Malaysia - Multiculturalism in a Nutshell

Well these guys look like they've got a lot to celebrate. And maybe they have. I've deliberately gone a bit off the beaten track to find a news site away from the UK to cover this one, and I found this page on ABC News. I think you'll agree it paints a more genuine picture than the downbeat treatment handed out by the bbc news site.

Malaysia likes to paint itself as a secular, multicultural country where there is equality and freedom of religion under the law. Well, at least, it likes to paint itself that way when tendering for british companies to supply them with the radar systems that protect their country from the bombs that would be dropped on them by the air forces of their oh-so-friendly neighbours, given half a chance. However, this utopian multicultural ointment has a bit of a fly in it.

Azlina Jailani, now known as Lina Joy, lost her interest in the cult of the dead paedophile in 1990 and was baptised a christian in 1998. In 2000, after the National Registration Department refused to remove the description "Islam" from the religion column on her identity card, she went to the high court.

Malaysia's constitution guarantees freedom of worship but says all ethnic Malays are Muslim. So while ethnic minorities such as Chinese and Indians are governed by civil courts in the multi-racial country, and would have sought and found justice there, Sharia courts decide on civil cases involving Malays. So the secular High Court, following that fine example set by Pontius Pilate, washed their hands of the matter, declaring that as she was a Malay, this was a matter for a Sharia court. And under Sharia law, Muslims are not allowed to convert.

The ruling marked the end of her final appeal. Mind you, this was in a court where any woman's testimony is only worth half that of a man's, so what on earth did she expect ?

Ms Joy has been disowned by her family and forced to quit her job. She went into hiding last year. A Muslim lawyer who supported her case received death threats.

Vote BNP. get a moslem who wants free parking for moslems

Hands up all of you who voted for the BNP or the English Democrats, or indeed any party other than the Labaah Sheep Herders, the Plaid Cottage Burners or the Lib Dem Abdicators of Responsibility in the last Assembly Elections. And a BIG thank you to each and every one of you for advancing the political footprint of the Cult of The Dead Paedophile.

Because thanks to you - and it has to be said the outrageously rigged regional election mechanism for this hot air shit pit - this man is now my elected representative, and he pledges allegiance to the party who saw fit to instruct its Assembly Members to ignore all comunications from constituents wishing to raise matters that would not further the aims of the party.

And who is he ? You can read his profile here. To be honest, I hadn't heard of him at all until in a previous step on the political ladder, as one of Newport's silly burghers he tried getting free parking for moslems in the heart of the most motorist-hating hell hole in this neck of the woods. You see, he was more that a little pissed off that moslems parking on the streets of newport to wander off to their mosque were coming out and finding the yellow peril had slapped a parking ticket on their car.

Now to be honest, given the fact that the followers of this cult are instructed how to live their daily lives down to the level of when - and how - to cut their fingernails, I am surprised that they are even allowed to come to a mosque other than by camel, but nonetheless it seems the radical petrolheads amongst them have had their way, because so many of them cram into the Newport mosque that there just aren't enough places on the street to put their camel-less carriages.

And this chap's solution - well it was inspired really. Paint out some of the yellow lines on the streets, and turn them into parking bays - but parking bays for the use of the followers of the mad mullahs alone.

Not surprisingly, this idea got rather short shrift from the rest of us. Why, one has to ask, should such favourable treatment be handed out to the followers of islam when the followers of the majority religion in Britain today - MAMMON - were denied free parking when they chose to worship their god in the shopping centres.

So, expedient to the core, it seems the chap has thrown in the towel and jumped on the gravy-flying-carpet to become the regional assembly member.

I think I'll write and ask him why all the official junk mail comes here with the cottage burner dialect on the front page, and the queen's english on the back. But he'll probably reply saying be thankful the Newport Council coat of arms doesn't say "There is but one god and Mohammed is His Paedophile" in drunken scrawl running right to left. That's if he replies at all given the instructions handed out to their members as revealed here

In the infamous memo Leanne Wood cites the case of former Rhondda AM Geraint Davies who dealt with 2,500 individual case complaints during his four-year term. "A very small proportion of those people indicated that they would be voting Plaid Cymru in telephone canvassing. "This begs the question, 'is casework the best use of any AM's time'?" Ms Wood suggests instead of "working with individuals" regional AMs should work with groups campaigning on issues as an opportunity to push Plaid Cymru's self-government aim.

What Ms Wood has clearly neglected to note is that the Parliamentary System requires the elected member to deal equally without fear or favour with issues broughtn to their attention by constituents. And whilst it has to be said Ms Wood can be excused for her ignorance because after all the English Parliamentary System was not originally designed to operate in the badlands to the West of the Severn Sea, nor in the lands claimed by the Marcher Lords, a band whose political allegiances to the crown were are as fickle as the allegiances of the followers of Gordon Brown to the leadership of their party, there really is no excuse for this violation of the "rules"

Lib Dem ? Vichy, more like

Well then, what have we here. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new arch-traitor to the cause of democracy. Step forward Mr Mike German, leader of the Welsh Lib Dems, and architect of Rhodri Morgan's return to fame and fortune in Cardiff Bay. Shall we have a brief pause for applause I wonder ? I think not.

I should have known when that cheeky chappie Lembit Opik decided to abandon the enclave discussing who was to rule at the Hot Air Pit in Cardiff Bay and make his way to the 'Have I Got News For You' studio to take the piss out of that well known (alleged) cutlery chucker Chris Tarrant that the Lib Dems were not serious about having real power . And so they decided to follow the example of the french, sink a group of warriors of the rainbow, and leave the door open for their old political masters to return.

Anyway, here he is, snapped by an enterprising papparazzi-to-be a short while ago, trying desperately to navigate his way back to civilisation after being thrown into the wilderness.

Actually, I think he's on the trail of something to do with the takings from his expense account. Again. Someone really ought to tell him that Gordy stopped the tax relief from 'investments' in woodland logging enterprises years ago.

So now it's back to work for Red Rhodri. But as you can see from the pic below, at least he has the sense to dress for stormy weather, especially when you consider the sort of company he keeps.

Peter Hain slaps Margaret Hodge down for Defending Rights of "Established British Families" to receive social housing before Economic Migrants.

In this post the Industry Minister Mrs Margaret Hodge declares the need for Established British Families to be given priority over economic migrants in the allocation of social housing. And in this post that well known digger-up of mud, Mr Peter Hain, slaps her down for saying it.

Now I find this most interesting. Let's be clear about what Mrs Hodge was actually saying. Because I see already from even these posts that Mrs Hodge's remarks are being smeared by the "Hug A Sangattee" brigade, with half a dozen links to BNP content being placed alongside her picture. So the Spin Doctors are already busy weaving their web of lies.

Mrs Hodge was saying that her constituents, people of all colours living in her parliamentary constituency with the right to live there, and with the right to vote there, which means they get mugged to fill gordy's war chest by the revenue men just as much as you or I, have contacted her to raise concerns that social housing in her area is being placed in short supply by the need to house what she terms Economic Migrants.

Read that again. She is saying that people who have lived here for years, people whose grandparents came here to work for a living, who raised children who equally expected to be paid wages for their labour, and whose children and grandchildren have British Passports, regardles of their colour, because they were born here are being denied social housing because the latest boatload of Poles and Romanians are perceived as having a greater need.

Well I'm sorry, but I know which side of this fence I'm coming down on.

I salute you, Mrs Hodge. You have shown me that there is one Government Minister that actually has an ounce of common sense and also has the sackful of courage needed to speak out. Hell if there were more like you and any reasonable hope your views would gain sway in the corrupt hole that is Westminster, I might even vote for you.

Vote BNP - and get a right shower.

Now be honest with me for just a minute. How many of the thousands of people who went out and votes for the man on the left of this photo thought they'd end up with the right shower (or as they prefer to call themselves, the "left of centre rainbow coalition") depicted on the right.

It was a bit of a neat trick though, wasn't it. A man who collaborates with cottage burners, whose rank and file were told by their generals to ignore any request for help from any constituent coming to them with any issue that wouldn't advance the welsh language, put in charge, and his group propped up by a party whose deputy leader, just like its former leader, discovered last week that poking fun at politicians from the safety of the 'Have I Got News For You' studio it much more satisfying than participating in politics for real.

Although I have to say that I much enjoyed watching Mr Opik appearing to re-enact either a quintesenntial scene from 'Deliverance', or possibly the soundtrack from 'Genevieve'. Lembit, Lembit, Lembit. When will you learn. When a man who makes his money chairing TV shows that show embarrassing film and TV advert clips invites you to come on a TV panel game with him you say NOOOOOOOOOOO !!!!!!!

So Mr Opik has shown us hos true colours - given the choice of playing his mouth organ in front of the cameras, or discussing the heavy business of how to manage the health service in wales, he'll take the Larry Adler Lookalike Talent Show any time.

But this is serious business. Political parties doomed to eternal opposition under our first past the post electoral system have, for as long as I can remember, extolled the virtues of Proportional Representation. And schoolkids are even being fed the spin; take a look at this page on 'historylearningsite' and ask yourself two questions. 1) Is this how you remember it and 2) Is this how Tony Benn's diaries remembered it. Because I don't exactly remember it this way. But hey, as they say, History is always written by the spin doctors of the winning side.

But let's take a closer look at how the Welsh Assembly elections worked. The Regional seats are split up so that twenty seats are handed out not as a block, but as five blocks of four. And the way it works is that the votes in each regional ballot are totalled, divided by the total number of seats that party has so far from both ballots plus one, and the party with the highest quotient wins the seat.

It is supposed to distribute seats more fairly to counteract the excesses of the first past the post system that has traditionally caused things such as the Liberal Party in the days of Jeremy Thorpe wasting massive majorities in a tiny number of constituencies, so double-figure shares of the popular vote yield single figure numbers of seats. But this isn't new. More that half the general elections I am old enough to remember taking an interest in have seen a party returned to power on the back of a minority vote.

But there's something special about the way the welsh assembly was elected. By splitting up the regional seats into five lumps of four, and considering the votes in the region, instead of having one national list, the election is rigged to ensure that the regional seats are dealt out in a "rigged card game" to the top two or three winners of first past the post seats.

Don't take my word for it. Read the report in the links in this blog

And there we have it, ladies and gents. A system designed to carve up the rump of the seats and hand them out as scraps of reward to those who are already in, and to hell with the minorities.

A load of (not so old) bull

This is Harriet. A Jersey Cow, kept as a pet, and in the farmer's own words NEVER destined for the food chain. It seems she fell foul of a BSE animal cull. And you can read the attitude of the Men From The Ministry towards her, and her (white farmer) owner here

For anyone who has been stranded on a desert island or locked in the Big Brother House or something similar, this is Shambo, A bovine of a different colour and gender. The attitude of the Ministry towards HIM seems somewhat different, to the point where, as you'll see from this news page, local farmers fear their own cattle herds, raised for the reason MOST farmers raise beef or dairy cattle, will have to be slaughtered if the disease Shambo is now carrying escapes into the wild. And while followers of a religion that it would be hard to claim is native to these isles threaten blockade and protest, the so-called welsh assembly government prevaricates

I need a bit of help. I know there are colour and gender issues here, but I'm having a hard time understanding the different treatment meted out by the government to two individuals. Why is there one law for a cow kept as a family pet by white english farmers, and another for a bull kept as a religious symbol by west walian hindus ?

Call it a Health Service. Don't make me Larf

Two Christmasses ago I heard about a rather unusual experiment . Faced with an apparent increase in people going deaf without realising it, the RNID set up a telephone hearing test. It's still there on their website. You ring the number, and you hear voices reading out a three digit number. After each, you type the three digits in on your phone keypad. The catch is each set of numbers is accompanied by background white noise, and the amount varies. So although the voice on the end is a constant volume, the clarity with which you can hear it most certainly isn't.

The result is the finest example of ingenuity in mass medical testing with limited equipment of limited fidelity I have ever encountered. It's the sort of thinking that made this country great.

You ring the number, take the test, and then you get a score. At the end of the test, you are told one of several things.

If you get most of the test right, your hearing is fine.

if you get some of it wrong, a kindly voice tells you that this is nothing to worry about, few people have perfect hearing but if it REALLY bothers you then make an appointment to see your doctor.

Get some more wrong and the kindly voice says that if you're able to apply for SAGA holidays then you are at that point in life when such things are to be expected, and your GP can help you explore options to correct matters, but on the other hand if you're of an age where you've just SENT YOUR granny on a SAGA holiday you really need to make that appointment with your GP, and do it now. As in, keep the receiver in your hand when this call ends and dial him. NOW !!

I had a feeling that if you got much more wrong the voice would ask just how, exactly, did you manage to hear anything of the Radio 4 discussion programme that handed out the 0845 number to dial ?

So I took the test, and I was told that it was time for me, as I approach my fiftieth year on this planet, to explore some options.

My GP was intrigued with my account of the test. He agreed with me that it was an inspired bit of brilliant thinking. And then he told me that as I was a scuba diver, it MIGHT have been physical eardrum damage causing my problem, but he'd be able to spot that just by looking, and it wasn't. And it might have been impacted ear wax too, but alas it wasn't that either. So it was off to the Ear Nose and Throat Specialist for me. Deep Joy.

That was rather a LONG time ago. Much more than the six (?) months Tony B-Liar said was the MAXIMUM I would have to face under his government's health policies. But then that lying piece of scum said Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction and too many people believed him on that too.

But today, I come home to find a letter from Gwent NHS Trust on my doormat. A letter dated SIX days ago, in an envelope postmarked THREE days ago, which has therefore taken six days to travel the three miles from the bloated consultant's hospital desk to my front door.

But at last I have the details of my appointment, yes ?

Er ... NO. I have a letter telling me it is now permitted for me to make a phone call to talk to someone about making an appointment.

The time is 16:28. I ring the number

"Ring Ring. Ring Ring. Click. Whirr. Click. Thud. Hiss"
"Welcome To The Booking Service" says a machine.
"Click. Thud."
"Transferring To An Attendant" says a female dalek. "Please Hold The Line"
"Click. Thud. Ring Ring (repeated between three and seven times)"
"Your call Is Important To Us" says a recording. "However, all our people are busy and there is no-one to take your call right now. You are in a queue and will be answered as soon as possible"
"Click. Thud."
"Ring Ring. Ring Ring. Click. Whirr. Click. Thud. Hiss"
"Welcome To The Booking Service"

I swear to god this pantomime went on with one electric dalek after another for TWENTY BLOODY MINUTES.

After which I heard, at TWO MINUTES TO FIVE

"Click Thud Whirr"
"We're Sorry But The Booking Service Is Now Closed. Our Hours Of Opening Are Normally 8:30am to 5:00pm but we are currently closed for the BANK HOLIDAY. If you wish to leave your name and details we will ring you back after the 10th of May "

"Beep"

Now this is like a WEEK AFTER the bank holiday, but hey, this is the NHS. So I take my chance. "Hi This is John of Gwent My patient Number is X my Mobile Number is Y SIX DAYS ago your consultant dictated a letter that you waited THREE DAYS to post and the Postman waited THREE MORE days to deliver. The letter asked me to ring this number to book an appointment. I have been hanging on listening to daleks and beeps for 28 minutes so here I am again my mobile number is Y RING ME tomorrow or ....."

"Click. Beep".
"Dialling tone"

And they wonder why staff in the NHS are attacked.

I predict that tomorrow evening the South Wales Argus will report the sudden appearance of a crazed, axe-wielding twenty two stone viking at the Royal Gwent Hospital. It will record how ten beefy policemen failed to subdue the crazed man as he swung his axe through the hospital telephone communciations room doing untold damage to their automated messaging system. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go sharpen an axe.

Musings on the loss of british coinage

It's supremely ironic that I am indebted to a website operating in FRANCE for the research background to this post.

Yesterday afternoon I was listening to a radio debate (yes, I do a lot of that, while I'm writing software) about the recent statement from the EU that britain will be allowed to keep her weights and measures alongside the metric ones of the european continent for as long as we want to. And a damn good thing too. Some idiot out there was trying to make the point that in pre-decimal days we had no end of trouble ading up five and seven-pence and one pound six and elevenpence. Well, guess what mister metricate-at-all-costs ? NO I DIDN'T and I didn't need calculators and electronic didgeridoos in the supermarkets to work out my shopping. Neither did barmen and barmaids have trouble working out six pints of beer at six and fivepence apiece when people went down the pub either.

Indeed, it can be argued that the mental agility needed to juggle four farthings to a penny, twelve pennies to a shilling, twenty-one shillings to a guinea, eight furlongs to a mile, four rods to a chain, and one chain by one furlong, the area a skilled man and a horse drawn plough would be expected to plough in a day being an acre, is how we bred our mathematicians and engineers in the days before 1971.

I'll tell you a little story about February 15th, 1971.

The Number 27 bus (today it's the number 77, hell inflation gets everywhere these days) ran from Cardiff Bus Station up North Road, past Gabalfa interchange, up Caerphilly Road, down Templeton Avenue, through Llanishen Village, round the back of Roath Park Lake, down past the University and the Blind Institute and back into town. The bit of the trip I did daily was from Gabalfa Interchange to Templeton Avenue and back again, to Llanishen High School. And in the last week of pre-decimal coinage, the bus fare was five old pennies each way. So when my dad handed me four shillings and sixpence for the week's bus fare, I knew that I'd have fourpence left on Friday night. Enough to go into the newsagents next to the bus stop I got off at and buy two BIG bars of chocolate at twopence each.

For one glorious week after February 15th 1971 I was incredibly wealthy at the end of the week. Why ? Because in the arithmetic that converted 240 pence into 100 new pence, five old pennies became two new ones. But two new pennies were, in reality, only four point eight old ones. So after ten trips on the bus, I had only handed over four shillings of my four and sixpence. In one glorious week I had received a fifty per cent increase in my disposable income. I was a bit sick that weekend as a result of stuffing THREE big bars of chocolate down myself.

But not half as sick as I was the next Monday Morning. Faced with the alarming loss of four per cent of their revenue as a result of decimalisation, the scum in the bus company put their prices up. But bus companies didn't deal with fiddling small halfpennies, so they jacked the bus fare up from 2p to 3p. Or to put it another way, from five old pence the week before decimalisation to 7.2 old pence the week after. A FORTY FOUR PER CENT INCREASE.

And the politicians wonder why Decimalisation almost caused riots in the streets and why there'll be politician's heads on spiked poles if they ever brought in the Euro over here. No Mr Metricate-At-All-Costs it's not the system I hate, it's the corrupt scum raking in their take on the undertow of the wave when our orderly lives are thrown into needless chaos.

---

But that's not the only thing I mourn the loss of this weekend. I've mentioned elsewhere that when I took my "O" level History exam in 1974 I sat a paper based on BRITISH Economic Political and Social History 1760 - 1832. The Industrial Revolution. Advances in Military Technology. The Meritocracy that was Nelson's Navy, where a man could advance from nothing to greatness by hard work, intelligence, talent, audacity and luck. Abukir Bay. Trafalgar. The Enclosure Acts. The Corn Laws and the Reform Act of 1832 that took the vote from any adult male not living in a dwelling valued at £10 or more. Which for some strange reason required parliament to be defended by armed troops against a mob of the angry disenfranchised.

But my kids know nothing of this. My 21 year old studied a syllabus requiring her to know about world war I (but not the significance of why it kicked off). Yes, you probably know, or if you don't then by looking here you'll quickly find out that World War I happenned not because Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assasinated on 28 June 1914, but because he was assasinated IN SARAJEVO by members of "The Black Hand", a Serbian nationalist secret society, and the "Treaty Alliance System" then in place meant 'one thing led to another'. But hell, what's a few tens of millions lives between monarchs whose interbreeding was a recipe for disaster in its own right.

The rest of my daughter's history GCSE syllabus covered America under prohibition, and the rise of the Speakeasy and the Tommy Gun, and Germany in World War Two.

And what makes me really angry is that five years later, when my 16 year old is about to take the same GCSE exam, she has been given the same syllabus.

FOR FIVE YEARS the youth of this country have been denied the discovery of what it was that made Great Britain the greatest nation on earth. It makes my blood boil.

This afternoon we were sitting in the car watching high tide lap round the pier on the Esplanade of the Victorian town of Penarth. My daughter asked me why the pier was built, and what use the large room you can see in this photograph was first put to. So I began to tell her of the way the Victorian Well-To-Do would come to the coast and take a walk on these piers to get the feel of the sea whilst staying firmly attached to dry land. And of course the pier provided a valuable docking platform for passenger vessels - and does to this day.

So when did the Victorians Build This ? She asked. And it took me ages to remember.

When I was her age I'd have put my hand in my pocket, pulled out a handful of pennies, found a venerable one with Victoria's head on it and turned it over to read the year as a 'good guess'. Which brings me back to the reason I started this post.

Once upon a time every British Citizen carried little time capsules of history in their pockets, wallets and purses, dating back two or three lifetimes. Today the best you can hope for is 1971. Two years after man landed on the moon. Two years before the Open University awarded its first degree. The year Idi Amin sized power in Uganda. And the year we were still putting the cottage burners where they belong - IN THE DOCK

Shock Horror Blair and Morgan in Gay Sex Scandal

Well what else was I supposed to think when I read the headline "Blair 'shafted' me, says Morgan". But as always, it wasn't quite as exciting as that. Read the details for yourself here on the BBC News site

However, the story did provide me with a marvellous caption competition opportunity. Come on boys and girls, tell me which you think is most apt.
Call 0906-RHOD-SUX for Caption 1) "Er.. Rhodri... How come you're a fat bloated git so full of lard you'll float of your own accord and yet your mae west is three times the size of mine"

Or phone 0906-RHOD-SINX for Caption 2) "Aha !! I see my apparatchicks have successfully planted the housebricks. Now all I need is one large wave and I can parachute Alun Michael back in as First Minister and all our problems with the cottage burners alliance will be over"

Remember, Calls cost £25 as a flat fee non-refundable donation to reduce the size of the yawning chasm in party funding and the buoyancy of overboard politicians can go down as well as up.

Musings on the reanimation of the Spin Doctors

This post on the BBC News site says it all.
Gordon Brown promised more transparency in government - but what everyone really wanted was slightly more transparency in the autocues placed in front of the chancellor.
We are expected to believe that the man who waits in the wings for his coronation cares so little about presentation that he can't be arsed to make sure Sky TV have a clear picture of him. In fact, sensing blood, one of the paparazzi pack took a WONDERFUL shot, which can only be called 'Gordy The Headless Wonder' which appears to show gordon's headless torso continuing to campaign long after he's been decapitated. However, as the paparazzi in question has sold his prize to the Getty Organisation, you'll have to click the link to the beeb site above - who've paid for the image from your licence fee - to see what I mean.

It does bring a whole new meaning to the concept that the guy talks out of his arse.

But are you really trying to make me believe the man who schemed and plotted the downfall of the small IT businessman so that indian software houses could have our contracts, and screw the job up, while charging five times what we would, the man who schemed and plotted the smash and grab raid on everyone's pension fund except his own and those of his westminster chums by taxing the returns on their investments, in violation of the basic principle that pension funds get everything tax free because the money they earn is taxed when it is paid to the recipients, the man who invented the budget that shafted the british worker earning less than £17k whilst at the same time claiming it was a budget cutting income tax by 2p in the pound, and the man who sat at the right hand of the most control freaked, media manipulating, image conscious politician the world has ever known DIDNT deliberately organise this as some stupid PR stunt.

Oh FFS give me a break.

Musings on 'The Cult of the Dead Paedophile"

I've never been one for bandying about management newspeak, especially the political newspeak of the doubleplus ungood variety mouthed by Tony B-Liar and his acolyte Gordy the Headless (courtesy of Sky TV) so when I heard this phrase being thrown around the 'net I felt a little research was called for. And Odin Bless You, Auntie Beeb; and the knowledge of Loki light up your days, Tom Cruise, for together you have provided me with just the ammunition I need.

There's a video going round U-Tube at the moment. A journalist (who clearly isn't proud of what he did) lost his rag while challenged by followers of the Church of Scientology. It seems that he was goaded by one of their followers and as soon as he lost his cool, his outburst was filmed (by cameraphone, I guess), shoved on U-Tube, and hawked round or handed on to anyone who could be persuaded to watch it.

In his own words he was "redder than an exploding tomato and screaming louder than a jet engine" and For anyone thinking of a cereer in objective journalism this is a case study in how NOT to go about it. The link to his page is here. I won't bother putting in a link to the U-Tube video. I have not watched it and I will not bother doing so; I have had quite enough run-ins with folowers of REAL religions (The Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints, The Jehovah's Witnesses, a group of Methodists who have clearly strayed from the path, and the Evangelical Christian faith to name but four) to waste my time researching the hurt feelings of the followers of dodgy beliefs put forth by dead science fiction writers. But I know EXACTLY how the BBC's John Sweeney felt after he was manipulated into losing his cool, I've been there myself thanks to followers of real religions, and I can well picture in my mind how those fool followers of the Cult of the Dead Science Fiction Writer cackled and howled with laughter as they danced back to their nest to uploaded this man's moment of madness.

Well John Sweeney has proved he feels human emotions and has human failings, and is not some brainwashed automaton. Mr Sweeney took the opportunity to lay down in public the full story behind his moment of madness, and for that I say 'thank you' for a refreshingly honest and very public statement of the moment you broke under duress. And let us not forget that unlike the "moments of madness" of several politicians, everyone kept their trousers on, no money changed hands, no armed men in uniform, be that black riot jacket, or battle fatigues had to die, neither did any plain clothes gun totin' ones, (and neither did any brazilians). No one had to make an appointment at an STD clinic and no-one felt the need to put a plastic bag over their head to experiment with eroticism in an oxygen-deprived environment.

But I have a special reason to thank Mr Sweeney. This link listed amongst the background articles on his explanation page yielded a priceless gem, a nugget of information that should be cherished and kept for use.

In 1999 Mr Ian Howarth, spokesman for the Cult Information Centre handed the BBC a definition of what constitues a 'cult'. It's still there on the Cult Information Centre Website. Here it is:-

"Every cult can be defined as a group having all of the following five characteristics:

1. It uses psychological coercion to recruit, indoctrinate and retain its members
2. It forms an elitist totalitarian society.
3. Its founder leader is self-appointed, dogmatic, messianic, not accountable and has charisma.
4. It believes 'the end justifies the means' in order to solicit funds, recruit people.
5. Its wealth does not benefit its members or society."

So I felt the need to ask the question "Is 'The Cult of The Dead Paedophile" a realistic description of the Moslem Faith?
Let us examine that in detail, starting with the question "Are they a cult ?"

A chap interviewed on the BBC PM programme a few days ago certainly thinks he was subjected to psycological coercion. He was drawn to the cause of radical islam after Tony Blair took us to Kosovo and had our boys stand round doing nothing while Kosovan Muslims were butchered in the name of ethnic cleansing. He bravely spoke out in an interview with Eddie Mayer, in the face of theats of violence, saying how radical islamists initially got his interest by "pointing out that in Kosovo Blair was letting white, blond, blue eyed followers of islam be butchered, so what hope did HE, a brown skinned follower of the same faith have here." And he believed it. And come on, be honest, if Sky TV showed pictures of lions east of italy being used to put down christians and someone found out Eurotunnel were shipping a consignment here next week, you'd give me a hand to blow up the channel tunnel entrance and don't even try to deny it. But the best bit in the interview for me was the way the radical islamists tried to turn this man away from his family. He says he found his father praying to Allah in their home, praying that his son might have his eyes opened and turn his back on the radical islamist mosque he was now attending and return to the one he had attended with his father. The radical islamists heard about this and told him this was a test of his faith, sent by Allah. Allah wantes to let you see for yourself that your parents were not true followers of Allah, he said.

Well, I've heard THOSE words before - because followers of the Evangelical Christian movement used the same words to ME in 1976. OK OK they said "God" not "Allah" but hand on it's the same deity isn't it ? So they score a pass on point 1.

Let's move on. Do they want to form an elistist, totalitarian society, in which they, the true believers, are the elite, and we, the infidel nonbelievers, are to be slain using the same methods they use to butcher the meat they eat. Er... I think that's a big fat YES to point 2.

Now was The Prophet Mohammed (piss be upon him) self-appointed, dogmatic, not accountable and charismatic ? I am led to believe by those who consider there is only one god and mohammed is is prophet that once again we have scored a bullseye. OK then, that leaves the question of whether he was messianic. Well I believe the followers of Islam relish their day of armageddon just as the Evangelical Christians do theirs, and just as I look forward to the day of Ragnarok. Three out of three.

And so moving on, do they believe the end justifies the means in recruitment and fundraising. Well, Gordon The Headless One certainly believes so as far as the fundraising goes. Have you TRIED opening a bank account lately ? Better still, try buying a holiday villa in the Republic of Northern Cyprus or anywhere else that gives the bird to anti-terrorist-money-laundering demands. And as for the ends justifying the means when it comes to new recruits, it seems there is no shortage of young men willing to lay down their lives for the cause, once the brainwashers have finished with them. So that's four out of four.

So, onto the last question. Funding and who benefits from it. The question becomes "Are the funds the radical islamists are amassing benefitting the average 'Follower of Allah and His Prophet on the Clapham Omnibus?'"

Well, it didn't benefit the ones on THIS omnibus did it.



So that'll be a big fat YES to 'Are They a Cult'. Now let's move on: Is he DEAD ?

Well, according to THIS page on Wikipedia he's got a tomb. Which puts him in my eyes on the same footing as Saint Peter and does rather set him apart from Jesus Christ (except perhaps in the eyes of non-christians and the followers of Jesus Christ and his Very Latter Day Saint Dan Brown, who believe he HAS a tomb, but we're not allowed to know where, and so does his wife, under a pyramid in France).

Now mind you, if you make google your friend, you can find some pretty outlandish links suggesting Mohammed's remains are in orbit between the earth and the moon (Here Comes That L Ron Hubbard Moment Again).

But OK I'm willing to go with the mainstream on this one. Unlike Odin, who first sacrificed his eye, and then hung on the tree Yggdrasil for seven days until he was dead, in order to gain the knowledge of runes, and who then used that knowledge to come back from the dead after three days (yup, thought I'd heard that story about that jesus bloke somewhere before) I'm going to declare the Prophet Mohammed is very dead, and buried in a tomb in Medina. On the grounds that if enough people felt it important enough to remember that a bloke who died centuries ago was buried at point 'X' on the map, it's a fair bet they WERE, and what remains of them is still there. Oh hang on, I need to make a small exception to that concept. For some chap named Tut-Ankh-Amun.

And finally then, was he a paedophile ?

I can almost hear the chants of "Well before we get into that, one has to bear in mind that things were diffent in those days ....". Bollox to that. Google is your friend on this one. I am indebted to the author of THIS website, which popped out top of a google search for "prophet mohammed's wives" and led me straight to what I wanted to find, without all that tedious mucking about in the Internet Sacred Texts Archive that I usually need to do. I quote verbatim.

‘Aisha was 6 (or 7) years old when she was married, and the marriage was consummated when she was nine years old. al-Tabari vol.9 p.130,131

He beat her too. According to the same website "Mohammed himself once deliberately struck ‘Aisha "on the chest which caused me pain", according to Sahih Muslim vol.2 book 4 ch.352 no.2127 p.462."

So, in summary, I feel 'The Cult Of The Dead Paedophile' is a fully justified description.

Musings on West Walian Anarchy

Now I've just spent the bank holiday weekend at Pendine Sands, and on the way back home I stopped off in the little village of laugharne, where I recall a most interesting bit of anarchy took place not so long ago.

At the time I recall the BBC Wales website had a full page on this, but now it's gone (I suppose it was considered unpatriotic and removed) so I was forced to look elsewhere for the evidence.

http://www.cronaca.com/archives/000777.html

It turns out the locals don't much like the bloke who bought Ferry House, a listed building just up the road from the boathouse where according to the tourist noticeboards Dylan Thomas spent his last days before his death. Now this wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that he's made lots of money in the ice-cream business, of course.

It seems the owner of Ferry House has the legal right to "pass and repass with or without vehicles" over highway in question leading to his property. But the previous owners didn't. What that has to do with the new owner's rights to resume doing so is probably the heart of the matter.

I know a bit about that legal wording, as I had the same specific rights over a "lane" used as a "footpath" but actually defined as a 'highway' that ran alongside my previous house, and I forced the council to back down when they tried to "bollard me in". But it seems West Walians - cottage burners to the core, I presume, don't give a fig for the law, because they decided to put their own little bollard in the road preventing the owner of the property from exercising his right to pass and repass.

Personally I'd have taken an H1 hummer down there and run every one of them over.

One other point. I found it amusing that the tourist noticeboards at Laugharne say Dylan wrote 'Under Milk Wood' there. Because the tourist noticeboards in New Quay, Cardiganshire, say he got the idea for it while living THERE and took the idea with him to AMERICA to write it.

And anyone who's heard his "play for voices" and has stood on the harbour wall at New Quay looking at the rows of cottages, and the church far above them at the top of the hill will instantly visualise Mr Mog Edwards standing in the front room of the cottages in question, and picture the "Rhiannon" bobbing on the slow, black, crow-black sea.

So it seems as with most things history is written by the spin doctors....

An open letter to everyone who stood for election in south east wales on May 3rd 2005

I emailed this to every contact email address I could find for the people who said they were standing for election in one form or another in the welsh assembly elections on the 3rd of May 2007.

None of them replied. And for the second election running, no-one bothered to ask my (now 21 year old) daughter what she thought about the whole business.


Good morning

As the election day draws near, and as you've seen fit to send numerous letters to me requesting my support, I thought it only fair to ask you for your opinions on a few matters:-

However, As MY daughter will be working abroad outside the EEC when SHE starts her working life, because there are no vacancies for her here, she won't have to repay her student loan at all. So I have a different set of priorities....

1. As I walk through the streets of Newport, Monmouthshire, I can't help noticing that all the official posters, signs, letters, and everything else to do with administering and taxing the sorry shambles that passes for this country nowadays has everything written FIRST in welsh, and often in a large font, and SECOND in english, and often in a smaller font. What do you think about that ?

2. Anything 'official' coming through my door now comes printed and inserted in a way that the WELSH is the language that stares you in the face, and the ENGLISH is tucked away beside it. Or the WELSH is written where the non-arab races start reading their letters, at the left, and the ENGLISH is in the other half of the page. What do you think about that ?

3. As a small businessman I am hearing noises that there is a campaign afoot to FORCE me to provide a means to conduct my business through the medium of welsh. I say it's my business what language I conduct my business in and if some people can't understand a word I say that's not my problem. What do you think about that ?

4. Did you know that planning applications in certain parts of wales have been turned down on the basis that to grant the application would present an unwarranted intrusion of english-speaking people ?

5. Did you know that there is at least one large organisations in what used to be the public sector whose language policy is that any welsh speaker complaining about being sent a document with english on it is immediately sent a welsh-only document, bereft of english, but any english speaker making the complaint about receiving documents in welsh receives a letter, sent to them welsh-outwards and english on the reverse, stating it is government policy that they must send their communications in both languages.

And now for a few more local matters

6. Did you know that if you take a car down to the tip today there's a notice on the site demanding that you be polite to the staff ?

7. Did you know that if you take something to the site that you cannot personally lift above your head in order to put in the skip, that one of the people paid from your council tax to man the site will shout and swear at you for not doing so.

8. Did you know that if you telephone to complain at the actions of those people you will be told that the staff there are told they must not assist you on the grounds of health and safety, and that in any case they are too busy directing the 300 cars that now turn up evewry day because rubbish is now only collected every fortnight ?

9. Do you know how much extra co2 is being pumped into the atmosphere by 300 cars making an average 10 mile trip to the tip instead of having one refuse lorry do it ?

10. Do you know how much we could save by sacking all the arrogant, rude, staff currently working at the tip and replace them with polish migrants ?

And now for another issue ?

11. Do you know when it was last possible to drive a car from junction 24 or 28 of the M4 into the centre of newport in daylight without hitting a delay caused by a roadwork scheme ?

12 Do you know how much money traders have lost because people are going to other places where their money is welcomed ?

13 Do you know how many businesses are looking outside newport to set up business premises because of the ongoing hostility to vehicle traffic ?


And whilst on the environment...

14 Would you please explain why we have to bear the cost of allowing your party to occupy the moral high ground when across the atlantic the smallest vehicle on the roads consumes more petrol per mile than our BIGGEST gas guzzler and the bloke in charge there laughs at us ?


And finally ...

At the last general election, there was widespread complaint from politicians on all sides that there was a complete lack of interest from the younger send of the electorate. At that election, my eldest daughter got a polling card for the first time. Now when I was in that position, the (tory) sitting MP for what is now Cardiff North, my constituency, wrote to every 17 year old, organised a coach trip to london, took us round westminster hall, walked us into the chamber of the house of commons (yes, honestly - it was in recess for the holidays and we walked in with him and looked at the green leather seats .....) and took us to the balcony outside where disraeli and gladstone (who were then on the GCSE O Level History syllabus) argued about the state of pollution in the river.

Can you explain why NO-ONE has bothered to do ANYTHING to give my daughter any belief, no matter how false in the current political and electoral system, that her vote, and her opinions matter to the way the country is run ? Because I believe that in a land where cottage burners are getting the upper hand, in a land where the only people the government bend over backwards for are those who claim to have put down the armalite rifle, the only message being sent out is that the way to be taken notice of is to PICK UP an armalite rifle and start using it, so that in twenty years time those of you who survive WILL be listened to. And that gives me what some might call a rather unique view on the unorthodox way chapati flour was being used in what is now the country across the river severn a few months back. And that makes me worried. What do you think about that ?

regards