Anders Behring Breivik Mad?

When Anders Behring Breivik was arrested ...

Face Of A Madman, or Clinical Killer?

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.

 

Zombie Walks

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" ...

The Zombie Craze is World Wide

..... this is a craze that is sweeping those parts of the world where you can't be denounced and killed for having a laugh, where people dressed as zombies can shuffle and moan about a city centre in their thousands.

 

In The Heart Of Darkness

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'.

DR Congo - Compared with Europe.

 

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.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

In the way that these things happen, there were two stories from Russia that caught my eye in the last few days.

 

Medvedev–Putin Tandemocracy

 

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 ... Vladimir Putin is leader of the ruling United Russia, but the incumbent President is Dmitry Medvedev (also from that party).

 

No Justice For Walter Patterson

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 .... 

 

George Wright, Criminal Fugitive, Plane Hijacker

.... 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. On the 31st July1972, Wright, then 29, and four accomplices (plus two of their children) hijacked a Delta Airlines flight.

Tough Pasta

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 ....

Salvatore Riina aka 'The Beast'

..... he was alleged to have personally killed 40 men. He was captured after 23 years on the run near Palermo in May 1993

The Seeds of Anger

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.


Steinbeck's 'The Grapes Of Wrath'

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 the same group take 25%.

 

Historic American Flag

I didn't know that the US flag had no set design until 1912, and I suspect that most US citizens didn't either.

 

US flag design 1777

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 an influence on the design ..... obviously, the rebellion (aka Independence) set the first design.

 

Arrivederci Roma

So its a wave goodbye to Europe's equivalent to the late (and unlamented) 'Gadfather', Silvio Berlusconi.

Silvio Berlusconi - Last Roman Emperor?

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. 

 

Friend To The Stars

Every one's got to have a hobby or at least an interest, and Louis Schlamowitz is no exception.

Louis Schlamowitz And Part Of His Vast
Collection - The Envy Of Many Collectors.

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.

 

The Cruelest Cut Of All

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.

The UK Has Four Civil Servants For Every Soldier

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.

 

Crime and Punishment

Crime does pay .... or at least if you are a Mexican prisoner.

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

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!

 

Thankful Villages

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).

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

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.

 

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

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!

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.

These Girls Could Be Blowing That Trumpet in Vain

 

And the reason I know this to be true?

 

European Union: Democratic or Despotic?

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

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

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 the order of gambling syndicates, 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 very long, with former Pakistan cricket captain Salman Butt jailed for 30 months, Mohammad Asif, 28, jailed for one year, and bowler Mohammad Amir, 19, was sentenced to six months. And all of them got a 'five year bans' from cricket by the International Cricket Council, with all three 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 the 'real truth'  Zahim the idiot 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

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

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.
 

Super Economy or Trade Dependent?

 
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%.

 

The "Yankee" Dollar

Its a sign of the strange times that we live in, that the US dollar is still weak against the crumbling Euro.


"Half A Dollar" in slang terms

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' .....