The Most Popular Boys Name In The UK Is ..........

2010 was the year that the boys name 'Mohammed, Muhammed or other of the 12 different spellings of the name' was reported as the most popular in the UK in 2009 (the last full year the office of national statistics reported on) ......

Anthony O'Brien

Anthony O'Brien is a 69 yr old RAF veteran who lives in Manchester .......... he was attacked by what the police described as "Asian or mixed race" teenagers, for this description read "Pakistani descent", simply for wearing a poppy and a RAF blazer.

"They were shouting, 'Fucking shoot all you bastards and blow your soldiers up. Death to all soldiers.' I was scared. I was wearing my RAF blazer and poppy - I wear it regularly because it's smart and I'm proud of it. I thought they were drunk or something. I told them to leave me alone but the little fella hit me on the side of my head. Then the other fella head-butted me. Then they ran away."

I put the two stories together because, whilst you and I probably can see a connection, our politicians apparently can't ...... the BBC can't bring themselves to report this story on their web sites, and don't discuss the nationality of the attackers on the local radio reports of the crime.

PC crap drives the left's agenda, and the BBC thinks its the natural champion of this credo.

Compare And Contrast

Yesterday the ex-President of Israel (he resigned from the largely ceremonial post of head of state in 2007), Moshe Katsav, was convicted of rape by a jury in open court in Tel Aviv.

 

Ex- President ......

 

He was found guilty of raping an employee in the 1990s, when he was tourism minister and of later sexual offences while he was President. The judges said they believed the evidence of the woman whose testimony had led to two charges of rape.

Beggars Banquet

Haiti dropped off the worlds news map very quickly after last years disaster ...... 

 

Haiti Earthquake Damage

 .... the reasons are the usual ones for this benighted country ..... violence, and corruption, and lets face it, ignorance.

Spam, Spam, Spam ... Eggs, And Spam

Spam, Spam, Spam ..... the bane of the email users life, is a common enough problem for most of us that we usually think of this context when the word comes up ...

Spam Cans

.... but of course originally it was the commercial name of a salted pork meat product.

Message In A Bottle

On the 4th of  July 1863 a soldier wrote a coded message and placed it in a bottle ..... the intended recipient was Gen John Pemberton, the officer in charge of the defences at Vicksberg, which was under siege from the Unionist forces.

General John Pemberton

The message was never delivered because that same day the Unionists marched into Vicksburg and the fate of the 'Confederacy' probably assured .... they lost the Civil War two years later.

Tall Romans, Old Romans, and Healthy Romans

And in another bit of research, its been shown that the Romans of Pompeii were as tall as we are, and ate a far better diet than the average Victorian.


Tall and Healthy Romans

We are often told that that the Romans, or anyone in the past for that matter, were all much shorter than we are.

 

The Long Road To Wealth Creation

In one in the eye for the welfare state ethos of 'welfare benefits' for life (which has made sections of us the poorest and fattest society in Western Europe), it was revealed this week that peasants living in medieval England, were better off under the feudal system, than the poor in many African countries today!

I had heard this idea of English peasants lives before (notably on Terry Jones history show about peasants that showed that with all the religious holidays and other holidays, they actually worked less than most of us today ..... they averaged three days a week off), but this latest study suggests that economically, they were doing OK as well. This despite the fact that the period was a particularly violent, with warfare and plagues a regular set of events.

Rich Medieval Peasants?

The report showed that the average income per head was $1,000 (around £638 in 1990 terms), and living standards were higher then, than in countries such as Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo), with an average income of $249, and Burundi ($479), in 1990. Even on the eve of the eruption of the Black Death, which first struck in 1348-49, peasant per capita incomes were more than £510, the report "British Economic Growth 1270-1870" has disclosed.

This means that people could afford a much more varied diet rather than the one based on grains and oatmeal, which is normally described in books, according to Prof Stephen Broadberry from the University of Warwick. He based his research upon a wide variety of records that have survived since the Norman conquest, which produced the most literate and numerate society (judging from the court records from the time, in which peasants were forever in court suing for their 'rights'), in Europe, and possibly in the world at this time.

• Zaire ($249)
• Burundi ($479)
• Niger ($514)
• Central African Republic ($536)
• Comora Islands ($606)
• Togo ($617)
• Guinea Bissau ($628)
• Sierre Leone ($686)
• Haiti ($686)
• Chad ($706)
• England in the late Middle Ages ($1,000) 

African Peasants

‘The path to the Industrial Revolution began far earlier than commonly has been understood,’ said Prof Broadberry ...... According to the World Bank, countries which had a per capita income of less than $1,000 last year (2009) included Ghana ($700), Cambodia ($650), Tanzania ($500), Ethiopia ($300) and Burundi ($150), while in India, one of the BRIC emerging economies, the gross income per capita stands only just above European medieval levels at a mere $1,180.

NB: The other episodes from Terry Jones series on the middle ages are here:

The Monk
The Damsel
The King
The Minstrel
The Knight
The Philosopher

New Politics, Same Broken Britain

We may have a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives forming what the government but two stories last week illustrated that Political Correctness still holds sway over the Law and other agents of power.

A Child Killer

Firstly, an illegal Iraqi Kurd immigrant, Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, who has fathered two children while here, killed a 12 yr old girl with his car (which he was driving illegally in any case), and two 'Senior Immigration' judges declared that it would contravene this mans "right to life and to "a family life" under the "Human Rights Act" to deport him .... the right to life of the little girl he killed was apparently of no consequence to the decision.

Her father said what most of us are thinking "What are the judges saying here? They are saying it doesn't matter what you do when you come here, who you kill, what laws you break, as long as you have children you can stay here? He's not a life saving surgeon or a Nobel Prze winner. he was a criminal before, a crimminal now, ands he will continue being a criminal".

And Secondly: There was the tale of a killer, Roger Kearney, who is suing the Post office for wrongful  dismissal because they sacked him for 'gross misconduct' six months before he was sentenced to "Life" or whatever passes for a life sentence in the UK, for the murder of his girlfriend . He says that he should have been paid while on bail and therefore is owed £8,225 .... his statement said that because he was “innocent until found guilty” and says his "human rights" were breached.

Killer

‘I feel that, if the Royal Mail could not trust me, they must have believed that the allegations against me were true and after 34 years of loyal service, a clear conduct record and no affect on my ability to perform my duties is a clear breach of my human rights.’ .... which ignores the fact that both the court and the jury also believed the allegations, which is why he is in Prison.

The "Human Rights Act" has been nothing but a millstone around our necks ever since the Blair government foisted it on the UK without the slightest hesitation. This liberal interpretation of the act, seems to be a peculiarly British thing, and now features in criminal stories on a regular basis.

• Being British Is Not A Privilege Anymore.
• "Haggis Munchers"
• Terrorists Can't Face Long Sentences
• Terrorists Evade Eviction From UK
• Rapist Paedophile Can't Be Deported From Britain
• Democracy Ain’t Working No More

The UK truly is an lunatic asylum run by the inmates ....

"Jaws" .... Not Radio Controlled?

Finally, this week .... there has been a series of Shark attacks in Egypt at the Sharm el-Sheikh which the Egyptians with their typical efficiency have completely failed to get control of. First they killed a couple of the wrong type of shark, and then in a scene reminiscent of the movie "Jaws" declared the beaches open again, only for another fatal attack to take place.

Mossad Agent

So what do you do in a Muslim country when you have a failure?

Why blame your failure on Israel and its intelligence service Mossad, the US and its intelligence service CIA, or even the near toothless UK and its intelligence service MI5 ..... normally this apparently satisfies the Islamic masses who seem unable to notice that its a stupid idea, and merely fuels their belief that they would shine, if only they didn't have so many powerful enemies.

But, surely a shark attack can't be someone else's fault?

That's no problem if you are a Governor of an Egyptian province and South Sinai governor, Mohamed Abdul Fadil Shousha, who was reported on an official Egyptian news site as saying that "What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark [in to the sea] to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs time to confirm".

Utterly imbecilic ..... needless to say Israel dismissed the idea .... with Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Igal Palmor telling the BBC: "The man must have seen Jaws one time too many, and confuses fact and fiction." .... not just the man, but the whole culture which could even allow such an idea to circulate.

Nobel Prize, Ignoble Politics

China's behaviour over the award of the Noble Peace prize to Liu Xiaobo one of their own citizens, but one who is in prison for protesting for human rights, has been nothing less than shameful

..... but the behaviour of some of their 'friends' around the world has been equally disgraceful.

 

Corruption Not Terrorism Threatens Most People

Sweden is possibly one of the most highly developed societies on Earth and regularly tops leagues for ethical societies ....... so imagine the shock to their self psyche when a story suggested all was not as squeaky clean as they believed ...... shock horror! The Swedish news headlines are dominated by a scandal in Gothenburg, with police investigating allegations that local government officials had accepted bribes from a major construction company.

Stockholm, Sweden

Now by most countries standards this would hardly be headline news, or certainly not for more than one day, but in Sweden, this is a shocking revelation ..... when you consider that outside of the first world economies (and there is a tie in with this fact), most countries are corrupt, with the very poorest societies also the most corrupt, then the Swedish problem is minuscule.

In fact some 56% of people interviewed by Transparency International said their country had become more corrupt in the last few years, which is a sad indictment on the state of the world. What makes this even more depressing is that most bribes are paid to the Police.

In Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iraq and India more than 50% of people said they had paid a bribe in the past year - many of them paying off the police. Bur even so they are not considered the most corrupt institution .... Political Parties were regarded as the most corrupt institutions with 80% of people regarding them as corrupt. Political parties also topped the list in Transparency's 2004 barometer, with 71%.

Religious bodies experienced a sharp rise in people regarding them as corrupt - 28% in 2004 increased to 53% by 2010. And with one in four of those polled saying they had paid a bribe in the past year, its not hard to make the correlation between corruption and poverty around the world.

• In sub-Saharan Africa, 67% of bribes were to avoid trouble with the authorities.
• In the Arab world and Latin America most bribes were paid to speed things up.
• In Asia-Pacific, 35% of people bribed to get a service they were entitled to.
• In North America and the EU, most bribe payers said they could not remember why they had paid (about 5% of those polled said they had paid a bribe).

(90,000 polled over 86 countries for the results)

NB: Sadly this morning the Swedish are discovering once again that being a civilised country only  makes  you apparently a target for the new barbarians with two apparent 'jihadist suicide' bombers attaking them ..... but they are not alone in this regard, and even so, I would argue that more people are affected by Corruption, than by Terrorism. 

Global Warming .... British Ice Age!!

Every year is record warmest year according to Meteorologists, and yet Britain currently has harder and harder winters ......  If Britain has much more "Global Warming" like this 'autumn' .....

 then I will freeze to death!

"Honey Traps" And Other Cold War Strategies

A British MP has had his Russian 'Parliamentary Aide', Katia Zatuliveter, age 25, arrested over claims she is a Russian spy.

Katia Zatuliveter

Of course he says she isn't a spy, but as the KGB (FSB, or whatever they call themselves these days), have used Russian ingenue's, to beguile older western males into loosening their tongues (if nothing else), over sensitive information for decades, so its rather odd that she should gravitate towards an old minor leftie MP just 'for love', and for no other reason.

Malware and Other Ills

This weekend I picked up a virus ..... no not the 'woman flu', or 'heavy cold' that is going around frozen Britain, no I mean one of those horrors that beset the Internet, the Trojan/virus call it what you will.

The one I got was the "Google Redirect" .... this is caused by something called the 'TDL3 Rootkit' which causes the Google redirect virus infection. A person who is using Google as a home page or search engine is redirected to visiting unwanted websites ..... and its a real bugger to get rid of!!

Eventually after much searching (hampered greatly by the fact that I was being redirected) I found a site that didn't just spout nonsense ....  "How to Remove the Google Redirect Virus", which apart from being full of generally good advice, has a specific link to the the utility 'TDSSKiller.exe' which is by Kaspersky, and killed the problem in a few moments ...... so a full cheer from a grateful web user for these companies who offer free cures for very nasty little problems.

Oddly, I still have no idea where I picked this problem up from because I most definitely did not give any administrator permissions to a download ..... ah well, at least its apparently fixed for now.