green” from the Poem by William Blake (1804), and which was based upon an older apocryphal story, which narrated that Jesus, while still a young man, accompanied Joseph of Arimathea to the English town of Glastonbury.

3. Many of these Stories, especially about Jesus in India, come from Islamic sources (based largely on the Quran, written 650 yrs after the New Testament), and obviously have a reason to “prove” that Jesus was not the “Son of God”. Mainly because it enhances their prophet, and also does a number on the Buddhists as well, by "showing" that their later teachings were influenced by Jesus. If Jesus was the Son of God, then there would be no reason to send the Muslim prophet, so they wanted to prove Jesus to be a lesser being … you get the picture. Incidentally, the Rector of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo issued a Fatwa (verdict) that according to the Holy Quran, Jesus had died a natural death…. (This is the same University that had the blogger Kareem arrested) … how “natural” a death by crucifixion is, is a matter of religion.

4. One of the main Islamic sources is Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), a man who had previously been declared as a “Reformer of Islam”, a title only 13 men had held before, for a very big book “proving” that all the other world religions were ‘pants’. He later went on to declare himself Mahdi, and declared a madman, but that’s never been a handicap in Islam. He still has followers now.

5. The current crop of books about Jesus and bloodlines come from the late 20th century and later, and carefully infer to be based on 'facts', but are largely made up of speculation built upon half facts, or just plain rubbish, are written almost entirely with a quick buck and a possible film deal in mind.

6. This latest story comes from a discovery in 1980 in Talpoit (Israel) … Yes this has been around for that long, before Mr Cameron “discovered” the story of some bone boxes (they used to intern the bones, not the bodies in those days) that were inscribed with names Mary; Matthew; Jesua son of Joseph; Mary; Jofa (Joseph, Jesus' brother); and Judah son of Jesua, and were featured on the BBC in 1996.

7. So far so good for the gullible, but here’s the bits Mr Cameron won’t have in his film.

8. At the time that Jesus was alive there were at least 351 other men with a first name of Jesus with their fathers name as Joseph i.e. about 5% of the male population of Jerusalem.

9. Miriam was the first name of at least a quarter of all Jewish women in the 1st century AD

10. The ossuaries were not found in Galilee, where the “Jesus” family would have lived and buried their dead, but in the centre of Jerusalem. A very strong indication that it’s another family, if not an outright fraud (see “Hitler diaries”, for this type of fraud).

11. The people who wrote the New Testament, are not likely to have ‘forgotten’ where his body was interred for three days, so when they said “The tomb of Joseph of Arimathea” as where Jesus’s body was interred after the crucifixion, then they knew, as they were there.

12. Why would they put his bones in an ossuary in any event, when they were telling everyone that he had ascended to heaven? It is not a secret you could keep for very long in a city where a lot of people were related to, or knew, the "disciples". Especially as Mr Cameron is saying that he not only lived, but married and had a child, who presumably lived in Jersualem long after his death. Presumably, everyone just "forgot" about his wife and child after Jesus was crucified? Duh, just how many fools does Mr Cameron think there are in the world?

13. If his bones were in a box, then all his disciples would have been tortured and martyred for a lie, and would have known this as they were being tortured …. Not very likely. People will endure a lot for something they believe in, but not for something they know to be a lie.

14. As for his enemies, do you think that the Pharisees/Sanhedrin wouldn’t have done anything to break this splinter Jewish cult? They even went to considerable lengths to ensure that his body would not be disturbed for three days by sealing the tomb it lay in. “We remember what while he was still alive, that deceiver said ‘That after three days I will rise again’. So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise the disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead” .. So if his bones had been put in the family vault in “Jerusalem” (or more likely Galilee) they would have exposed this fact immediately.

15. Israeli archaeologist Amos Kloner, who was among the first to examine the tomb when it was first discovered, said the names marked on the coffins were very common at the time. "I don't accept the news that it was used by Jesus or his family," he told the BBC News website. "The documentary filmmakers are using it to sell their film." "It's very interesting," he said of all of the names of Jesus' family being found on ossuaries in the same cave, "but it's not a convincing proof that it's the family of Jesus." He knows of at least two other ossuaries that bear the name of Jesus, son of Joseph.

16. And finally, what a coincidence that this historical bombshell should await 2,000 years to turn up, just in time for a film maker to be able make a considerable amount of money from it. As mentioned earlier, when they were first found, these bone boxes raised no more than minor academic interest as a curious coincidence, but following the Da Vinci code, these types of films will make money, so it is dusted off with some spurious *DNA tests (inconclusive), and rediscovered for TV.

According to Mr Cameron's theory the story of Jesus goes something like this.

• I am born the Son of God.
• I preach tolerance and love, and do amazing stuff.
• I am celibate, apart from Mary, who doesn't count somehow.
• I have lots of friends and enemies who are strangely blind to me dating Mary.
• I have lots of friends and enemies who are strangely blind to me marrying Mary, they missed the party and everything ... we didn't have a temple wedding, we just wanted a quiet affair, just friends and family .. a dozen or so you know.
• Young Judah was born, couldn't christen him cos we haven't got to that bit yet.
• I am the Son of God and I die for your Sins.
• I am hated by certain very powerful religious groups who are strangely blind to my family living in Jerusalem.
• My wife and Son all live with my earth Mum & Dad in Jerusalem despite the dangers, they preferred the big city life to Galilee.
• My son never married, and they were all buried with my brother in the same tomb ... my brother had no children or wife, so when he died they sealed the whole thing up for Mr Cameron to make a film and show disrespect to the beliefs of 1.8 billion people.

It sort of looks stupid when its put like that doesn't it? But there are going to be a lot of people who will want to believe every word of this version, especially when its on TV.

Now that really is Amazing, Astounding, Incredible!

* How would we know what Jesus's DNA was?

For more on this story … including arrests for antique fraud and an attempt to swindle monies from a collector of antiquities:

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070226/jesus_tomb_060226/20070226?hub=TopStories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ossuary `
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2393209.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2349325.stm

For Jesus in the East, you don’t get a better review of the stories than this from the Fortean Times (unfortunately you have to subscribe for full article but I recommend it) .. get the postal version its more fun!
http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/183_jesuseast1.shtml

For other versions just Google “Jesus in India”, “Jesus in Japan” etc … you can even try “Jesus in Afghanistan” and get hits.

Morality Tales:

In the UK there are adverts for the forthcoming “Red Nose” charity day, and one supermarket is saying that if you buy this or that, then they will donate money to help children in South Africa. Now, nothing wrong with that you might say, and there is no doubt that there are a lot of very poor kids in South Africa who need help.

However, at the very same time that the UK is being asked to find money to educate South African children, they are building football stadiums for the next world cup. The costs of this building work are enormous (17.4bn rand ($2.2bn)), for stadium and infrastructure that in many cases will have no real use after the competition, and in some cases have been built using green belt land that will never be reclaimed e.g. The Cape Town stadium is sited on land (Greenpoint) that was a golf course, and acted as a green belt around the mountain side city.

Apart from the fact there are considerable doubts that all of the work will be completed before the competition, we have to ask the question as to whether it’s morally correct to ask UK charities to provide, food, water and schooling for your poorest children, whilst you spend billions of Rand on what is essentially a showcase “white elephant” event. Interesting fact: According to the South African reserve bank, only 5% of government debt (around R17-billion) is foreign debt … oddly the cost of the world cup, and could relieve South Africa of all its foreign owned debts.

If a man spends all his wages on drink, and leaves his children to be fed by the social services, those kids are taken off him and he goes to jail, so why not a state? One of the African dictators (85-year-old Ivory Coast President for life, Felix Houphouet-Boigny) had built, an exact copy of the Vatican in the middle of the bush, in a country that was predominately non Catholic, and he was rightly condemned for it. I can see little difference between this, and with holding a World Cup in a country beset with poverty in large strata’s of its society.

No doubt there will be an argument that if you have a World Cup, there will be jobs created, so rather like the old adage that if you “give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you give him a rod, he can eat everyday”, they would argue that in the long term the stadiums, roads and tourists etc will bring long term benefits. Wrong, there will be millions made by some big international businesses, and some local firms will have a small bonanza at the time, but for the local community, a few thousand temporary part time jobs will last 5 or 6 weeks, and then be gone.

You could cite other examples like this, such as the Olympics in China, except that despite the undoubted poverty in China, they have pulled 500 million out of absolute poverty in 15 yrs, and the signs are that if they continue as they are, then many millions more will benefit in the next decade, and will therefore benefit from the infrastructure windfall that the Olympics will leave behind.

This brings us back to the morality of Western charities providing welfare in third world countries. Can we really think that it’s right giving money and aid to the poor, in a country that spends 25+% of its GDP on weapons, and 10% on its poor? Are we not just in fact rewarding feckless and morally bankrupt countries for ignoring their own poor, whilst protecting their regimes by buying weapons to suppress those same poor?

It’s an interesting fact that one of the best governed, but poorest governments in Southern Africa, Swaziland, which is democratic, never had a military coup, and has managed to keep on top of its debts, didn’t qualify for any international debt write off, whilst all the badly governed states did. So the moral appears to be that being corrupt and anti democratic pays, whilst being honest doesn’t…. what sort of message does that send out to dictators?

I fall neither one way nor the other, as humanitarian thought says it’s wrong to leave the poor to die, but on the other hand there is no pressure on bad governments to change if their poor are provided with aid by the West.

It’s kinda like the chicken and the egg argument about which comes first…. Does good governance come if we help their poor, or does that in fact end up reinforcing bad governance, by removing internal pressures to reform?