Yellow Stars In The UK?

I recently pointed out the recent trend in the UK of boycotting Israel in support of 'Palestine' despite the fact that one is the regions only democracy, and the other is governed as a one party Islamic state.

This story of the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge getting caught up in the politics of boycott illustrates the issue nicely. The choir had been due to attend at St George's Cathedral in East Jerusalem, and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem after they had been invited to sing in both locations by the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem.

But the London-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign wrote a letter, signed by just over 200 people (yes, as many as that), asking that the choir cancel its tour of Israel or risk, in their words, "appearing indifferent to Palestinian suffering". The spokeswoman for this tiny organisation Betty Hunter, says that the choirs tour, is "surprising and shocking" which she said "promotes Israel as a normal state rather than one which represses Palestinians".

In a right minded society that would have been the end of the matter, but then the one party and profoundly undemocratic Palestinian Authority joined in. According to the reports the PA asked the Bishop of Jerusalem to withdraw the invitation for the choir to sing in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and then 'banned' them from entering 'ene masse'.

This sort of 'pressure' by small, one issue (and usually blinkered) pressure groups would be easily resistible in normal society but when its in the general 'Anti-Israeli' atmosphere of the left-wing in the UK then its much harder for PC groups such as the Anglicans and Universities to resist them.

I might add as an another illustration of this growing (and shameful) trend, the decision of the UK government to use UK food labels to distinguish between goods from 'Palestinians in the occupied territories' and 'produce from Israeli settlements', is little more than an Anti-Semites and boycotters charter. Somewhat disingenuously the Labour government said that it was 'opposed to a boycott of Israeli goods', but that 'the settlements posed an obstacle to peace'.

The Future Of Anti-Semitic Labelling?

For shame ............ its sad that the left wing want to finish the job of the Nazis, and maybe we should just put a yellow star on the food labels?

The Drugs War - More Bad News

This graph produced by the UNODC shows some selected types of crimes

and the interesting thing is that while most of the crime types have stabilised or fallen, drug related crimes have doubled in the last decade. If ever proof was needed that illegal drugs cause the most misery in the world, then its surely this simple fact.

This blog doesn't have a magic solution but has noted the fact that the drug traffickers are winning (or at least not losing) the war, and this observation is supported by the same UN organisation reporting that huge amounts of heroin and cocaine were being traded by "terrorists and anti-government forces" to fund their operations and is transforming Africa into a major crime hub.

US Airliner Attack - UK Connections?

It being the holiday season I was laying low on my blogging, but the news that a Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, has tried to blow himself up on a US airliner has forced me from my inertia.

Sadly he's not the first Muslim to attempt to blow up an airliner and he probably won't be the last, so its not that which drew my attention, no what interested me was the fact that the bomber appears to have been led down the path of 'radicalisation' while studying in the UK.

He was a well supported and regarded student at Imperial College London until 2008, but during or after that period, his father became sufficiently disturbed by his sons views, for him to allegedly report his son to the US authorities.

The bomber is reported as being denied a UK visa this summer when he attempted to claim student status again for one of our numerous 'bogus colleges' and that should surely have raised some alarm bells .....

I would suggest that the authorities should take a close look at the contacts he made and the mosques Mr Abdulmutallab attended while in the UK, as well as those abroad because it can't just be a coincidence that a well regarded student, should end up as a wannabe suicide bomber attempting to use the same chemical explosive method as Richard Reid the British 'shoe bomber' who attended the Finsbury Park mosque (run by Sheikh Abu Hamza).

Although the evidence suggests his radicalisation took place in Lome before he came to the UK, and later in the Yemen where he went to 'study', it seems unlikely that while in the UK he didn't come into contact with either extremist literature or Imans.

Broken Britain Vl - A Christmas Tale

It appears that Fagin's are back in the UK with this story of young children being dropped into the hatches of charity recycling banks, to steal second-hand clothing meant for the third world.

"They are putting a person into the hopper, usually a child, into a dark metal bank not knowing what's in there.... " Sue Ray the Oxfam spokeswoman said. She added that said the donations were "desperately needed" by shops and appealed for people to take bags directly into branches.

Is this a sign of increased poverty in the UK, or the work of 'gangs' from Albania / Roumania etc?

Who can tell, the story doesn't speculate, nor give more details.

So all I can say is that like the petrol stealing from farmhouses last year, its a new low in the UK.

The Next Y2K Bug?... 19th Jan 2038

I read somewhere recently that there is potentially another Y2K (Millennium) bug coming up.

The original problem was caused by the old fashioned data storage methods that meant that many older systems stored dates as two-digit numbers instead of the four digits needed to display years as four digits. e.g. 99 instead of 1999. This meant that when the year 2000 approached it would show as '00' (which could be 1900 or 2000) and humanity would end or so it was claimed.

So vast amounts of money were spent to prevent this catastrophe and many mainframe systems were upgraded (I was involved in this exercise) however this fixing didn't address the fact that many Unix systems (including the Linux Kernel), continue to count time as starting from midnight on 1 January 1970, which means other analogous situations can arise in the future.

For instance, the article stated that on January 19, 2038, at 3:14:08 am UTC (Coordinated Universal Time - based on International Atomic Time), the number of seconds since 1/1/1970 will be too great to be stored in the 32-bit number used by these older Unix systems. In other words instead of computers thinking it could be 1900 instead of 2000, the computers could think its 1970 again instead of 2038 and the world will end (again).

Fortunately the more modern Unix systems mostly use 64 bits to represent integers, so the problem is not likely to be major, but in some ways that means there may be more surprises than we would wish, simply because no one will investigate the possible impact. Old 'legacy' systems are usually disregarded simply because they will never be upgraded, and only one member of staff (who is due to retire soon) understands what they are doing.

So be warned ......... the 19/01/2038 bug is coming our way!