Sikhism's Lost Masters

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

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

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

Teodoro (or Teodrin) Nguema Obiang Mangue is the son of  the corrupt President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea.

Corruption Buys A Lot Of House

 

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.

 

Empires End

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 cycle of deep recessions which is mirrored by the other *Western economies retracting with it, there are some strange stories popping up


Empire Nevada, Modern Ghost Town.

 

 .... not least of these are the rust belt towns in Europe and the USA, and now these are spreading into previously prosperous suburbs.

 

Jailbreaking iPhones

"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

Col Gaddafi has been killed .... he didn't fight to the death as he vowed, choosing instead to fight to other peoples deaths before surrendering .... 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 initial 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 at least one fatal bullet wound in the head.

There are conflicting reports on his death; One states that a nearby group of NTC fighters opened fire (or he was wounded by his bodyguards mis-thrown hand grenade which blew up after hitting a wall and bouncing back towards him), wounding Gaddafi with shrapnel, not gunshots to his leg and back before his surrender. Gaddafi is said to have shouted "Please don't shoot!"

Actually his last moments are shown on video and indicate that rebel fighters were beating him and one of them sodomizing him with a bayonet, before he was shot several times as he begged for his life. Gaddafi can be heard in one video saying "God forbids this" and "Do you know right from wrong?" which is somewhat ironic coming from a man who did such terrible things to others ....

A doctor's examination in the town of Mistra stated he had been shot in the head and abdomen.

Whatever the truth of it, he was now dead, killed in much the same way that his secret police killed thousands over the years, with a bullet after being tortured, 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

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  ....

 

Gilad Shalit - Worth Freeing A Thousand Terrorists?

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? 

 

Lord's Resistance Army

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.

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

Catholicisms Dirty Open Secret

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


Too Many Little Children Betrayed
By The Catholic Church?

.... 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.

Jewish Taliban

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.

Haradi Ultra Orthodox Jews Block Girls School

In fact all the things that we accuse Muslim groups of doing throughout the world.

One Less Miracle

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

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

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. 

Candles in London

A sad loss for his family and friends no doubt, but not the death of Mother Teresa, Gandhi, or Mandela. 

American Xtremist

John Lindh (aka John 'Walker' Lindh) was arrested by US forces in Afghanistan when they invaded (or liberated) it in November 2001 .... he had gone there in May 2001 to fight with the Taliban against the non Taliban forces, after he had converted to Islam in 1997.

He received two months of military training at the Osama Bin Laden financed al-Farouq training camp, and twice met the al-Qaeda leader (but his father Frank Lindh denies his son had anything to do with terrorism) ... this is the same father who apparently was undisturbed when his son converted to Islam, went to Yemen, and then went to Pakistan to 'further his studies'.. "I trust your judgment and hope you have a wonderful adventure", was his quoted comment to his son.


American Taliban

In other words, Lindh is at best naively stupid, and at worst a traitor to his country .... he got a twenty year sentence, when many wanted him shot .... his father now wants a presidential clemency for his son. This is not going to happen, except possibly if a two term President uses his traditional powers to do so as they leave office.

Mr Lindh should possibly just be grateful his son is still alive. All things considered, that's something of a miracle in itself.

Lashings Of Fun In Saudi Arabia

A woman, identified only as 'Shema', went to court in Saudi Arabia last week. Her crime? Driving a car ...

Her punishment? 10 lashes on the back for breaking the country's ban on female drivers .... at least two other women are due to appear in court later this year on similar charges as part of the 'Women2drive' campaign in that country. The 'official' Saudi interpretation of Islamic law includes the guardianship system under which women need permission from a male relative to participate in public life.


Wanted -"Dead or Alive"

This sentence was overturned by the 'liberal' King of that paradise who in the same week had grandly announced that women could now vote in the meaningless local elections next year. Instead of being angry that the courts can still pass these sentences of torture on men and woman in Muslim lands, some spoilt air head princess (Princess Amira al-Taweel, wife of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal) tweeted

"Thank God, the lashing of Shema is cancelled. Thanks to our beloved king, I am sure all Saudi women will be so happy".