ALL THE ISSUES

The Muslim Population Has Grown From 1.65 Million To 2.87 Million Since 2001, Say Researchers. What Does This Mean For Britain & Europe?

2010-12-29T11:18:00.006+08:00

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life estimates that there are 2,869,000 Muslims in Britain, an increase of 74 per cent on its previous figure of 1,647,000, which was based on the 2001 census. No demographic statistics are reliable in an era of open borders, but such an expansion is unprecedented.

The figure of 2.87 million was first published by Pew in a little-noticed press release last September, announcing a report on Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe. The Pew Centre, based in Washington DC, is one of the most respected demographic research bodies in the world; its methodology is scrupulous and its approach non-partisan. The new total for British Muslims means that, so far as this country as concerned, Pew’s major 2009 report Mapping the Global Muslim Population is already spectacularly out of date. See the map above showing the updated distribution of the Muslim population in Europe:

The material about global Islam in the 2010 report is fascinating, but it’s the revision of British figures that takes most people by surprise. Why was it not more widely reported in the autumn? And what are the implications for society? For an analysis that puts the statistics in context, see this article from the British Religion In Numbers website, which makes the point that the 2001 figure was probably an underestimate.

Pew’s UK figure for 2010 is 2,869,000, which is equivalent to 4.6% of the population. In absolute terms, the UK has the third largest Muslim community on the continent, after Germany (4,119,000) and France (3,574,000).

In percentage terms, the UK is in ninth position, after Belgium (6.0%), France, Austria and Switzerland (5.7%), The Netherlands (5.5%), Germany (5.0%), Sweden (4.9%) and Greece (4.7%). UK Muslims account for 16.8% of all Muslims in Western Europe.

There have been other indications of a dramatic increase in the numbers of British Muslims: the UK Labour Force Survey recorded a rise from 1,870,000 in 2004 to 2,422,000 in 2008. So Pew’s findings aren’t unsupported by independent data. Common sense suggests explanations for the increase: a high Muslim birth rate and large-scale immigration. But we are not sure that common sense tells us what this demographic earthquake means in practice for British public life.

Setting aside for the moment the topics of Muslim ghettos and jihadist Islam, let’s ask another question. What will happen when the indigenous white population realise one day that the European culture and lifestyle is changed for good and that the muslims have taken over and are now becoming the dominent culture? Will we see the sparks fly then? You bet we will!!!

Speaking Volumes To Silence Doubters

2010-10-01T13:23:00.006+08:00

IN the land of the free, where you don't have to have any religion but just you try being a President without one (must be fundementalist Christian) by the way and settled by nonconformists fleeing religious persecution, dedicated to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, President Barack Hussein Obama has been reduced to a confession that his mother did not go to church. Instead, he became a "Christian by choice". Now isn't that wonderful? Sends a tingle up your spine doesn't it?

Having been cornered by a powerful constituency of doubters on the subject of his faith, his place of birth and other pertinent questions, Obama believes he has no choice but to spell it out: he was not raised a Christian, which does not mean he is an unbeliever or a timid, European-style birth, deaths and sometimes marriages agnostic. Or a Muslim.

The phrase "by choice", uttered on Monday in New Mexico, is his attempt to turn the issue to his advantage. He hopes Christian voters who worry about his identity and care deeply about his values will take these words to mean he is an active, and not passive, member of their spiritual "I believe in Fairies" club.

It speaks volumes about his vulnerabilities halfway through his first term in office, and about a country that still thinks of itself as "one nation under God".

Two years ago, Obama the campaigner stormed across the US calling himself the "kid with the funny name". It was a laugh line. It also drew attention to his middle name, Hussein, without doing him any harm in the polls. It thanked the audience for their tolerance. This was what the US was all about.

Two years ago. Obama the President has been intimidated by those whose instincts tell them that the US must be one nation under their particular God.

He did say in New Mexico how much it mattered to him that the US "embraces people of many faiths and no faith", but what was striking was he felt the need to. The majority that swept him to power took it for granted.

Obama is, indeed, a Christian by choice. One day there may be a US president who is something else by choice - but that day seems a long way off.

Now just to settles all doubts when will we see his birth certificate, we presume that it is written in Arabic?

Nine Years, Two Wars, Hundreds Of Thousands Dead – And Nothing, Nothing At All Learnt, Are We Proud Of Ourselves?

2010-09-11T12:32:00.008+08:00

Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" – as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West. But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived – or lives still – in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah – not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all – utterly – on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be ready to take his place. Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters.

They have prowled Iraq – both the Western and the local variety – and slaughtered 100,000 souls, or 500,000, or a million; and who cares? They have killed tens of thousands in Afghanistan; and who cares? And as the sickness has spread across the Middle East and then the globe, they – the air force pilots and the insurgents, the Marines and the suicide bombers, the al-Qa'idas of the Maghreb and of the Khalij and of the Caliphate of Iraq and the special forces and the close air support boys and the throat-cutters – have torn the heads off women and children and the old and the sick and the young and healthy, from the Indus to the Mediterranean, from Bali to the London Tube; quite a memorial to the 2,966 innocents who were killed nine years ago. All in their name, it seems, has been our holocaust of fire and blood, enshrined now in the crazed pastor of Gainesville.

This is the loss, of course. But who's made the profit? Well, the arms dealers, naturally, and Boeing and Lockheed Martin and all the missile lads and the drone manufacturers and F-16 spare parts outfits and the ruthless mercenaries who stalk the Muslim lands on our behalf now that we have created 100,000 more enemies for each of the 19 murderers of 9/11. Torturers have had a good time, honing their sadism in America's black prisons – it was appropriate that the US torture centre in Poland should be revealed on this ninth anniversary – as have the men (and women, I fear) who perfect the shackles and water-drowning techniques with which we now fight our wars. And – let us not forget – every religious raver in the world, be they of the Bin Laden variety, the bearded groupies in the Taliban, the suicide executioners, the hook-in the arm preachers, or our very own pastor of Gainesville. And God? Where does he fit in? An archive of quotations suggests that just about every monster created in or after 9/11 is a follower of this quixotic redeemer. Bin Laden prays to God – "to turn America into a shadow of itself"... and Bush prayed to God and Blair prayed – and prays – to God, and all the Muslim killers and an awful lot of Western soldiers and Dr (honorary) Pastor Terry Jones and his 30 (or it may be 50, since all statistics are hard to come by in the "war on terror") pray to God. And poor old God, of course, has had to listen to these prayers as he always sits through them during our mad wars. Recall the words attributed to him by a poet of another generation: "God this, God that, and God the other thing. 'Good God,' said God, 'I've got my work cut out'." And that was just the First World War. God is good for contemplation, not for war. But – and here we are driven on to the reefs and hidden rocks which our leaders wish us to ignore, forget and cast aside – this whole bloody mess involves the Middle East; it is about a Muslim people who have kept their faith while those Westerners who dominate them – militarily, economically, culturally, socially – have lost theirs. How can this be, Muslims ask? Indeed, it is a superb irony that the Rev Jones is a believer while the rest of us – by and large – are not.

Hence our books and our documentaries never refer to Muslims vs Christians, but Muslims versus "The West". And of course, the one taboo subject of which we must not speak – Israel's relationship with America, and America's unconditional support for Israel's theft of land from Muslim Arabs – also lies at the heart of this terrible crisis in our lives. In yesterday's edition of The Independent, there was a photograph of Afghan demonstrators chanting "death to America". But in the background, these same demonstrators were carrying a black banner with a message in Dari written upon it in white paint. What it actually said was: "The bloodsucking Zionist government regime and the Western leaders who are indifferent [to suffering] and have no conscience are again celebrating the new year by spilling the red blood of the Palestinians." The message is as extreme as it is vicious – but it proves, yet again, that the war in which we are engaged is also about Israel and "Palestine". We may prefer to ignore this in "the West" – where Muslims supposedly "hate us for what we are" or "hate our democracy" (see: Bush, Blair and a host of other mendacious politicians) – but this great conflict lies at the heart of the "war on terror". That is why the equally vicious Benjamin Netanyahu reacted to the atrocities of 9/11 by claiming that the event would be good for Israel. Israel would now be able to claim that it, too, was fighting the "war on terror", that Arafat – this was the now-comatose Ariel Sharon's claim – is "our Bin Laden". And thus Israelis had the gall to claim that Sderot, under its cascade of tin-pot missiles from Hamas, was "our ground zero". It was not. Israel's battle with the Palestinians is a ghastly caricature of our "war on terror", in which we are supposed to support the last colonial project on earth – and accept its thousands of victims – because the twin towers and the Pentagon and United Flight 93 were attacked by 19 Arab murderers nine years ago.

There is a supreme irony in the fact that one direct result of 9/11 has been the stream of Western policemen and spooks who have travelled to Israel to improve their "anti-terrorist expertise" with the help of Israeli officers who may – according to the United Nations – be war criminals. It was no surprise to find that the heroes who gunned down poor old Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Tube in 2005 had been receiving "anti-terrorist" advice from the Israelis. And yes, I know the arguments. We cannot compare the actions of evil terrorists with the courage of our young men and women, defending our lives – and sacrificing theirs – on the front lines of the 'war on terror". There can be no "equivalence". "They" kill innocents because "they" are evil. "We" kill innocents by mistake. But we know we are going to kill innocents – we willingly accept that we are going to kill innocents, that our actions are going to create mass graves of families, of the poor and the weak and the dispossessed. This is why we created the obscene definition of "collateral damage". For if "collateral" means that these victims are innocent, then "collateral" also means that we are innocent of killing them. It was not our wish to kill them – even if we knew it was inevitable that we would. "Collateral" is our exoneration. This one word is the difference between "them" and "us", between our God-given right to kill and Bin Laden's God-given right to murder. The victims, hidden away as "collateral" corpses, don't count any more because they were slaughtered by us. Maybe it wasn't so painful. Maybe death by drone is a more gentle departure from this earth, evisceration by an AGM-114C Boeing-Lockheed air-to-ground missile less painful, than death by shards from a roadside bomb or a cruel suicider with an explosive belt. That's why we know how many died on 9/11 – 2,966, although the figure may be higher – and why we don't "do body counts" on those whom we kill. Because they – "our" victims – must have no identities, no innocence, no personality, no cause or belief or feelings; and because we have killed far, far more human beings than Bin Laden and the Taliban and al-Qa'ida. Anniversaries are newspaper and television events. And they can have an eerie habit of coalescing together to create an unhappy memorial framework.

Thus do we commemorate the Battle of Britain – a chivalric episode in our history – and the Blitz, a progenitor of mass murder, to be sure, but a symbol of innocent courage – as we remember the start of a war that has torn our morality apart, turned our politicians into war criminals, our soldiers into killers and our ruthless enemies into heroes of the anti-Western cause. And while on this gloomy anniversary the Rev Jones wanted to burn a book called the Koran, Tony Blair tried to sell a book called A Journey. Jones said the Koran was "evil"; Britons have asked whether the Blair book should be classified as "crime". Certainly, 9/11 has moved into fantasy when the Rev Jones can command the attention of the Obamas and the Clintons and the Holy Father and the even more Holy United Nations. Whom the gods would destroy.

Desperate Days For The Warmists

2010-07-25T18:25:00.005+08:00

The following article from "The Sunday Times" on 25/07/2010 explains what is now happening to the climate change industry around the world and in my opinion indicates that the final days may be approaching when this scam will have zero credibility left.

Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One familiar technique they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF, the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as evidence of climate change, claiming that in future "such climate abnormalities will only become more frequent". He didn't explain what might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago.Meanwhile, notably little attention has been paid to the disastrous chill which has been sweeping South America thanks to an inrush of air from the Antarctic, killing hundreds in the continent's coldest winter for years.

In America, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been trumpeting that, according to its much-quoted worldwide temperature data, the first six months of this year were the hottest ever recorded. But expert analysis on Watts Up With That, the US science blog, shows that NOAA's claimed warming appears to be strangely concentrated in those parts of the world where it has fewest weather stations. In Greenland, for instance, two of the hottest spots, showing a startling five-degree rise in temperatures, have no weather stations at all.A second technique the warmists have used lately to keep their spirits up has been to repeat incessantly that the official inquiries into the "Climategate" scandal have cleared the top IPCC scientists involved of any wrongdoing, and that their science has been "vindicated". But, as has been pointed out by critics like Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, this is hardly surprising, since the inquiries were careful not to interview any experts, such as himself, who could have explained just why the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were so horribly damaging.

The perfunctory report of the Science Appraisal Panel, chaired by Lord Oxburgh, examined only 11 papers produced by the CRU, none of them remotely connected to what the fuss was all about. Last week Andrew Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, revealed on his blog (Bishop Hill – bishophill.squarespace.com) that the choice of these papers was approved for the inquiry by Sir Brian Hoskins, of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College, and by Phil Jones, the CRU's former director – an appraisal of whose work was meant to be the purpose of the inquiry.

A third technique, most familiar of all, has been to fall back on the dog-eared claim that leading sceptics only question warmist orthodoxy because they have been funded by "Big Oil" and the "fossil fuel industry". Particularly bizarre was a story last week covering the front page and an inside page of one newspaper, headed "Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics".The essence of this tale was that Exxon Mobil, the oil giant that is the world's third biggest company, last year gave "almost £1 million" to four US think-tanks. These had gone on to dismiss the Climategate inquiries as "whitewashes".It was hardly necessary to be given money by Exxon to see what was dubious about those inquiries. Not one of the knowledgeable sceptics who have torn them apart has received a cent from Big Oil. But what made this particularly laughable was that the penny-packets given to think-tanks that have been largely irrelevant to the debate are utterly dwarfed by the colossal sums poured into the army of groups and organisations on the other side of the argument.Even the big oil companies have long been putting their real money into projects dedicated to showing how they are in favour of a "low-carbon economy". In 2002 Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford University to fund research into energy sources needed to fight global warming. BP, which rebranded itself in 2004 as "Beyond Petroleum", gave $500 million to fund similar research.

The Grantham Institute provides another example. It was set up at the LSE and Imperial College with £24 million from Jeremy Grantham, an investment fund billionaire, to advise governments and firms on how to promote and invest in ways to "fight climate change", now one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative businesses in the world. Compare the funding received by a handful of think-tanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars lavished on those who speak for the other side by governments, foundations, multinational corporations, even Big Oil, and the warmists are winning hands down. But only financially: they are not winning the argument.

Tiger, Tiger, What Damage You Have Done to The World

2010-02-22T14:39:00.003+08:00

There is nothing like a good old-fashioned show trial, preferably followed by an execution, to bring the public together. It cheers almost everybody up, watching a fellow human being humiliated in public for crimes real or imagined, hearing them confess, head bowed, and seeing them having their noses rubbed in it good and proper. The Stalinists of the old Soviet Union were masters of the art but, give us credit: we’re getting there. And we don’t need the bureaucratic conventions of a communist state either — we’ll do it happily enough of our own volition, in an open and democratic manner.

Hate Week followed by Show Trial — everybody gather around for a spot of totalitarianism by mutual assent, and now, for your added pleasure, in HD. Grab your knitting: here comes the tumbril. The Tiger Woods televised confession and apology was extraordinarily chilling, mainly for the fact that it happened at all, but also for the words used by this pilloried man, which consciously or unconsciously had echoes of those old show trials of the 1930s and 1950s; a nod here to the doomed old Bolsheviks who confessed to crimes they did not commit for the sake of the party. Tiger Woods’s “crimes” were not really crimes at all, as any court would regard them; instead they were stuff that these days can have you simply destroyed and your livelihood taken away.

And then a nod forward from Tiger to Chairman Mao or maybe the entertainingly deranged Pol Pot: henceforth, the golfer said, he will live “a life of integrity”. What’s he going to do? Throw away his five iron and start tending the paddy fields? The public and press demanded he be abject, insisted he prostrate himself before the nation, and did the poor man keep his side of the deal. “I have let you down,” he said repeatedly. “I have bitterly disappointed all of you.” The only person you might argue he had let down was his wife, and she wasn’t even in the room. How has he let you down, or me? I suppose you could argue that he might disappoint golfing fans by missing a short putt on the 18th, but by having sex with some women? What business is it of yours?

The jury — the world — was then left to debate whether he’d been “sincere” or not. The debate is still going on. There was a page of hyperbolic drivel in one of our national broadsheet newspapers yesterday in which the writer commented on the telecast: “ . . . but a small voice kept asking if every word and gesture had been arranged”. Did it really, mate? That’ll be the little Hitler nestled inside your skull, then. Golfers, porn stars, kebab shop owners, insurance loss adjusters were all solicited for their opinions: was he sincere; did he mean it, the grovelling apology? Or should we make him grovel some more? Nick Faldo thought he had been sincere. Thanks, Nick. A fellow professional, Ben Crane, quoted from Jesus. A woman with enormous breasts in the New York Daily News said she didn’t believe Tiger for a minute.

The eternal justification for this sort of stuff, the way we excuse ourselves for revelling in private misery, is that famous people such as top golfers have a responsibility to live better lives than the rest of us, that they are there, in this gilded place, to set some sort of example. Because, you know, they earn all that money. This line is trotted out every time some poor soul is being eviscerated by press and public alike. But — and I’m sorry about this, but I simply cannot think of a better, less coarse description — this has always been a barrel of horse manure. An almost bottomless barrel. We have a Stalinist streak a mile wide, an endless appetite for vindictiveness and nastiness.

The Great Climat Change Farce - Get the real Facts

2010-02-07T19:39:00.007+08:00

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035. These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia's nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country's plight, Nepal's top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest. But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change. “The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics. The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards.

As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end. And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide. Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging.

An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced. Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless. For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.” Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri's own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits. Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labelled as a climate sceptic, or worse.

But many climate scientists now sense a sinking ship, and they're bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain's Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri's resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC.

None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed. By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the sceptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: “Sceptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead.” That also goes for Australia, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States. Our prime minister, the nodding donkey himself will follow whatever outlandish theory he can to legitimize his vast tax grab with his ill designed ETS. As Tony Abbot says "it is nothing more than a vast tax grab and an Employment Transfer Scheme". “I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper scepticism,” says John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He is a staunch believer in man-made climate change, but he also points out the complexity of climate science. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can't be changed.” In his view, it's time to stop circling the wagons and throw open the doors.

How much the public will keep caring is another matter. Have a look at what Lord Monkton has to say, I saw his lecture on Monday night in Perth and was very impressed. If you believe Al Gore now you certainly wouldn't after listening to the Lord.

Sick Of It!!!!

2009-12-30T15:51:00.008+08:00

To add one more level of absolute stupidity to air flight (as is pretty much standard operating procedure with every new terrorist incident aboard an airliner), passengers are now no longer allowed to have anything on their laps for the final hour of a flight, and are not even allowed to stand up during that time.

And the airlines wonder why they are dying? It's not the terrorists that are killing them, it's their reaction... overreaction... that is killing them. They (and their passengers) need to tell the U.S and European governments that all of this nonsense has gone beyond ridiculous into insanity. I personally am sick of having these morons ordering me to remove my shoes, belt, watch, money from pockets, mobile phones and anything else that is currently not allowed before I can proceed through their ridiculous scanners that still invariably beep anyway. Surely they can see that I am not a potential terrorist? Sick of it.

Stop with the in-flight stupidity; improve passenger screening, let us responsible adults use real metal cutlery again. Airlines are punishing passengers for what is clearly a problem with the airport security apparatus. Improve scanners, improve procedures, improve training, and improve the job benefits so that you are not forced to hire retards and the assorted knuckle grazers that you typically find at airports for the job of ensuring aircraft safety. Most importantly don't intimidate the people without whom the airlines could not survive, yes us, the white middle class travelers who give the airlines a reason to be.

Oh yes, I forgot: Try paying 100 times more attention to the people who fit terrorist profiles (you know... single males (usually black, Arab looking or Muslim) from certain countries is a really good indicator) than you do to middle aged and old couples from Perth and families from Sydney would probably help immensely too. What on earth is so wrong with a bit of racial profiling anyway? If we know what the terrorists look like 99.99% of the time then why not target them and if things get worse then we may then have to consider banning the above from Western Airlines completely. Let them fly on their own stinking airliners from their own stinking countries and leave us alone.

p.s. And then we have the Obama reaction to the latest scare, did you hear it? Oh no, you say and the reason that you didn't hear one was because he didn't make a comment for 24 hours or so because he has a problem with anything Muslim related. Why? Because he is one!! Black African Muslim terrorists from Nigeria are not what Obama wants to hear about.

HOW THE GREAT DEPRESION BROUGHT ADOLF HITLER TO POWER

2009-03-08T17:52:00.002+09:00

Oh goody! Looks like we're having another Depression -- maybe just a little one, but who knows how long we can stretch it out, if we give it a good try?

So now we can play FDR and The Glorious New Deal.

If that sounds insane to you, well, it's what both Charles Krauthammer and David Broder -- the Burt and Ernie of the Washington Post -- have now concluded about the Obama White House.

The Great Depression certainly empowered FDR to make big changes in America over his four terms. In spite of all the hoo-hah the country didn't get out of the long, long slump until 1940 or so, with the huge mobilization of men and industrial resources for World War II. But FDR did get to play to his heart's content, through the NRA, the WPA, the AAA, the CCC, the TVA, the NLRB, the FDIC and the SEC. By comparison all we've got is a measly TARP. So far.

Trouble is, the Great Depression also brought Adolf Hitler to power. (There, I knew there had to be a downside somewhere.)

For those who have forgotten history or never bothered to learn it, here's is the sixty-second version.

1. Adolf Hitler started out as just another Bohemian intellectual, a sort of fire-breathing hippie, hanging around the coffee houses of Vienna after the big defeat of World War I. Just like Lenin, Mussolini and all the other psychopaths who rose to power around the same time. (Look it up, kids). His ilk can still be found in all the big city cafes of Europe, along with Berkeley, California, Madison, Wisconsin, and other college towns. They all profess peace. But in the right conditions, they are all happy to set off sociological or real dynamite. (Viz., Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn; the Rev. J. Wright and all the rest.)

Today the cafe intellectuals are more likely to be Islamic fascists, but what's the big diff? They all follow Hitler's big maxim, "Alles muss anders sein!" ("everything must change") or, in Obamalingo, "Change you can believe in." They all hate whatever is; it doesn't matter where they want to go.

They want a perfect world, every single one of them. Therefore they all hate freedom, electoral democracy, and the blood-sucking capitalists. They all demand justice and equality. And millions of suckers always fall for it. Some things never change; even the words don't change, much less the marching music.

2. When Hitler got out of the Kaiserliche Wehrmacht with burned-out lungs from mustard gas, Germany was broke. The Reich had started the war as the wealthiest, most industrialized, most highly-educated, and perhaps even the most arrogant nation in Europe. (Although that's a tough one to judge, there being so much competition in the arrogance sweepstakes in Europe.) Anyway, if you remember the goose-stepping soldiers with the funny helmets with the little spikes on top, and all the cheering people standing on the sidewalks going Hoch! Hoch!, that's the one.

3. As punishment for the war, the Versailles Treaty required the Germans to pay their victims, to handicap their military and heavy industries, and to be nice to their neighbors. They did pay some money for a while, but then they just lied about all those other things. None of the victorious nations dared to actually find out if the Germans were re-arming or not. Besides, the Germans and Austrians felt threatened by the new and militant Soviet Union, accidentally created when the old Reich helped Lenin to overthrow the Czar of Russia. (Lenin was another cafe intellectual who turned into a ruthless mass-murdering tyrant, except that he hung around Zurich rather than Vienna.)

4. After WWI the Weimar Republic brought parliamentary democracy of a kind to Germany. But it also saw a wave of corruption, degradation of middle class values, attacks on religion, promiscuity, and glorification of "alternative lifestyles" -- which all agreed on their hatred of the bourgeoisie (who happened to be their parents) -- along with lots of artistic expressions of the same Up Yours! attitude that has made government-funded artists so popular in our day.
(A lot of our avant garde is just the derriere garde of Europe's Weimar period. Nothing new there at all.)

5. Having the Soviets practically next door was a big help to the German Communists -- who still called themselves Communists rather than Black Liberation Theologians, as ours do today. But just like Rev. J-Wright, they all hated middleclassness, or as they called it, the bourgeoisie. (That was their parents, remember?) So did Mussolini and Hitler, who also rose to power as radical world-changers in the turmoil of the day. They were also big ecofreaks -- because Mother Nature was good, you see. They practiced a fair amount of nudity and gayety, celebrated sex and violence, got drunk and carried on riots, and whipped up giant hatreds against scapegoats -- the French, other racially inferior peoples, and of course ... . Yes.

They also swore to eliminate the handicapped, the retarded, and any organized religion. Both the Communists and the Nazis really really hated Christianity. Not just Judaism and the Jews. They were equal-opportunity haters, without fear or favor.

6. The whole Ship of Fools seemed to go sailing along until the economy went kaput. But why did it? You can point to hyperinflation, long and deep declines in industry and agriculture, unemployment, and shaky currencies. Europe had decades of troubles before the United States caught the bug. Stock markets dwindled, trade barriers went up, and on October 29, 1929, far away in New York City, Wall Street went into a tailspin. It was followed by the other big stock markets. People lost their jobs and their savings. No capital, no productivity, just despair.

7. Europe decided that democracy wasn't its thing after all, and looked for nice trustworthy generals to take over the hopelessly ineffective parliamentary governments -- like in Germany. But the President of Germany, General Paul von Hindenburg, was elderly and out of his depth, and after a while was forced to ask that nice Herr Hitler to organize a new government. Hitler's National Socialist Workers Party had never gotten a majority, but the time was ripe, and the Nazis never cared much for rules. So they took power.

In the end United States kind of lucked out, compared to Europe -- but don't try to tell that to anybody who managed to live through it. It's not just our habit of democratic governance that brought us out of it without tyranny and the devastation of Europe and Asia. FDR had a certain amount of demagogue blood in him.

Or as he proclaimed in accepting the Democratic Party nomination,
"Throughout the nation men and women ... look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth... I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people... This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms."

A better "opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth? ... A call to arms?" Has the Obama crowd seen this speech? FDR naturally attacked greed and wealth, coming from a family of old wealth and long-forgotten greed himself. Greed is in the eye of the accuser.

What's the bottom line? Well, certain politicians thrive in times of trouble; and if they don't see enough trouble, they're always happy to add some more. They always practice the same kind of demagogy. They always promise radical change. And they often bring the opposite.

Historians have long pointed to the breakdown of Europe's middle class as the single biggest earthquake, the one that shook all the other pillars of society until it crumbled.

In the 21st century, you can kill the middle class by teaching kids to despise their parents and their traditions; you can tax them into poverty; you can whip up nationalistic fervor against the Frogs or theBoches; you can inflate the currency so that everybody is equally miserable; you can teach the poor, the black, the women, the young, to attack the middle class values that brought prosperity over generations of toil; you can torpedo the currency and destroy retirement plans; you can turn the Organs of Propaganda -- pardon me, the "news media" -- to assault middle class values; you can unify the very wealthy with the very poor to try to squeeze and whack the middle; you can take historic wrongs like black slavery or Christopher Columbus to turn people against each other; you can easily turn bubbleheaded movie makers and starlets against George W. Bush; you can break the banks and turn the desperate against the malefactors of great wealth; or you can unify white liberals with poor blacks and militant feminists against all the Evil White Guys...

But it's all the same, you see. Nothing ever changes except the color of the flags and the uniforms. And it's always the militant idealists, the obsessional clerks and scribblers, who seize the moment to raise yet another Hero of Change and Hope to the peak of power. Because, you see, Adolf Hitler was not the exception. In the century of Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, of Lenin and Stalin, of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, of Robert Mugabe and Saddam Hussein, of Ahmadinejad and Khomeini, of genocidal little tyrants in the Sudan and Rwanda, Hitler was by no means the exception.

He was just brought down faster than the others.
Heigh-ho. Interesting times.

See what a little history can teach you?

Doomsday nation

2009-03-05T15:26:00.004+09:00

The story of how and why the west is bogged down in Afghanistan.

Nuclear-armed and terrorist-riddled Pakistan is spinning out of control, writes Sally Neighbour March 05, 2009

Article from: The Australian

IN 1994 a group of religious students from a madrassa in Kandahar banded together to take on the vicious warlords who then ran southern Afghanistan. About 30 young men with 16 rifles stormed a military camp where two girls were being held and raped, rescuing the girls and hanging the camp's commander from the gun barrel of a tank, or so the story goes. Thus began the movement known as the Taliban, from the word talib, meaning student. As Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid wrote in his seminal book, Taliban: "They saw themselves as the cleansers and purifiers of a guerilla war gone astray, a social system gone wrong, and an Islamic way of life thathad been compromised by corruption and excess."

Within months, 12,000 volunteers had joined the new organisation.

The Taliban would likely have been just another in the plethora of Afghan militias scrabbling for power except that it found itself a powerful sponsor in the government and military establishment of neighbouring Pakistan. Keen to have a biddable ally in Kabul, Islamabad provided the weapons, ammunition, funding and logistical support that enabled the Taliban -- "our boys", as Pakistan's interior minister famously called them -- to seize power and rule Afghanistan for five years.

But the forces of militancy unleashed more than a decade ago in Afghanistan are surging back across the border to swamp Pakistan itself. A full-blown insurgency is raging in the North-West Frontier Province and spreading to the main cities, and the country's powerful security forces seem impotent to stop terrorist atrocities such as Tuesday's attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore that have seen the country branded as the new epicentre of global terrorism.

As the US moves to send another 17,000 troops to Afghanistan -- and Australia faces pressure to boost its contingent -- it is clear that the roots of the militant uprising and the new wave of terrorism lie next door in Pakistan, where a far graver crisis looms. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is spinning out ofcontrol.

As William Maley of the Asia-Pacific college of diplomacy at the Australian National University in Canberra observes: "There are huge problems in Afghanistan. Confidence has plummeted because of the insecurity, but people haven't turned against the democratic transition, they are still strongly committed to it, and that may well carry Afghanistan through.

"But in Pakistan there is a profound crisis of confidence in the political system. It's a failing state and a decidedly roguish state. And this is why a lot of Western leaders are becoming profoundly concerned."

The roots of this transnational crisis stretch back more than a century to when Pakistan was part of the British Indian empire, or Raj, that sprawled across the subcontinent. Repeated attempts by the British to extend their dominion into Afghanistan failed, as they were fought off by the fearsome Pashtun warriors whom no invader before or since has been able to subdue. The British finally conceded defeat and in 1893 drew a line on a map to divide their territory from Afghanistan's. The enduring problem with this arbitrary border was that it cut straight through the middle of the lands known as Pashtunistan, the harsh mountain terrain inhabited by tribal Pashtuns, who number about 40 million and are renowned for their fierce independence, elaborate hospitality and ferocious fighting skills.

The British knew they could never conquer the Pashtuns, so in 1901 they carved out a separate realm called the North-West Frontier Province and gave the Pashtuns almost total autonomy in seven tribal agencies strung along the border.

For more than a century the Pashtuns were left largely to themselves, forming the world's largest autonomous tribal society, run by local jirgas (councils) according to an honour code called pashtunwali, which prizes courage, chivalry, hospitality and patriotism, and deems that "women belong in the house or the grave", in the words of a Pashtun proverb. The agencies were closed to strangers and guidebooks warned tourists that in the tribal lands: "Pakistani laws don't apply and the Pakistani government has no authority whatever."

The status of Pashtunistan was never resolved and spurred repeated uprisings and border clashes. To this day the Afghan Government refuses to recognise the so-called Durand Line (named after the Raj's foreign secretary Mortimer Durand), claiming the Pashtun lands are rightfully part of Afghanistan, and Pashtun leaders on both sides simply ignore it.

The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted Pakistan to seize the opportunity to install a compliant regime in Kabul in the hope of finally resolving the border issue in its favour. It threw its support behind the Islamic militants, becoming the conduit for billions of dollars funnelled from the US and Saudi Arabia to the mujaheddin. When the rival factions turned on each other after defeating the Soviets, Pakistan switched its support to the Taliban and celebrated when the black-turbaned warriors swept to power.

The warning signs of blowback were there for all to see.

French scholar Olivier Roy wrote in 1997: "The apparent victor, Pakistan, could pay dearly for its success. The triumph of the Taliban has virtually eliminated the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. On both sides, Pashtun tribes are gaining autonomy; already small fundamentalist tribal emirates are appearing on Pakistani soil."

Up to 100,000 Pakistanis are estimated to have trained with the Taliban, then returned home to take up the fight.

As Rashid reported, as far back as 1995 the Movement for Enforcement of Islamic Law led an uprising to demand sharia law in Bajaur, the northernmost of the tribal agencies and lately the scene of all-out warfare between government troops and militants. In 1998 the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, Tehrik-e-Taliban, began burning cinemas, smashing satellite dishes and publicly executing murderers in areas it controlled.

The militants were fortified by the arrival in the tribal belt of the Afghan Taliban leadership and its al-Qa'ida allies, who escaped across the border after being driven out of Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks on the US in September 11, 2001. They were welcomed in Pakistan by tribal warlords such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, a veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad who is aligned with the Taliban and is also believed to be a prime mover behind the recent wave of terror.

Haqqani, too, owes his survival to the Pakistani military, at least in part. Pakistan's army chief Ashfaq Kayani was heard to describe Haqqani as a "strategic asset" in an intercepted conversation reported by The New York Times correspondent David Sanger in his new book, The Inheritance.

The twin arm of the aggressive and duplicitous foreign policy overseen by Pakistan's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency was to covertly wage war against its eastern neighbour India in disputed Kashmir. The ISI-sponsored, funded and instructed Islamist groups including Lashkar e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) as its proxies to fight Indian forces in Kashmir. Like the al-Qa'ida camps in Afghanistan, the training camps of LET in Pakistan, supplied and protected by the Pakistan army and ISI, became training sites for jihadists from across the world.

Islamabad's response to the burgeoning militancy was to declare a truce in 2005 with the leading Pakistani Taliban commander, Baitullah Mehsud, which bought him two years in which to expand his territory across the tribal areas and amass an armed following of up to 30,000 men.
Intelligence analysis group Stratfor describes Mehsud as part of a new generation of militant leaders, inspired and influenced not by the Pakistani security forces but by al-Qa'ida. Mehsud's group is blamed for a string of atrocities, including the 2007 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

The militants have been emboldened further by a level of public support or at least tolerance. A 2007 survey in Pakistan by the US-based Terror Free Tomorrow showed that 67 per cent opposed military action against jihadists in the tribal zone. Between 37 per cent and 49 per cent said they supported the militants. Those figures have probably been bolstered by rising anger over the belated offensive in the tribal zone and the US Predator drone strikes aimed at Taliban and al-Qa'ida leaders that reportedly have claimed a high civilian death toll.

The army's claim to have wiped out the rebels in their stronghold of Bajaur has been greeted with scepticism.

Maley says it's "a balloon-squeezing exercise": the militants will simply pop up somewhere else. The likeliest place seems to be the nearby Swat Valley, where the Pakistani Government last month agreed to allow sharia law in return for a ceasefire.

Like many experts, Maley predicts this will prove disastrous, merely creating a new sanctuary for the extremists bent on destroying the Pakistani state

THE GORACLE SCAM HOAX

2009-01-30T08:10:00.003+09:00

I came across a very interesting climate change article the other day and the story of how this huge industry came about in a nutshell is as follows:

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax we citizens for our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way, the faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have lead to a rise in public awareness that CO2 is not a pollutant and is not a significant greenhouse gas that is triggering runaway global warming. How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big government we have to struggle so to stop it?

The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the US Navy in World War II. After the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California. Revelle saw the opportunity to obtain major funding from the Navy for doing measurements and research on the ocean around the Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the Institute’s areas of interest and among others hired Hans Suess, a noted Chemist from the University of Chicago, who was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle tagged on to Suess studies and co-authored a paper with him in 1957. The paper raises the possibility that the carbon dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming. It seems to be a plea for funding for more studies.

Funding, frankly, is where Revelle’s mind was most of the time. Next Revelle hired a Geochemist named David Keeling to devise a way to measure the atmospheric content of Carbon dioxide. In 1960 Keeling published his first paper showing the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and linking the increase to the burning of fossil fuels. These two research papers became the bedrock of the science of global warming, even though they offered no proof that carbon dioxide was in fact a greenhouse gas. In addition they failed to explain how this trace gas, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, could have any significant impact on temperatures.

Now let us go back to the1950s when this was going on. Our cities were entrapped in a pall of pollution from the crude internal combustion engines that powered cars and trucks back then and from the uncontrolled emissions from power plants and factories. Cars and factories and power plants were filling the air with all sorts of pollutants. There was a valid and serious concern about the health consequences of this pollution and a strong environmental movement was developing to demand action. Government accepted this challenge and new environmental standards were set. Scientists and engineers came to the rescue. New reformulated fuels were developed for cars, as were new high tech, computer controlled engines and catalytic converters. By the mid seventies cars were no longer big time polluters, emitting only some carbon dioxide and water vapor from their tail pipes. Likewise, new fuel processing and smoke stack scrubbers were added to industrial and power plants and their emissions were greatly reduced, as well. But an environmental movement had been established and its funding and very existence depended on having a continuing crisis issue. So the research papers from Scripps came at just the right moment. And, with them came the birth of an issue; man-made global warming from the carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle and Keeling used this new alarmism to keep their funding growing. Other researchers with environmental motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing and climbed aboard as well. The research grants began to flow and alarming hypothesis began to show up everywhere. The Keeling curve showed a steady rise in CO2 in atmosphere during the period since oil and coal were discovered and used by man.

As of today, carbon dioxide has increased from 215 to 385 parts per million. But, despite the increases, it is still only a trace gas in the atmosphere. While the increase is real, the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 remains tiny, about .41 hundredths of one percent. Several hypothesis emerged in the 70s and 80s about how this tiny atmospheric component of CO2 might cause a significant warming. But they remained unproven. Years have passed and the scientists kept reaching out for evidence of the warming and proof of their theories. And, the money and environmental claims kept on building up. Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation’s bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meeting. Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations for the climatic damage from their burning of fossil fuels to benefit the underdeveloped nations, a sort of CO2 tax that would be the funding for his one-world government. But, he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis. So Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was not a pure climate study scientific organization, as we have been lead to believe. It was an organization of one-world government UN bureaucrats, environmental activists and environmentalist scientists who craved the UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels. Over the last 25 years they have been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international meetings and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, the UN IPCC has made its points to the satisfaction of most and even shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. At the same time, that Maurice Strong was busy at the UN, things were getting a bit out of hand for the man who is now called the grandfather of global warming, Roger Revelle. He had been very politically active in the late 1950’s as he worked to have the University of California locate a San Diego campus adjacent to Scripps Institute in La Jolla. He won that major war, but lost an all important battle afterward when he was passed over in the selection of the first Chancellor of the new campus. He left Scripps finally in 1963 and moved to Harvard University to establish a Center for Population Studies. It was there that Revelle inspired one of his students to become a major global warming activist. This student would say later, "It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates. Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!" The student described him as "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming,"

That student was Al Gore. "THE GORACLE" He thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992. So there it is, Roger Revelle was indeed the grandfather of global warming. His work had laid the foundation for the UN IPCC, provided the anti-fossil fuel ammunition to the environmental movement and sent Al Gore on his road to his books, his movie, his Nobel Peace Prize and a hundred million dollars from the carbon credits business.

What happened next is amazing. The global warming frenzy was becoming the cause celeb of the media. After all the media is mostly liberal, loves Al Gore, loves to warn us of impending disasters and tell us "the sky is falling, the sky is falling". The politicians and the environmentalist loved it, too. But the tide was turning with Roger Revelle. He was forced out at Harvard at 65 and returned to California and a semi retirement position at UCSD. There he had time to rethink Carbon Dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The man who had inspired Al Gore and given the UN the basic research it needed to launch its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was having second thoughts. In 1988 he wrote two cautionary letters to members of Congress. He wrote, "My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." He added, "…we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer." And in 1991 Revelle teamed up with Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, to write an article for Cosmos magazine. They urged more research and begged scientists and governments not to move too fast to curb greenhouse CO2 emissions because the true impact of carbon dioxide was not at all certain and curbing the use of fossil fuels could have a huge negative impact on the economy and jobs and our standard of living. it appears that Revelle was considerably more certain than he was at the time that carbon dioxide was not a problem. Did Roger Revelle attend the Summer enclave at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California in the Summer of 1990 while working on that article? Did he deliver a lakeside speech there to the assembled movers and shakers from Washington and Wall Street in which he apologized for sending the UN IPCC and Al Gore onto this wild goose chase about global warming? Did he say that the key scientific conjecture of his lifetime had turned out wrong? The answer to those questions is, NO, maybe.

If he were still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam. Al Gore has dismissed Roger Revelle’s Mea culpa as the actions of a senile old man. And, the next year, while running for Vice President, he said the science behind global warming is settled and there will be no more debate, From 1992 until today, he and his cohorts have refused to debate global warming and when ask about we skeptics they simply insult us and call us names. So today we have the acceptance of carbon dioxide as the culprit of global warming. It is concluded that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint which we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists to offset. Our governments on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels.

The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the US congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course. We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by no drilling and no new refineries for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. On top of that the whole thing about corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies. That also has driven up food prices. And, all of this is a long way from over. And, I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it. Global Warming. It is the hoax. It is bad science. It is a highjacking of public policy. It is no joke. It is the greatest scam in history.

Law Less Ness??

2009-01-16T14:41:00.002+09:00

I remember a comment by one sociologist that Prohibition's biggest damage to America was that it was a huge blow to respect for the rule of law. Before Prohibition, all Americans — law-abiding and criminal — were cognizant of the moral, social, and personal repercussions of making a conscious decision to engage in an illegal activity. After Prohibition, the concept of "breaking the law a little" was born, and the creation of a gray area between the legal and the illegal created in America a large population of people who were prepared and for whose actions there existed virtually no legal repercussions.

This law-breaking nonchalance born in speakeasys and other abstruse locations eventually found its way into the forefront of American thought, in "bending the law", in "just as long as you don't get caught", in "just this once", in "loopholes". Now people can be convicted of a crime, and Americans can say, "Yeah he has a criminal record, but it's just for tax evasion" or "but officer, there isn't another car on the road for miles in any direction. Give me a break."

The sociologist explained that this nonchalance itself wasn't the problem, but was a gateway to a bigger problem: that it detrimentally moved America's mental and moral boundaries between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable. To put it succinctly: after Prohibition, "wrong" was simply not as wrong as it used to be.

MELTDOWN!! MELTDOWN!!

2008-10-13T11:16:00.008+08:00

Great. I turn my back for a few months, and what has happened? The banks are on fire, the U.S economy is is now looking to be not much better at managing peoples money than those Nigerian scammers that so kindly send us those get rich quick offers, the the UK is at war with Iceland, Kevin is running around trying desperately to look serious and knowledgeable about economical matters and Malcolm is endeavouring to make us forget that he used to be one of those merchant bankers who got us into this mess in the first place. A list was published in the papers this morning of the probable next countries that will go bust, Pakistan, Argentina, well, most of South America actually, South Africa etc. The one bright spark on the horizon? Sarah could be the next VP. She said the other day in trying to demonstrate her foreign policy credentials that she could see Russia from her house, well, she bettered that the other night when she told an interviewer that in fact she could also see the moon from her house and that means that she would push for further space exploration. But I don't think that she will draw enough votes to get McCain over the line so we will be stuck with Obama anyway.

As I type these words, Sky News is zooming in on a screen full of red flashing numbers, apparently willing them to fall yet lower. The problem is a lack of confidence, they keep saying, cutting away every so often to show a big plunging downward arrow or a shot of a City trader holding his head in despair. But the constant doom and gloom headlines are not actually confidence inspiring are they? Maybe if the papers and TV news would give it a break for a couple of weeks it would all blow over anyway.

I'm a bit sick of that whole holding-his-head-in-despair thing, to be honest. It's about time they tried something more spectacular. Surely it's time for a revival of that great cliche of the 1930s, the ruined City whizkid hurling himself out of the window? The credit crunch high dive. Extra points if you manage to pull a backflip on the way down, or crack your jaw on a window cleaner's cradle somewhere around floor 35. The ultimate high score goes to the first one who manages to successfully update his Facebook status using an iPhone seconds before slamming into the pavement. "Danny is plummeting to his doom." Click here to tag him in a photo.

Is this the end of the world? If so, it's a bit more boring than I'd imagined. So far, it's been an invisible apocalypse. Poke your head out the window and there's little evidence of charred debris. Perhaps that's yet to come. Like I say, I'm writing this on Monday morning. By the time you read it, it'll be Tuesday. Maybe we're already bartering with coloured pebbles or fighting over water or something. But, be honest, we came into the world with nothing and we will go out with nothing.

Still, there's no point in worrying. If we're going to be plunged into some kind of barbaric medieval dark age, I might as well be philosophical about it, because there's no way I'll survive more than a month. I'd be hopeless at fighting over basic resources and don't have any essential manual skills, such as the ability to hunt and skin rats. Perhaps I can learn the lute and become a minstrel, or perform bawdy jigs in exchange for pennies. Assuming there are any pennies. Hey, maybe just before all currency is finally declared worthless we'll get to experience the whole wheelbarrows-full-of-worthless-banknotes thing, like they did in Germany just before the war. That'd be good fun wouldn't it? There will be Jamie Oliver books explaining how we can live on a small bowl of cold potato soup a day with maybe a carrot added on the weekends.

It all seems particularly bizarre, every time I walk down the street to the shops I walk past a TV shop the windows of which are crammed full of gigantic, wall-mounted HD plasma TVs, every single one of which is screaming bad news about the economy. I feels like being trapped inside a terrifying satirical sci-fi flick

And it had to happen, obviously. For years, money was just appearing from nowhere, or so we were told. People bought houses and bragged about how the value kept zooming up, and up, and up. And how terribly clever they all were. In fact they didn't seem to be houses at all, but magic coin-spitting machines. It was all a dream, a dream in which you bought a box and lived in it, and all the time it generated money like a cow generates milk. Great big stinking clouds of money. And none of it was real. And now it's gone. Your house is worth less than your shoes, and your shoes are now, in turn, worth less than (you fill in the gap). Yes, your most valuable possession is now your mouth and your brain, and you're going to have to use both of them in all manner of previously unthinkable ways to make ends meet, to pay for that box, the box you live in, the one you mistook for an enchanted, unstoppable cash engine. I hope you've got a nice kitchen and bathroom. Maybe they take your mind off things. And sell that flash coffee maker and the flash juicer while you're about it. You can't afford fruit any more. It's tap water at best from now on. It's good for you! Really, it is. But we always knew that anyway didn't we? We bought water at a higher price than a litre of petrol because we had so much disposable money sloshing around in our pockets that it became a headache knowing where to spend and what on next.

All of it was a dream. All that rubbish we bought, all the bottled water and Blu-Ray players and designer shoes and iPod Shuffles and patio heaters; all the jobs we had; all the catchphrases we memorised and the stupid things we thought. Everything we did for the past 10 years - none of it really felt real, did it? Time to snap out of it. Time to grow our own vegetables and learn hand-to-hand combat with staves. And time, perhaps, to really start living and not talk endlessly about how brilliant we all were in picking which property and apartments to buy because the truth was that whatever you bought, it went up anyway without any meaningful input from you. And now all property will go down also without any help from you. Enjoy the new reality.

Dumb And Dumber Maths

2008-06-04T07:36:00.002+08:00

There is an ongoing debate in the UK and Australia concerning the "dumbing down" of maths in schools. The emphasis has been switched away from algebra, arithmetic and geometry, the necessity for pupils to think for themselves about the required solution, and a requirement for conceptual understanding. It has moved towards less challenging, real-life problems that lead pupils, step-by-step, towards an answer.

Despite this lowering of the demands, there has also been a watering-down of pass marks: scores of less than 20 per cent can now be enough to be awarded a grade pass to university in Australia. The educational establishment has become overly concerned that children might be put off by the difficulty of maths, forgetting that having to deal with difficulty is itself a useful life skill.

The following illustrates the present crisis well:

1. Teaching Maths In 1970
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is 4/5 of the price.
What is his profit?

2. Teaching Maths In 1980
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or £80.
What is his profit?

3. Teaching Maths In 1990
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is £80.
Did he make a profit?

4. Teaching Maths In 2000
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is £80 and his profit is
£20.
Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

5. Teaching Maths In 2008
A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because
he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing
for the habitat of animals or the preservation of
our woodlands.
He does this so he can make a profit of £20.
What do you think of this way of making a living?
Topic for class participation after answering the
question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as
the logger cut down their homes? (There are no
wrong answers.)

6.. Teaching Maths 2018
? ?????? ???? ????? ????? ?? ????? ?? ??? 100 ?????. ???? ?????
??????? ??

Rich And Poor Will Pay For The Coming World Food Crisis

2008-04-24T17:12:00.003+08:00

"Global so called warming" is not the biggest problem facing the human race, it is the looming food crisis and the wars that will arise because of it.

There was a man sitting opposite me on the bus as I came home tonight. He was eating Big Macs from a paper bag as though his life depended on it. He swallows the first between St Georges Terrace and The Barracks Arch and the second as I was stepping off the bus at the stop opposite my apartment block. That is a total distance of about one and a half k's. That's about 1,000 calories in three minutes.

This story is, I suppose, a parable of the tyranny of food. So is Michelle's. I read her story yesterday in the Telegraph, she lives in Dakar, the capital of the West African nation of Senegal.

Her story features no flyblown refugee camps or skeletal babies with hollow eyes. Not yet, at least.

A glass chandelier hangs from Michelle's ceiling. There are artificial sweet peas on the mantelpiece and, on the wall, a framed certificate commending her brother for his 25 years' work as a social services administrator. Once, this middle-class family felt prosperous and ate three meals a day, Now, there is only a sparse lunch, and fruit for an evening meal. Never meat or fresh milk. Michelle and her daughter are the new poor, but - through pride, or habit, or fear - they do not count themselves badly off.

As she says: "There are children in this city who barely eat." In the nearby market, there are fewer beggars than you see in some parts of London.

But the dried fish and vegetables aren't selling, and street cafés that used to offer bread and coffee for breakfast now have only grey maize gruel in doll-size cups.

Slowly, and still almost invisibly, surging food prices have strangled this country and much of Africa and is now becoming a major problem in much of Asia as well as parts of Europe.

Riots broke out a few months ago in several African and Asian countries including Egypt, The Phillipines, Malaysia and Indonesia. The uprisings were fueled by the lack of and rising cost of staple food.

The politics of food used to be simple. The poor died of starvation and the rich of gluttony. Now there's a bond stretching from Senegal to Sydney to Jakarta and on to Rome. Australian families must find more than $200 extra a month extra to cope with basic living costs, and food bills alone are up 15.5 per cent.

In Italy, women are marching against the cost of spaghetti. In China, a consumer who ate 20 kilograms of meat in 1985 will eat 50 this year: and it takes eight kilos of grain to produce one of meat.

In Britain, farmers are slaughtering pigs they cannot afford to feed. Some of the elements of the food panic are trivial, some surreal. The Waitrose pasta shortage in Britain has been superseded by a fig roll crisis, caused by heatstroke among the Turkish wasps that pollinate the crop.

The supermarket biscuit blight might be several Jaffa Cakes short of a famine, but the world's population is rising fast and the omens daunting. By 2030, global demand for food will double.

A lot of this shortage is due to the Left-wing Eco-Liars and Mentalenvironists.

If we had invested in Nuclear power years ago we would not be in this mess. If the money stolen in energy and "green" red taxes had been put into improving infrastructure and real alternative energy sources such as pyrolysis/gassification as opposed to endless summits, committees and feel-good quangos, we would not be in this mess.

If the Europeans and especially the French had ditched the nonsense of the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy, we would not be in this mess.

If we hadn't have bloated the so-called "welfare state" to nurture every dysfunctional, lazy, feckless, baby-popping chav or made it so attractive that half of the universe turns up in places such as Britain to improve their lifestytle in the most unproductive way and at the expense of the rest, we would not be in this mess.

If Za-NuLabour-PF hadn't swollen the state into the power-junkie, interfering, massive malignant tax-absorbing cancer that it is, we would not be in this mess.

As usual the cretins on the Left will blame the USA, Big-Oil, Big-Business and the Lizard People, but if you look at what the same malignant Left have done to Africa and its corrupt coterie of vicious tyrants, it could have fed the world as opposed to need feeding and clothing by the world. Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa is now the basket-case of Africa.

Kyoto was a sham, a chance for idiots such as Gore, Blair and others to posture on the world stage making themselves look "green" and "caring" when it is those same "green" policies that are turning food into fuel. Wheat and Corn turned into Ethanol, by government diktat, to satisfy the "green" lobby. Hardly the fault of "Big-Oil".

The wheat, corn and rice should ONLY be used as food and drink sources. The technology exists to turn the straw and waste (and landfill rubbish) into gas to run power stations.

As for population, yep, far too high and for this I blame third world religion, poverty, religion, ignorance, religion and the welfare state.

After reading this ask yourself a very simple question. Why, a couple of short years ago was their plenty of food as well as ample surpluses? Where has is it all now gone?

Behind everything that has gone wrong lies the jealous politics of the bullying "socialist" Left. Are we better off after Mugabe and his commie mates have wrecked the countries that they "govern"? Is Zimbabwe better off after the productive sector was pillaged and where Mugabe is buying weapons instead of food and equipment? What does Cuba actually produce apart from cigars, illegal emigrants and cheap holidays? How long will Venezuela last under Chavez? Compare relative production between Jordan and Israel, or better still, what does the Palestinian Authority actually produce apart from hatred and missiles? The latter don't even make their own electricity and yet receive more "aid" per head than any other? Apart from oil, what else is actually produced and exported, apart from Wahhabi funded hatred, in quantity by Saudi Arabia?

Then re-read the above until it all sinks in.

It's Over And She Doesn't Know It!!!

2008-03-01T21:13:00.002+09:00

Somebody with a few more minutes to spare than I do does the maths: At this point, it is statistically impossible for Hillary to win the Democratic nomination for President. Assuming an even split of superdelegates with Obama, Hillary must win 65% of Ohio and 65% of Texas, AND get all of the delegates from Florida and Michigan who were disqualified by the DNC to be counted as well in order to come close enough to Obama to make Pennsylvania meaningful.

The Bearded Monster Of Muddled Thinking

2008-02-11T05:25:00.001+09:00

If you haven't yet noticed the controversy aroused by the statements of Dr Williams the archbishop of Canterbury last week then it is timely I think that we all listened very carefully to his muddled words.

The basic kernel of the lecture was as follows: that we should be wary of the "inflexible or over-restrictive applications of traditional law", that "a universalist Enlightenment system has to weigh the possible consequences of ghettoising and effectively disenfranchising a minority, at real cost to overall social cohesion and creativity", and that there is therefore a case for "plural jurisdiction".

What he basically said was that certain elements of Sharia law be incorporated into British law so as to make the resident Muslim population in the UK not feel so outcast and disenfranchised. What utter nonsense. The danger is even greater than that however, it is not just nonsense, it is the thin end of the wedge in that if this man and others like him with similar agendas are able to sway public opinion in this way and theoretically he does have the power and authority as the A of C then Britain will indeed be a Muslim state within the next fifty years. What a buffoon!!

In an interview with World at One on BBC Radio 4 on the same day as his idiotic speech, Dr Williams made his case more accessibly, claiming that the adoption of certain aspects of sharia law "seems unavoidable". As things stand, he said, "there's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts - I think that's a bit of a danger." Hence, the Archbishop's enthusiasm "for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law". Because Dr Williams has the hushed manner of a consultant oncologist reassuring a nervous patient, it is easy to assume that what he says is benign and full of common sense. Not in this case, however. In the name of liberal co-existence, the Archbishop took arms against the very principles that give our ever-more diverse, cacophonous and mobile society what cohesion it has. This was a very dangerous intervention.One of the reasons why religion is dying out in the well educated ranks in the UK and elsewhere is due to buffoons like Dr Williams speaking out on matters beyond their own cult. Religion has not had a place in the law of the land for many years now and that is a good thing.

Choose if you must to assemble in a dusty cold building every Sunday and sing dreary songs to your chosen monster in the sky, but leave the law alone. For those who do not suffer from mass delusion, we need those laws to protect us from you implementing rules based on your book of myth and legend. The Archbishop of Canterbury should spend more time worrying about the state of his beard and leave parliament and the courts to manage the laws of the land. The mistake many make is to attribute deep intellect, academic status and wisdom to an old ditherer who hides behind specs, prose which is difficult to understand an untidy bearded face.

The General Public Is Not Fit For Purpose

2008-01-21T21:31:00.000+09:00

Is this the speech that a decent politician should, could make? I believe that it is time that someone had the courage to. It is written from a British perspective but equally I think applies to Australia.

People of Britain, in a democracy like our own, you share with us, your elected representatives, the sacred duty of governance. I should like to thank you for your contribution. I should like to, but I won't. Most of you are just too pig ignorant to take any notice whatsoever of what we try to do in your best interests. You're not only failing to do your bit; you've become the biggest outstanding obstacle to the advancement of your own well-being.I appreciate that you can't be bothered to vote, join a political party or teach your kids to be socially responsible.

You're far too busy with all that binge-drinking and spree shopping. Obviously, you've got to make phone-calls while driving, park in bus lanes and cycle on footpaths. And, of course, you find it too much bother to pay any of the resulting fines.But do you have to demand better services at the same time as lower taxes? Must you ask for the planet to be saved while you insist on driving and flying? Do you have to clamour for things to be banned while decrying any infringement of personal freedom? Must you complain about immigrants taking jobs you're too idle to do yourselves?

You say you want politicians to speak their minds, but whenever we do, you accuse us of gaffes or splits. You hound us for accepting dodgy donations, but you refuse to fund our parties out of your taxes. You begrudge us our little perks, though we can't claim unfair dismissal when you capriciously turf us out. You have the nerve to despise us, when, unlike you, we make at least some effort to discharge our democratic duty.Above all, with your unmerited sway over all of our destinies, you make it impossible for any politician to deliver a message like this. Voters, enough is enough.

You're ignorant, stupid, selfish and hypocritical. Quite clearly, you're unfit for purpose. Resign, I say, resign.

Wobbly Hillary Fights Back

2008-01-11T08:11:00.001+09:00

Now that Billary has won in New Hampshire, the whole circus moves on to Michigan on the 15th, Nevada on the 19th and the racially charged South Carolina primary on the 26th and Florida on the 29th before moving to America’s most populous states and biggest cities next month. Obama would be expected to take SC easily as the black candidate but that was before the result of Tuesday’s primary, which may rekindle doubts in the minds of black voters who have told pollsters that they did not think he could win. Bill Clinton, who remains an enormously popular figure among African Americans and earned himself the moniker “America’s first black President”, is expected to feature prominently in the South Carolina campaign.

The biggest prize remains "Super Duper Tuesday" on Feb 5th when delegate-rich states such as New York, California, New Jersey and Illinois vote. Both candidates will need to raise vast sums of cash for an advertising air war as the focus shifts from the “retail” politics of the early-voting states to the “wholesale” operation needed for a national campaign. It is becoming a very interesting contest.

I Am Being Reviewed

2008-01-11T07:43:00.000+09:00

I received the email below a couple of days ago. I don't know if you have noticed that now when you click the "next blog" button at the top of this page you are likely to get connected to a spam blog. They are virtually the same as spam emails, something I fortunately do not receive these days. The anti spamming efforts of the ISP's and Norton's has made a huge difference over the last year or so. But now that the spammers are finding that they are being defeated in the email spam war, they are looking for other ways to get their messages out and the blogs are in the front line. I like the bit about "Since you are an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not spam". Anyway this post has posted OK so I must have been cleared.

Dear Blogger user,

This is a message from the Blogger team.

Your blog, at http://all-the-issues.blogspot.com/, has been identified as a potential spam blog. For an explanation of what spam blogs are, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577

You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog. To request a review, please fill out the form found here: http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=35892063

We will take a look at your blog and unlock it within four business days. Please note that if we do not hear from you within 20 days, we will remove your blog. If this blog does not belong to you, then you do not have to do anything. Any other blogs you may have will not be affected.

Since you are an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not spam. We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this erroneous result. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to users like you instead of to spammers.

Thank you for your understanding and for your help in our spam-fighting efforts.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

Huckabee And Obama Take Iowa Wins

2008-01-04T12:02:00.000+09:00

Mike Huckabee has won Iowa's Republican caucuses - the first nominating contest of the 2008 US presidential election. Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, came second.

At the Democratic caucuses, Barack Obama won a close race to defeat Hillary Clinton and John Edwards - but it is still unclear who was second. I watched Huckabee on the Late Night Show with Jay Leno last night (it would have been recorded on Wednesday) and I must admit that he looked good. He came across as being very laid back and relaxed. He made many jokes about himself and the overall impression came across as a genuine nice guy.

I would now say the Hillary is down if not out of the Democratic race. Obama won the Democratic race quite easily as expected and in the most open contest for many years my tip remains that the next president will come from Huckabee or Obama.

Past Iowa caucuses have broken some campaigns and given big boosts to others, correspondents say. The next contest is on Tuesday in New Hampshire.

The US media projected Mr Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and an ordained Baptist minister, would win the Iowa contest based on partial results from more than 1,780 locations across the state.

Similar caucuses, or public meetings, will take place across all American states before each party backs a single candidate to contest the November election for the White House.

The Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary on 8 January are regarded as key for building momentum in the state-by-state process of winning the presidential nomination.

Candidates who do poorly tend to drop out of the race. Polls from New Hampshire have indicated that the Republican contest is between Huckabee and the Mormon Romney with John McCain a distant third, while for the Democrats Obama and Clinton lead the field.

St Pancras International - London

2008-01-04T07:55:00.001+09:00

St. Pancras railway station, branded as St Pancras International, is a major station located in the St Pancras area of central London, between the new British Library building to the west and King's Cross station to the east. National rail enquiries have split areas of the station up for ticketing purposes into St Pancras (International) for services to continental Europe, St Pancras (Domestic) for domestic services including East Midlands trains and, Southeastern services to Kent which will start in 2009 and St Pancras (Low level) for First Capital Connect services on the Thameslink route.

The station is the terminus of the Midland Main Line for services from London to the East Midlands cities of Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, and Sheffield, presently operated by East Midlands Trains. In 2007, these were joined by High Speed 1, which carries Eurostar’s high-speed services to Paris, Brussels, and Lille. Suburban trains on the cross-London Thameslink route will begin stopping at new underground platforms in December 2007, followed in 2009 by domestic high-speed services to Kent.

St Pancras is often termed the ‘cathedral of the railways’, and includes two of the most celebrated structures built in Britain in the Victorian era. The main train shed, completed in 1868 by the engineer William Henry Barlow, was the largest single-span structure built up to that time. The frontage of the station is formed by St Pancras Chambers, formerly the Midland Grand Hotel (1868–1877), an impressive example of Victorian gothic architecture.

Both St Pancras and King's Cross stations are served by King's Cross St Pancras tube station, which provides onward connection by London Underground trains.

St Pancras

2008-01-04T07:54:00.001+09:00

This is a steel detail from the refurbished St Pancras station in London.

FACEBOOK???

2008-01-03T14:07:00.000+09:00

In an idle moment, I was thinking about social networking sites and how the natural progression might be from all-encompassing global phenomena to a tightly controlled specifically targeted medium. As such, here are a few ideas:

fakebook: For forgers.
fadebook: For sound engineers.
facebuck: For deer (or 80s sci-fi) lovers.
facebucket: For window cleaners.
facebok: For South Africans.
facehook: For pirates.
bakebook: For bread makers.
vasebook: For people who insist on using American pronunciation (i.e. Americans)
fastbuck: For people who have sold their social networking sites to massive faceless global conglomerates and gone to live in the Bahamas.

AND:

Then we have the second life crowd,

pastlife
nolife
miss spent life

It goes on.

Christmas & New Year

2008-01-02T10:14:00.000+09:00

Well, it's 2008, another new year. I am optimistic that this will be a good one. We (Carlijn & me) had a great Christamas and new year. Christmas was spent at a great outdoor party at Ton & Lia's place in Rolleystone. 40 degrees and we (all the men anyway) where in black tie dress. Ton & Lia put on a great spread of food and the garden with it's new lawn made a lovely backdrop to proceedings. Very nice.

On New Years Eve, Miss Carlijn and I first went out to a good Chinese Restaurant in East Perth. Food was excellent but the service was pretty poor. The poor service was understandable though, many businesses in WA are suffering due to the extreme labour shortages in this state. Restaurants in particular are suffering. Anyway after the meal we headed over to Burswood and played the Roulette tables for about 2 hours. Had a load of fun, up and down and walked away up. Then at midnight we enjoyed a Champagne and then started to play Caribbean Stud poker. We lasted till about 2.30 and finally left to go home. A really great night. As we left the casino and went outside the queues for taxis was just amazing. Also the sight of many mainly young people sitting in the gutters vomiting, crying and holding their heads made me realize how very fortunate I am to have never been tempted by drink. One or at the most two is my maximum and has been since I was a teenager. As I knew that I would only have one or two drinks the whole evening, we had taken the car and we drove home through strangely deserted and quiet streets.

The Coming Crisis - It Is Not That Far Away!!!

2008-01-02T10:09:00.000+09:00

With the coming sub-prime crisis threatening to engulf all of the worlds major economies, there is a worst-case scenario in which the menace of inflation means that the Australian Reserve Bank cannot cut interest rates, real incomes fall, consumption is slashed, unemployment rises and the property market commits hara-kiri. It could happen. Yet there is also an alternative hypothesis. It involves oil prices tumbling as some of the political concerns that have pumped up its value are discounted. The Bank thus finds itself able to reduce the cost of borrowing faster than it expected, and after a spell of cautious retrenchment the average citizen starts to feel wealthier again by the summer. I know which one I would rather be true.

PPP's Corrupt Legacy

2008-01-02T10:05:00.000+09:00

I consider that by automatically giving Bhuttos' son the leadership of the PPP that the Pakistan People's Party is being treated as a family heirloom, a property to be disposed of at the will of its leader. Nothing more, nothing less. Poor Pakistan. Poor People's Party supporters. Both deserve better than this disgusting, medieval charade. How can Western-backed politicians be taken seriously if they treat their party as a fiefdom and their supporters as serfs, while their courtiers abroad mouth sycophantic niceties concerning the young prince and his future. Dynastic politics is a sign of weakness, not strength.

World Plunged Deeper Into Crisis

2007-12-29T03:41:00.000+09:00

Now she's gone the gloomy predictability of Benazir Bhutto's assassination cannot detract from the diabolical crisis into which it has plunged Pakistan and the free world's struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Ms Bhutto's death potentially holds the seeds of international catastrophe, allowing radical forces to move one step closer to gaining control of the world's most unstable nuclear-armed state. In her final months, Ms Bhutto foresaw the murderous attacks against her and warned that, left unchecked, Taliban forces would be marching on the Pakistan capital, Islamabad, within two years.

Despite her chequered history as two-time prime minister of Pakistan, Ms Bhutto undoubtedly represented the country's best prospect of a smooth return to democratic rule following President Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule in November. She was also the West's best hope to help close off Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan for use as a safe haven by Islamic militants engaged in a war against the West.

Whoever is found to be responsible for Ms Bhutto's death, it represents a significant boost for the extremists, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida. What was thought initially to be the shooting-and-bombing murder (but turns out to have bean a head banging accident involving the sunroof mechanism in her car) of Ms Bhutto has already unleashed explosive forces of protest, aimed initially at Mr Musharraf, Ms Bhutto's main political opponent, who has responded by putting the country on red alert. Planning for national elections, scheduled to be held on January 8, has been thrown into disarray.

Ms Bhutto's assassination may initially strengthen Mr Musharraf's claim that the alternative to his authoritarian rule is extremist-led chaos. But Ms Bhutto's death is also confirmation of Mr Musharraf's failure on many fronts. Despite the known dangers, he failed to provide adequate security for the political contest that was supposed to restore democracy. Rather than contain the extremists, Mr Musharraf has run roughshod over Pakistan's democratic institutions for little apparent dividend. Distracted by power, the Pakistani military is split and less potent.

The fact is, Ms Bhutto's murder was the latest in a series of suicide attacks that mirror al-Qa'ida's insurgent campaign that crippled Iraq. Radical forces linked to al-Qa'ida and the Taliban now occupy large areas of Pakistan, including the former tourist destination and skiing resort Swat Valley, north of Islamabad. This year, there was a bloody showdown in the capital to root out Islamic militants from a two-month occupation of the Red Mosque compound, which they had used as a base from which to impose Islamic law.

The spiralling escalation of violence underscores the extraordinary bravery shown by Ms Bhutto in returning voluntarily to re-enter Pakistan's political fray. As a woman and symbol of modernisation and democracy, Ms Bhutto has long been a prime target for the radicals. She was the target of a bomb attack in October, immediately following her return to Pakistan after brokering a deal with Mr Musharraf that decades-old corruption charges against her be dropped.

Another Dead Corrupt Paki Politician

2007-12-29T03:15:00.000+09:00

So the "Queen" of Paki politics is dead. Entirely predictable and maybe not a bad thing. My first reaction? You will never civilize the black man (or Muslims) obviously. The press are now saying that it was al-Qa'eda and the Telegraph this morning are publishing a phone intercept that seems to prove it:

Here is a translation of the transcript of the alleged telephone conversation from senior al-Qa'eda leader Baitullah Mehsud to another militant said to have been intercepted after the assassination.

Maulvi Sahib (MS): Asalaam Aleikum (Peace be with you)

Baitullah Mehsud (BM): Waleikum Asalam (And also with you)

MS: Chief, how are you?

BM: I am fine.

MS: Congratulations, I just got back during the night.

BM: Congratulations to you, were they our men?

MS: Yes they were ours.

BM: Who were they?

MS: There was Saeed, there was Bilal from Badar and Ikramullah.

BM: The three of them did it?

MS: Ikramullah and Bilal did it.

BM: Then congratulations.

MS: Where are you? I want to meet you.

BM: I am at Makeen (town in South Waziristan tribal region), come over, I am at Anwar Shah's house.

MS: OK, I'll come.

BM: Don't inform their house for the time being.

MS: OK.

BM: It was a tremendous effort. They were really brave boys who killed her.

MS: Mashallah (Thank God). When I come I will give you all the details.

BM: I will wait for you. Congratulations, once again congratulations.

MS: Congratulations to you.

BM: Anything I can do for you?

MS: Thank you very much.

BM: Asalaam Aleikum.

MS: Waaleikum Asalaam.

My take on this? Firstly, don't go anywhere near Anwar Shah's house. Secondly, These despot crime ridden and corrupt little countries deserve all they get.

US Election Predictions 2008

2007-12-29T03:06:00.000+09:00

One of the wonderful things about having a blog like this is being able to say things and make predictions for 2008, As Yogi Berra once said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” As far as the US presidential race is concerned this is what I think will happen:

1. Barack Obama will win the Democratic nomination. I think it will be a very close run thing indeed in Iowa but I feel that the Illinois senator has hit his stride, is well organised in the state and the Hillary campaign has made some major strategic errors - most notably by getting caught smearing Obama and by making their campaign about the past and the status quo rather than the future. Earlier this year, I predicted a Hillary sweep

2. Rudy Giuliani for the Republican nomination. I was uncertain about this earlier this year and I’m uncertain about it now. I think if Rudy does pull it off he’ll be one of the luckiest men in politics - but luck is a key ingredient in success. No Republican has come even close to sealing the deal and Rudy’s late-state strategy could work if the picture remains muddy by the time Florida votes on January 29th.

Quotable

2007-12-18T12:22:00.000+09:00

"Let's be clear: we have lost this war. We have lost because the initial, central goals of the invasion have all failed: we have not secured WMDS from terrorists because those WMDs did not exist. We have not stymied Islamist terror — at best we have finally stymied some of the terror we helped create. We have not constructed a democratic model for the Middle East — we have instead destroyed a totalitarian government and a phony country, only to create a permanently unstable, fractious, chaotic failed state, where the mere avoidance of genocide is a cause for celebration. We have, moreover, helped solder a new truth in the Arab mind: that democracy means chaos, anarchy, mass-murder, national disintegration and sectarian warfare. And we have also empowered the Iranian regime and made a wider Sunni-Shiite regional war more likely than it was in 2003. Apart from that, Mr Bush, how did you enjoy your presidency?"

Andrew Sullivan.

A Mess. A Mess Of Mud And Mistakes

2007-11-22T13:35:00.000+09:00

England 2 Croatia 3: Carson calamity sets the tone as abject England reach all-time low.

A mess. A mess of mud and mistakes and comebacks and despair and hope but ultimately, heartbreakingly, a night of failure. England have failed to reach the finals of Euro 2008 next summer. McClaren will be sacked – probably today. And yet that only begins to tell the story of a remarkable night.

The night the so-called golden generation delivered their most monumental failure, a diabolical performance served up on a churned Wembley pitch that looked like that famous night in the 70's when the old Wembley pitch was so chopped up from the preceding weekends horse of the year show that it was almost unplayable. Anyway, this game leaves England on the outside of a major international tournament for the first time in 14 years. There was intense drama and a two-goal comeback but, when the crowd rubbed their eyes and reflected on the ruins of McClaren's team, they knew what they had seen. True to form, England did exactly what they had done against Russia last month when they conceded a first goal. They made a bad situation worse by conceding a second. It is ever thus with this team; something goes wrong, then, as night follows day, something else does too. A side so incoherent and half-cocked that they could not take the chances that have been given them time and time again. I do wish sometimes that I wasn't English.

Earlier in the evening, I watched some interesting videos on YouTube. First there was a documentary on the history of Chinese food. (Thousands of years ago, Chinese liked to boil everything, and nothing gets bits and pieces out of boiling water better than chopsticks. In Chinese, chopsticks are called "quick sticks". The "quick" word was replaced by European sailors with the word "fast"... which is "chop". (You have probably heard the saying, "C'mon, let's go! Chop-chop!")

Earlier in the evening we went to the AGM of my apartment management team. As usual we didn't get anywhere near enough attendees for a quorum. We needed 36 and managed only 25 or so. It is very difficult to get people to go to meetings anyway so in my opinion the format should be changed to allow a smaller group to run things.

This weekend we have the general election and after five weeks of intense electioneering it seems that nothing has really changed as far as the opinion polls are concerned from five weeks ago. The ALP will win. The only fly in the ointment seems to be WA. We in the west may spoil Kev's party. We will see.

Election 07 Part 1

2007-10-22T11:42:00.000+08:00

Well we are back. We actually arrived back in the small hours of last Monday morning. As you can imagine, last week was fairly busy what with catching up with work etc. Carlijn still has to finish the holiday reports and though she is working on it I would guess that as she is very busy also the exercise will take another week or so. She has also been sick since we got back unable to shake off a cold or flu that we both picked up on holiday. I have been busy editing and generally sorting the hundreds of photos that we bought back. I do intend to put some on Flickr as soon as I have the time. I have put a few up but will add some more. We did have a great time but I won't go into too many details myself as you will get many more details from Carlijn's reports.

Now that we are officially in election mode in Australia I can start commenting on that as well as other goings on that are happening.

I watched the election debate between Mr Rudd and Mr Howard last night in real time on Sky. Last nights debate was very predictable and Mr Howard did look tired and irritable at times and so I think that the fresh faced Rudd won overall and would have strengthened his position. Whether that means that he will be PM in 5 weeks time is another matter. The ALP still need to gain back 16 seats to get a majority and more to get a clear majority that would last 3 years. So, we will see.

Before we get too far into the election discussions here I should say that I have voted ALP since first arriving in Australia. I did try to vote for the coalition once (I think it was in 1996) but just couldn't do it once I was in the ballot box.

I was very left leaning when I was first aware of politics when I was 12 or so. This came about because I was very aware that being so dependant on social security as a child made me realise that the left did provide me with a more decent upbringing including subsidised clothing, school dinners and other "socialist" benefits than I could have expected from the hard nosed right wing Tories in the UK at that time. I then became very right wing in my late teens more I think as a way of being different from the scruffy left wing rabble that were at that time trying to ban the bomb and protesting against the Vietnam war. I then became a liberal in the seventies in the UK because I thought that labour had gone too far left and was controlled by the unions, a concept that I was never easy with. Then for a brief while I supported the first Thatcher government primarily because she was dedicated to destroying the unions. I have always hated unions and I suppose that stems from always being self employed. I have never had a boss as such and have always liked the freedom that that state of affairs brings.

Then I arrived in Australia at the tale end of the Fraser years and was quite impressed with Bob Hawke and then with Mr Keating when they came to power in 1983. I have always appreciated the reforming medicine that they imposed on the Australian economy. To a very large extent that is the legacy that Mr Howard has had to build on.

I have no major complaints with the Howard years but do believe that to a large extent the prosperity that we have all enjoyed recently would have happened under an ALP government as well. This is similar to the smugness many people show when boasting of the huge profits that they and others have made from real estate in Australia recently. If you invested in property from 2000 onwards anywhere in Australia then it really wouldn't matter whether it was a shack in the poorest areas of Perth or new apartments or houses virtually anywhere else then you would have made money. Now you endlessly hear people gloating about their cleverness in becoming brilliant real estate investors. Wait until the markets crash (as they could at any time) then will they be boasting about their real estate skills? Similarly, most of the prosperity in Australia has been due to very benign conditions overseas. The Australian economy always generally reflects overseas conditions and has very little to do with local politics. So to a large extent Mr Howard's gloating about economic management and inversely Mr Rudd's boasts about how he would manage the economy are hollow words with both politicians knowing deep down that their success or failure will be influenced more by happenings in London, Washington and Beijing than their own skills. Just as our real estate investors will crash if the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US gets any worse, if China catches a cold then we are all in deep deep trouble and the government, whoever that will be come November 24th know it also.

9/11 Military Pictures

2007-10-22T11:03:00.000+08:00

The following photos are a stark reminder to those who forget why the Americans were so shaken and upset and subsequently rightly or wrongly went into Afghanistan and Iraq. Look at them and see the awful devastation.

Pictures here:

The Next Installment

2007-10-11T17:13:00.000+08:00

Friday Sept. 28
Our last day in the Riel home. It was sort of pandemonium. We were all pretty well organised but Ingrid made an appearance again at about 9 am not only to pick up the money, but since this was the day she would leave for the middle of Holland to attend an art fair, she also trotted backwards and forwards to her garages to pick up more art stuff to add to her already overloaded car. Ingrid was not happy. Stressed to the max, she made us all nervous by simply looking at her. Finally she left and we could get on with packing up. At 11 am we were all but gone, just the last bit and pieces when Ingrid turned up again. She was agitated; “I thought you’d be gone by 11” she complained, again raiding her garages. Then her mother turns up, who was going to clean the house, but who had evidently parked her car in the wrong spot in the street. Stressed-out Ingrid then proceeded to yell and scream to her mother, right in front of us, embarrassing both all of us and her mother. Not a nice moment. We really don’t like Ingrid.
Then we drove to Overloon, to go to a famous war museum, full of memorabilia, history, tanks and planes and we all enjoyed it very much. Alan and Richard enjoyed the history aspect, Lorna and me were intrigued about the family life at the time, the lack of basics, such as food and sanitation, little Jack couldn’t get enough of planes and tanks, but wasn’t too impressed with the noise associated with them; you could press a button, to make the planes and tanks come “alive” (start the motors) and he got really frightened!’
We had lunch at a real pancake house close by and that was a real fun experience. The pancakes were delicious, there was a huge kids-corner to keep Jack and Tom occupied and at the end they could even pick a little present from a basket. The overall service was tremendous, so all were happy and we went on our way home. Home that night was going to be Poppel. We made a small detour via “the Bredaseweg” the address of the house I was born in. It was really nice to see it again and to show it to Richard and Lorna.
In Poppel we had a lovely meal again and after the kids were tucked in bed the four of us went to the Pub. First to “the Fijnproever”(the gourmet) where my brother Rob was playing billiards and after an hour or 2 to Rob’s pub “The Troubadour”. Richard got introduced to a nice strong Belgium Beer: Triple Leffe, he took to the taste, got used to that after about three and then decided to go one better and have a “Quadruple”........ We were home at about 1.30 and had had a great evening out.

Saturday September 29.
The two families met up 10.30 in the Bokkenrijder” (The Buck-rider) a famous cafe in the middle of the woods about 20 km from Poppel. We had coffee first, and then were going to have a good walk, then come back for lunch. Unfortunately it rained, but it didn’t dampen our spirits, just about everything else. We had umbrellas, so we were all pretty well set up. We came back after about an hour and settled in for lunch and Richard couldn’t believe the big meals of 3-4 slices of bread, covered with more slices of cheese and ham then topped with 3-5 fried eggs , apart from the little gherkins and pickled onions etc. He was a happy boy. We had a great relaxing time. Alan and I presented Richard and Lorna with a wooden Christmas tree with lights in it which George had made. After lunch it was time to say our Goodbye’s since Lorna and Richard and family were heading back to England that night. We would take them to Brussels, then stay overnight ourselves.
That’s what we did and after a straightforward trip to Brussels airport thanks to “Jane” we arrived there in good time to sit together for a little while, have another chat and a drink before they went off to check in. We both had really happy memories of the time spent with Richard, Lorna and kids and of the lovely hospitality and generosity shown to them by my family. We found our way to the Mercure hotel very easy, settled in and freshened up, then took a taxi to the centre of Brussels in search of a really nice restaurant. Renee had told me about these little streets with wall to wall restaurants and we found them quite quickly. The atmosphere was fantastic, people everywhere, tables spilling over into the street, and the food very mediocre, but well; blame it on the competition and the tourist-trap.
Sunday September 30
At 10.30 we were at the convent where my eldest sister Myriam lives. This is in Kraainem, a small village close to Brussels and close to the hotel where we had spent the night. It was so fantastic to see her again and the three of us had some great talks. Myriam’s English was definitively better than last time when she managed to speak French, Dutch and English in one sentence. I thought she looked fabulous, well rested and very content. We spent a good 2 hours there and even had lunch there. We took quite a few pictures and I found it a bit hard to say goodbye again; we always have such little time together. Then we went on our way to Breda, to see Hanneke’s flat. Well, really it is a two storey apartment. The downstairs apartment is narrow and very long. Next to the downstairs front door is Hanneke’s door and you go immediately up the stairs. There is only enough room left for a bicycle and a coat hanger. Up the stairs is a hallway opening up to the kitchen and lounge which then sit on top of half the downstairs apartment. The balcony at the back sits on top of the other half. Then there is another stairs to the second floor to the bedrooms and bathroom and laundry. So from the front they all look like normal houses, but each house really is divided in two. Very nice and quite ingenious. Hanneke has fantastic taste and was justifiably proud to show us around. We enjoyed a nice cup of tea and some apple cake and then we had to leave to be back in Poppel for a dinner with the family. When we arrived Alan and I were really very tired and managed to have a lay down for about half an hour. This was really nice. Monique had done a fantastic job of the table decorations, even cutting some “bottlebrush” type grass which she then sprayed silver to decorate the plates. The theme was black, white and silver and the result was truly stunning. She simply has the knack for this. Renee and Reinier were in charge of the meal and as usual this was 5 stars. We started with bruschetta, followed by veal saltimbocca, then tiramisu. The wine flowed freely and time got away from us and I certainly didn’t go to bed as early as I had wanted. Alan was more sensible and had gone to bed at a reasonable hour.

Holiday Update

2007-10-06T16:23:00.000+08:00

Friday 21 September.

(Carlijn) We all got ready to go to Eu where the wedding was going to take place. Carolien and Stephane helped us on our way by giving us the Tom-tom (GPS) and lots of maps of Europe. We then took a taxi to Les Invalides where we were to pick up our hire car. Since we were quite nervous about making our way out of Paris, Tom-tom or not, I asked the taxi driver the way. Reassuringly he told us that the quickest way out was: “Go over the bridge here, turn left and just go straight through until you get to the Peripherique (= ring road around Paris) and you’ll see the signs from there”. So we picked up our nice big car from an uninterested big man. He threw in a child seat, dirty and all, complaining that although we had ordered one, it hadn’t registered on his computer, it had really been reserved for someone else, but what could he do. We left him; still complaining, found our car in the car park and off we went. After 10 minutes we mentally kissed our taxi driver, because we were on the Peripherique and on our way to Eu.
We were reasonably early and decided to make a small detour to Giverney, to the gardens of Monet. It involved getting off the main road, to take the direction to Vernon. So we did and passed through some beautiful countryside. All of a sudden there was a big noise and felt a big bump and then heard the flapping of something. Not good. The right front wheel was badly bent and the tyre ruined. What we had hit we don’t know, could have been a pothole or a rock or possibly a kerb. Unfortunately we were on a stretch of road which didn’t allow us to stop at all so we flapped and bumped our way to the nearest strip of dirt we could park on which was at least one kilometre further down. On the car contract we found the emergency number only to find that there was no coverage for the mobile net. We looked around us. Nothing except for 2 houses, one next to the other, both behind a great big wall with forbidden looking gates. I pressed the bell of one and yelled over the fence. A female face peered from an upstairs attick window, then disappeared. A few seconds later a burly man of around 45 came to the gate followed by the face from upstairs. I explained the situation and they both came out to inspect the damage. The front wheel was damaged and the tyre was flat. Our man uhmed and ahed , walked around the car a few times, then disappeared under it, muttering all kind of French technical Oh la la’s, then came up again and asked us if we would like him to change the tyre? We enthusiastically yelled “Oui, Ou” in 1 second flat and off he went. His other half and I in the meantime had a nice conversation about all things women like to talk about. I was proud of the fact that my French didn’t seem to have had much of a battering over the years and I found myself to be still quite fluent.
After about half an hour the car was fixed and we had been given directions to the nearest Renault dealer to try and get a new tyre and wheel. We thanked both of our hero’s profusely and left them with a reluctantly accepted note to buy themselves a decent bottle of wine. We didn’t fancy driving very far on a flimsy space saver spare and having to keep our speed down to 125 K/h.
It was now too late to continue to Monet’s gardens so we decided to go straight on to Eu. Our B&B for the next three nights, organised by Carolien, was actually in Ault, a little village near Eu. Eu itself is a coastal village between Dieppe and Boulogne. We found our B&B quite easy and the house was absolutely magnificent. More French provincial you couldn’t find, with all the white and blue you wanted, with the comfort and elegance so typical of the French. We were shown to our wonderfully big room in the attic. There were 2 more rooms, all opening up to a hexagonal sitting room, and all three rooms had been reserved for our family. My brothers Reinier and his wife Renee, George and Rob were also going to be staying there. We quickly organised ourselves, then went to the Hotel in Eu were we would meet everyone for an informal meal and a rugby match between Ireland and France after. When we arrived, Hanneke, Reinier’s daughter and my very much loved niece, came almost running over the grass to meet us, which made us feel so welcome. It was great to see everyone again and for the rest of the evening we just caught up with everyone, had a really nice relaxed meal and tried not to block any rugby fan’s view of the big screen.
We all went back to our B&B and I was going to show the way. Unfortunately I hadn’t yet found out how well our Tom-tom worked and decided to use my memory. That one didn’t work that well that night, so we got ourselves into trouble on a few occasions, but in the end we got there, stayed up to have a glass of whiskey, courtesy of Reinier (I think....) and another chat, then went to bed.
The next day was the day of the wedding. The weather so far on our holiday had been cold and rainy, but the Gods must have been with Carolien and Stephane, because the weather was beautiful and sunny. The wedding was in the afternoon, so after breakfast that morning we decided to have a walk to the village to get a cup of coffee. This we did and then walked back via a little market where Renee and I each found a little gem among some pretty ordinary accessories, so we were very happy. We then drove to Le Treport, another seaside village almost bordering Eu, where we met up with Hanneke, her brother Maarten and his fiancée Kirsten. We had a nice lunch of mainly fishy ingredients and then it was time to freshen up and get ready for the wedding.
It was a church wedding and my brother in law Chris had his proudest moment when he walked his daughter Carolien to the altar. They were a beautiful sight. Carolien, who always manages to look fantastic and stylish, now had a positively Audrey Hepburn quality about her, her hair was parted on the side, then very tightly taken back and fashioned into a roll. Her dress was elegant and very simple and the whole image was very French, very chic. I felt proud to be her aunty!
After the wedding we hung around town a bit, had a cup of tea somewhere then made our way back to the hotel for pre dinner drinks and canapés followed by the official dinner. The evening was fantastic, some magic speeches, some of them in 3 languages, French, Spanish and Dutch, Stephane’s mother being Spanish. The food was exquisite and afterwards we had some great music starting and we all danced. We called it a night at about 1.30, went home and still managed to have another drink and some nibbles and a quiet chat.
Sunday morning we had brunch at the hotel where most of the guests said their Goodbye’s. Alan and I were staying one more night in our B&B and after the brunch we went back there for a little snooze before going to Le Treport for a nice meal and a little flutter in the casino. We were home quite early, had a good night and left for our trip to Bruges around 9 am on Monday morning.
From the time of our accident we had been in contact with Europe car regarding the best way to solve our dilemma regarding the replacing the wheel and tyre. We tried at various locations to find these, but no one had stock. In the end it was decided we would take a punt and drive to Brussels on our spare tyre, hoping that we wouldn’t get in trouble with another wheel or tyre! In Brussels we would then simply change over the car and have it over and done with. We used the Tom tom this time, which had been patiently explained to us by Reinier and found it to be extremely user friendly and simply invaluable. We arrived in Bruges around midday, had just a few hours to walk around there before continuing our journey to Brussels. Unfortunately it rained quite heavily, but armed with our umbrella we managed quite well. We had a lovely lunch on a heated terrace, then walked around a few beautiful squares and side streets, bought enough Belgian Chocolate to sink the Titanic and admired the beautifully preserved cathedrals, buildings and shops.
Around 3 pm we set off to Brussels and obediently listened to Jane telling us to go left, right or make a U turn. We arrived at the Thon hotel, a simple but adequate business hotel, near the airport around 6 pm, settled in and decided to have a drink and a meal at the hotel itself and have an early night. The next day early morning we needed to be at the airport to pick up Richard, Alan’s son and his wife Lorna and two children Jack (6) and Tom (2) who were going to spend the next 5 days with us.

After we changed over the car at the airport the next morning we waited for Richard and family to arrive. It was great to see them again as they came through arrivals on time. The boys and Tom especially immediately took to us and learnt Carlins name before we left the airport. Alan is "dida" and Carlijn is "lane". We went straight to the car hire desk so that Richard could sign the form as a named driver and without much ado we set off to Antwerp to have a quick look around and have some lunch. We admired the famous Cathedral, walked on the cobblestones, had a little tram-ride and after a few hours set off again to go to the house we hired just over the border in Holland, in Riel, which is a little village between Tilburg, my home town and Poppel, which is just over the border in Belgium. My three brothers and sister and spouses live in both towns, so this was very close. Reinier and Renee had very kindly taken our cases from Eu to allow more space for 6 people and the luggage of the English Contingency and when we arrived in Riel these cases had already been dropped off. The house was really comfortable and modern and we felt immediately at home. Ingrid, the owner, welcomed us and showed us around before leaving. She is an arty sort of a lady with a temperament to match and in the end of our stay, having met with her a few more times, we decided she was not exactly our cup of tea but not before she managed to flog Lorna and myself some of the artwork she either made or sold and had stored in her garage!
After getting organised we drove to my sister’s Monique and her husband Chris’s place in Poppel where we were warmly welcomed and treated to a nice meal. We left pretty early to give everyone a chance to have a nice long night’s sleep.
We took our time on Wednesday. My brother Rob was going to accompany us to a theme park, "The Efteling" and arrive at our place at 11 am. However he was still not there at 11.30. Apparently he didn’t know the house number and had been driving up and down in our street for a while. Anyway he found us and we set off to the Efteling. We all had a ball. There is a fairy park to walk around in and many different and totally amusing attractions and rides. The kids and adults alike had a fantastic time and it was almost 6 before we left again, having had a very satisfying, if wet day.
That evening we simply had some Chinese and I was really very tired and went to bed early. The others talked on for a while.
Thursday we decided with Richard’s prompting to go over the border and drive into Germany. Reinier told us that Köln was a good idea so that’s what we did. We had a nice drive there (Richard did the driving after he commented that my driving (Alan) reminded him of the film “Driving Miss Daisy” Carlijn laughed at that until I reminded her that if I was the driver then she must be Miss Daisy. Again it was raining all the way to Koln, but we still managed to have a good time. Lorna and I explored a few fashion shops, Alan bought some electronics, we had lunch at KFC (yes, really! but it was German KFC) and went into Koln Cathedral. This one was far more stern and dark, compared to the one in Antwerp. We drove back to Riel, did some shopping, added to our left over Chinese with some more dishes and some pizza and were ready to entertain my family, who we had invited, in grand style around 6.30. We had a great evening together, very relaxed and for Alan and me it was very nice to see the two families together.

This post takes us up to Thursday 27th September. The next post will follow shortly as time allows.

Last Weekend

2007-09-10T13:44:00.000+08:00

Well we left last Saturday for our holiday in Europe. First stop was Dubai overnight on Saturday then on Sunday on to Paris. We had a little mix up with flights for the Dubai - Paris leg and that delayed us for a few hours but we finally arrived at 8.30 pm. Carolien met us and we are staying with them for 5 nights. On Friday 21st we drive up to Eu (near Dieppe) for the wedding on Saturday of Carolien & Stefane. Should be a great time. Then on Sunday we have a day in the area to relax and recover from the expected hangover from the wedding. On Monday morning we drive to Brussels via Brugge (quick look around). We stay in Brussels overnight and go to the airport on Tuesday morning to meet my son Richard, Lorna and the boys Jack and Tom. Then all 6 of us drive to holiday house near Tilburg that we have rented where we can relax with R&L and the kids. By the way, we are both writing this so you will have to just figure out who wrote what.

On the following Friday we go to Carlijn's sister and brother in law's house in Poppel in Belgium to stay overnight and on the Saturday we'll do something with both families before we drive back to Brussels to see Richard and family off back to London.

Carlijn and me then stay in Brussels overnight and on Sunday morning we visit Carlijn's sister Myriam who lives in a nunnery in Brussels and in the afternoon we drive back to Tilburg, stay overnight and on Monday morning we visit some of Carlijn's relatives in the area. On Tuesday morning we drive to Soest near Amsterdam to visit friends Eric and Ria. On Wednesday morning we drop the car off at the airport and fly to Prague via Copenhagen (Cheap flights hardly ever go direct!). We have 3 days and nights in Prague for sightseeing. On Saturday we fly to Zurich to stay with friends Erica and husband at Stein Am Rhein. We have 2 nights there before heading to Interlaken on Monday. We have 2 nights in Interlaken before heading back up through France where we will spend a few nights in the Bourgogne district (B&B's) before ending up in Paris on 14th of October. Well that is the plan.

Now, what have we done so far? It is now Thursday 20th September 9.30 am.

On Sunday night as I said before, Carolien picked us up from the airport and once home and had said our hello's to Stefane, we all had a glass of wine and relaxed, watching the rugby. Monday morning we ventured out in the big wide world of Paris and took the bus to The Place de Madeleine in the 8th arrondissement. This is where I (Carlijn) used to live back in 1971 and it was great to be there again. We had vowed that each day we would have coffee and croissants in a "Tabac", a typical french cafe/bar. We found one and set on the pavement watching the world go by. Afterwards we walked a little way to "Rue de la ville L'Eveque" which was the actual street I used to live in and although I didn't quite remember the house no, I now believe it was 11! All those apartmentblocks look alike anyway.

Then we continued to Place de la Concorde, walked over the bridge, then followed the Seine until we we got to the Eiffel Tower and were relieved to see only a small queu. We went all the way up to the third level and that was actually quite scary. I was obviously not the only one who had trouble handling the increasing height, because when we were in the lift I asked Alan anxiously how high the tower was and a few people panicked and told Alan they didn't want to know. Anyway, the view was magnificent, the atmosphere electric, the tower, the most imposing and impressive piece of engeneering I ever have come across. Afterwards we took our first ride in the metro, going to the Champs Elysees for a beer. We made another vow to have at least one pint of beer every day; it tasted that good! Then we went back to the apartment for a rest before going out again to to meet Carolien & Stefan near the Place de la Concorde. Then we took the metro to Neuilly for dinner in a lovely little restaurant. The place had a wine cellar underneath so you could choose your own wine. We went for some robust red and it proved to be a good choice. Fed and watered we went home at about 11 pm.

On Tuesday we went out early to a place that Stefan recomended for breakfast in the area near the Opera. The place was called : Le Pain Quotidien (The daily bread).This was a breakfast with a difference: This is how it works: There are communal tables and you just sit somewhere. On the tables there are groups of different confitures and honey. Then you order your breads and croissants and maybe an egg (only boiled) and some sliced meats and off you go! Thought the idea would go down well in laid back Oz. We thoroughly enjoyed this and then walked our way to Musee Rodin. But on the way we decided we were too cold and I bought a cheap windcheater and Alan a cheap sweater and cosily snuggled up we continued our walk.ued then we walked to the Museum Rodin. I (Alan) have wanted to go to this museum ever since a Rodin collection was displayed at the WA art gallery a few years ago. Fantastic sculptures. The museum was much bigger than I (C)remembered and I also hadn't realised Rodin was also a painter of note. We even saw some paintings from Vincent van Gogh, a gift from the artist to Rodin. We spent considerable time both in the gardens and in the house and it was past 2 pm before we left.

We then took the metro to the famous department stores Le Printemps and Galleries Lafayettes. My (Carlijn) mission was to find some shoes for my outfit for the wedding but we soon found that our budget didn't match their prices so we walked further afield and finally found a nice pair only to discover at home that they were really far too dark, so it was back to square one. After the shopping we had our daily pint in a bar and then took the metro to the 5th arrondissement, or the Latin Quarter and in Rue Mofftard we found a beautiful little restaurant which served "Fondues". I (C) always wanted to have a fondue in Paris and Carolien had told me that they were to be found in Rue Mofftard. I had a beef bourgignon (hot oil) and Alan had a "Raclette" melted cheese with a baked potato and sliced meats. What a feast. We were home quite late again and went to sleep straight away.

On Wednesday (yesterday) we left at 9.30 for breakfast then we caught the train to Versailles. It is a huge and magnificent collection of buildings but somehow has a rather scruffy appearence on the outside. The interiors are maganificent and we made lots of pictures. We walked around for a few hours. We met some really nice people on this trip. Firstly while we were standing on the platform trying to fathom out the train times on the journy to Versailles we asked what we thought were 2 French guys for help. Well, it turned out that they were from Tanzania and so spoke perfect English. We chatted to them for a long time while we waited for the train. They were government people and were here in Paris for a conference. Then later while we were having lunch in the cafeteria we sat next to a couple about our age from the US. They were originally from Jamaica. They live in New Jersey and he works for New York City as an economist. We had a lovely chat with them. After Versailles we took the train to Sacre Coeur and Montmartre. We walked around, sat in the chappel for a while and then walked around the Place Du Tertre where the street artists congregate. We had our portraits done and though the result was not quite as we had hoped it was amusing anyway. After that we had dinner in a small local restaurant and headed home on the Metro arriving after 10.00 again. Carolien had also just come home and we both relaxed in front of the telly watching Desperate Housewives while Alan downloaded that day's pictures onto the computer. More soon!!!

Real Men Go To Tehran

2007-09-10T13:24:00.000+08:00

The Bush administration is set to embark on a final, military adventure that in terms of it's destructiveness will far exceed what has happened in Iraq. In May 2003 a senior Bush official succinctly expressed the administration's conception of world politics, declaring: "Real men don't go to Baghdad, they go to Tehran".

Until recently the unfinished Iraq war appeared to have rendered this option inconceivable. Conventional wisdom assumed that Bush was too discredited and the US military too vulnerable in Iraq to attempt another brave adventure aimed at effectively eliminating another of the "evil empire" members. Last week, however, this consensus was challenged in a chilling 80-page discussion paper considering a war with Iran.

According to the authors, the US military's 'Global Strike' capability makes it possible to "destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours" using conventional weapons and the option of nuclear weaponry, without committing significant numbers of troops.

Though this attack would be supported by Special Forces, it would not require an invasion. Instead, its ultimate aim would be to turn Iran into an 'oil-rich failed state' by destabilising the regime and annihilating its military infrastructure. In itself, this report proves nothing. But there are other indications that the Bush administration may not have exhausted its capacity for mayhem in the Middle East.

There was last month's designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps as a global terrorist organisation, making it easier to use Iranian involvement in terrorist attacks as a pretext for war. Already US and British Special Forces are believed to be operating in southern Iran and last week Bush delivered one of his most bellicose anti-Iranian speeches, warning of "the shadow of a nuclear holocaust" hovering over the Middle East.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, in clear contrast to his "cheese eating, surrender monkey" predecessor has added his voice to the anti-Iranian chorus. The Brown government has distanced itself from military action, but will almost certainly fall into line if a war unfolds.

The countdown may already have begun. Last week Barnett Rubin, an Afghan expert at New York University, was told by one insider that the administration plans to unroll a coordinated PR campaign this month to prepare public opinion for war with Iran.We should be absolutely clear: these are pretexts for a war of aggression aimed at eliminating a regional rival to US and Israeli interests. Such an attack would not only devastate Iran, it would lead to renewed conflict in Lebanon, to intensified attacks on British and American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to more atrocities carried out against British and American civilians, but, if in the end the evil Muslim worldwide advance was halted for a few generations then I believe that the end would certainly justify the means.

THICKO Miss Teen USA 2007 Lauren Caitlin Upton.

2007-08-31T07:36:00.001+08:00

Can you believe this rubbish? Is this the dumbest blond ever?

I personally believe, that you as Americans are unable to do so because some "soommeeh" people out there in our nation don't have maps, and I believe that or ad.. education, like such as South Africa, The Iraq everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should.. our education over here in the US should help the US or should help South Africa it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we can be able to build up our future. or..

Towards An Age Of Abundance

2007-08-25T11:00:00.000+08:00

I was thinking the other day how the lefties and greenies are constantly whining and moaning about development and prosperity. Everything about our modern lives according to them is somehow evil and bad. Well I don't go along with that at all. I say that we should ignore the critics of economic growth who claim that prosperity makes us unhappy. We need to win the war against scarcity once and for all, so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of longer, healthier and wealthier lives.

Imagine an egalitarian world in which all food is organic and local, the air is free of industrial pollution, and vigorous physical exertion is guaranteed. Sound idyllic? But hold on… Life expectancy is 30 at most; many children die at or soon after birth; life is constantly lived on the edge of starvation; there are no doctors or dentists or modern toilets. If it is egalitarian it is because everyone is dirt poor, and there is no industrial pollution because there are no factories. Food is organic because there are no pesticides or high technology farming methods. As a result, producing food means long hours of back-breaking physical work which may end up yielding little.

Well, there is – or at least was – such a place. It is called the past.

And few of us, it seems, recognise the enormous benefits to humanity of escaping from it. On the contrary, there is a pervasive culture of complaint about the perils of affluence and a common tendency to romanticise the simple life. From the 1790s onwards, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the prospect of a world without scarcity seemed like a realistic possibility. Humans strove for a day when they could have a guaranteed food supply at all times.

It should be remembered that the famous clause in Christianity’s Lord’s Prayer – ‘give us this day our daily bread’ – was meant literally. Our ancestors struggled for a world where we could take abundant food, clean water and adequate shelter for granted. Not only have we achieved these goals, at least in the developed world, but modern technology and economic organisation have improved our lives hugely. Yet in the midst of contemporary abundance, there are vocal criticisms.

The gains of modernity are under attack. Cheap food, one of the great achievements of humanity, is frequently derided as a curse rather than a blessing. Our houses are said to be too large. Cars and aeroplanes are seen as both destroying the planet and wrecking communities. Although we travel more than ever before, the local is being exalted at the expense of wider horizons. Of course most people get on with their lives and enjoy the benefits of affluence. They eat plentiful food, travel abroad for their holidays and go to the doctor if they become ill.

But the pervasive cynicism towards popular prosperity still has a negative effect. It makes it harder to enjoy or make the most of what we have got. It is also a barrier against making things better still. In this context, it is important to remember that there are still many billions of people in the world who live in poor countries. And yet the prospect of everyone having access to the best the world has to offer is commonly seen as an environmental nightmare rather than a worthwhile goal.

His Bobness

2007-08-24T13:26:00.000+08:00

Last night we, (me, Carlijn and Phillippa) went to see Bob Dylan at the Burswood Dome. As usual, a great performance from the undisputed greatest poet of the last half century. His repertoire is amazing. After all, Dylan and his polished five-piece band have 32 studio albums to choose from, including last year’s chart-topping Modern Times. He opened up with a very loud rocking version of Rainy Day Woman #12&35,

Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good,
They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would.
They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to go home.
Then they'll stone ya when you're there all alone.
But I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.

Then went straight into “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”, before settling in behind the keyboard for the excellent “The Levee’s Gonna Break” off his latest album.

With a hat straight out of a Clint Eastwood western pulled over his greying curly mop of hair, Dylan then gave us favourites such as “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Tangled Up in Blue”. He came back to do an encore of "Like A Rolling Stone".

Dylan looks these days like a craggy old blues man with the raspy voice to match. Anyway, a great night of great music.

WE ARE BACK - BE SCARED BUT NOT TOO SCARED!!

2007-08-18T11:39:00.000+08:00

In what seems like a return to the good old days, Russia is starting to reinvigorate the old cold war strategy of bomber patrols as well as generally starting to be much more belligerent in it's dealings with the West.

Having lost most of it's empire in Eastern Europe and seen the lost countries already having joined or clammering to join NATO, Russia is feeling the need to make it's considerable presence felt again in world affairs. With huge revenues streaming in from it's vast Oil & Gas resources it has the money to begin rearming and being able to push it's weight around.

Russia, having made the greatest sacrifices and lost more manpower and wealth in WW2 than all other participants combined has always had a fear of being surrounded and trapped. This is the reason primarily for the deeply ingrained and ongoing Russian psyche of paranoia.

During the Cold War, nuclear-armed bombers based in Russia's Kola Peninsula regularly flew patrols that took them close to NATO airspace. NATO jets would be scrambled to intercept. Often the opposing aircrews would wave at each other and the Soviet bombers would return home. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian military activities of this kind dwindled. It was not just the bomber patrols. The Russian navy reined in its operations far from its home ports. But now all this is changing. President Vladimir Putin's announcement of the resumption of bomber patrols seems to have been previewed by recent Russian air force activity.

Last month, two Tupolev 95 aircraft - "Bears" according to their NATO code-name - strayed south from their routine patrol pattern off the Norwegian coast and headed towards Scotland. Two RAF Tornado fighters were sent up to meet them. This month, two similar Russian aircraft flew thousands of miles across the Pacific towards the major US military base of Guam where an air and naval exercise was under way. The Russians have also been making noises about re-establishing a naval presence in the Mediterranean, probably utilising Syrian ports.

Russia and China have also just held highly visible military exercises along with troops from four Central Asian states and President Putin has warned of Russia's need to modernise its nuclear arsenal in the face of the Bush administration's plans to deploy limited anti-missile defences.

So what is going on? Well it is not quite a Cold War mark II. But it is part of a new, more muscular Russian foreign policy; a result of a growing perception in Moscow that Russia's interests have been ignored for too long. Domestic political factors are at play too. It is all about image-building; something that must be set against the enigma of Vladimir Putin's political future once his presidential term expires.

Russia's armed forces are also badly in need of modernisation. The aircraft involved in these long-range patrols, the ageing Tupolevs, date back to the 1950s. As a key element of Russia's nuclear forces they are being modernised with new avionics and improved weaponry. Russia's military is slowly recovering after more than a decade of neglect.

Nonetheless, Russia can project only a shadow of the Soviet Union's military might. That is one good reason why this is not a reprise of the Cold War. And while money from oil and gas will help to pay for new equipment it looks as though Moscow's nuclear forces will continue to receive preferential treatment in terms of funding.

Above all else the resumption of long-range bomber patrols must be seen as largely diplomatic symbolism; part of a new Russian military strategy of heightened visibility. You could add in Russia's recent planting of an underwater flag in the Arctic.

But it is not just show of course. Real issues are involved and the message is simple: Russia wants it to be known that it is back as a player on the international stage.

STOCKMARKET JITTERS & MURDER

2007-08-17T13:14:00.000+08:00

Well, it has been quite a week. The stock market ups and downs (mainly downs) have been very interesting to watch. Some of the ridiculous comments you hear seem to suggest that this is the end of the world as we know it. In fact when you look at the market and what has actually happened you see that in reality nothing has really happened at all. The market today, even after yesterday's sideshow ride, is 80 per cent more valuable than it was in 2003. The 2003-2007 bull market in share prices was, in part, a reflection of a great asset price bubble that has inflated the value of everything from house prices to commodity prices to currencies swollen by the hot air of cheap money.

Alan Greenspan in America slashed interest rates to keep the US afloat after the dotcom crash and shocks such as 9/11. There were similar moves across the world.

Cash became cheap, borrowing became as easy as signing your name and spending became an addiction. That debt-fuelled addiction to spending has been the same among consumers, investors and governments.

Whether you've been buying cars, plasma TV's, companies, or commodities we've spent too much on credit and lots of people now can't repay. Some of the newer investors in stocks as well as property have never known downs, only ups and they get quite offended when the markets dip and their property values take a little tumble. Us older players have seen all of this many times before and know that we will look back in a few years and will hardly remember what happened. In 7-10 years when stock prices and property values will be at least twice what they are now many people will be just as shocked again when the market takes a little correction. These cycles come and go and the trick is not to panic and sit back and watch.

And we have had some real excitement in West Perth. The body has been found buried in Kings Park of a missing woman. She went missing last week and there was a search for her Ford car that was also missing. Anyway, a resident living in a quiet side street in Subiaco called the police yesterday about a car that had been abandoned outside his house. The police investigated and it is indeed the missing car but there was no indication concerning the whereabouts of the woman. Then, an amazing piece of luck, it seems that there is an oil trail leading from the car all the way back into Kings Park. The trail ends at a disturbed piece of ground off the track in the bush area of the park. A little bit of digging reveals the body of the missing woman. It seems that the car was used to transport the body into the park by, presumably, the murderer. But in his haste to leave the scene he drives over one of the low bollards that are there to restrict access to the bush by vehicles. The bollard rips a hole in the transmission of the car and the oil leaks out leaving a lovely trail for the police to follow all the way back to the burial location. With clues like this, this case has all of the hallmarks of a nice Miss Marples type murder mystery. We will see what developes over the next few days.

What this sort of behaviour will do to West Perth property prices I can hardly imagine. Carlijn and I tend to treat Kings Park as our own personal garden and we do not like this sort of thing at all.

Work, Fun, Food

2007-08-06T11:39:00.000+08:00

Last week was particularly busy. I have become quite busy at work over the last few weeks primarily because we have picked up quite a lot of work from several clients recently and the job of coordination and recruitment of new people to handle this extra workload is creating a lot of work for me. As you would know, I work in engineering and have settled into a very relaxed work routine over the 18 months or so since my heart attack of arriving in the office between 9.30 and 10 in the morning and invariably getting away in the afternoons between 2.30 and 3.00. While this has suited me very well I have wished recently as I have recovered and got a lot stronger that I was busier now that I am able to cope with longer hours.

Well as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. We have just been awarded some really substantial projects. The first is 2-3 years work on the Woodside oil assets both onshore and offshore. This work is worth probably 20 to 25 $million to my company over the next 2-3 years. Primarily this will be maintenance and refurbishment/modification work and will involve all aspects of the engineering design of piping systems, structural work and electrical/instrumentation work. My job is basically to manage and coordinate that work as well as be the contact for the regular reporting and review meetings with our client.

To be able to do this work we have identified that we will need 20 - 25 additional people (engineers and designer drafters) and so I am and will be very busy interviewing potential new contractors for this work. In the extremely tight labour market in WA at the moment, recruiting people isn't easy but we firstly try to entice people we have employed in the past or that are recommended by people we know and trust. We "employ" contractors in this industry as do virtually all of our competitors because that way we can pay them more, we can be very flexible with contracts and we are not responsible for their tax, holiday, sick pay or other entitlements in the way that normal employers are. We have also taken a lease on some new office space (in an old building) in King Street in Perth.

In addition to that work one of our directors came back from Singapore last week with another new job comprising the design of a large area of the topsides of a FPSO (floating production storage offloading) vessel. This floating moored vessel collects the oil from several subsea well heads and after initial processing such as water separation etc. stores the oil in the hull ready for periodic offloading to oil tankers that take the oil to refineries. This project will generate another 2-3 $million in revenue for the company. As we never turn work away, we will have to juggle resources and squeeze this job in as well so I think that the next few years should be very interesting from a work point of view.

And so, back to the weekend. It really started on Thursday evening with dinner at a restaurant in Belmont with friends Ron and Dymphy. They are always good and amusing company. Very plain but reasonable food, nothing to write home about.

Then on Friday we decided to go out after work to our usual pub the "Belgian Beer Pub" on the corner of King and Murray streets in Perth. A few drinks in there is always nice on Friday as it is full of the after-work crowd and the atmosphere is good. Then we walked around the corner to Nine Mary's Restaurant on the corner of Milligan and Hay streets. This is a very modern Indian restaurant that we have been to several times before. I usually go for the lamb vindaloo and usually regret it as it so hot sometimes that it is a struggle to eat it. But this time it was not too bad or rather maybe my taste buds have been desensitized enough to enjoy it. Carlijn had Tandoorie chicken and what with several side dishes the meal was excellent. We were back home by 9.30.

Up early on Saturday and as the weather was forecast to be nice for the weekend we went to the carwash first thing to clean away the last months grime and muck away that was deposited on our cars by the horrible rainy weather that we have had. We then went straight to Miss Mauds for breakfast. The usual sausage, eggs and toast with orange juice and coffee sets us up for the day. After lunch we went to Subi to get the normal weeks food shopping at Woolies. I was planning to cook dinner on Saturday night so I bought a nice beef joint. I started preparations at 3.30 and as well as the beef had carrots, potatoes, pumpkin, onions and Yorkshire puddings. This was my first attempt at cooking a full roast dinner. The reason for this was that I woke up one night last week at 2.00 or so and watched a cooking show on TV. They were doing Yorkshire puddings and they looked so good that I decided to try cooking some. But I thought that it would be a good idea to do a full roast dinner. The meal was ready at 6.00 and Carlijn bought over the starter course and deserts. The Yorkshires turned out well but I will leave them for another few minutes next time as the bottoms could have done with some more cooking. But as a first effort they were acceptable I think. After dinner we watched "The Fugitive" on TV and half way through Carlijn made the waffles for dessert.

We were up earlyish on Sunday and drove with the top down to Mounts Bay Road and parked by the river and then walked back to the Old Swan Brewery cafe for breakfast. Had fresh fruit, orange juice and coffee. Then we spent a few hours on the computer searching for accommodation etc. and then on Google Earth to measure distances to help us put the final touches to the itinerary for our trip to Europe later this year. Talking about Google Earth, if you haven't already, you must try the new "directions" feature. It is amazing. You enter your start point and your destination and then you have a fly-by view of the whole trip. You have a full list of directions that you can print and you watch the movie. It works for trips of a few metres or thousands of kilometres. Try it. We still have to book some accommodation and cars but the timetable is more or less fixed now.

After lunch we went to the WA Art Gallery to see the current exhibition of Egyptian art and artifacts on loan from the Louvre in Paris. There are some beautiful objects on show and everything is dated between 500-2000 BCE. Now, you may ask, what is BCE? I had not come across this before and so turned to Wikipedia. The explanation is as I thought, more PC nonsense. Wikipedia says that it means "before the common era" and is a replacement for BC "before Christ". Wikipedia puts forward arguments for the change such as "Many scholars and editors working today in the multicultural discipline of world history use terminology that does not impose the standards of one culture on others," the Scientific community typically "uses the terms BCE (before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era)." and "Forcing a Hindu, for example, to use AD and BC might be seen by some as coercing them to acknowledge the supremacy of the Christian God and of Jesus Christ." Now you know my views on religion but whatever we believe about religion the fact is that our calender and so many other bedrocks of western civilization are based on Christianity and meddling with this system to appease our Muslim mates is just not on in my opinion. And that is exactly what this is. Maybe we think that by changing all of these highly offensive references to our Christian and western civilization will deter them from bombing and killing us. Well, forget it.

Wikepedia also to be fair puts forward some opposing views as well: The implication that Christ's nativity constitutes a "common" heritage of humanity regardless of religion, is arguably more offensive to non-Christians than the honest admission that a Christian calender system is being used. (Cf. English-language citations using the Muslim calendar and other calendars.) and "If we do end by casting aside the A.D./B.C. convention, almost certainly some will argue that we ought to cast aside as well the conventional numbering system itself, given its Christian basis." and It is inconsistent to remove this "religious" reference from our nomenclature and not remove other religiously derived words such as the days of the week and months of the year which are named after various pagan deities: January = Janus' month, Thursday = Thor's day, etc. But in spite of this nonsense, the exhibition is very informative and interesting. Well worth the $20 entry fee.

I had an earlyish night last night but woke up at 2.00 and decided to watch the Community Shield English football - Chelsea/Manchester United, the game was played earlier in the evening and I had recorded it. It was nice to watch a football game again after the summer break. It's all on again this Saturday with the start of the English Premier League season. So the weekends will be even better for the next 9 months with loads of football to watch.

Tonight we are going to a meeting that is put on periodically by Perth city council to inform ratepayers and interested parties of the developments that are planned for the city. We try to go to the meetings concerning West Perth because as we have several properties in the area it is interesting to see where the planned developments are going to be and what effect they will have on property values.

Why Intellectuals Like Genocide

2007-07-28T07:44:00.000+08:00

Seemingly obscure historical disputes can often cast a powerful light on the state of our collective soul. In 2002, the Australian free-lance historian and journalist, Keith Windschuttle, published a book that created a controversy that has still not died down. Entitled ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,’ it sets out to destroy the idea that there had been a genocide of Tasmanian aborigines carried out by the early European settlers of the island.

For about the previous quarter century, it was more or less an historical orthodoxy that there had been such a genocide. Robert Hughes accepted the idea in his best-selling history of early Australia, The Fatal Shore.

Windschuttle argued in his book that they had fabricated much of their evidence, and that, contrary to what they claimed, there had been no deliberate policy on the part of the colonial authorities or the local population to exterminate very large numbers of aborigines. He showed that the historians’ reading of the obscure source materials was either misleading or mendacious. He sifted the material very carefully and found that there was evidence for the killing of 120 Tasmanian aborigines, either by settlers or by the military and police.

However, a similar number of settlers were killed by aborigines, and perhaps it is not so very surprising that there was conflict between people of such widely different conceptions of life as the aborigines and the early British settlers. But conflict is not genocide, which entails a plan deliberately to rid the world of a certain population. There was no genocide in Tasmania. The Tasmanian aborigines did indeed die out in the nineteenth century, but largely of disease and as a result of the loss of fertility caused by the venereal disease introduced by the settlers.

I think the explanation lies elsewhere. Australia is known, not without reason, as the Lucky Country. It has virtually every resource known to man. It is a liberal democracy and has been for most of its existence. No one in Australia has ever feared the midnight knock on the door. To live well here requires a good deal less effort than in most places, perhaps anywhere else. The climate in much of the country (the current drought notwithstanding) is very pleasant. Overall, it is probably the best place, certainly among the best places, on earth to live. The fact that it is lucky is not, of course, a consequence of its natural endowments alone, but of what human beings have made of those endowments. Australia is a triumphant success.

This is not to say that everyone in Australia is deliciously happy, or that Australia is a modern day Garden of Eden. People who live here, like people everywhere, have their problems. They go bankrupt, divorce, neglect their children, have accidents, die prematurely, kill themselves, overeat, drink too much, get bored, suffer illnesses, and so forth, just like people everywhere else. Australia confronts human beings with their existential responsibility to make happiness for themselves, and this is sometimes a hard responsibility to face up to. For if you are unhappy in a country like Australia, you have to consider the possibility that the problem lies with you rather than with the conditions that surround you.

This is a disagreeable thing, particularly for an intelligentsia, which is deprived by it of a providential role for itself. What does an intelligentsia do when a country is already as satisfactory in its political arrangements and social institutions as any country has ever been? Intelligentsias do not like the kind of small problems that day to day existence inevitably throws up, such as termites in the woodwork or conflict at work over desk-space: they like to get their intellectual teeth into weightier, meatier problems.

Where there has been genocide, it is only right that there should be apology and, more importantly, reparation. In the case of the aborigines, this can only be restoration of the land to them as a collectivity. And that, my friends is what is at the heart of the debate. We want an apology which must also come with millions of dollars in compensation and we want it now. The scary thing is that the ALP still has enough of this nonsense baggage hanging around it's necks that they may if they got back into government still be tempted to take us all down the "sorry" road again. That is why saying "It didn't happen" is so upsetting to the intelligentsia in Australia. They have had one of their favourite toys taken away.

My 62nd Birthday - Spoilt Again

2007-07-22T20:33:00.000+08:00

Saturday was my 62nd birthday. Was I spoilt? I couldn't have been spoilt more. Miss Carlijn excelled herself. She had some lovely presents for me on Saturday morning at breakfast. Then we did our usual Saturday chores of shopping and washing etc. In the evening we went out to a fabulous restaurant in The new Richardson hotel in West Perth called Opus at The Richardson, it is billed as Perth’s most glamorous dining experience. Every single detail in this wonderful restaurant is given the greatest care. The refined atmosphere, the attentive yet unobtrusive service and superb cuisine do make a memorable dining experience. The interior design has produced a feeling of “modern old-fashioned” elegance which pervades throughout the restaurant, achieved by a combination of sophisticated original ideas. The restaurant boasts its own Wine Annex; the raised semi-private section of the restaurant displays a library of fine wines against a natural stone backdrop and that is where we sat. We started with cocktails in the bar. A very nice evening. Thank you Miss Carlijn.

On Sunday morning we met Phillippa and her friend for breakfast at a nice beachside cafe in Scarborough. Philly gave me a very nice present and card and we enjoyed a lovely breakfast together. Philly informed us that she and her friend will be moving away from Perth in a couple of months to relocate to the Gold Coast in Queensland. That is something that we have been expecting but she is 27 now and as we all do, needs to spread her wings and see something of the world outside Perth. We will miss her obviously but as long as we have regular updates and phone, email and photo contact she goes with our blessing. Carlijn has quite a bond with Philly as well and will also miss their lunchtime meetings. The pictures above were taken at the restaurant on Saturday and I thought that the one of Carlijn is particularly good, she is a very photogenic lady.

I have been putting a few pictures on to my FlickR site recently so have a look now and then. http://www.flickr.com/photos/perthside/

Fear Of A Global 'Coldening'

2007-07-14T16:32:00.000+08:00

The great Global Warming, sorry Coldening debate progresses on its merry way, it was reported in the Australian press last week that last month Australians endured their coldest June since 1950. Imagine that; all those trillions of tonnes of evil carbon we've pushed up into the atmosphere over six decades of rampant industrialisation, and we're still getting the same icy weather we got during the Cold War.

Not that June should be presented as evidence that global warming isn't happening, or that we're causing it. Relying on such a tiny sample would be unscientific and wrong, even if it involves an entire continent's weather patterns throughout the course of a whole month, or would it be wrong?

Sadly, the high priests of the great and booming global warming religion - and who would compel us also to believe - aren't similarly constrained. By the way, are we very close yet to getting the true believers of the GW religion creeping up to our front doors as the JW's & Mormons do (or used to before whole households had to go out to work every day to make ends meet) with piles of GW religion literature ready to hand out whether we want it or not? A few warmish days are all they ever need to get the global warming bandwagon rolling; evidently it's solar powered. Here, for example, is an Australian Associated Press report on May's weather, which in places was a little warmer than usual:

"Climate change gave much of Australia's drought-stricken east coast its warmest May on record, weather experts say.

"Global warming and an absence of significant cold changes had driven temperatures well above the monthly average, said meteorologist Matt Pearce.

According to Mr Pearce, May's temperatures were "yet another sign of the widespread climate change that we are seeing unfold across the globe."

If that's the case, shouldn't June's cold weather - coldest since 1950, remember - be a sign that widespread climate change isn't unfolding across the globe? We're using the same data here; one month's weather. And, in fact, the June sample is Australia-wide while May only highlights the east coast. Fear the dawn of a great "coldening"!

Perhaps we should be anticipating the phantom British summer forecast by The Independent's environment editor, Michael McCarthy, in April:

"The possibility is growing that Britain in 2007 may experience a summer of unheard-of high temperatures, with the thermometer even reaching 40C, or 104F, a level never recorded in history.

"This would be quite outside all historical experience, but entirely consistent with predictions of climate change."

As Wimbledon watchers would be aware, what with the rainiest tournament since Jimmy Connors defeated John McEnroe in 1982, those unheard-of high temperatures remain unheard-of. Someone might conclude, therefore, that the not-hot summer is not entirely consistent with predictions of climate change.

But climate change is like Michael Moore's tracksuit - it can fit anyone. In 2005, Greenpeace rep Steven Guilbeault helpfully explained: "Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with."

What we're dealing with, apparently, is weather.

What will the weather be like 100 years from now? Don't ask. Read the door stop literature.

The Great GW Religion - All Hot Air If You Ask Me

2007-07-13T12:19:00.000+08:00

Well, we watched the great Global Warming Debate last night and I think that I am now even more convinced that the problem (if there is one) is not caused by mankind but is a purely cyclical progression from the beginning of time. Watching the idiot scientists earnestly pushing their arguments was really fascinating. They have the audacity to believe that mankind has become so powerful that we now have the know-how to dictate and control the weather patterns and that the sun, which has been warming the planet for billions of years cannot possibly be playing a part.

The smug woman on the discussion panel, Dr Nikki Williams, Chief Executive Officer of the NSW Minerals Council, and a director of the Australian Coal Association believes that climate change is a very real threat to our planet, based on the overwhelming scientific evidence (she says) that burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming - she however stated that the coal industry is dedicated to finding solutions. What she didn't say is that the solutions that she is dedicated to finding are funded primarily by us, the taxpayers and if you were an organisation having upwards of $2bn of public money thrown at you then yes, you really would have an incentive to find solutions that will ultimately make your industry more profitable by having others fund your research.

Then on the other side of the debate was Ray Evans, Secretary of The Lavoisier Group, an organisation that is concerned that Australia's economy would suffer if we adopted a 'superstitious belief' in man-made climate control. Apart from his very annoying cough, I thought that he made some very strong and well thought out arguments against the GW religion.

It was pointed out in the documentary that temperatures have fluctuated about 15 degrees over the last 800,000 years and all sorts of flora and fauna adapted. We were 4 – 5 degrees hotter, on average, 130,000 years ago.

Meanwhile the Left says nothing about the 800 new coal fired power plants that will be built by India and China and that will be completed and opened at an average rate of 2 per week for the next 10 years or so. Surely they alone will far and away overwhelm any efforts to reduce emissions made by the rest of the world in that time. In this year, to August, China alone will commission 2 new plants per week (the equivalent of Australia’s total output) yet the hot-heads want to destroy our economy, our jobs and our lifestyles in the course of promoting something that probably isn’t even true.

Also, would somebody please tell me why the average tides are NOT rising although the arctic circle has melted to such an ‘alarming’ extent!

So, at the end of the day, where do I stand?

1) I really don't believe that humans are the primary cause of climate change. I still remember being told in the 70's that we were heading for another ice age.

2) I believe that global warming has attracted too much attention when compared with more pressing issues and is turning into a religion and vast worldwide business that will be self perpetuating.

Climate Documentary - The other Side Of The Story

2007-07-12T13:08:00.000+08:00

The director of a controversial documentary about global warming airing on ABC television tonight says he's been vilified for challenging popular theory. The documentary, made and broadcast earlier this year by the UK TV staion Channel 4 has certainly raised a few hackles amongst our greenie lefty anti-industry friends.

Briton Martin Durkin directed The Great Global Warming Swindle, which seeks to debunk the idea that climate change is being caused by human activity.

Climate scientists and minor political parties in Australia have criticised the national broadcaster for screening what ABC journalist Tony Jones says is a "deeply flawed" program.

Mr Durkin today accused his opponents of prejudice and denied that an overwhelming majority of scientists believed mankind's greenhouse gas emissions caused global warming.

"Doing this film has really opened my eyes about how sinister the whole affair is," he told Southern Cross Broadcasting.

"I can understand now why so few scientists are prepared to really stick their neck out and take this issue on because you're lambasted if you dare to. To suggest that this theory isn't true is an absolute taboo." Mr Durkin said support among scientists for the theory fell well short of the claimed consensus. He referred to the Oregon Petition which opposes the Kyoto Protocol, saying it had more than 17,000 scientist signatories. "The trouble is it's a dodgy theory combined with a very big fashionable prejudice which is the kind of anti-industry kick that so many left and middle class people seem to be into these days."

The British director said there was no evidence to support the theory that carbon dioxide had affected the planet's climate in the past.

"The climate has been changing throughout all of Earth's history all of the time. "The recent warming we've had represents a recovery from a particularly cold period in Earth's recent climate history.'' Mr Durkin said the planet was in another interglacial period between ice ages and one of the coldest such periods.

"The idea that there's a normal temperature on earth is simply ridiculous."

The documentary first attracted controversy when it aired on Britain's Channel 4 earlier this year.

An edited version screens on ABC TV at 8.30pm (AEST) tonight, followed by a taped interview with Mr Durkin and a studio debate involving opponents and supporters of the film.

"I hope (Australians) watch. Even if they end up disagreeing, I don't mind at all if they give the argument a fair run," he said.

It's All About Freedom Of Speech....When It Suits Them

2007-07-09T10:42:00.000+08:00

Well, what do we have here?

Looks like a small case of some people being able to dish it out, but not take it. Let's start at the top.The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman. Wichman sent an e-mail to The Muslim Student's Association. The e-mail was in response to the students' protest of the Danish Cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were "hate speech" and that they were very offended.

Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following:

Dear Moslem Association:

As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I would like to Protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more Mundane and ordinary things, things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on Public buildings, suicide murders in London, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey ), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia Law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called "whores" in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France. I know that these are minor things and obviously nowhere near as important or offensive as a few cartoons but that is the way that we feel about things here in the West.

Your infantile "protests" leave me cold. If you do not like the values of the West - see the 1st Amendment - You are free to leave. I hope for God's sake that most of you choose that option. Please return to your glorious ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans and the rest of the civilized world.

Cordially,

I. S. Wichman
Professor of Mechanical Engineering

As you can imagine, the Muslim group at the university didn't like this too well. They're demanding that Wichman be reprimanded and that he receive mandatory diversity training for faculty and a seminar on hate and discrimination for freshman.

Now the chapter of CAIR has jumped into thefray. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently doesn't believe that the good professor had the right to express his opinion.

Is This War Actually Lost But We Don't Know It Yet?

2007-07-05T16:16:00.000+08:00

The thwarted and bungled terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow show us just how poorly we are doing in the war on terror.

The startling fact about these attacks is that six years after 9/11, after all the relentless efforts every moderate has allegedly made to condemn extremism and violence, the hate-filled and murderous ideology of al-Qa’ida is able to recruit even doctors to its cause.

Britain was lucky that the detonators did not go off in the London cars. This has allowed commentators to adopt an almost mocking tone about the amateurism of the terrorists. The armchair critics, ever ready to accuse Western governments of overreacting, have slipped into their customary voice of supercilious condescension.

But had the detonators gone off, and hundreds of young British men and women been killed in the nightclubs targeted, the talk today would be of how sophisticated the plot was. The line between amateurism and sophistication is very narrow.

But the real point is something different. This is a sublimely fluid and adaptable movement. In Iraq and Lebanon it is sponsored by a state, Iran. In Saudi Arabia it is entirely home grown. As it is in Indonesia, the southern Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan, now terror central.

In the West it can draw in home-grown young men of Islamic background whose ethnic make-up provides some confusion of identity, as with the London Tube bombers. But it can recruit Westerners of Anglo-Saxon background, such as Jack Roche or David Hicks in Australia or the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid in the UK. Or, apparently, it can draw in highly educated Muslim professionals from Muslim countries, such as the doctors allegedly at the centre of the British plot, or Mohammed Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers.

How can it do this? The answer is obvious and utterly resisted by most commentators. The terrorist movement represents a powerful, coherent ideology with an appeal to millions of people across the world. As the Arab encounter with modernisation has proved such a complete and utterly dismal failure, the only ideology left standing in the Arab world is Islamism of one kind or another. Is it so astonishing that the London doctors wanted to attack a nightclub on ladies’ night? Is this really the result of Iraq?

Understanding that the enemy is an ideology, not a sociological dysfunction, is central to beating it. You beat an ideology with military force where necessary, relentless police work, cogent argument and good education. The question, though, is whether the liberal state really has the ability to answer the challenges al-Qa’ida and similar ideological movements pose.

The British security authorities are at absolute maximum effort. They are flat out all the time. Yet they apparently did not know these bombers at all. It seems that it is harder, after all, to learn bomb-making on the Internet than at a training camp, for which much thanks. But do we really think that this adaptable, clever movement will be stopped permanently by this inconvenience?

Might not the next group of doctors recruited to the al-Qa’ida cause decide they can do more by attacking a water supply, blowing up a hospital or using biological agents? There is another particular problem that liberal societies face in responding to the terrorist movements.

There is a large overlap between the Muslim Brotherhood-Sayyid Qutb-al-Qa’ida world view and the world view of Wahhabi and other extreme but non-violent Islamic movements. Wahhabism is the literalistic, fundamentalist style of Sunni Islam favoured in Saudi Arabia.

Australia’s national security establishment knows and admits that it has no idea how much Saudi money there is sloshing around Australia. It is not illegal to be a Wahhabi Muslim. Al-Qa’ida upholds a paranoid and apocalyptic world view, according to which Crusaders and Zionists have been conspiring for centuries to destroy Islam. And this world view turns out to be widely accepted in many places.

Wahhabism, while many of its adherents reject al-Qa’ida’s violence, embodies the same paranoia and apocalyptic world view. So does the extreme Islamism of Iran. Anyone who has read the speeches of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can readily identify the “paranoid and apocalyptic world view”.

It is believed that 2000 to 3000 young Muslims in Sydney alone stand on the brink of radicalisation, or acting on their extremist teachings”. Here is another dilemma. In 2005-06 Australia took 6500 immigrants from the Middle East, 5000 from North Africa, 2000 from Pakistan and Bangladesh, 2700 from Central Asia and 10,000 from sub-Saharan Africa, about half from mainly Muslim countries. That means probably 20,000 Muslims.

The official line is that they are all absolutely welcome if they want to live according to the basic compacts of Western liberal societies. But statistically it’s likely that, say, 10 per cent will be attracted to Wahhabi-style Islam or Iranian clericalism, or some other version of extremism. That doesn’t make them terrorists but it does mean that given the right circumstances, it is a short step to active support of al-Qa’ida style activities. So, the official line has to change, the truth is that most people would ban any more Muslim immigration tomorrow and closely examine and asses whether the ones already here are likely to turn into extremists if allowed to stay. Alarmist I know but does anyone else have a better solution?

How does a liberal society reconcile the contradiction between its liberalism and its national security? The answer to that question will I believe define the answer to how long the existence and freedoms that the west has enjoyed for generations can continue

I also believe that here in Australia we are drifting into a situation like the UK, in which our security agencies simply cannot cope. And all the while the capabilities of terrorists are growing.

Be afraid, very afraid.

'Those Who Cure Will Kill You'

2007-07-04T11:13:00.000+08:00

Another interesting development has come to light concerning the recent UK terrorist attacks. Apparently, an al-Qa'ida leader in Iraq boasted before last week's failed bombings in London and Glasgow that his group was planning to attack British targets and that "those who cure you will kill you". Well! that is a pretty clear statement isn't it? How can any of the thousands of foreign, mainly Arab, Indian and Paki doctors working in the UK Hospital system now be trusted? Would you trust them?

The Times of London reports the warning was delivered to Canon Andrew White, a senior British cleric working in Baghdad, and could be highly significant as the eight Muslims arrested in the wake of the failed plot are all members of the medical profession.

Canon White told The Times that he had passed the general warning, but not the specific words, to a senior official at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in mid-April. A Foreign Office spokesman said last night that it was forwarding the actual words to the Metropolitan Police.

The Times also learnt yesterday that one of the suspects, the Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdulla, had links to radical Islamic groups, and that several of the eight suspects have now been linked to known extremist radicals listed on MI5’s data base.

Canon White, who runs Baghdad’s only Anglican parish, said that he met the al-Qaeda leader on the fringes of a meeting about religious reconciliation held in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

“He talked to me about how they were going to destroy British and Americans. He told me that the plans were already made and they would soon be destroying the British. He said the people who cure you would kill you.”

The man, who was in his forties and had travelled from Syria for the meeting, said that the plans would come to fruition in the next few weeks and target the British first. He said that the British and Americans were being targeted because of their actions in Iraq.

He did not learn the man’s identity until after the meeting, and will not disclose it now, but said: “I met the Devil that day.”

Airport Worker 'A Hero For Our Time'

2007-07-03T21:51:00.000+08:00

Further to my last post about the inept Glasgow bombers there is now a website up and running in recognition of John Smeaton the hero of the Glasgow action. They are calling him "The one man anti-terrorism unit"

The link is:

http://www.johnsmeaton.com/

Quotes:

"That’s right Osama, this is how we do things in Raintown. This ain’t London. There’s no stiff English upper lip here, no WAGs. And it sure ain’t Edinburgh - they’d all be hiding in Harvey Nicks and hysterically babbling about their Tuscan villas. There’s no ‘Big J’ in Edinburgh airport, there’s no ‘Smeato’ at Heathrow. Here we take the law into our own hands". And feet.

"This man shows us that the law-abiding, honest, brave citizen is still very much with us. Here’s to his heroism, his straightforward belief in right and wrong, his support for Law and Order, and his willingness to give a good kicking to someone richly deserving it".

"When the camera cut back to the studio, you could see them blinking and wondering just what language it was they had just heard".

After the incident Mr Smeaton, of Renfrewshire, said he had to act when he saw one of the two men apparently fighting with a police officer.
He added: "I thought, 'You’re not hitting the police mate, there’s no chance’. Other members of the public did the exact same thing as me.
"We all ran towards him, we all tried to get a kick in and get a boot in at him, and just try to subdue the guy. All that was going through my mind was I’ve got to help the policeman, I’m not letting these guys get away with this.
"It’s your work, it’s your duty to make sure stuff like this doesn’t happen. It’s your civic duty."

The website said: "Here’s to John. This man shows us that the law-abiding, honest, brave citizen is still very much with us.

"Here’s to his heroism, his straightforward belief in right and wrong, his support for law and order."

What Did She Say??

2007-07-03T10:20:00.000+08:00

Fortunately the (Doctor) car bombers in the UK have not been very successful with their bombs. Does this indicate how low a level of intelligence is required to get a doctors degree from Iraq or Pakistan or wherever they came from is? These are some of the people who are working in many British and I am sure some Australian hospitals too. In fact it is reported just this morning that a Paki or Iraqi doctor has been arrested at Brisbane airport in connection with the bombings.

On another note: A British TV news crew were interviewing people outside the airport terminal in Glasgow immediately after the car had tried to enter the terminal. I know that this is Glasgow and this is where they invented the "Glasgow Kiss" (a particularly vicious head butt), but you do have to admire the fighting spirit of the Scots. How many other people would run over to restrain a burning man surrounded by pools of burning petrol and in his words "deck" him before he could cause any more havoc? The man actually said "He wis running aboot on fire, so a ran up n gave him a good boot, then decked him" then he added "he swaggered by the motor that wis on fire, and the dafty couldnae even open his boot, he wis in fire annaw so a ran up n gave him a good boot to the baws" Unfortunately that was about the extent of the eyewitness statements that I could decipher.

Glasgow English is almost impossible to understand by outsiders. One woman carrying a baby was explaining I think how close she was to the action but I honestly only managed to understand every second or third word and wasn't even sure about some of them. It didn't help either that she had a couple of those huge decorative pins through her lips and cheeks that she was constantly sucking and pushing around with her tongue. I think that she said : "There wis a bang, yi know when yi throw BO basher intae a fire it wis like that"

What ever BO basher is I don't know. Probably a local delicacy.

By contrast on CNN they interviewed an American eyewitness who said : "We thought he was gonna blow us all up, he had a gas canister, and was trying to get into his trunk, I thought we were gonna die, I just ran for my life" Another said: "Oh my God! There was a man on fire, he was running about, I just ran for my life. I thought I was gonna die, he got so close to me, I just wanna get home, away from here. I just wanna get home, I thought I was gonna die" Bunch of softies, you don't run for your life in Glasgow, not if you don't want to be called a sissy and beaten up.

And finally, two quotes from an eye-witness.........John Smeaton.

John just surpassed himself on the National ITV news . The interviewer asked "What message do you have for the bombers" - he replied "This is Glasgow, we'll just set about you"

John then did an interview on CNN and they asked how he restrained the guy and he said "me and a bunch of other folk were just tryin to get the boot in and some other guy banjoed him"!

He sounded quite disappointed that his services weren't required anymore. There was probably not much restraining that the police needed to do after that.

The moral of the story? If you are going to set off bombs in Glasgow, make sure that they work because the locals have a reputation for fighting and generally causing havoc way beyond anything your puny little bombs can cause.

"Today I Say: Rejoice, By Allah, London Shall Be Bombed."

2007-06-30T21:03:00.000+08:00

"Was London Bomb Plot Heralded On Web?"

Hours before London explosives experts dismantled a large car bomb in the heart of London's theater district, a message appeared on one of the most widely used jihadist Internet forums, saying: "Today I say: Rejoice, by Allah, London shall be bombed." CBS News found the posting, which went on for nearly 300 words, on the "al Hesbah" chat room. It was left by a person who goes by the name abu Osama al-Hazeen, who appears regularly on the forum. The comment was posted on the forum, according to time stamp, at 08:09 a.m. British time on June 28 -- about 17 hours before the bomb was found early on June 29.

Al Hesbah is frequently used by international Sunni militant groups, including al Qaeda and the Taliban, to post propaganda videos and messages in their fight against the West. There was no way for CBS News to independently confirm any connection between the posting made on Thursday night and the car bomb found on Friday.

Al-Hazeen's message begins: "In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful. Is Britain Longing for al Qaeda's bombings?" No.

Al-Hazeen decries the recent knighthood of controversial author Salman Rushdie as a blow felt by all British Muslims. "This 'honoring' came at a crucial time, a time when the whole nation is reeling from the crusaders attacks on all Muslim lands," he said, in an apparent reference to the British role in Iraq. "We say to Britain: The Emir of al Qaeda, Sheikh Osama, has once threatened you, and he carried out his threats. Today I say: Rejoice, by Allah, London shall be bombed," the message reads. Speaking at a news conference Friday after the bomb scare in central London, the Metropolitan Police force's Counter-Terrorism Commander Peter Clarke said that officials had "no indication that we were going to be attacked this way".

Prior to the Thursday night posting by al-Hazeen, there had been no specific allusions to threats against London or Britain seen on al Hesbah, or any other major jihadist forums in recent weeks. Several responses to the posting by other forum members expressed hope that an attack against London would be realized in the near future. In response, al-Hazeen urges patience, saying, "Victory is very close, but you are just rushing it."

He's Gone

2007-06-28T13:23:00.000+08:00

The official Court Circular from Buckingham Palace recorded the events.

It read: "The Rt Hon Tony Blair MP had an audience of The Queen this afternoon and tendered his resignation as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury which Her Majesty was graciously pleased to accept. Mrs Blair was also received by The Queen."

So, that is it, the man who has dominated British Politics for 10 years is gone. He is replaced by the dour Gordon Brown. The changing of the guard in Britain is certainly preferable to the farcical circus that happens in the United States every 4 or 8 years. A certain dignity I think. And how will Mr Blair's term be recorded and remembered in historical terms? I think that he will be remembered rather positively and that history will decide that his decision to embark on the war in partnership with the United States in Iraq will come to be seen as rather a brave decision and as one of the major turning points in the West's fight back against the Muslim and Arab hordes who have no other aim than the complete annihilation of western democracy.

Domestically, I think that Britain is in better shape than could have been foreseen 10 years ago. Internationally, Britain has certainly regained a dominance in Europe and an international standing that is certainly a vast improvement over the way things have been more or less since the end of WW2. Whether this is entirely due to Mr Blair is another point for discussion. Mrs Thatcher began the transformation and did set some of the important ground breaking policies into place for Mr. Blair to build on. But, to sum up, I would mark his end of term report card 8 out of 10 and comment that on the whole he did much good for Britain and it's standing in the world.

Plastic Duck Armada Is Heading For Britain After 15-Year Global Voyage

2007-06-28T13:03:00.000+08:00

A flotilla of plastic ducks is heading for Britain’s beaches, according to an American oceanographer.

For the past 15 years Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been tracking nearly 30,000 plastic bath toys that were released into the Pacific Ocean when a container was washed off a cargo ship.

Some of the ducks, known as Friendly Floatees, are expected to reach Britain after a journey of nearly 17,000 miles, having crossed the Arctic Ocean frozen into pack ice, bobbed the length of Greenland and been carried down the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Mr Ebbesmeyer, who is based in Seattle, said yesterday that those that had not been trapped in circulating currents in the North Pacific, crushed by icebergs or blown ashore in Japan are bobbing across the Atlantic on the Gulf Stream.

Any beachcomber who finds one of the ducks will be able to claim a $100 (£50) reward from the toys’ American distributor, First Years Inc.

The ducks began life in a Chinese factory and were being shipped to the US from Hong Kong when three 40ft containers fell into the Pacific during a storm on January 29, 1992. Two thirds of them floated south through the tropics, landing months later on the shores of Indonesia, Australia and South America. But 10,000 headed north and by the end of the year were off Alaska and heading back westwards. It took three years for the ducks to circle east to Japan, past the original drop site and then back to Alaska on a current known as the North Pacific Gyre before continuing north towards the Arctic.

Many were stranded as the currents took them through the Bering Strait, which divides Alaska from Russia. Mr Ebbesmeyer predicted that they would spend years trapped in the Arctic ice, moving at the rate of one mile a day towards the Atlantic.

In 2000, eight years after their journey began, the ducks were reported in the North Atlantic and in 2003, when they were expected to wash up on the east coast of America, First Years Inc announced the reward. By now the ducks had been bleached white by the sun and sea water. Sightings in the past two years have been scant, but oceanographers believe that their next port of call is southwest England, southern Ireland and western Scotland.

Simon Boxall, of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, said that the ducks offered a great opportunity for climate change research. “They are a nice tracer for what the currents are doing as they travel around the world, and currents are what determines our climate, and cycles of carbon.

“I would ask holidaymakers to keep an eye out, as they might be very few and far between by now. It’s a real adventure story and the plastic should last 100 years, so we hope it will continue.”

The landfalls have all been logged on a computer model called the Ocean Surface Currents Simulation, which is used to help fisheries and find people lost at sea. Two children’s books have been written about the saga and the ducks have become collector’s items, changing hands for £500.

Tony vs. Paul

2007-06-25T15:31:00.001+08:00

This is clever. Stop motion Video.

Black Kettles And Pots

2007-06-25T04:34:00.000+08:00

The history of the Soviet Union had fewer black pages in its history than certain other countries, not least the United States, President Vladimir Putin has said in a speech. "Regarding the problematic pages in our history, yes, we do have them, as does any state,'' Putin said at a social sciences conference, citing Stalin's purges during the 1930s.

"But other countries have also known their bleak and terrible moments,'' he said in comments published on the official Kremlin website.

"In any event, we never used nuclear weapons against civilians, and we never dumped chemicals on thousands of kilometres of land or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire Second World War, as was the case in Vietnam,'' he said.

He does make some valid points but he overlooks the fact that unknown millions (some sources estimate 25-30 million) of their own citizens were murdered in Stalin's time. To my knowledge, the Americans never went that far.

Britains Got Talent - A Star Is Born

2007-06-19T14:38:00.001+08:00

A truly amazing performance. This guy (Paul Potts) won the BGT contest over the weekend. Apparently he is planning to spend some of the $250,000 prize money on getting his teeth fixed. What a voice.

All About Iraq? Don’t You Believe It

2007-06-18T14:17:00.000+08:00

The following is taken from a very interesting article published in the Times today: I modified and shortened the article in some places.

It is “all about Iraq”, isn’t it? The Blair legacy thing that is about to start in ten days’ time when he finally vacates Downing Street. This is what many commentators seem to be chiming. Who cares what lies on the positive side of the ledger? It is “all about Iraq”, ultimately. In that sense, Tony Blair is not unlike Anthony Eden, for whom it is “all about Suez”, or poor old Neville Chamberlain, whose premiership was “all about appeasement”, or, further back, Lord North, whose time in office was “all about losing the American colonies”. End of assessment.

So certain are those in this camp that they are prepared to set aside minor details such as facts. They portray Iraq as if it was a bellicose British prime minister who made the decision to invade and somehow dragged a slightly sceptical American President along with him, which is not quite how it happened. They dismiss the self-evident truth that any politician in Downing Street (and Canberra) in 2003 would have done what Mr Blair (and Mr Howard) opted to do.

Why? Because for six decades the essence of British and Australian foreign policy has been to play Robin to the American Batman. This has been pursued by a succession of Labour and Conservative governments. It is a wholly rational stance because it maximises our international influence. Comparisons with the manner in which Harold Wilson avoided military commitment to the Vietnam War are not viable. Vietnam was a process, not an event. There was no starting gun at which the man in the White House could eyeball allies and implore “Are you with me?” This was the position that Mr Blair was in four years ago.

Not to have supported the United States in such a situation would have been seismic. It would have entailed a complete reversal of British foreign policy and a dash to become more deeply enmeshed in the EU. This would have necessitated, at a minimum, euro membership that British voters would rightly not have tolerated. It would also have meant trading down from the role of Robin to something a lot less attractive— in theory being part of a gang in which the entire group is equal but where, invariably, it is either France or Germany who exercises the authority. The killer flaw in the “all about Iraq” argument is that it presumes that there was a serious choice.

In addition, the idea that Mr Blair is more to blame for what has occurred in Iraq since 2003 than either the Pentagon or, more relevantly, the Iraqis themselves, who have treated their freedom as the chance to engage in fratricide, is ridiculous. In fairness, some of those who claim it is “all about Iraq” will concede this privately. Their critique of Mr Blair is more sophisticated and rests on three suppositions. These are that he was unduly enthusiastic about a venture that he was obliged to undertake; that “he lied” about weapons of mass destruction; and that he failed to secure the revival of the wider Middle East peace process after the Baathist regime in Baghdad had been overthrown.

These might be a smarter set of indictments but they nevertheless do not stand up to much scrutiny. Let us take the accusation of excessive enthusiasm. It implies that Mr Blair should have sent the minimum number of troops possible into battle to keep the Americans sweet, or toned down the volume in his own endorsement of the cause. Would that have been leadership?

Furthermore, why shouldn't’t he think that removing odious dictators is worthwhile? It does not appear that much of a crime to me. Moral intervention has virtues. One notes that a number of those who attack Mr Blair for being involved in Afghanistan or Iraq are also urging that Britain becomes more entwined in Darfur, or Somalia, or Zimbabwe. Their logic results in the mixed logic that says that while it might be fine to interfere in places that are of little or no strategic interest to the United Kingdom, it would be dreadful to do so in the Middle East, where our strategic interests are enormous. This is not a thesis that is destined to survive long in the harsh conditions of the real world.

Then there is “he lied” to the electorate about weapons of mass destruction. Oh, come off it. Every intelligence agency on the planet, including those serving governments that opposed the war, thought Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq Study Group’s reports observed that, while the senior Iraqis whom they interviewed denied handling biological and chemical weapons themselves, many identified others in high command whom they assumed must have done so. What the tyrant’s motives were for wanting to create the impression that he had these materials cannot be divined. But if the likes of the CIA and MI6 were groping in the dark on WMD it was because Saddam had turned off the lights.

Finally, there is the aftermath and the failure to press the Middle East peace process forward. After all we have witnessed in the past 12 months or so, is it possible to place any blame at the Prime Minister’s door? Does the evidence not hint that it is Hamas and Hezbollah, Syria and Iran that have conspired to wreck the chance of a viable settlement? Those factions and countries were plotting long before the intervention in Iraq had been envisaged and would have done exactly the same thing if the US had blinked at the last moment, or if circumstances in postwar Iraq today were strikingly stable.

It is not, therefore, “all about Iraq” — although for some people it plainly always will be. Future historians, I hope and suspect, will be far more rounded about the Blair record.

Agriculture Goes Up In The World - The Rise And Rise Of Vertical Farming

2007-06-14T22:43:00.000+08:00

Traditional farms are beautiful. They're sweeping, green, majestic even, and without them we wouldn't have the constantly whinging farmers. They're also a waste of space.

We will need 60 per cent more food to meet the needs of the world's ever-growing population in the next thirty years, according to UN figures. Unfortunately, building an extension or expanding planet earth is not an option.

One scientist believes that the only way is up - farms built vertically, giant greenhouses piled on top of each other which use space, water and energy more efficiently than Farmer Brown with his rolling landscapes. Instead of soil, plants float on trays of nutrient-rich water, growing hydroponically. Dr Dickson Despommier, professor of environmental sciences and microbiology at Columbia University, began developing the concept six years ago. His theory, that 'skyscraper farms' could provide plentiful food organically, without herbicides, pesticides or fertilisers, has attracted venture capitalists and scientists from around the world, intent on making the theory into reality within 15 years.

After a strawberry farm in Florida was wiped out by Hurricane Andrew, the owners took production into high-tech indoor farms. They now grow on one acre what they used to grow on 30. Expanding that to all crops (and some livestock - pigs are a possibility) as Despommier suggests, is the next step.

It's a tempting proposition - no more weather-related crop failures, diseases spread by livestock, or runoff polluting water sources. Not to mention locally-grown produce for the residents of central London, Manhattan and Tokyo, eliminating the environmental costs of transport (with fresher lettuces to boot).

Skyscraper farms can operate year-round with artificial lighting, so, on average, one indoor acre is the equivalent to between four and six outdoors, and companies are vying to reap the financial rewards that come from this increased efficiency.

OrganiTech, a company based in Delaware, wants to turn abandoned shipping containers piled on top of each other next to I-95 in Newark, New Jersey into farms. "This is a factory, not a farm," says Lior Hessel, the company's CEO, of the plan. "We just build lettuce instead of CPUs."

With the powerful combination of money and morals behind the idea, it's only a matter of time until the Archers relocate to a farm tower in Dubai

Chinese Surname Shortage Sparks Rethink

2007-06-13T05:41:00.001+08:00

With more than a billion people now sharing just 100 surnames, Chinese authorities are considering a landmark move to try to end the confusion, state media reported Tuesday. Current Chinese law states that children are only allowed take the surname from either their mother or father, but the lack of variety means there are now 93 million people in China with the family name Wang.

In a country of around 1.3 billion people, about 85 percent share only 100 surnames, according to a nationwide survey conducted by the Ministry of Public Security in April and published in the China Daily newspaper on Tuesday.

The survey found 92 million people shared the surname Li, while 88 million were called Zhang. A further seven surnames -- including Chen, Zhou and Lin -- are held by at least 20 million Chinese.

Under a new draft regulation released by the ministry of public security, parents will be able to combine their surnames for their children, a move that could open up 1.28 million new possibilities, the China Daily reported.

For instance, a father named Zhou and mother named Zhu could choose to call their child either Zhou, Zhu, Zhouzhu or Zhuzhou, the report added.

Guan Xihua, a household registration officer with the Beijing public security bureau, said the lack of variety caused trouble in daily life and the new regulation would slash repetition.

Du Roufu, from the academy, said combined surnames had already become popular with younger couples even though such combinations were not strictly permitted by law.

The draft also allows ethnic minorities to register some letters and characters among new names, but bans any foreign letters.

Du said the move for ethnic minorities would encourage them to use traditional surnames and avoid the practice of taking Han Chinese surnames, which reduces the variety of names and harms their cultural heritage.

Bush in Albania 2007 - Hey!! My Watch Has Gone.

2007-06-13T05:21:00.001+08:00

Now you see it. Now you don't.

Amazing video of GWB having his watch nicked in Albania.

George W Bush was visibly cheered when he received a hero's welcome in Albania at the weekend, with Albanians draped in the Stars and Stripes reaching out to hug him and shake his hand.

But perhaps the leader of the Western world should have exercised a little more caution and followed the standard advice to travellers in the Balkans to keep an eye on their belongings.

Film footage of the President being mobbed taken by the Albanian TV station News24 was broadcast today on Italian TV news bulletins and watched by thousands on YouTube - and it looks like Mr Bush may have had his watch stolen. Mr Bush had taken his jacket off on a hot day and was in a short sleeved shirt, the watch clearly visible. It can still be seen as the heaving crowd presses round him - but the next moment it is no longer there.

At Least It's Not OSAMA

2007-06-06T21:28:00.000+08:00

Just think. In 20 years or so, we'll hear how much they're seething, filled with rage and blowing up buses and tube trains or worse, but love their football, cricket and fish and chips.

Muhammad is now second only to Jack as the most popular name for baby boys in Britain and is likely to rise to No 1 by next year, a study by The Times has found. The name, if all 14 different spellings are included, was shared by 5,991 newborn boys last year, beating Thomas into third place, followed by Joshua and Oliver. Scholars said that the name’s rise up the league table was driven partly by the growing number of young Muslims having families, coupled with the desire to name their child in honour of the Prophet.

Muhammad Anwar, Professor of Ethnic Relations at Warwick University, said: “Muslim parents like to have something that shows a link with their religion or with the Prophet.”Although the official names register places the spelling Mohammed at No 23, an analysis of the top 3,000 names provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) puts Muhammad at No 2 once the 14 spellings are taken into account. If its popularity continues – it rose by 12 per cent last year – the name will take the top spot by the end of this year. It first entered the Top 30 in 2000.

A Body But No Engine Or Wheels.

2007-06-06T20:41:00.000+08:00

What exactly was the brief for the London Olympics logo?

Having some experience of how these things work, my guess would be that the designers were handed about a ton of impenetrable document, full of words like 'cutting edge', 'forward vision', 'matrix', 'paradigm' and 'multi-dimensional' which they would have promptly tossed in the bin. Then they would have got on with the job of coming up with an elegant symbol that incorporated the three obvious points: London, The Olympics, and the date. Except they didn't.

The logo is a bizarre, squat, frankly ugly representation of the number 2012. The other two of the three key elements, London and the Olympics, are just randomly forced in.

Never mind the bizarreness, the squatness or the ugliness - the very opposite of elegance – the point is that not only does this design so obviously fail to measure up on aesthetic grounds, it signally fails to meet the brief. One out of three simply ain’t good enough. This design is like a car with a body but no engine or wheels.

And if anyone tries to argue that these three points weren’t the cornerstones of the brief, then don’t believe them. They simply must have been. This all begs the question, how on earth did they come up with this?

My bet would be that the poor, put upon designers came up with dozens of other solutions first, all of them infinitely better, but which the marketing theorists and the bureaucrats and the politicians managed, between them, to mangle and murder, one by one. (What else are meetings for?)

Then, in a blind panic, and with the plot long since lost, someone retrieved some of the screwed up rejects from the bin, and cobbled together what we will clearly now have to put up with until the memory of the 2012 Olympics finally fades away.

Remember also, - London prides itself on being if not the premier creative design centre in the world then certainly in the top three.

The Queen ‘Exasperated’ By Tony Blair

2007-05-28T02:35:00.000+08:00

The Queen is "exasperated and frustrated" at Tony Blair and "deeply concerned" by a number of New Labour's policies, the Sunday Telegraph claims. She feels the outgoing prime minister has little understanding of countryside issues, has meddled unnecessarily with the House of Lords and has damaged the Commonwealth by aligning Britain so closely with the USA. "Sources close to the Queen" claim she has raised all these topics with Mr Blair at their weekly audiences over the past ten years.

The Root Of All Evil?

2007-05-28T01:55:00.000+08:00

I watched the second and last episode of Richard Dawkins' "The root of all evil?" last night. Dawkins also wrote "The God Delusion" that I have mentioned before. The God Delusion explores the unproven beliefs that are treated as factual by many religions and the extremes to which some followers have taken them.

Dawkins opens the programme by describing the "would-be murderers . . . who want to kill you and me, and themselves, because they're motivated by what they think is the highest ideal." Dawkins argues that "the process of non-thinking called faith" is not a way of understanding the world, but instead stands in fundamental opposition to modern science and the scientific method, and is divisive and dangerous.

The TV programme is basically a series of discussions that he has with various religious leaders, pastors and preachers etc. One such discussion is about what he sees as a conflict between faith and science. He points out that science involves a process of constantly testing and revising theories in the light of new evidence, while faith makes a virtue out of believing unprovable and often improbable propositions. For an example of faith, Dawkins takes the infallible doctrine of the Assumption, which Pope Pius XII declared in 1950 simply by relying upon tradition. He contrasts this with the scientific method, which he describes as a system whereby working assumptions may be falsified by recourse to reason and evidence. Dawkins provides an example from his undergraduate study, when a visiting researcher disproved a hypothesis of a professor, who accepted the outcome with "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you, I have been wrong these fifteen years."

Dawkins then considers a scientific theory of great significance to him – Charles Darwin's theory of evolution – which he discusses by reference to his Mount Improbable analogy. The notion that the full complexity of life emerged either through blind chance or by the hand of an intelligent designer, he likens to leaping up the sheer face of a mountain in one bound. By contrast, he suggests that Darwin's theory of design by natural selection provides an explanation which is akin to climbing a mountain gradually, via a gentle gradient. Dawkins also comments that the design hypothesis raises another question: who made the designer?

Quotations:

“ The time has come for people of reason to say: enough is enough. Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive, and it's dangerous.”

“For many people, part of growing up is killing off the virus of faith with a good strong dose of rational thinking. But if an individual doesn't succeed in shaking it off, his mind is stuck in a permanent state of infancy, and there is a real danger that he will infect the next generation.”

“The god of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic-cleanser urging his people on to acts of genocide.”

“Fundamentalist Christianity is on the rise among the electorate of the world's only superpower, right up to and including the President. If you believe the surveys, 45 percent of Americans, that's about 135 million people, believe the universe is less than ten thousand years old.”

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they are never going to be born. The number of people who could be here in my place outnumbers the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here: the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world.

Dawkins finishes by arguing that atheism is not a recipe for despair but just the opposite; rather than viewing life as a trial that must be endured before reaching a mythical hereafter, an atheist sees this life as all we have, and by disclaiming a next life can take more excitement in this one. Atheism, Dawkins concludes, is life-affirming in a way that religion can never be.
Religion, says Dawkins, is the big issue that can no longer be ignored or respectfully tolerated. Rather, it is the decaying carcass that must be confronted and cast out if civilisation is to be saved. His attack is trained not solely on Muslim fundamentalism and its Western religious counterpart - a right-wing fundamentalism that is creationist, evangelist, extremist , which he says is rising alarmingly in America, but also in Australia and Europe. He has benign "mainstream" churches in his sights, too.

Religion, he argues is superstition. It is the enemy of rational thought, the ever-present threat to civilisation, the fuel of war, the bastion of bigotry, the rulebook for systematic human rights abuse, the virus with which parents infect their children. In the home, and in church schools.

Religion, he says, is the root of all evil. For the statement, surely, demands no mealy mouthed question mark in the mind of Dawkins, whose best-selling books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion have confirmed his leadership of a swelling band of militant atheists.

Crews tackle Cutty Sark fire

2007-05-23T07:06:00.005+08:00

The fire on the Cutty Sark in Greenwich is bad news. It is one of my favourite places to visit in London. As I lived most of my childhood only a couple of miles away, I went there many times. I have taken my children there and in 2005 took Carlijn and my son, his wife and my grandson there. I love that area of the Thames and have walked around there many times. The ship was undergoing restoration work and much of the topsides had been removed but the fear is that the steel frame may be warped by the heat. Very sad.

I'm Back

2007-05-10T09:56:00.000+08:00

Well, over the last few days since our mini holiday I have felt the need to start blogging again. I did say in the last post that it was the end and that's how I felt at that time but I do feel much better now in myself than I did when I last blogged. I didn't expect to revive the blog but rather than start a new one I am going to get this one going again. It is something that I have enjoyed doing and I am missing the satisfaction that I did get from posting. Even if nobody apart from me reads it, it gives me an outlet for thoughts and opinions.

What have we been up to? Well, I had a very bad few weeks when I didn't do much at all really. Easter was a bad time. I have managed to get things back in perspective to some extent and generally feel much better. These episodes can be quite bad but this last one was luckily not too serious and I have come out of it with Carlijn's help very well I think. After a few weeks complete rest, we went to Bali (Sanur) last week for 6 days and had a very relaxed time. Eating, reading, sitting around the pool and the beach all made for a nice break. I have kept up with current affairs and goings on and will start commenting again.

I have also replaced my computer in the last week. It is 5 years old and started to get really slow and clunky so I have purchased a very nice top spec Dell work station with Vista. It will take me a few days to transfer all of my docs and pictures and website links etc. but it seems to be a great improvement on the old machine. I also bought a new laptop, a Sony Vaio top of the range machine, quite small and therefore quite light. In addition I also bought a nice large Sharp Aquos LCD TV for the bedroom. So now I can watch EPL football in bed in comfort.

What else? Carlijn has been working very hard and has been very successful with her sales figures last month and this and is very pleased with the results as she should be. We have had numerous nice meals out as well and have generally overindulged. We have seen a few movies as well: Hot Fuzz, Wild Hogs, Priceless, Copying Beethoven. All good entertainment bu the best was Wild Hogs, very funny and well worth seeing. We are going to see Swan Lake at Burswood this Saturday and that should be good.

No More Blog

2007-03-30T12:32:00.000+08:00

This is the last post for this blog. I am finished with this blog, there is nothing more to say. That is it for now.

Pressures

2007-03-30T08:28:00.000+08:00

Why is life so hard? I guess that I am making it hard. Another blow this morning, I collect the mail and there is another confusing issue to deal with. Well, I'm not going to deal with it. There is no way that it is good for me to deal with anything today. I just don't want to, so I will leave it. The pressures are building again and I don't know how to handle it all. I can't handle it all. There is too much to think about. The walk this morning wasn't enjoyable, don't think that I will walk again in the morning. I don't enjoy it now. Why do I walk when I don't enjoy it? Why do I do anything that I don't enjoy or don't want to do? I must try to take control of everything that affects the way that I feel. I have a plan. I have a plan. I want to go away, that is what I really need. I must go away. Get away from the pressures. I have to make my own decisions about my own life and future and stick to them, I am being pushed and pulled and it is time that I stood still and took my own decisions. I did in the past take some of my own decisions, not many for sure but some. The decisions that only affected me I could make on my own. But, I have never been in a position to take big decisions. It is similar now, I have got myself into a position where many of the decisions that I would like to make on my own are those that affect others as well so I am not free to make them. I can decide what I have for breakfast but not much more. I am digging myself into a deeper hole now that I don't know how to escape from. I must escape and do what is good for me sometimes. Why is life so hard and difficult to deal with?

Forces Or Helpers And Carers?

2007-03-30T02:03:00.000+08:00

Well, its 2.04 and I have just got up to get a drink. WATER, Miss Carlijn. As usual, the first thing that I do when I get up is to check the BBC to see what world shattering developments have occurred and which news stories have progressed since I last checked. Then, a quick round up of the blogs and other favourite news outlets such as the Drudge Report etc.

I see that the Iran hostage crisis is still bubbling along. What I really don't understand here is how a foreign navy boat can come along and "arrest" armed sailors and marines. Aren't our armed forces supposed to be trained and programmed to fight to the last man in these circumstances? Can you or anybody else who wants to, simply "arrest" them? What is going on here? An American admiral the other day made the point that he could see no circumstances where American forces would allow themselves to be arrested while going about their legitimate business on the high seas. "Arrested"? They have guns and other weapons to enable them to fight back and avoid being arrested surely? Surely they should have responded literally with all guns blazing and fought to the last man? But I and many others see that a woman was involved and the worry is that this would be the main reason that they decided not to fight. So, the politically correct version of events is that they were outnumbered and decided that they would allow themselves to be arrested. Should women be in the front line like this? Are these chickens now embarrassingly coming home to roost? Is feminism now dictating and unduly influencing the ability of our forces to act in the way that they should? Are our forces becoming not so much forces as helpers and carers? What is going on here? So many questions but so few answers coming out of London.

I am feeling more settled this morning, Still have a headache but the thoughts are clearer. I was home about 3.00 yesterday afternoon and went to Carlijn's apartment at 7.00 for dinner. She had cooked a very nice fish curry. We watched the 7.00 news while we ate and afterwards filled in some forms and talked generally about things.

After dinner, I came back home about 8.30 and was quite tired so went to bed about 9.30. I am feeling very fragile still and am not looking forward to any social engagements this weekend. I would like to just do the normal chores and spend a few hours on the balcony in the sunshine with cups of tea and the weekend papers. Maybe a movie on Saturday evening and watch the football on Sky after that. Next week is the long Easter weekend so that will give us an opportunity to relax for a few days and generally unwind from the tensions of this week.

I am getting the things that have been so worrying to me more into perspective now and can see light at the end of the tunnel I think. I don't expect to be very busy at work today and should be able to get away soon after midday. There is a sundowner at work at 4.00 this afternoon and while I would normally go, I am not at this stage looking forward to it so probably won't go. I am not really in the mood to make small talk for a couple of hours. I do normally enjoy these after work get togethers but not today I think. I may feel differently this afternoon, we shall see.

Head Is Clearer

2007-03-29T07:14:00.000+08:00

I slept much better last night. These episodes are starting to worry me even more and are adding to the ordinary day to day worries that I spoke about. My head is clearer today and I can think about things in a more reasoned way. I did nothing after work last night, just cooked some potatoes and ate them for diner. Then I went to bed as I was so tired from the lack of restful sleep. Carlijn came home about 9.00 after going to a meeting with her nephew Tim. I got up when she came in and we had a cup of tea before bed. I was up at 3.00 this morning for an hour and then went back and slept until 6.30. I feel very "detached and distant" after these episodes and it takes a couple of days for the confusion to clear away completely. Just one of those things I suppose. The ordinary day to day worries get blown out of proportion when this happens and afterwards I find it hard to remember what exactly I was so worried about. I know that this sort of thing does have a serious impact on the people around me but that is better now that I live alone. I don't feel as though I am imposing on anyone more than they are prepared to let these episodes impose on them. That is one of the great advantages of living alone now. I can do what I am comfortable with when I am alone and I have the freedom to live the way I like. I am not saying that I don't appreciate what Carlijn does for me in any way but by living apart we can both have our space as we feel the need. I find it hard to explain the way that I am feeling some times because unless you have experienced this I suppose that it is an unknown concept. I do understand that and am very appreciative of her concern and love for me. I am not so sure that I would be so patient.

Worry, Worry, Sell

2007-03-28T10:35:00.000+08:00

Disturbed. That is the word. I don't know why but I am today. I am very worried and my feelings are very negative as well and that is not the best way to survive. I think that I had a terrible nights sleep last night, a very long night but a very disturbed night. I was told to get the washing done, I had to get the washing done, there was loads of it, but the funny thing is I didn’t do it. I slept instead. Then the worst thing was that I fell over after getting out of bed this morning. The new form signings are very disturbing too, especially after doing them all just 3 weeks ago and now having to do them all again. This will definitely delay things. Dealing with people is something that I am not good at. No confidence with some people I suppose, I trust them to do what they say and then they let me down. That sounds bad, it is my fault not theirs. I just really need to get away for a few weeks or years and that would calm everything down I think. If I cannot get away for a specific purpose then I will go away anyway and stay for a long time or even until I die. That is the plan I think, it is all falling apart now, no sense to anything anymore. Why should I have to spend most of my time deeply worried? The worrying is the worst thing of all, constant worry and confusion. Nothing seems to make sense any more. Plans I made 3 years and 6 months ago are not working out as I had hoped. Sell, Sell, Sell. The washing was just a side issue I think not the main plan of the way things need to be done at all. These things represent the other side of the argument, I hate arguing and because of that I think that I don’t express my thoughts clearly enough. Maybe that is why I am so worried all the time. The washing is still not done. They have stopped telling me to do it and I am happy with that but tonight, who knows? Calm down and relax, that is what I must try to do but I can't while I am worried. I didn’t attempt it this morning but slept after the exercise but I am still confused and very tired. Work is easy; it is everything else that is so hard. Very hard for me anyway. I must get away somewhere. I am sorry if this sounds confused but I am not thinking very clearly yet and I am still very worried, I know that I will feel better later and then I will be able to stop worrying. My head hurts as well now.

Map That Shows Northerners Have The Last Laff

2007-03-27T21:16:00.000+08:00

Article in "The Telegraph" today:

The grarse spreading out from its London roots is gradually stifling the graaas, but one of Britain's leading accent experts said yesterday that a larf will never drown out a laff.

Students of the voices that make up a patchwork quilt of spoken English across the country have drawn up a map of the way in which the long "a" of received pronunciation has followed the exodus of Londoners into the rest of southern England.

But a sort of linguistic Hadrian's Wall just south of Birmingham is keeping the long grass out of northern England and the rest of Britain. Not so long ago people in counties such as Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire would pronounce "grass", "bath" and "after" as if they were spelled with a double "a". Today, younger generations will say those words as the Queen does, or indeed as they do in the Queen Vic on EastEnders, as if the "a" was lengthened with an "h".

Read on:

2007-03-27T10:35:00.000+08:00

Tony Benn Beats Bolton To A Pulp

2007-03-26T12:19:00.001+08:00

A five minute video of John Bolton coming up against Tony Benn (British MP) in the most recent edition of the BBC political debate programme "Question Time". I don't agree with Tony Benn most of the time but, he is a very intelligent man and I put this up in respect of fairness on this blog. What Benn says does have more than an element of truth and anyway, it is good to see the Americans come up against some informed and eloquent argument.

SweatShirty Things

2007-03-26T11:12:00.000+08:00

Well, the weekend went more or less according to plan. The meal in the pub on Saturday was good fun and everyone said as we broke up that we must do that again, so we will. On Sunday Carlijn and I went down town at noon when the shops opened as I wanted to buy some new sweatshirty things for the cooler weather that should be upon us in the next few weeks. So, that accomplished, Miss Carlijn decided that she should have some new clothes as well and so she did. At 4.00 we met Louise in the park for the picnic, that was very pleasant and we enjoyed the chat and the food. We got home at 6.30 and Carlijn had an evening movie arranged with one of her girl friends at the Sommerville outdoor theatre. It was a French movie with subtitles and even though I was half heartedly invited, the Frenchness and the subtitles were enough to persuade me to stay at home and watch the football. I did get a very good precis of the movie from Carlijn this morning as we trudged around the park anyway.

I fiddled about on the computer for an hour or so and paid some bills on-line that were due and then read some blogs and fiddled around with my blog but what with the fresh air and a busy weekend I kept dozing off so I gave that up and had an earlyish night. We were up and out at 6.00 this morning for our walk around Kings Park. With the end of daylight saving at the weekend it is pleasantly light again at that time. We actually witnessed the sun rise at 6.25. I was in the office at 9.30 this morning and have a fairly busy day ahead. The three directors of this company have gone up to Darwin for a few days for some Barra fishing. So I will be putting the fires out this week. Not expecting any problems.

Hot Shot

2007-03-25T21:39:00.000+08:00

Against a perfect backdrop, the space shuttle undocks from the ISS

No, it’s not dust on the lens. The specks on this image of the sun are in fact the International Space Station and the space shuttle Atlantis. Less than an hour after the shuttle detached to return to Earth in September, astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured this image from a cow pasture in Normandy, France. It was his consolation prize: He’d hoped to shoot the docking of Atlantis, but climate got in the way. “The weather was awful all week, and I had only been able to take my chance during a small moment of clear sky,” explains Legault, who used special software to predict the alignment of the station and the sun and shot the photo at an extremely fast 1/8000s shutter speed. His camera was mounted on a telescope with a solar filter—which produces black-and-white images that Legault later colorized—and a motorized base to track the sun. When he took the picture, the shuttle was about 350 miles away. The sun? Some 93 million miles.

First Act Of WW3?

2007-03-25T14:46:00.000+08:00

The eight British sailors and seven Marines - who were seized by Iranian gunboats on Friday were yesterday reported by Iran to have "confessed" to straying into Iranian waters off the disputed waterway which separates Iran and Iraq.

The timing of the stand-off could not be worse as the sailors' fate risks getting caught up in the showdown over Iran's refusal to curb its suspected nuclear weapons programme.

The 15 members of the UN Security Council, were set to vote unanimously last night on a resolution ordering the expansion of sanctions on Iran to force Tehran to halt sensitive activities that could lead to production of a nuclear bomb. The session took place without President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who sent a deputy foreign minister to address the council after accusing the Americans of delays in issuing visas.

The hostage-taking looks increasingly like a deliberate act by Iran's Revolutionary Guards who have now reportedly transferred their hostages to Tehran. There are suspicions that the seizure was ordered in retaliation for the kidnapping of Iranians by US forces in Iraq.

The kidnapping stemmed from Thursday's events, when a barge suspected of smuggling cars tried to evade the Royal Navy sailors who decided to take a more forceful approach. They leapt on to the craft as it sped towards the buffer zone that separates Iraq and Iran's territorial waters. As the Royal Navy crew jumped aboard, the car traders tried to hide a box before tossing it over the side. The Marines half raised their rifles and ordered the barge to turn back. Ominously, they could see an Iranian Republican Guard boat circling nearby.

Minutes later, half a dozen large Iranian Republican Guard Corps Navy fast-attack speedboats mounted with machine guns suddenly appeared and ambushed the British sailors as they returned to their two small inflatable boats. Soon as many as 15 to 20 boats encircled the trapped team.

And then, Tehran said yesterday that the 15 British sailors taken hostage had confessed to straying into Iranian waters. What next? A show trial?

Dreadful England, Israel 0 - England 0

2007-03-25T11:37:00.000+08:00

This is dreadful, this is getting worse every match. Steve McClaren is proving to be the worst coach that England have ever had. The players as well are woeful, bring back Beckham!!! As it stands now, England are slipping further away from Euro 2008, not to mention the expectations of their frustrated supporters, who ended the match chanting "this is a load of rubbish" and "McClaren you don't have a clue".

This was dreadful - and sadly, predictable. England's travelling army of 7,000 or so were entitled to much better than a scoreless draw against a team who didn't do much more than run themselves into the ground all night. Yet, after ordinary nights against Croatia and Macedonia already, the boys might soon run out of patience.

Bent, Bent, Bent

2007-03-25T11:25:00.000+08:00

Was the Pakistan coach’s tragic end a by-product of match-fixing? Of course it was, the man was up to his neck in the South african scandel a few years ago but the media insists on playing the "innocent till etc." game. He was obviously as bent as most other international cricketers are.

The speculation that fills the news vacuum caused by the death of Bob Woolmer has grown wilder with the shocking announcement by Jamaican police that he was murdered - by 'manual strangulation' - on the night after his Pakistan World Cup team had been beaten by a team of make-weights.

What could the motive have been? Pakistanis take their cricket seriously and mobs routinely issue death threats after a cricketing catastrophe. But that has always been bombast.

It is barely conceivable that an enraged Pakistani fan got into Woolmer's 12th floor hotel room in Kingston, Jamaica and delivered the coup de grace, and indeed the evidence points to his having opened the door to someone he knew.

The theory most likely to flourish is that Woolmer's death was a by-product of match-fixing. After all, Pakistan's loss by three wickets to Ireland is just the kind of result that would have led the ICC to investigate possible misdemeanours.

And the Pakistanis do have form: in the 1999 World Cup, their defeat by Bangladesh in a qualifying match was widely believed to have been fixed. A judicial inquiry in Pakistan by Justice Qayyum reached the damaging conclusion that some fine players from that tournament - Wasim Akram, Mushtaq Ahmed, and Inzamam-ul-Haq who captained Pakistan against Ireland - were guilty of 'partial amnesia' and withholding evidence.

Woolmer, when he coached South Africa, was present when the whole team discussed and accepted a bookie's bribe to fix a match while touring India in 1996. Four years later, Woolmer constantly insisted on the innocence of Hansie Cronje, the SA captain, even after Cronje had confessed to match-fixing.

History 1980-2000 Has Disappeared Into The Ether. Sorry

2007-03-23T21:28:00.000+09:00

This is quite a worrying article in Todays "Times". How many of the thousands of digital photos that we take today will be saved and archived properly and therefore be available for viewing even five or ten years from now? Unless they are printed on good quality paper the answer is virtually none.

We know what was written in the first telegram, sent by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844: “What hath God wrought?” We know the words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell when he made the first telephone call in 1876, to his assistant, Thomas Watson: “Mr Watson — come here — I want to see you.” (The “polite telephone manner” had not yet been invented.) But we have absolutely no idea what was said in the first e-mail, just 35 years ago.

The digital age brought with it the false promise that everything written, filmed, photographed or recorded might now be preserved, for ever. The “save” key would eliminate the need for filing and storage. Since 1945 we have gathered 100 times more information than in the whole of human history up until that point. Entire libraries could be preserved on disks that fitted into a pocket. Paper was dead. It has not quite worked out that way. Digital information may be impossibly voluminous and convenient, but it is also vulnerable and dangerously disposable.

Already a vast amount of information has been lost. CDs disintegrate in just 20 years, whereas the Domesday Book, written on sheepskin in 1086, will still be with us in another millennium. Few people still write regular letters, but their replacement, the ubiquitous e-mail, is so easily deleted and forgotten, to say nothing of the fleeting text message.

Technology has already left behind the forms of electronic storage once expected to be eternal: the laser disk, the 5¼in, the 3.5in floppy, the Amstrad all-in-one word processor have all been flung into obsolescence, often taking their information with them. Only a small fraction of government bodies and companies even bother to archive their digital material. Who, save the most fastidious self-chronicler, takes the trouble to embalm their own e-mails electronically?

Historians of the future may look back on the 1980s and 1990s as a black hole in the collective memory, a time when the historical record thinned alarmingly owing to the pace of technological change. Future biographers may be reduced to trying to extract personality from whatever electronic fragments survive, cheque stubs and those few ritual moments (birth, death and overdraft) when a subject still puts pen to paper.

Read the full article:

The Most Barbaric Thing Imaginable

2007-03-23T16:38:00.000+09:00

BAGHDAD: The police said on Wednesday that children had been used in a weekend car bombing in which the driver had gained permission to park in a busy shopping area after he pointed out that he was leaving his children in the back seat.

To my Iraqi readers (if there should be any): This is not America or Australia's problem. This is your problem. Whether you personally condemn strapping children to bombs and exploding them in a market or not, apparently some of your fellow Shias think it is a good idea. If you are a Sunni, you know perfectly well that another Sunni somewhere in Baghdad is dreaming about sacrificing his own children in an explosion of revenge.

America and Australia didn't bring you to this level, nor did Israel, Thailand, The Philippines, India, The Netherlands, the suburbs of Paris, a magazine in Denmark, or the South of Nigeria, or Croatia, or Ethiopia, or Darfur. Not even other Muslims who don't believe the same way you do could bring you to this level. None of these places, and none of the people who inhabit them are so evil that they could condone the evil being practiced within your ranks of followers.This evil stems from your people's own indigenous animosity and your people's own set of religious values and cultural beliefs. I'm sure you disagree with me as much as you disagree with the bombers themselves, but you cannot deny that the actions of these barbarians stem from feelings of hatred instilled in them... more by the encouragement and sentiment of their own people than by the actions and injustices committed by others.

The world is full of inequities. How a population handles those inequities is not a measure of the inequities themselves but is instead a window onto the mindset of the population dealing with them. Sacrificing children as a means to lash out against those inequities is the sign of a population whose problems lie primarily internally... not externally. This bombing is the sign of a cultural cancer that only Muslims — not coalition soldiers — can cure. The coalition will be leaving Iraq soon, and frankly the American and Australian people have pretty much decided to let you commit genocide there against other Muslims.

We understand: It is our fault. We took away Saddam Hussein, the death squads, the brutal repression, and chemical Ali, which were the only things keeping you from each others' throats, and for that we are sorry. Some of us thought you were capable of handling freedom. (Some of us in the West knew from the very beginning that you weren't capable of handling freedom, and now you can see that this pessimism wasn't misplaced.)

Personally, I say to you be patient, I'm sure that another brutal dictator even worse than the last one will come along soon and murder and torture you and generally scare you all into submission. Either that, or all of the Sunnis... or all of the Shia... in Iraq will be refugees or dead.

As you can guess... we in the civilized West are all pretty much at the point of not caring anymore. We've seen what things you value and what things you will throw away in an attempt to harm others, and we've decided that those are not values worth defending with our soldiers' lives. Good luck to you all, and may God bless you and protect your children.

What The Weekend Holds In Store

2007-03-23T13:03:00.000+09:00

Well it's Friday again and all is well. we are looking forward to the weekend, as we normally do, what do we have planned? Well tonight we will have a drink at a local bar before we go to TableSeventyEight in West Perth for dinner. They have been advertising dinner and lunch specials for a few weeks so we thought that it was time to give it a go. Table is booked for 6.30.

Tomorrow, the usual chores and shopping in the morning and in the evening we are meeting some of Carlijn's family at the Woodbridge Pub in Guildford for dinner. We had planned originally to have the meal first and then all go on to the Garrick Theatre Club to see "It's My Party (And I'll Die If I Want To)". But, when we went to book this week we found that it was all booked out so it is just dinner. That should still be fun though.

On Sunday we will walk early, the summer daylight saving finishes on Saturday night so apart from the extra hour lay-in it should also be lighter for our walk or bike ride.

Then on Sunday afternoon we are meeting Ralph and Louise in Kings Park for a picnic. R&L are going back to Germany to live. They lived in Perth for several years a few years back and sold their house when they left but when they returned this time they were surprised at the way that the property market had boomed during their absence and decided that what they would like to buy was now a little beyond what they want to pay so back to Germany it is. Apparently property is much cheaper in Germany. Ralph is German and Louise is English.

So, that is a summary of the weekend as it stands on Friday afternoon. I had a nice surprise last night, my eldest son Richard who lives in London with his wife and children called me for a chat. We mainly talk about football-who is going up and who is going down etc and politics, Richard has a very keen interest in politics and we always discuss the global warming issue. Anyway it was a nice chat and afterwards I always feel that I should call him more regularly. I know that I should but I do tend to be lazy in that area but I will try to make the effort more often.

While I was on the phone with Richard, as I said, I was sitting out on my balcony and so didn't hear Carlijn call my mobile. She tried twice and then tried the landline and as I was on that at the time she didn't get an answer there either. I can see her apartment clearly from my balcony and saw her rushing around putting lights on and getting ready to go out. She told me later that she started worrying and decided to come over the street to check on me. She saw that the car was in its place so I wasn't out and so she is then even more worried as she came up to my apartment. But when she came in and saw me still alive and kicking at the computer all was forgiven. We had a cup of tea and a laugh so that was that. It is very nice that I have someone who cares for me like that.

After Carlijn left, I was messing about on the computer and found lots of nice pictures on FLICKr of the areas of South London that I know very well and spent the time until about midnight downloading and printing pictures. So that was why I had no time for blogging last night.

This morning we were out at 6.30 for our walk and enjoyed it as usual. I went to work earlyish as I had several meetings this morning. We have picked up a fair bit of new work over the last few days so maybe I will have to work harder for the foreseeable future so as to get on top of it all, I will enjoy that, I like to be really busy and having to juggle several jobs at the same time. That is when I perform at my best.

Is It About Time We Got Rid Of The UN?

2007-03-22T22:22:00.000+09:00

The other day, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women closed its fifty-first session with a vote.

Did it vote to condemn the brutal rape and murder of women in Darfur?

Nope. Did it vote to encourage the Saudis to end misogynist laws against women? Nope.

Did it vote to ostracize Iran for condemning adulterous women to death? Nope.

Did it vote to condemn China for forcing women to have abortions? Nope.

Nope. None of those things.

It simply voted to declare Israel as being the only country on the planet that is in "violation of Women's rights." The vote passed 40-2, with only the United States and Canada voting against the measure.

Picture Of The Day - Trafalgar Tavern at Greenwich

2007-03-22T13:27:00.001+09:00

Trafalgar Tavern at Greenwich, originally uploaded by Whipper_snapper.

Lovely night view of one of my favourite areas of London

Spiderman Climbs Twin Towers

2007-03-21T07:06:00.001+09:00

Apart from the girly giggles this is quite interesting.

Vote Different - HRC Not Sincere - Obama

2007-03-21T04:10:00.001+09:00

Obama makes a video questioning Hillary Rodham Carter sincerity.

Study Finds One-Third in D.C. Illiterate

2007-03-21T04:03:00.000+09:00

Only A Third?? read article here:

Researchers Question Validity Of A 'Global Temperature'

2007-03-21T04:01:00.000+09:00

Science Daily article.

Translate This Blog

2007-03-21T03:49:00.000+09:00

In the quest for constant improvement of my blog dear reader, and in the continuing absence of anyone yet inventing a workable Babel Fish I have added at great expense another mind blowing new page element for your use. You may have noticed the small flags at the left. These give you a translation of the blog into the nine languages listed. After translating into a language you must return to the original English page before translating into another language.

To translate into a language other than the European languages listed (such as Korean, Chinese, Japanese etc), you require the character/symbol set for that language to be loaded on your computer. Unfortunately there is not a translator into Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, American, Australian, Kiwi, Scottish or English other than London and many others available at this time but I am sure that they will be available soon. As soon as they are then I will facilitate them on my blog. In the meantime - enjoy.

Mindless Trash

2007-03-21T03:26:00.000+09:00

This is the absolute truth - I didn't make this up, I promise. I often joke that my TV doesn't receive channels Seven, Nine and Ten because to be very honest I can say that I never watch those channels out of choice. I find the programs to be mindless trash and the constant screaming ads for carpet warehouses and Utes with dogs in the back something that I can absolutely do without. Their so-called "News" services are complete jokes and generally the channels produce mindless time consuming fodder for the great Aussie public. The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting this morning the following:

Television manufacturer LG has failed to determine the source of a glitch in some of its televisions, which caused them to freeze when screening Nine Network's programs, despite being notified of the problem three weeks ago. The manufacturer said 10 models in its television range were affected, but that as far as it was aware, the problem only occurred in Sydney and Melbourne.

Many people have reported the problem in other cities, including Brisbane, Gold Coast, Perth and regional centres in New South Wales and Victoria. People also reported the issue was not limited to Nine's programs, but LG's marketing manager, Darren Goble, said that these could be unrelated issues caused by a number of factors outside of LG's control including "reception, locality and external factors".

A statement released by LG yesterday morning said "LG has become aware that occasional 'freezing' problems were experienced with selected TVs when viewing particular network digital programming in metropolitan Melbourne and Sydney over the weekend".

It did not specify which programs, but a large number of readers have reported experiencing the glitch when watching CSI on Sunday night.

But upon further questioning an LG spokeswoman admitted "LG became aware of of the issue three weeks ago, [but] did not have any data streaming recorded and therefore were unable to trace the problem".

Britain "Stifling Debate On Muslim Extremism"

2007-03-20T22:57:00.000+09:00

The German academic who was prevented from giving a speech at Leeds University on the link between Nazism and anti-Semitism in the Islamic world has hit back at Britain. He said:

"It is a worrying trend. If I say something which is not positive about a particular brand of Islam, the imposition is that I am inciting hatred of every Muslim. I am very concerned about this - it is an attack on academic freedom. We are seeing it more and more, particularly in the UK.

There is nothing wrong with holding beliefs but you must be able to challenge and question them. Academic integrity is all about the exchange of positions and the search for truth - I think this is in danger in the UK.

The organisers accused the university of bowing to pressure after receiving e-mails from Muslim students complaining about the talk. One claimed, "The only intention that you have for doing this is to increase hatred as I clearly regard it as an open racist attack."

The university insisted that the speech was cancelled because of security fears. Presumably they were concerned about the possibility of violent protests by the Muslim students.

Previous article on this issue:

The Telegraph is reporting that Leeds University has cancelled a speech by Matthias Küntzel entitled, "Hitler's Legacy: Islamic Anti-semitism in the Middle East" citing security concerns. The article says:

In a statement yesterday, two academics in the Leeds German department, which had organised the event, claimed the university had bowed "to Muslim protests".That statement added:

The reason the university gives for the cancellation of the talk and seminars by Dr Küntzel are security concerns. 'These concerns are founded on emails received by the office of the Vice Chancellor. The sudden cancellation is a sell-out of academic freedom, especially freedom of speech, at the University of Leeds.Dr Küntzel is quoted as saying, "My impression was that they wanted to avoid the issue in order to keep the situation calm. My feeling is that this is a kind of censorship." He also said the contents of emails described to him did not overtly threaten violence but "they were very, very strongly worded''.

So, within one week we have an attempt to prevent a member of the Israeli embassy from speaking on the grounds that Israel is a "racist, illegal state" and now we have the University bowing to Muslim pressure to stop someone suggesting that some people in the Islamic world are anti-Semitic. And all brought to you by the university who defended a motion (passed by the student union) to prevent the Jewish Society from making legitimate complaints. A bastion of intellectual enlightenment or a haven for radical Islamic extremism?

How The Insurgency Works

2007-03-20T22:43:00.000+09:00

From the Andrew Sullivan Blog:

An interesting insight from someone who's been there who's just venting on a message board:

I'll just take my old stomping grounds in Baqubah, and create a fictional 10 man terror cell operating in the area to illustrate my point.

Habib has his 9 insurgents, plus himself as the "sheik". In the immediate vicinity, there are over 1,000 American troops, producing round the clock patrols of the city of Baqubah and the surrounding highways. He cannot hope to do damage to so many soldiers by fighting them directly, so he plans ambushes of small convoys, roadside bombings, and suicide bombings. His only problem is the fact there are so many Americans watching these areas at such random times that he can't accomplish much without risk of losing his people.

So here's what he does...

He targets the poor families with men of fighting age (and with lots of mouths to feed), and he approaches them to guage interest in the insurgency. If the people reject him, he threatens to kill the family, and fades off to the next target. If the people waiver, or express interest, he will innundate them with propaganda, and eventually make an offer of cash for doing some "small" task. This might be something like wiring a roadside bomb, or firing an RPG at an American convoy. The men of the starving family are eventually swayed to the insurgency through the fear, or the money, the latter being the most common. In this case, we'll say they've been asked to fire an RPG at an American convoy for $100, which is a small fortune to these people.

So a man and his son then take the RPG, and find an area that they feel they have the best chance of success, and they set up there. This is usually a rooftop or an alleyway, and they wait for the convoy. The Americans don't disappoint. They arrive on their convoy, which is likely a combat presence patrol designed to project force, and deter action in a sector. They choose the vehicle they want to shoot (usually a command vehicle, which is rather stupidly identified from the pack by virtue of having multiple antennae on them for better communications)and fire.

Usually, panic and lack of training account for a missed shot, but on occasion they will hit the mark. The Americans in the convoy then must identify the source of the attack, and engage the threat. In this case, they will dismount, and enter the building chosen by the insurgents for their attack. They will leapfrog through the building, clearing each room until they find the man and the son, and they will engage and kill them.

The family lost two men, and did not earn a dime. The Americans may or may not have taken casualties, but engaged and killed two "insurgents". The insurgency, however won the day without doing a thing. They protected their numbers, and through the inability of the Americans to discern who or what the threat was or wasn't, they didn't even lose a hundred bucks.

That's how the insurgency works ... They use the Iraqi people to fight for them, and so we must hunt and kill them instead of those who oppose us.

Taliban Mutilation Barbarism

2007-03-20T22:38:00.000+09:00

Taliban militants have hacked off the ears and noses of three Afghan drivers captured helping American forces. Fighters mutilated the three men seized after delivering fuel to a US base in the eastern province of Nuristan on Saturday.

"After downloading their supplies into a coalition base in Nuristan, they were heading to Kunar," said Ghulamullah, the deputy chief of police in Nuristan, who uses only one name. "On their way the Taliban stopped them and cut off their noses and ears."

It is the first time that such a barbaric punishment has been meted out by Taliban fighters on those suspected of working with foreign forces. Fuel tankers supplying American bases have previously been targeted by insurgents with the tankers routinely torched and the drivers often left badly beaten.

In October a group of eight Afghan labourers doing building work at a base in Nuristan were shot by the roadside.Dozens of government officials, notably teachers, have been executed in the south and east of Afghanistan in the past year.

Illegal Taliban checkpoints operating on roads in the south and east of the country have been reported to check drivers' mobile phones for foreign names or aid agencies and ring the numbers, executing the owner if a foreign voice answers.

The cutting of noses and ears echoes the Taliban's period of rule in Afghanistan when their government became notorious for its savage and often bizarre interpretation of Islamic Sharia law.

3 Day Catch Up

2007-03-19T21:14:00.000+09:00

I realised tonight that I haven't blogged since 3.05 am on Saturday morning and I was getting withdrawal symptoms. Anyway with 3 days news to catch up on I thought that I would do a full update in one post:

Friday evening.

I was home about 3.00 from work and Carlijn and I went to the St John of God hospital in Subi to visit a very special new baby. My friend Hugh who I have known for over 20 years has a daughter Catherine. Catherine is a lovely girl and she worked for me for about 3 years from 1998 to 2001. Whilst working for me back then she started going out with Steven. They were married actually on the day of my heart attack on the 10th December 2005. Steven was an electrician and last year Hugh asked me if I could get him some training as a drafter. I did take him on so now he is a drafter working in the Oil and Gas field. Anyway, they had their first baby last Monday, Matthew 9.5 lbs and very healthy. We stayed for about an hour and Steve has promised to email me some pictures so as soon as I get them they will be on the blog.

After we got home we cooked some chops and veggies on the BBQ and just had time to clear up when Rhiny and Pete came over to drop off some work to Carlijn but I think that was just an excuse for a nice evening that we could spend on the balcony (mine) a few drinks and a good chat and lots of gossip. Carlijn is not drinking until the end of the month and she has been very good. She is getting "foggy" feelings in her head and not thinking clearly sometimes so she decided to leave of the alcohol for a few weeks to see if there is any connection there. We had a great time as usual and I spent an hour or so on the computer showing photos from our holiday last year and many others. I am using Picassa now for my pictures, it is really good software for storing, manipulating, printing and generally organising photos.

Saturday

Carlijn had to work in the morning so I did my house work and washing etc. After she came home about 1.30 we went to Subi to do our shopping. At 5.00 Ron and Dymphy who were Carlijn's neighbours at her old house in Ascot came over for dinner. Ron is 85 but still working virtually full time. He is the resident Perth expert on the organising, running and setting up of outdoor cinemas. He owns a huge amount of projectionist equipment as well as the sound systems etc. He flies all over the state to country towns setting up and maintaining outdoor cinemas. One of his regular jobs every year is the organising and running of the "Movies by Burswood" outdoor cinema. It runs for about 3 months and all of the profits go to children's charities. Last year they raised over $600,000. We are going this Wednesday to see "Dreamgirls". Ron is an amazing chap to talk to. He was a pilot in England during the war and obviously has many stories from that time and then he had a career in cinema which took him to Hollywood where he met all the big actors and directors of the time. He receives and reviews all of the latest movie releases in Perth for some organisation and generally leads a very interesting and busy life. After they left at 9.30, I watched the Manchester United / Bolton game live and really enjoyed that.

Sunday

We were up early and out on our bikes to Subi for coffee and a croissant. Then at 12.30 we went to meet Sandie and Dave at the Royal Perth Golf Club for lunch. They are friends who live in Guildford and they are the people that we met up with at Grand Central Station in New York last year for lunch in the Oyster Bar. Very interesting people and lunch lasted about 3 hours.

Monday (today)

I went out a 9.00 this morning for a haircut then went on to the clinic to finally get my blood test done. I didn't make it on Friday as I had planned but got it all done today. There was an extra test required this time, I had to do a urine sample and as I wasn't expecting that I had been to the toilet just before I came out so it wasn't easy coming up with the required sample. Anyway I did the best that I could and even though the bottle was less than half full, the technician said that it would be enough. So all that is out of the way now and I will see my GP next Monday for the results. After all of that I went into the office at about 11.00 because I had to go down to Henderson at 2.00 to see a client that we are just finishing off a job for to attend a design review meeting. I didn't get away from there till 4.30 so I wasn't home until 5.15. So all in all a busy day and no time for blogging.

Why We Should Support Bush and Blair

2007-03-17T03:05:00.000+09:00

William Shawcross has an article in The Sun explaining why, despite the fashion, we should support Bush and Blair and the war in Iraq. He takes the comparison to Vietnam and turns it round to show just why we must stay: to stop the spread of Islamism. Here is an extract:

Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, argues that because America was in Vietnam so long, other south-east Asian countries had time to improve the lives of their people enough to resist communism — which they could not have done had America let Vietnam go Communist in the 1960s. The long view has to be applied to Iraq also....

What should terrify us is this: The result of an American defeat in Iraq would be even worse than in Vietnam. As the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Musab al-Zarqawi, said before he was fortunately killed by a US air strike: “The shedding of Muslim blood is allowed in order to disrupt the greater evil of disrupting Jihad.” If Iraq collapses, such nihilist killing will spread. As in Cambodia, mass murder is the only alternative to what the US-led coalition is trying to achieve under its UN mandate.

Read the rest of the article here.

Multiculturalism And Islamism

2007-03-17T02:51:00.000+09:00

A school in Yorkshire has decided to rename the story of the Three Little Pigs to Three Little Puppies so as not to offend Muslims. The decision has been roundly criticised. Let's just take a quick look at some of the quotes (from The Daily Mail).

The headteacher said, "We have to be sensitive if we want to be multi-cultural", clearly stating that this decision was about multi-culturalism and reinforcing the fact that multiculturalism doesn't produce many cultures living within the host culture but rather the erosion of the host culture.

Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra from the Muslim Council of Britain said, "Every time we get these stories Muslims are seen more and more as misfits. We have to accept there's a predominant culture here." That first sentence leaves doubt over the sincerity of the second sentence. Is he condemning it because Muslims should bend to British culture or because such stories make Muslims look bad?

And a local paper reports:

Clr Terry Lyons was upset to learn of the decision. The independent, whose ward includes Honley, said: "I can't believe that Muslims would be offended by this. This is pandering to a few extremists."

Clr Lyons believes the people who made the decision may have been influenced by the controversy surrounding the sacking of teaching assistant Aishah Azmi in Dewsbury last year. He said: "There's an element of fear evident since the veil dispute and I don't think that's healthy."

So, we have a mixture of multiculturalism and radical Islamism. Multiculturalism which insists on the removal of the predominant culture in the face of any other. And Islamism instilling fear in the decision makers.

Study: Geography Greek To Young Americans

2007-03-15T20:39:00.000+09:00

Further to the last post I also found this article that seems to confirm what that post is saying. I promise that this will be the last post for a while on this subject. While the figures show that we are not quite as bad in Australia, we certainly have nothing to brag about in this area.

The Article

After more than four years of combat and more than 3000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released recently showed.

The study found that less than six months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map.

The National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs 2006 Geographic Literacy Study paints a dismal picture of the geographic knowledge of the most recent graduates of the U.S. education system.

"Taken together, these results suggest that young people in the United States ... are unprepared for an increasingly global future," said the study's final report.

"Far too many lack even the most basic skills for navigating the international economy or understanding the relationships among people and places that provide critical context for world events."

The study, which surveyed 510 young Americans, showed that 88 percent of those questioned could not find Afghanistan on a map of Asia despite widespread coverage of the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and the political rebirth of the country.

In the Middle East, 63 percent could not find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map, and 75 percent could not point out Iran or Israel. Forty-four percent couldn't find any one of those four countries.

Inside the United States, "half or fewer of young men and women 18-24 can identify the states of New York or Ohio on a map [50 percent and 43 percent, respectively]," the study said.

On the positive side, the study noted, seven in 10 young Americans correctly located China on a map, even though they had a number of misconceptions about that country. Forty-five percent said China's population is only twice that of the United States. It's actually four times larger than the U.S. population.

When the poll was conducted in 2006, "Americans scored second to last on overall geographic knowledge, trailing Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and Sweden," the report said.

The release of the 2006 study coincides with the launch of the National Geographic-led campaign called "My Wonderful World." A statement on the program said it was designed to "inspire parents and educators to give their kids the power of global knowledge."

A SEPERATE GEOGRAPHY SURVEY RECENTLY PUBLISHED FOUND:

Thirty-three percent of respondents couldn't pinpoint Louisiana on a map.

Fewer than three in 10 think it important to know the locations of countries in the news and just 14 percent believe speaking another language is a necessary skill.

Two-thirds didn't know that the earthquake that killed 70,000 people in October 2005 occurred in Pakistan.

Six in 10 could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East.

Forty-seven percent could not find the Indian subcontinent on a map of Asia.

Seventy-five percent were unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East.

Nearly three-quarters incorrectly named English as the most widely spoken native language.

Six in 10 did not know the border between North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified in the world.

Thirty percent thought the most heavily fortified border was between the United States and Mexico.

Source: The Associated Press