Ayrshire Blog

A case for the UN : Peace for Palestine and Israel

2011-09-16T22:32:00.000Z

The United Nations is exactly the right body to lead the resolution of the Palestinian Israeli conflict. The UN was midwife at the birth of Israel and carries a responsibility to find a just end to a terrible conflict. The Palestinian move to seek UN recognition is a historic development and , like the Arab Spring, provides an opportunity for all sides to make moves that will heal long running sores.

When thinking about the potential for resolution of the Palestinian Iraeli conflict both in terms of those two entities and in terms of wider international relations it is important to understand what gave birth to the problem.

In essence it was collective international guilt about the Jewish Holocaust and the determination of Jews to have a safe historical homeland that drove the creation of Israel out of the land of Palestine. While the British and others were key players it was the UN through resolution 181(11) in 1947 that partitioned Palestine into an Israeli Jewish state and an Arab Palestinian state.

There is in fact a strong argument that the current Palestinian request that the UN recognise their statehood is merely asking the UN to acknowledge something it has already granted by way of UN resolution 181(11)

This is not a minor matter. In essence the UN general assembly through 181 has already in fact determined by international law the boundaries of Israel and Palestine. It is now time that the UN sought to find a way to have this will realised in a way that provides justice for all parties. Indeed the Palestinians have every right to call on the UN to help resolve a problem that it in part created.

One of the problems with the UN imposed partition of 181 was that Arab states rejected the partition. This was understandable at that time. Palestinians must no doubt have taken the view that they were not responsible for the Holocaust but were being told they must forfeit half their lands for a Jewish homeland - a hard and bitter pill to swallow.

The world has moved on though and Israel is a reality. It was right that the call for a homeland for the Jewish diaspora was heeded, but the international community has failed to live up to its responsibility to heal the damage that was caused , not least to the Palestinains, in the process.

Israel is now faced by acute challenges as a result of the Arab Spring. For a long time it has been able , with some justification, to point to its neighbours as violent repressive dictatorships and to highlight the miltary and terrorist threats against it. All of this was true, but it also provided cover for land grabs through the development of illegal settlements that attempted to change the reality on the ground.

There is much anger among Muslims in the Middle East about this behaviour but the Palestinian case was only ever damaged by its association with terror. I wrote a long time ago on this and suggested that when Muslims and Arabs moved from extremism to democracy they would find the cause of resolving the Palestinian injustice very greatly strengthened. So it comes to pass it seems.

The West has rightly thrown some weight behind demends for freedom in the Middle East and North Africa. Now the Palestinians ask for their own justice. How can that in conscience be rejected? It can't., but can resolution for Palestinians be achieved while not damaging Israel? I believe it can.

There are Arabs in Israel. Not, by some accounts, always viewed as equal citizens but nevertheless part of the state. There are of course Jewish settlers who are living in settlements in Palestine and protect themselves with guns. Finally, there are generations of Palestinians who like the Jewish Diaspora yearn for their homeland even as Israel resists the inclusion of this diaspora in a settlement.

So here is a thought. Imagine with me if you will that the parties can be brought to agree ( by some divine intervention perhaps?) that they will return to the 1947 partition as the basis for their settlement and that the refugee diaspora issue is to also be addressed.

Now here is the crunch. Each of the peoples here wants its own religiouslyt informed state but also has people of its own who feel that their home or place is in the other state. Now imagine that both states guarantee to all parties the fair and equal treatment of both peoples in both states.

The next step in a resolution would be for Isreal to give up an agreed portion of its settlements. Importanly the villages and homes would be left intact. These villages should then house some of the Palestinian diaspora as part of the solution to that problem. Israel might be seen as paying a price in agreeing this but she would of course be reminded that those settlements were in any event illegal.

The remaining Jewsish settlers in their settlements would then become citizens of the Palestinian state. A state which would legally and in practice guarantee the rights of all citizens of whatever religion. The same rights and guarantees would apply to Arab citizens and returnees in Israel. To work this would need both states to develop a good framework for bi-partite relations based on their mutual self interest in good inter-community relations. ( Jerusalem is of course a particular but solvable issue)

It goes almost ( but not quite) without saying that any settlement constructed on this kind of approach would be impossible without the clearest possible acceptance both by the Palestinians and other Muslim states of Israel's right to exist without rancour or conflict. This would be the ultimate payoff for Israel and worth, what for them will seem like sacrifices. Israel will finally be a safe Jewish homeland and have neighbours with whihc it builds productive realtions.

Pie in the sky? Perhaps; but major changes are abroad in the Middle East and in such times major opportunities arise and must be grasped by statesemen who desire to be the agents of resolution and peace.

The Palestinians have made an astute move going to the UN to highlight the issue of their status even as other Muslims demand their freedom and democracy. The UN has the responsibility to treat their demands with great consideration and not to lightly dismiss them. At the same time the UN also has a responsibility to safeguard the Israeli state. The Arab Spring and the Palestinian UN move has shaken the dice and its now game on for change. The important question is wether politicians who represent the Palestinian and Israel peoples can be astute enough to grab the chance of just resolution and be bold and imaginative enough in finding solutions, with the help of the UN.

Libya and the prospect of post-Islamist reform and renaissance

2011-08-25T20:59:00.000Z

If the events over the last months in the Middle East have been an Arab Spring then the final days of the revolution in Libya may prove to be a period of April thunderstorms and showers - something you wouldn't want to be caught up in but a sign , nevertheless, that summer is on its way.

As popular revolutions have rolled through Arab countries, some in the West have been doom-sayers; urging us to stick with the devils we know, those crazed dictators who murdered their own people, rather than embracing the people who were rising to throw of the yoke of tin-pot tyrants.

Some of this anxiety was understandable. Extremist Islamism has been a destructive force around the world inspiring terrorism that has casued death and destruction to Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

But one thing became clear as these revolutions sputtered into life - while people were drawing inspiration and identity from their Islamic religion they were not rising up in order to demand Islamist solutions. They have on the contrary raised calls for political freedoms that have great resonance in the democratic world.

Suddenly the old argument that Arab populations are unsuited to democratic governance started to seem a little hollow. These people were now demanding a say in running their countries and they werent it seemed demanding to be ruled by Mullahs.

The Libyan revolution has been the most bloody and posed a challenge to players on the world stage. There seems little doubt that the US led Nato intervention prevented a massacre of the rebellious east of Libya but it has come at a cost - and not just in money.

Only a minority of NATO countries actually put their shoulder to the wheel and participated in the action in Libya and NATO as a result will soon need to be re-thought. Is there a point in having members of a military alliance who stand on the sidelines when things get tough?

The more important issue though is the revolutionary upsurge among Arab peoples across North Africa and the Middle East that has bubbled up in recent months like champagne from an uncorked bottle. The pent up frustrations of people living under dictatorial regimes finally burst out in revolutionary mass demonstrations that have profoundly shaken the former status quo. In Arab countries and in North Africa people now know that they have the potential through mass action to assert their right to democracy and freedom in the face of autocratic regimes.

This is all still a strange experience for many in the West, not least those who viewed Islam and Arab nations in particular as being culturally incompatible with notions of democracy and freedom. They observed Islamism in action and it was almost invariably hostile, violent, intolerant and anti-democratic.

But there is now another possibility - that we are seeing the emergence of something we might call post-Islamism were people want islamically informed states but states which are not Theocracies and which are more pluralistic and tolerant than we have come to expect from many Islamic countries in that part of the world.
They may of course emerge with more restricted freedoms than we now associate with democracy but that doesnt mean that such countries could not be decent neighbours and essentially controlled by their peoples.. Many European countries have been religiously informed democracies in their past..

Equally significant changes may also take place in the way that we in the West view the Israeli Palestinian conflict. If Islamic nations in the Middle east and North Africa show themselves capable of taking a democratic path then Israel will find less excuse for its policy of suppressing the Palestinians by controlling and annexing their land.

These recent and ongoing revolutions have shown that there is a real appetite for freedom and democracy on the arab "street" and oppressive Islamist theocracies now seem by no means the only or even the most likely alternative to oppressive dictatorships.

On that view it is possible, just possible, that we might be seeing the first twinkling of a sort of combined Arab reformation and enlightenment - a time when democracy and rationality flower , a time of renaiscance, albeit in countries which are fundamentally Islamic.

That would be a huge step forward , not only for the people in those countries but for all of us.
Much depends on Libya and the Libyan people now. If the Libyan people can overcome these final bloody days and hold their untiy through what will no doubt be very difficult months ahead then the prospects for such a benign Islamic renaissance seem good.

Libya - send in the drones

2011-02-25T21:33:00.001Z

There was never much doubt that Muammar Qaddafi of Libya was a deluded narcissist but the incredible violence he has unleashed on his own people this week has now established that the man is a raving lunatic who will happily see his country descend into complete chaos and destruction rather than release his group on power.

Qaddafi still has loyal armed forces at his disposal despite the rapidly growing defections from within the Army and Air force. These forces, some of whom are lead by one of his sons, are bolstered it appears by large numbers of African mercenaries and together they have been engaging in seemingly wanton killing of civilians.

Many countries had large numbers of their citizens working in Libya and there is a scramble to get the remainder of these people out of the country. Western leaders have been slow to take action against the Libyan regime and this might be seen as at least in part due to the fact that they are still playing catch-up with fast moving events in Mediterranean Africa and the Middle East. However it also seems likely that they are only just now beginning to take firm positions on such matters as sanctions because of a fear that their citizens in Libya might be taken hostage by the regime. That fear should now be rapidly passing though and the time has come to consider what further actions might be taken to support the Libyan peoples revolution.

Passing resolutions at the UN and throwing Libya out of international Human Rights organisations is all very symbolic but is likely to have little effect on the decisions taken by a madman. Neither is the imposition of sanctions likely to have any impact in the short term on the murderous behaviour of Gaddafi's regime. Threats that members of the regime will be taken to an international court might work for a sane leader but probably wont work with Qaddafi.

Qaddafi it seems has decided that if he cant rule Libya then he and his country have reached their Gotterdamerung. This man is mad enough to want to go out in an orgy of blood and destruction rather than step aside.

The only question then at this stage is whether a way can be found for Qaddafi to meet his fate without him taking the lives of many more thousands of Libyans with him.

A no fly zone wont really deal with this situation and there will be little appetite in the west for any intervention on the ground. Western armies do now though have access to remote technologies that could be used to target Qaddafi and either kill him or weaken him enough to allow the Libyan people to complete their revolution.

One solution to this present situation might be for the security council to recognise the madness of this dictator and to authorise the use of cruise missiles and /or drones to target Qaddafi's known centres of power and known loyal armed force bases.

It would not be wise for any group of nations to do this without UN backing of course but with UN security council support this would be a legitimate act. The problem is that the security council has on it nations who themselves are autocratic states such as Russia and China who will not wish to authorise actions against a tyrant - even a mad tyrant - when they themselves are little better and may now themselves be feeling vulnerable to this wave of people revolutions. So the cruise missiles and drones will probably stay in their bases. More the pity.

Airgun shooting at Auchinleck Academy

2011-02-23T18:22:00.002Z

The Ayrshire village of Auchinleck was shocked today when a shooting incident at Auchinleck Academy resulted in injuries to nine pupils. The shooting took place at around 1:30 today in the Church Street area of Auchinleck and some reports suggested that two people were involved in shooting the young people. More recent reports have suggested that the police have now arested an 18 year old man in connection with the incident. The nine injured children were taken to Crosshouse Hospital in Kilmarnock were eight discharged quickly but one was kept in for further treatment.

Reports suggested that the pupils had been shot in the legs or the back. The school appeared to act quickly and called in the police.and notified parents. East Ayrshire Council has indicated that it is working with the school to arrange apropriate support for the pupils involved.

This incident comes hard on the heels of of a riot at a recent local football match between Auchinleck Talbot and Cumnock Juniors which made the national news and it does further serious harm to the reputation of the area.

Iran regime seeks conflict as distraction from protests

2011-02-16T17:40:00.001Z

Reports suggesting that Iran may be about to try to send warships through the Suez Canal to Syria have produced a predictable angry and threatening response from Israel. This is entirely what the Iranian regime is looking for - conflict with Israel which will distract from the protests in Iran.

The Iranian regime tried to claim that the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt were Islamist revolutions inspired by Irans own Islamist revolution but nothing could be further from the truth. The revolts started as protests against economic and social conditions but quickly morphed into wider demands for an end to autocracy and demands for democratic freedoms. The revolts had an Islamic flavour of course - that is to be expected and is not an unreasonable thing in countries which are essentially Islamic. But the slogans of the revolutions were not Islamist - people were not on the streets demanding that the dictatorship of Mubarak be replaced by a dictatorship of the Mullahs.

In a dictatorship as tightly controlled as Iran though the religiously minded autocrats thought that they could fool their own people by claiming that the Pan Arab revolutionary atmosphere supported their own Shia Islamist world view. The Iranian regime immediately started a campaign of misinformation and intimidation intended to frighten the pro-democracy movement in Iran from attempting anything similar to what as happened in Egypt.

The Iranian thugocracy has perhaps even less scruples than the Mubarak regime. They are likely to be less troubled by firing on their own citizens given their shameful record of executing dissidents.

There is a wind blowing in the Middle East though that can't be stopped. People clearly are fed up with autocracies of any form and they want the freedom to express their views and choose their own rulers. They want freedom from the threat of secret police and religious police.

The regime is showing signs that it is worried by the protests and there are calls for the leaders of the opposition movements to be executed. Protesters are being decried as agents of foreign powers and the media is under tight control with little access for foreign journalists. The Iranian regime is wheeling out all the same tired tactics that dictatorships do when their people revolt and cry "enough" !

Not only should we expect the Iranian regime to be more violent in its response but we should not be surprised when we hear them take actions which provoke conflict with Israel and the West. The regime will be desperate to create headlines for its people which give them something to rally around other than calls for proper democracy. It's in that context that Iran is now perhaps about to send ships through the Suez Canal.

The regime will figure that whatever the outcome it will gain. If Israel responds firmly and harshly then the regime will have a cause to rally the Iranian people. If Israel does not respond then Iran has shown that it can exert naval; power and influence in the Mediterranean right next door to Israel.

Egypt and Algeria : the same but different?

2011-02-12T13:26:00.003Z

After the successful overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt there are now signs that Algeria is going to be the next Arab country to see mass demonstrations for democratic reform. Algeria like Egypt is a police state, riddled with corruption and governed under ong standing state of emergency laws. Today there are reports of a large anti-government protest in the capital Algeria.

Chanting "no to the police state" and "Bouteflika out" thousands of demonstrators were initially outnumbered by riot police and struggles broke out.

Pro-democracy demonstrators in Algeria can look to their colleagues in Egypt for lessons on how to conduct an inclusive non-violent revolution of course but the conditions in each country are perhaps not identical.

Unlike Egypt, Algeria has a recent history of extensive political violence and has in the past been on the brink of having a democratic system. In 1991 an Islamist group won the first round of democratic elections but the military stepped in and cancelled the next stage of the elections. The ensuing Islamist insurgency and Algerian civil war saw the death of around 160,000 people over the next decade.

In the context of such recent large scale and deadly internal conflict a generally restrained response from the regime is much less certain than it was in Egypt. The pro-democracy movement in Algeria will know that they have a huge hill to climb if they are to persuade the Algerian people to set aside their real fear of widespread political violence.

It will be interesting to see in the coming days if the pro-democracy movement in Algeria can create the sort of momentum that ultimately toppled the Mubarak regime.

The rebirth of Egypt

2011-02-11T21:26:00.004Z

Truly amazing scenes of joyous celebration are still going on in Egypt following the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak a few hours ago. The Egyptian people have every cause to celebrate the overthrow of a dictator through a revolution that they conducted with great dignity and unity. They were an inspiration to many people.

It is easy living in a western democracy to fail to understand what it must be like for people who have lived under the rule of dictators for generations. The fear of the secret police has evaporated now in Egypt as the people place their faith in a temporary army council which, it seems, will run the country on an interim basis.

Given the conduct of the army so far there is hope that the army will stay true to the clear expressed will of the people and that it will help guide the country to free elections and democracy.

The members of the regime may yet try more tricks though. There will be those in Egypt who feel their livelihoods or wealth threatened by the collapse of the regime and they will look for ways to retain influence. It may not be impossible for example that we will see characters like Suleiman backed by the former ruling NDP party re-emerge and contest elections. These natural right wingers may yet find a future accommodation with equally right wing conservative Muslim religious groups. That seems an unlikely pairing in the short to medium term but not so unlikely in the longer term.

The future political balance of the country is coming under the control of the Egyptian people now - which is where it should be. Their choices will have consequences for relations within the Middle East and beyond. Whatever those effects are though other countries will happily now at least need to deal with Egypt in future as a fellow democratic state - a nation reborn in a January revolution.

Mubarak still in denial

2011-02-10T21:25:00.003Z

Massive crowds which had gathered in Tahir Square in Cairo had been celebrating wildly in anticipation that Hosni Mubarak was about to announce that he was stepping down. The crowds this evening were among the largest that have yet been seen during 17 days of historic protest. All the signs seemed to be pointing to a resignation and the probability that the army would take a temporary role during the transition.

Instead, as the crowds listened in anticipation,. Mubarak simply confirmed his previous statement that he would not stand in the future elections. In a patronising speech in which he called the people his "children" he threw sops to the Egyptian people. He said he would transfer some powers to the vice president Suleiman and that he would support the amendment of some parts of the constitution.

There was no mention of the role of the newly announced army council however so it remains uncertain what role this body will now play in the crisis. One possibility is that the army is preparing a clamp down of course but it is also possible that what we are seeing are cracks emerging among the power blocks in the country.

It was easy to foresee what the reaction of the crowds of Egyptians would be. What had been a scene of festivities and celebration turned within minutes to a scene of unbelievable disappointment and anger.

This revolution has reached a very critical point. It is becoming abundantly clear that Mubarak will only go if he is abandoned by the army and if they play a role in removing him in support of the peoples demands.

The protesters again face critical decisions - how can they wind up the pressure further on the regime without giving the regime cause to instigate suppressive actions against them. It is at such points in revolutions that people in their anger may decide for example to try to storm the presidential palace or to take over the state media. These actions remain open to the protesters but there is the risk of course that this type of strategy may merely set off another train of violence.

Mubarak proved one thing with his speech tonight though. There is no fool like an old fool.

Egypt Mubarak regime crumbles

2011-02-10T16:14:00.003Z

The Egyptian revolution now appears to have achieved an unstoppable momentum with breaking news that Mubarak may be about to announce today that he is stepping down. This will be a momentous step forward for the pro-democracy revolution if it is true - but the devil will be in the details of any announcement.

In my previous I wondered if the protesters had the fortitude and staying power to outlast Mubark in the staring contest that appeared to be developing. The pro-democracy protesters in Egypt have never failed to inspire us and the Egyptian people though.

Far from seeing the protests fade away in the face of superficial concessions by the regime it seems that the protests have if anything gained new momentum in recent days. The protesters have also shown some adaptability as they found new targets such as the parliament building. Other groups in Egyptian society are now coming out and making a stance in support of the protests. There are reports today of doctors and nurses joining the protests as well as strikes by various groups of transport and other workers. This is a peoples revolution which is increasingly drawing to itself all sectors of Egyptian society in a mighty roar for freedom.

The regime has given concession after concession in the face of this pro-democracy revolution but there had until now been little which concretely changed the fact that Egypt continues to be an undemocratic autocracy. Nevertheless, the fact that the regime has felt the need to be seen to make concessions is an indication that it has no real answer to this popular uprising.

Now it seems that the revolution may be about to wring real change out of the regime.

There remain grave dangers of course. Today's shifts appear to have coincided with the emergence of a military council which now seems likely to emerge as the interim source of authority in the country. The people have placed great faith in their army and the hope must be that the army will not betray that trust but will help guide the country towards a functioning democracy. The risk is that what will emerge is an army led regime - a sort of generals council which continues to hold the country in an autocratic rule.

There are hopeful signs though with announcements seemingly coming from the army that the people should expect announcements that the demands of the people will be met.

For Egyptians believe in freedom and democracy these are momentous times but they must remain watchful and ensure that this revolution is not hijacked by interest groups intent on replacing one authoritarian regime with another. At this stage though one must remain hopeful of a good outcome for this revolution as far as the Egyptian people are concerned.

Others will remain unsettled and deeply disturbed by these events. A democratic Egypt which challenges the status quo over Gaza and the Palestinians will be a real challenge for Israel. If it has sense it will seize the opportunity and try to ride the wave of democratic change in the Arab world.

These events also pose major challenges for other dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. The Iranian regime which at first tried to co-opt this revolution as some sort of Islamist revolution is now clearly worried. Not long ago it faced its own popular freedom movement and events in Egypt seem likely to give support and legitimacyacy to pro-democracy activists in Iran. China too faced its own pro-democracy challenges which it brutally suppressed and it too has clearly been worried as it has tried to suppress the flow of news about the Egyptian revolt within China.

We live, as the saying goes, in interesting times. Interesting but wonderful times - for those that hope that people around the world can secure their rights to freedom and democracy.

Where now for the Egyptian revolution?

2011-02-08T11:10:00.003Z

The ongoing struggle by the Egyptian people to assert their right to freedom has been a wonderful sight. Not only have the pro-democracy protesters taken on the might of the Egyptian state and its hired thugs but they have done so with a spirit of unity that has crossed religious and political differences.

Last week, after the heroic fight against Mubarak's violent thugs, it seemed that the peoples revolution might have gained an unstoppable momentum that would lead to his swift departure. This outcome appeared more likely as the US government appeared to be further nuancing it's earlier stance and appeared to be signaling a desire to see Mubarak's swift departure.

As a new week dawned things started to look a little less certain however. This is the nature of revolutions - their course is only predictable with hindsight. The Mubarak regime dug in and adopted what at first sight appear to be contradictory actions. These actions however bought it some breathing space.

In the face of intense international criticism they called back their violent thugs and their crude attempt to create chaos and violent instability. At the same time they had unleashed a major assault on the media in an attempt to control the flow of news about the revolution. This was coupled with a mixture of soothing noises about change, suggestions that the revolution was narrowly supported and a mixture of threats and appeasement via the state controlled media. The regime was in effect trying to buy itself time and this strategy appears to have worked for now.

It is a strategy that also wrong footed the US. Towards the end of last week the US assessment was, no doubt, that events were spiralling and that the quick departure of Mubarak would lead to a less not a more volatile situation. As the regime has dug in though, the US stance of last week perhaps began to look to the US government like it might leave them on the wrong side of events. What if Mubarak and the regime managed to hang on in a situation where the US had apparently been calling for him to go? What then for their relationship with this regime? Such calculations have no doubt fuelled the slight softening of the stance of the US in recent days.

Whatever the position of the US though this revolution still belongs to the Egyptian people. Taking their protests at face value it seems clear that the position of all the groups involved - including the Muslim Brotherhood - is that they want to see a change to a democratic state - one in which there is freedom of association, freedom of the press, free speech and a freedom to take part on political activity.

The big question now for the protesters must be how best to achieve this overall aim. Is it possible that the slogan "Mubarak must go now" might actually compromise this larger and more significant aim?

I am beginning to conclude that it might. Mubarak is a stubborn and proud man and it looks unlikely that he will step down unless there is a sea change in the way the protests are being conducted. That could only mean entering a new period of revolutionary activity - trying to take over state institutions for example such as the State TV or occupying the Presidential palace or an all out strike. The problem with that strategy would be that this would play into the regimes hands. It seems unlikely the army would stand by and do nothing faced with events escalating in that way. This approach is an option for the protesters but if they were to choose that course then the end of last week was probably the flood tide for that too happen. They may not now have sufficient momentum to adopt that kind of strategy.

So what would I do in their place? I think at this stage their best course is not to call for Mubarak to actually go but rather to present a series of demands that in practice prevent the regime from conducting itself as a dictatorship during the period leading to free elections.

I think the protesters should begin to focus on changes to the way the system works which ensure that Egyptians can exercise free speech, free assembly and political activity from here on in. If they can achieve significant interim changes then they can in effect make Mubarak and the regime irrelevant and incapable of stopping change. Such demands would be legitimate and it would be very difficult for the regime to justify refusing such demands.

There is no doubt that Mubarak is going to leave power one way or another. The protesters arguably would now be better raising their sights and focusing on the bigger and longer game here. Mubarak is perhaps now a distraction.

The real issue is that Egyptians need their freedoms guaranteed and protected by the state and it is changes in this area that should be the priority. This may not have the symbolic value that Mubarak's departure would have but these types of changes will in the long run do much more to ensure that the Egyptian people achieve their aim of a free democracy.

The difficulty with this strategy of course is that it is much easier to rally people around simple slogans such as "Mubark must go now" than it is around more complex messages. Therein lies the condundrum for this revolution. A simple slogan more easily mobilises the people but may well not achieve the real aims of the revolution.

Update: The Egyptian regime appears to have offered some further concessions and "sweeteners" - Some reports suggest that Suleiman has said that there will be no attempt to track down and persecute the pro-democracy protestors ( get it in writing guys !). The regime is also trying bribery by announcing significant wage rises for public sector workers. On the other side the protestors are maintaining more mementum than some had feared might be the case this week - another very large rally underway in Tahir square today. Can they keep it up and outlast the regime?

Regime in Egypt claims black is white

2011-02-03T20:33:00.004Z

The dreadful violence last night and today in Tahir Square, Cairo, showed clearly that the Mubarak regime are prepared to unleash total disorder on the streets of Egypt in order to ensure their own survival. The timing of the violence so soon after Mubaraks speech was no coincidence. It is clear that the regime organised the violent protests in an attempt to force the pro-democracy protesters from Tahir square, the place which has become so symbolic of the "Lotus Revolution".

In his speech, Mubarak tried to claim that his presence was necessary in order to ensure that Egypt didn't descend into chaos and then, as if to prove his point, his supporters unleashed an incredible assault on the democracy movement shortly afterwards. This was a blatant attempt to convince other citizens that the country was at risk of violent chaos because of the demonstrations.

Today the recently appointed puppet Suleiman gave a long interview on Egyptian TV and tried to suggest that he and the regime were shocked by the violence and that they would track down the instigators. If they wish to do this they might start by rounding up the Egyptian police who were clearly orchestrating much of the violence. The pro-democracy protesters managed to capture many of these thugs and were able to identify them by their ID cards.

Clearly aware that it was losing the public relations battle due to the presence of the worldwide media and the live streaming of TV images of the violence the regime has unleashed its thuggish followers against the media itself. ABC World news has compiled a list of reporters and journalists who have been subject to assaults in Egypt and it is clear that these are not isolated incidents but part of an organised and systematic attempt to drive the media from the streets and prevent them reporting what is happening.

Suleiman today tried to claim that while the pro-democracy protesters had legitimate demands that were being listened to they were also being influenced by unnamed outside forces. This was a clear attempt to fire a shot across the bows of other governments who have demanded an end to the violent anti-revolutionary actions.

According to Mubarak and his regime only they can defend Egypt from the chaos that we have seen -despite the fact that they are the direct cause of this chaos. Clearly the Egyptian government wants the world and its own people to believe that black is white. We aren't fooled.

Update: Some interesting links about the Egypt revolution. I'll update this further as I spot good links this evening.
Pro-democracy headgear !
White House now condems systematic assaults on journalists
Mubarak camp tries to associate journalists with Jews
Christians protect Muslims in prayer amid chaos

I must note that Aljazeera's coverage of the events in Egypt has been exemplary and it's no wonder that the Mubarak regime are singling Aljazeera out for particular attention.

Too little too late from Mubarak

2011-02-01T21:30:00.002Z

Tonight President Mubarak of Egypt went on state TV to finally respond to the growing clamour from the Egyptian people demanding that he step down. If he thought that his statement that he would not stand at the next election would satisfy his people in the current revolutionary atmosphere then he has badly misjudged their mood. The risk now is that, while he clings to power using the need for "stability" as the excuse, his stance will merely fuel further instability in his country. It is a position which will almost certainly not defuse the current situation.

Egypt is now in the throws of a genuine peoples revolution and little but the actual departure of Mubarak will now satisfy his people as they continue to demand freedom. So far the US government has wished to be seen as not interfering in these developments in Egypt. While this position was to a degree understandable there is now a grave danger that the US stance is being rapidly overtaken by the momentum of history. The US government has so far confined its pressure on Mubarak to encouraging him to stand down from the future elections but this is a position that is no longer adequate to the situatiuon.

The time has now come for the US to be seen to clearly stand with the forces of democracy, freedom and change in Egypt. The only credible position now is for the US to make clear that it sees Mubarak as a leader withput legitimacy and for it to put its weight fully behind measures to create some form of interim national unity governement able to take Egypt forward to a new political settlement.

There are risks of course and the concern in the US will be the potential for a rising influence of Islamist groups in Egypt. But that risk is far outweighed by the risk that the US will be seen as betraying the Egyptian people if it fails to act to clearly to show support for their legitimate demands. The standing of the US could be significantly enhanced at this point if it was seen to throw it's full support behind the forces crying for real democracy. No observer of US foreign policy would bet on the US following this course of action sadly. It seems more likely that it will continue to try to hedge it's bets and that as a consequence it will further entrenche the view in the Middle East that the US has no real concern for the legitimate democractic demands of people in the Arab states.

Tommy Sheridan Trial article list

2011-01-04T23:07:00.000Z

A wide range of opinions have been expressed following the verdict in the Tommy Sheridan trial. James Doleman who has been maintaining a detailed blog about the trial has posted a full list of articles and reactions to the Tommy Sheridan trial and the guilty verdict. As James blog may not have a complete list I will add in any additional article and blog links here.

Tommy Sheridan police interview tape

2010-12-23T16:34:00.002Z

The video tape of one of Tommy Sheridan's interviews by the police makes fascinating viewing. Excerpts from the videos have been published by the BBC and at the end of the excerpt there appears to be an admission by Sheridan that he had in fact participated in group sex. The admission does not appear to be a direct admission that he was involved in the Cupids visit which was at the centre of the recent trial but it is clear that the police could be certain even at that stage that the case they were pursuing was not completely without relevant background foundation. It will be fascinating to see what other revelations emerge now that the Jury have brought in a guilty verdict.

Tommy Sheridan Guilty of Perjury

2010-12-23T16:07:00.001Z

Tommy Sheridan was today found Guilty of Perjury after a lengthy trial which saw him make an emotional plea to the Jury "for his life". The Jury of fourteen - two men and twelve women returned the verdict today after failing to reach a verdict in 90 mins of deliberations yesterday.

Sheridan in his 5 hour closing speech had been emotional and close to tears as he pleaded with the Jury not to find him guilty and see him parted form his wife and young child over Christmas.

In his summing up the Judge Lord Bracadale warned the Jury that they should pay no attention to the consequences of their verdict because that was a matter for him. He directed them to simply pay attention to whether they were satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Sheridan had committed perjury.

The full trial started on 4 October 2010 with a jury of 13 women and 2 men, mostly younger women with one ethnic minority juror. However, on 15 December the judge excused one of the women jurors from serving further, the trial continued with 14 jurors. In Scotland a trial with 15 jurors requires a majority of 8 for a conviction. the trial is able to continue if there are fewer jurors but the requirement that 8 jurors must still vote for conviction remains even when there are fewer jurors.

Sheridan has initially hired Donald Findlay QC to defend him, but he later chose Margaret Scott QC, who had represented Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in the Lockerbie bombing trial. On 11 October Sheridan dismissed Margaret Scott QC and began to conduct his own defence. He retained his solicitor Aamer Anwar.

The prosecution was led by Alex Prentice and as the trail progressed on 25 November and again on 2 and 20 December the prosecution removed a number of items from the indictment.
A considerable part of the prosecution case concerned a the crucial SSP executive meeting of 9 November 2004, when Sheridan resigned as convenor.
16 witnesses present at the meeting claimed that Sheridan admitted to visiting Cupids sex club in Manchester at the meeting. Barbara Scott, the minute secretary, that she made notes at the meeting and produced minutes which supported this claim.

The crown evidence also included a video-tape which was claimed to have been secretly filmed by a friend of Sheridans a few days after this meeting. It purported to show Sheridan making a "foul-mouthed tirade" containing statements inconsistent with his evidence in the civil trial.
Sheridan claimed in the trial that the voice on the tape was not his and suggested that it might have been a scripted piece using an actor or a mimic. Sheridan had in previous TV interviews appeared to concede that the voice might be his but suggested that the tape had possibly been "spliced" together. Bob Bird, Scottish editor of the News of the World, gave evidence about how the paper acquired the tape.

Katrine Trolle, a Danish woman and former SSP candidate in Aberdeen North in the Scottish Parliament election, 2003, claimed that she had had an affair with Sheridan and that she had visited Cupids sex club with him and others on 27th September 2002. This evidence was supported in testimony by Ruth Adamson, a former housemate of Trolle, and her ex-boyfriend Ralph Barnett, who claimed that Sheridan did spend the night with Trolle.

Gary Clark, a former professional footballer and childhood friend of Sheridan, claimed in his evidence to have visited a club in Manchester with Sheridan and the others.

Anvar Khan, a News of the World journalist, claimed that she had visited Cupids sex club as part of a group with Sheridan and that she had an affair with him. This was supported by Elizabeth Quinn, a former neighbour of Khan, who claimed to have seen Khan and Sheridan appear from the direction of a bedroom.

A former worker in Cupids. and another witness,claimed to have seen Sheridan in Cupids. A number of SSP activists also claimed that Sheridan had made admissions to them about his personal life inconsistent with his evidence in the civil trial.

The defence case began on 3 December. Neither Sheridan or his wife took the stand as witnesses themselves. Many of the witnesses called by Sheridan including Hugh Kerr aand Rosemary Byrne were members of Solidarity, his own party.

Sheridan also called Andy Coulson, Downing Street director of communications and former News of the World editor. In his examination of Coulson Sheridan attempted to paint a picture of a conspiracy by the News of the World to "do him in" because he was a leading socialist. Sheridan attempted to link his own case the investigations in England of illegal phone tapping by an investigator working for News of the World.
Coulson denied any personal knowledge of illegal activity at the News of the World.

Four witnesses who were present at the crucial SSP executive meeting of 9 November 2004, John Penman, Rosemary Byrne, Patricia Smith and Graeme McIver supported Sheridan's claim that he did not admit to visiting a sex club at the meeting.

In regard to the video tape Sheridan produced witnesses at trial who knew him and who claimed that it was not his voice partly because of the swearing which they said was not Sheridan's normal mode of speech. On eof his witnesses claimed that the voice on the tape made him sound like Cartman the South Park character.

The defence case completed on 17th December and the prosecution and defence began their summations.

For the prosecution Alex Prentice pointed to the wide range of witnesses who had testified to matters that supported the perjury charges and he poured scorn on the notion that there had been some sort of conmspiracy involving SSP members and the News of the World.

In his speech to the Jury Sheridan claimed that the News of the World was at the centre of the case and he also clamed that he had been the subject of a vendetta campaign by Lothian and Borders Police force.

At the close of his final defence speech, Sheridan said he was not afraid of the News of the World newspaper but he then addressed the jury saying;

“I’m frightened of you … because you can do something that the News of the World will never be able to do.You could separate me from my wife, you could make me break my promise to my daughter that I’d spend Christmas with her. Given what you’ve heard I ask you to believe you’ve heard more than enough reasonable doubt to convince you that I’m innocent of the charges that remain.”

There was a round of aplause from Sheridan's supporters in the public gallery as he ended his speech.

Lord Bracadale in his charge to the jury told them to put aside such emotion, telling them "not to be swayed by the consequences of conviction". He told them to focus on the evidence that they had heard during the trial and not to to be influenced by views of the sexual mores or politics that had emerged during the case.

Tommy Sheridan has been a prominent Scottish socialist politician. He is the founder and currently one of two co-convenors of the left-wing Scottish political party Solidarity.

Sheridan has a degree in Economics from University of Stirling and later obtained a MSc in Social Research at the University of Strathclyde in 2008.He is currently studying law at Strathclyde Law School.

Sheridan was active in the Militant tendency an entryist organisation in the Labour Party. He was a prominent campaigner against the poll tax in Scotland, and was jailed for six months for peacefully attending a warrant sale after Glasgow Sheriff Court had served a court order on him banning his presence.

He became unpopular with some on the left though when he denounced those who fought the police in the large-scale anti poll tax riot in London on 31 March 1990 and when he publicly threatened to "name names". Some called him "Shop 'em Sheridan" as a result of this. Over 100 individuals were jailed.

Sheridan has himself twice been jailed in connection with the peaceful campaign against the nuclear fleet at Faslane Naval Base.

In 2006 Sheridan won an action for defamation against the News of the World and was awarded £200,000 damages. The judge in the case made remarks that indicated he felt that perjury had been committed. The following year Sheridan was charged with perjury and subsequently six of his relations and colleagues were also charged.

Sheridan has also culitivated a media career. He had a chat show on Talk 107, appeared at a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Most famously he appeared on Celebrity Big Brother 2009 for a reported fee of £100,000. He defended this by saying that he needed the money and that it was "..an honest offer of employment. I'm not crossing a picket line. I'm not hurting anyone."

Wikileaks Assange is leaked against

2010-12-20T23:21:00.001Z

How ironic. Julian Assange, the Wikileaks head and erstwhile hero of free speech libertarians has found himself on the receiving end of leaking activity. Assange has been embroiled in strange case of alleged rape in Sweden that has been on again off again on again and which recently resulted in his appearance in a British court after Swedish attempts to have him arrested on the rape charges. The case has the wiff of expediency about it and of course many suspect that the Swedes are trying to get him to Sweden so that the US will find a way then to extradite him from there.

Assange of course has through Wikileaks been releasing swathes of secret and sensitive diplomatic which has stirred up various hornets nests among governments and rulers around the world. I have to admit that personally I have had very mixed feelings about Wikileaks recent activity.

On the one hand we all have a strong interest in knowing what our governments and leaders are really up to. On the other hand governments and their diplomatic staff need to be able to communicate and pass information securely. Speculating about the motives and actions of foreign governments and their agents is an important part of developing a governments position and influence in dilomatic affairs.

For free speech libertarians though the only thing that matters is that we the people should have access to any information that we want. All information is to this mind set fair game. Assange of course is a leading light of this way of thinking.

How ironic then that Assanges lawyers are now complaining that details of the police files in his case have been made public by the media. As a staunch defender of our right to know one would think that Assange would be the first to say a big hoorah that secret Swedish police files have been exposed. But of course this time it concerns his own affairs - and that isn't so comfortable. This time the boot sits squarely on the other foot and he is the one who will now be arguing that this information has only been released to damage him. Pots and kettles spring to mind here.

Tommy Sheridan Trial nears the end

2010-12-20T22:28:00.002Z

The trial of Tommy Sheridan and his wife Gail on charges of perjury is now reaching the final stages as Alex Prentice today summed up the prosecution case for the jury. Over the course of this lengthy trial the Prosecution has brought forward a range of witnesses who have testified to the matters set out on the indictment.

One of the features of the case has been that the prosecution have, with the agreement of the court, amended and reduced the indictment from the one that Sheridan and his wife first faced. In a dramatic twist in the case on Friday the prosecution dropped all the remaining charges against Gail Sheridan.

The prosecution was careful to insist that the charges had been dropped due to her "personal circumstances" and despite there being a "sufficiency of evidence" against her - a position that was not disputed by her counsel.

While the trial has been reported widely in the media in the UK the media has tended, as it often does, to focus merely on headline issues and often at a fairly shallow level. However those interested in the full details of the workings of a major trial such as this in a Scottish court have had the benefit of a blog which has published full details of each day of the trial in detail. The blogger concerned Mr James Doleman has done a wonderful job in presenting a balanced and detailed report of the proceedings.

Mr Dolemans blog has been followed avidly by a large group of commenters ( including myself) who have , within the limits of contempt of court, debated and teased apart the evidence as it has emerged. Many of the commenters have some involvement in socialist politics and supporters and detractors of Sheridan have been there in equal measure engaging in what for the most part has been fairly rugged but generally civilised debate.

While there have been many complexities in the case at its core is a simple allegation - that Tommy Sheridan had visited a Swingers club and had certain extra marital liaisons. That the newspaper the News of the World found out about this and published certain stories. That Sheridan confessed to a small group within his party at a very stormy meeting but said that was going to sue the paper for defamation as he was convinced that they could not prove the truth of the story. That this split his party with many of the leading members being adamant that the defamation action would bring nothing but destruction on Sheridan and his party.

Sheridan did sue the paper and leading his own case in court he came away with a victory that astounded many. He was awarded £200k by the jury but the judge in the case reported that he had major concerns about perjury having been committed. A lengthy police investigation ensued and Sheridan, and his wife were then charged with perjury. The perjury allegations essentially centre around the fact that Sheridan is alleged to have lied about these events during the defamation case.

Neither Sheridan or his wife took the stand in the perjury trial, something which was their right of course in law but which perhaps still leaves certain matters unanswered - such as why he had the partial address , name and telephone of the swingers club in his diary.

Sheridan's overall version of events will be heard tomorrow when he sums up the defence case for the jury. So far his defence has appeared to be based on a similar approach to the one he used in the defamation case which was to claim that the whole affair involves a conspiracy by a group within his party to oust him and a conspiracy by Rupert Murdoch and his media empire to destroy Sheridan because he is supposedly a leading socialist. Essentially Sheridan appears to argue that the News of the World was engaging in conspiratorial class warfare.

One fascinating aspect of the case has been the production of a "video confession" allegedly recorded by an associate of Sheridan. Unfortunately Sheridan can't be seen clearly on the tape and Sheridan has tried to claim variously that the tape is a "concoction" or that an actor or mimic was used to impersonate him.

The jury will, within the next few days, be able to deliver their own verdict on this whole affair. Should they find Sheridan Not Guilty then the implication will of course be that a large number of prosecution witnesses came into court and perjured themselves in a perjury trial. What will follow from that is anyone's guess at this stage. If he is found guilty then his own supporters and Sheridan himself are unlikely to let the matter rest there and it is hard to imagine that having let matters develop this far that Sheridan would not then appeal. There is a third option in Scottish law - Not Proven and some have speculated that this trial may be headed in that less than conclusive direction.

It seems certain though that one way or another we have not heard the last of Tommy Sheridan in Scotland's courts.

And of course neither is that the last of Tommy Sheridan on this blog, because I will, of course, post further after the both the prosecution and defence have completed their summing up and give my own take on events once the verdict is in.

Loans to Third world Entrepreneurs

2010-11-21T18:10:00.001Z

According to an old Chinese proverb "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". Like many proverbs it sums up an essential truth but perhaps doesn't tell the whole story. What if that man has learned to fish but can't afford to buy or build a fishing boat and fishing nets?

This is the position of many people in the so called Third World. It's not that they always lack the skills or the willingness to improve their lives. Sometimes they simply lack the capital to develop a small business - either because they have no capital of their own or because the credit infrastucture that we all take for granted doesn't exist to the same extent in their countries.

A colleague of mine recently drew my attention to a site called KIVA which plugs this gap. Kiva acts as a sort of central clearing house for those who are interested in helping poorer people help themselves through loan giving.

The system works by allowing you to give small loans to individuals and groups who are looking for capital to expand small businesses or to invest in things that will improve their lives. While there is a charitable element to the process because these loans are on an interest free basis the recipients are expected to repay the loans.

KIVA handle the whole process of managing and disbursing the loans and as a loan donor you get feedback on the difference your loans are making to the lives of people who are keen to work hard and improve their own lives.

KIVA looks like an excellent system and I am intending to start this Christmas by lodging a starting $25 and selecting someone to give my loan to.

For any readers looking for a way to make a positive impact on someones life this Christmas I would encourage you to check out the KIVA website and consider making a small loan through that site. You might just find that fisherman who needs your loan to help him buy the fishing net that will help him feed his family or community for a lifetime.

Edinburgh glorious and gruesome

2010-11-15T20:47:00.002Z

Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland has many claims to fame, a fascinating history, connections with many notable events and people and is host to probably the biggest cultural festival in the world - the Edinburgh Festival and the Festival Fringe. Edinburgh is a big draw for tourists from across the world who come to enjoy Edinburgh's fabulous culture and long history. City living is something I gladly left behind many years ago but one city I do enjoy spending time in is Edinburgh. It's a city with a rich and interesting history - some of it glorious and some of it gruesome.

I lived in Edinburgh near to the Meadows area while I was a student and I only recently discovered that Charles Darwin was actually a student in Edinburgh for a time, between 1825 and 1827. He was a medical student there and lived at 11 Lothian street, Edinburgh. Darwin reportedly didn't have the stomach for what passed as medical practice in those days though and abandoned his medical studies after two years. Darwin was it seems there at the time that Sir Walter Scott publicly acknowledged that he was the author of the Waverly novels. (The novel Waverly is suggested as being the first work of historical fiction.)

Interestingly a notorious pair of Edinburgh residents, Burke and Hare, were plying a gruesome trade to the Edinburgh medical establishment sometime around the end of the period that Darwin was in Edinburgh. There were a number of schools of anatomy in Edinburgh at the time and Edinburgh itself was at the leading edge of medical education at that time. Providing bodies for the many medical students was no easy task for the Edinburgh medical schools.

The only legal supply of bodies for the schools were the bodies of condemned criminals but these were becoming increasingly in short supply as the execution rate fell. Into htis gap in the market stepped the body snatchers or resurrectionists. Families would find to their horror that the graves of their recently deceased loved ones had been dug up and the bodies stolen. These bodies were bought by the anatomists and used in the anatomy schools.

Burke and Hare became active in this murky world and soon realised that it was perhaps less trouble to arrange their own supply of fresh corpses rather than having the trouble of finding graves and digging bodies up. So began the murderous career of Burke and Hare as they began to sell their freshly killed victims to one particularly ambitious anatomist Dr Robert Knox. A total of 17 victims were sold to the anatomist before the pair were caught. Hare agreed to give evidence against his co-accused and Burke was hanged. There is still a notice of the execution of Burke in the Scotsman archive.

A current film about the pair called ( imaginatively ) Burke and Hare was directed by John Landis and stars Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis. It is being billed as a "Black Comedy" but I am at a loss to understand what level of comedy they can have found in a story based on so many gruesome murders. Indeed it seems in poor taste to even think about making a "comedy" about such a subject no matter how long ago these murders occurred.

No doubt Darwin after he left Edinburgh would have heard of these events and he must have been confirmed in his view that he had made the right decision to leave his medical studies.

These days Edinburgh is more glorious than gruesome and it's a mecca for tourists from all over the world. Most come during the Edinburgh festival season when artists from around the world perform in the city and during that time it can become very difficult to find accommodation either in Hotels or in an Edinburgh Bed and Breakfast establishment unless you have booked well in advance. It's also busy at other times throughout the year, particularly for Hogmanay when many tourists come for a real Scottish New Year.

Hotels in Edinburgh range widely in both price and facilities. Personally I would always recommend Edinburgh Bed & Breakfast establishments for a visitor coming from outside Scotland. Although I use hotels myself mostly because I'm usually there on business, in an Edinburgh B&B you'll get a much more personal Scottish experience than you will in a hotel.

I rate Edinburgh as one of the top ten cities I have visited. I'm going to do some further posts about Edinburgh and look at some more of the interesting history of the place.

IAmSpartacus Twitter Judge to arrest Wiley Coyote

2010-11-12T16:16:00.003Z

In a significant further twist to the draconian anti free speech approach take by the judiciary in this country it seems that the Judge in the twitter bomb threat trial that I posted about previously has now issued an arrest warrant for Wiley Coyote. It seems Wiley Coyote has been issuing threats of violence against the RoadRunner. Ever alert to threats of terrorism the British establishment is taking this latest threat of violence very seriously. The Judge Jacqueline Davies declared that Mr Coyote's remarks were a clear "indication of menace".

British Police are currently believed to be hunting a number of other individuals who pose a known threat to public safety and disorder. Warrants are believed to have been issued for Monty Python, Mr Bean, Benny Hill and a number of others known to frequent so called "Comedy clubs".

Meanwhile a spokesman for the United Islamo-Fascist Organisation of Fiery Fundamentalists ( Ui F OFF ) stated that "the UK is full of Satanists and your women are all sluts. In the Jihad we will wipe you from the face of the earth". The Ui F OFF spokesman currently works with the London Metropolitan Police as a Community Liaison and Women's issues advisor.

#IamSpartacus say thousands on Twittter

2010-11-12T14:18:00.003Z

#IAmSpartacus claim thousands of twitter users now enraged by the treatment of Paul Chambers who just lost an appeal against a conviction and £1000 fine for posting a jokey message on Twitter. In January Paul Chambers had been trying to catch a flight, in bad weather, to Belfast Airport to see his girlfriend.
Worried about missing his flight he tweeted ""Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" That message is now being re-tweeted by thousands of Twitter users in defiance of the law.

The tweet came to the attention of the authorities and the full force of the law came down on his head when he was prosecuted. A prosecution under terrorist legislation would of course have required that the prosecutors establish intent in his message and it was quite clear to the police and obviously to the prosecutors that he had no intent to blow anything up. If reports are to be believed the police who investigated accepted without question from the start that he had been joking.

Instead prosecutors found an old telecommunications act originally designed to protect telephone operators from abuse and prosecuted him under that law. Talk about using a hammer to crack a nut!

Many thousands of pounds will have been wasted on this ridiculous prosecution which has raised widespread concern, yet again, about the attitude of the courts to freedom of speech issues. For many Twitter users the last straw came when he lost his appeal and a campaign started with people re-tweeting his original message under the tag #IAmSpartacus in a massive campaign of defiance against the law.

This is not the only case this week where someones use of Twitter has got them into hot water. Tory Councillor Gareth Thompson was arrested this week and charged under the Telecoms Act 20043 after making what was intended to be a jokey remark about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

he had been reacting to her saying on Radio 5 Live that no politician had the right to comment on human rights abuses, even the stoning of women in Iran. In response Compton tweeted "Can someone please stone Alibhai-brown to death? I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It really would be a blessing". Alibhai-Brown is of course not stupid enough to think that this was a real call for her to be stoned but she nevertheless decided to take great offence and the matter has rolled on from there.

While both these remarks may be tasteless it is debatable if the correct response to them is to bring down the full force of the law. There is a long tradition in this country of forceful and satirical debate about matters of public interest and people in the public eye. It is one of the things that helps to maintain a healthy democratic process and it''s very concerning to see this kind of knee jerk reaction by the state to debate which is clearly couched in tongue in cheek terms.

Even more worrying are the double standards that are clearly evident. Yesterday a group of Muslims staged a poppy burning event in a calculated insult to British servicemen and women everywhere. Hardly anything more clearly designed to spark a breach of the peace can be imagined on remembrance day. The police intervened to try to keep order and some arrests were made but nevertheless these idiot fanatics enjoyed their full and protected right to express their extremely offensive and threatening views - in public.

Law and practice in the UK really is in a sorry state when it comes to freedom of speech and dealing with real threats to the public and public order.

Really, if things don't improve I will have no choice but to arm the Dark Matter Bomb that I have been secretly building in my spare time in my basement and blow up the whole of the world including the British establishment to make my point.

(FAO the authorities - there is of course no such thing as a "Dark Matter Bomb" - I was of course JOKING. That's joking as in not meant to be taken seriously. If you don't understand the meaning of that word I can lend you a dictionary.)

Angry Student demo in London

2010-11-10T21:18:00.006Z

Massive Student Protest In London

Scottish students joined other students from across the UK today as they converged on London for a demonstration against a massive rise in student fees proposed by the ConDem coalition government. An estimated 50,000 students were determined to show their contempt for politicians from the parties in the government who, before the election , a few months ago, had signed pledges promising that if elected they would not raise student debt in this way.

With anger growing across the UK at the way that deficit reducing cuts are being targeted at the most vulnerable in society it was always likely that a massive student demonstration would provide a lightning rod for the building anger.

Student leaders and the police clearly worked together before this event to try to ensure a peaceful outcome but clearly both sides underestimated the potential for fringe anarchist groups and others to take advantage of the march.

As some marchers reached Millbank House , the Tory party headquarters, fringe elements in the crowd stormed the building, smashing windows and wrecking the entrance area. The few police who were on duty in that area were powerless to stop them. The anger of a larger group of students who might not have otherwise joined in such activity was clear and a large group of thousands of students milled around the building harassing the police and contributing to a general sense of disorder.

It was clear that for some students they had mixed feelings about the vandalism and damage. But as one student pointed out it was the media who had chosen to focus on the damage and not the larger peaceful element of the demonstration. Another student suggested that while they were not supportive of the action taken by a minority they realised that without such action there would have been nothing like the amount of media attention which the protests eventually received.

The violence reached a peak in the afternoon after a group of students occupied the roof of the building and pictures were shown of one or two throwing concrete and in one case a fire extinguisher down towards the police who were lined up below trying to prevent more of the crowd entering the building.

The students made their point loudly and clearly today. There is vast anger building at the way the ConDem government is targeting its program of cuts and students across the UK have laid down a marker that they are not going to take this without major protest. The violence and damage are unfortunate but have kept the student issue in the news the whole day. The present government would do well to think hard about the outcome of this protest because if they are not careful those who are being targeted by cuts will increasingly feel that their only resort is to engage in determined resistance and potentially damaging protest.

The only sensible way forward for student funding is a properly progressive graduate tax alongside proper levels of funding for the tertiary education sector.

Top Ten Points of Wisdom

2010-11-04T23:36:00.002Z

Number 10
Life is sexually transmitted.

Number 9
Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

Number 8
Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny.
If you see him without an erection, make him a sandwich.

Number 7
Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day,
Teach someone to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.

Number 6
Some people are like a Slinky... not really good for anything, but you
still can't help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.

Number 5
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday,
lying in hospitals, dying of nothing.

Number 4
All of us could take a lesson from the weather.
It pays no attention to criticism.

Number 3
Why does a slight tax increase cost you $200.00,
and a substantial tax cut saves you $30.00?

Number 2
In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird.
Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

And The Number 1 Thought
Life is like a jar of Jalapeno peppers;
what you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.

A Halloween message from the crypt

2010-10-30T12:00:00.023Z

Down in a dark place
deep and dank
something stirred
something rank
it writhed and it twisted
it slithered and it slimed
and in its eye
dread evil shined
then up it crawled
and with a shuddering scream
it opened it's maw
and said
"Happy halloween !"

Oh and before I forget - here are some tips for a pleasant Halloween

1. Be very careful when roasting your nuts by the fire - it's much safer just to dress warmly.

2. The best pumpkins come in pairs and should be firm when squeezed.

3. When ducking for apples remember to breathe in before you put your head under water - not after.

4. If you find yourself getting chased by a horny devil don't run too fast or I'll never catch you.

5. If you see a strangely dressed beast mimicking your every move then - before calling the exorcist - check for the possibility that you are drunk and looking at yourself in the mirror.

6. Witches do not take kindly to being referred to as "ugly old hags" - the politically correct term these days is "aesthetically challenging older female". In fact the term Witch is better avoided - the modern pc job title equivalent is "Supernatural Process Operative" or "Prince and Toad exchange mechanic".

Evil greets to all my readers
from The Bunc

£270k scammed from North Ayrshire Council

2010-10-28T12:50:00.000Z

North Ayrshire Council has fallen victim to a £270,000 scam when criminals falsely posing as a contractor used forged documents to instruct a change of bank details. North Ayrshire is not the first council to have fallen victim to this sting - South Lanarkshire fell victim to essentially the same type of scam earlier this year and lost around £102k followed shortly after by the retiral of the councils Executive Director of finance.

Strathclyde Police say a 44 yr old man has been arrested in the west midlands in connection with the North Ayrshire fraud.

North Ayrshire Council had been reviewing procedures for updating creditors' bank details after there had been nation-wide e-mail alerts about possible fraud. It was during this time in September that the fraud was discovered. North Ayrshire Council say they are confident of recovering at least £117,000 of the £270,000 which was fraudulently obtained and they have alerted other local authorities and local businesses to the methods used in the fraud.

Tidal Power wave breaks in Pentland Firth Scotland

2010-10-27T23:21:00.001Z

While Scotland is never likely to be a hotspot for solar power we certainly have no shortage of other sources of renewable energy. There has of course been a good deal of windpower development but so far at least the tremendous power of the sea around the UK has been relatively untapped.

There has been plenty of cutting edge development work on tidal and wave power in the UK but nothing deployed on any great scale. There were plans for a tidal barrage across the river Severn but as far as I am aware that has now been kicked well into the long grass by the ConDem Government.

There is now welcome news that a group called MeyGen have secured a 25 year lease and are going to develop a huge tidal project in the inner sound of the Pentland Firth in Scotland.

MeyGen is a joint venture owned by International Power PLC, Morgan Stanley and Atlantis Resources Corporation and the construction is likely to take place in phases through to 2020. Eventually there should be up to 400 submerged tidal turbines in an area of around 3.3 sq Km. IF the development reaches that size it should generate enough energy to power around 400,000 homes.

Falling down for Jesus

2010-10-16T15:32:00.003Z

How does the "power of the Lord" manifest itself these days among the christian faithful? Well, if the first video below is anything to go by the spirit shows itself by making people fall over - at least if you are ministered to by Benny Hinn.

To the sceptical eye Hinn is every inch the picture of the charlatan manipulative US evangelical christian "pastor" - no doubt complete with some dodgy "doctorate" in divinity and biblical navel gazing from some obscure mid western Christian college. It doesn't take a genius to guess that he will be milking these crowds for donations to his "ministry" as well.

Hinns "ministry" judging by this video appears to largely consist of working his flock of desperate-to-believe believers into a heightened state of emotional and spiritual frenzy then waving his arms at them so that they fall down.

I can only assume that "the Lord" heaps great praise and benefits on those who are prepared to fall down in his name. Quite where this falling over for the lord malarkey originated or what it has to do with christianity I I don't know but the US has never fallen short when it comes to the zanier side of christianty.

What I find most disturbing though is the sheer number of people who are clearly being taken in and "enraptured" by this complete and utter nonsense. Hinn is clearly using psychological techniques to put his crowd into a state of suggestibility and compliance. What he is doing here is so obvious that it is scary that the people at the event are seemingly still completely taken in by this.

Still - shouldn't be too surprised I guess. We can all be suggestible if people manipulate us. I had looked up a video of Hitler addressing crowds to show similar techniques and a similar audience reaction, but I decided against that. It's too easy for people to dismiss such a parallel because they see Hitler as such an extreme phenomenon.

The second video therefore is a (much shorter !) clip of a master British magician mentalist called Derren Brown. In it Brown demonstrates how he has set up a crowd in a shopping mall to respond to him. He doesn't use anything like the hyped up atmosphere that Hinn uses but even so elicits the reaction he wants from people. I'll be greatly surprised if you don't see strong connections between Hinn's hysterical performance and Brown's calmer demonstration of crowd manipulation.

Derren Brown using Mind Control on a Crowd of people! @ Yahoo! Video

Water, symbolism and reality

2010-10-15T05:45:00.000Z

Genesis, the Biblical story of creation, refers to the existence of water before the creation of light;

" In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

This recognition of the importance of water appears symbolically in many religions and in our cultural life. In the Christian ceremony of Baptism the Christian sees himself reborn in faith. The Hindu and Muslim believe in the cleansing power of water. Macbeth tells us that "A little water cleans us of this deed" ( Macbeth Act 2 scene 2) in an echo of the biblical hand washing of Pilate.

These perceptions of water as an elemental substance that is fundamental to the world and our life comes from our deep natural connection with water. Our general hairlessness, compared to our Ape cousins, has been suggested to be a consequence of selection, during a period when we found our food in and around water. Perhaps our need for salt is a product of such a time.

This is mere speculation. What we do know is that, for animals like us, the need for water to drink is even more critical than the need for light, or even food.

Little wonder then that early man would have a special relationship with water as he developed his myths and ceremonies to placate the forces of the world. The symbolic significance given to water is founded in a deep recognition of this vital role and woven into the stories that early man must have told himself about the world and its wonders.

Stand with me, for a while, long ago on the shores of a great sea near where we have our home. We early humans have consciousness but without our current understanding of the mechanisms that drive the world. What wonder in those waters do we see? Do we recognise the beauty? Can we give those thoughts words? We would no doubt recognise the bounty and the power of the water. We might seek to placate it or look to it for favours like we would from some powerful leader.

Whatever the symbolism of water it has a real-world power; the power to give, or take, life.

When water overwhelms us with floods we die. When rains fail to come our harvests wither and we starve.

These are not just tales from ancient men. For many of our fellow humans around the world today the struggle with, or for, water is a major day-to-day concern. Clean drinking water is something we take for granted but , for many, simply obtaining enough water to survive, from one day to the next, is an all consuming task.

As a blogger living in Scotland, writing about the crisis of water around the world is a strange experience. The one thing that Scotland has an abundance of is water, and most Scots would happily trade some of their ever present rainfall for a little more sunshine. Scotland is wet. We long for the sun. Yet, without our rain, Scotland, and the rest of the UK, would not be such a green, generally pleasant and productive land.

It is easy when you live a life with plenty to forget that many live a life with little. On this Blog Action Day 2010 don't shut these people out. Think of those who live their lives without access to healthy water for drinking or who struggle to find water to grow food. Think how lucky you are. Think what you might do to ease their plight.

Posted for Blog Action day 2010

Apologies to Socrates and Monty Python

2010-10-11T23:14:00.002Z

I was recently reading Plato's dialogue Euthyphro which contains the original of what is known as the Euthyphro dilemma. The dialogue itself is interesting in its original form but I thought it might be equally interesting to try to set out a more modern version of the dialogue and perhaps even include a nod towards some of the later philosophical attempts to deal with the dilemma.

I am of course no Plato and I have no current Socrates to guide the discourse that I will set out here. I'm not going to follow the originals slavishly rather I 'm simply going to use them as a starting point to explore some interesting ideas.

The Euthyphro dialogue is in essence an interrogation of the meaning of piety and impiety and the relation between these concepts and "the gods". In the following dialogue I will broaden this out to address the broader question of the existence of good ( and by definition evil ) and the relationship of this concept to the existence and nature of god. I enjoyed an earlier post where this type of discourse was given as a rewrite of the Monty Python sketch so, with that as broad inspiration, I give you the first of Socco's dialogues with the shopkeeper.

Dialogue One.
Persons in the dialogue: SOCCO and the SHOPKEEPER
Scene: The Shop - Monday Morning: Sometime after a man leaves with a dead parrot

SOCCO: Good Morning sir and a fine morning it is.
SHOPKEEPER: Yes sir indeed it is. Looking for a Norwegian Blue are we today sir?
SOCCO: No thank you, not today. I do have a question that has been bothering me though.. I wondered if we could have a short philosophical dialogue?
SHOPKEEPER: Let me see , yes you're in luck sir. I have two left. Would you like the 10 minute exploratory Socratic dialogue or I've got a special offer on a 2 hour turgid discourse on semantics and comparative religion?
SOCCO: I'll take the exploratory Socratic one please. Does that come with difficult to deal with responses and questions?
SHOPKEEPER: Er that really depends on you sir. I'll do my best though. Ok fire away!

SOCCO: Ok what I was wondering was this, if we assume there is a God then what relation does God have with Goodness?
SHOPKEEPER: Blimey sir you must have been up all night thinking that one up! OK let me see ... well goodness comes from god doesn't it sir? You'll need to do better than that sir or your not going to get your moneys worth here.
SOCCO: Aagh ... but by goodness coming from god you mean what exactly? That God created goodness?
SHOPKEEPER: Hmm. Well I guess .. yes of course he did. God created everything so he must have created goodness sir, stand to reason don't it?
SOCCO: I see. So if God created goodness then he must have existed before goodness if he was going to be able to create it. We see that the existence of the thing created always follows in time from the existence of the thing that does the creation do we not?
SHOPKEEPER: I see where you're going with this one sir. I'd have to say yes to that I guess.
SOCCO: Wait I'm still getting started here.
SHOPKEEPER: Sorry sir , fire away

SOCCO: OK. Now in order to recognise a thing we must distinguish that thing from some other thing or things which are different from that thing must we not? We know a dead parrot by knowing what is not a dead parrot do we not?
SHOPKEEPER: ( Shifting uncomfortably) er I knows nothing at all about dead parrots honestly gov. But I would have to say you are right with that one.
SOCCO: So to recognise goodness we must recognise that which is not good must we not? And this is the thing we call bad or evil is it not?
SHOPKEEPER: yes sir right again.
SOCCO: So if god created goodness and knew it was good then he must have known that he was also creating evil and known that it was evil?
SHOPKEEPER: Oh steady on there sir, I'm not sure about that...

SOCCO: If God created goodness who created evil?
SHOPKEEPER: well er god ... no hang on I'm not falling for that one. Wait a minute. I know! .. evil is just the absence of goodness. So god didn't actually create evil oh no, he sort of created goodness and evil was just kind of what was left behind after he done the creating.
SOCCO: But God is all knowing is he not?
SHOPKEEPER: Of course sir - he wouldn't be god now if he didnt know everything would he?!
SOCCO: He must have known then that in creating goodness he was making evil exist?
SHOPKEEPER: Not so fast sir. It's like the sculptor sir , he chisels out the statue and what's left is the dross. Evil is the dross that was left behind when God created good.
SOCCO: It is true that when the sculptor creates a statue he does not know the form the dross will take. Because of this we do not say he creates it intentionally. It is the sculpture that he creates intentionally because it is that to which he knowingly gives a form.
SHOPKEEPER: Exactly sir.
SOCCO: But if the sculptor did know exactly what form the dross would take, if he was all knowing, might we not say that he created the dross intentionally as well as the sculpture? He could as much be described as having the intention to create the dross as create the sculpture because the form of both would be known to him in advance.
SHOPKEEPER: Hmm. I see. I guess so.
SOCCO: and even if he didn't know the exact shape of the pile of dross that would result he still would know that the act of making the sculpture would create the dross would he not? He would know that in creating the sculpture he would be creating the dross, that which was left after creating the sculpture?
SHOPKEEPER: Yes I guess so.
SOCCO: So when we create one thing from parts of another thing we are also creating the thing left behind are we not?
SHOPKEEPER: OK yes that is true
SOCCO: And the more so if we are all knowing and know exactly the form of the thing that will be left behind?
SHOPKEEPER: I see were you're going again here sir.
SOCCO: Good. So when an all knowing God creates goodness he also creates evil and he knows he is bringing both things into existence by his actions.
SHOPKEEPER: Tricky today aren't we sir? yes .. well er .. I would need to think about that one. Oh look sorry but that's your ten minutes up sir.
SOCCO: but I was just getting started !
SHOPKEEPER: Strictly ten minutes for the exploratory Socratic dialogue sir. I could book you in for tomorrow though- say 2 o'clock?
SOCCO: Splendid I'll be back then.
SHOPKEEPER: Sir? sir, aren't we er forgetting something?
SOCCO: Oh yes - sorry . thank you very much I enjoyed that debate.
SHOPKEEPER: No er I mean that will be £5 sir. Strictly cash by the way . You sure you don't want a Norwegian Blue?

Tommy Sheridan sacks legal team again

2010-10-11T11:07:00.002Z

Tommy Sheridan has sacked his legal team and is planning to represent himself in his trial for perjury at Glasgow. A strange sense of deja vu now hangs over the case as Sheridan looks to take on his own defence in the trial. When Tommy Sheridan sacked his legal team in the previous defamation case in order to represent himself it seemed an incredibly high risk strategy - but it was a strategy that paid off handsomely.

He won his defamation case and was awarded a sizable sum of damages against the News of the World in that trial. It can only be speculation of course but his strategy of defending himself in the defamation trial may well have earned him much sympathy from the jury in that case. Whether the tactic will have any influence on the jury in this case remains to be seen.

Sheridan was being represented by Maggie Scott QC in the current perjury trial. The first week of the trial saw a succession of witnesses testifying to Sheridan having made admissions to colleagues in the SSP, individually and at meetings, about his sexual conduct. The court also heard a 40 minute tape which allegedly contained audio of Sheridan substantially admitting the allegations made by the News of the World.

Tommy Sheridan has now asked the court for an adjournment of the trial so that he can prepare his own defence. This move would seem to indicate that Sheridan has either not been happy with the way his legal team have tackled the evidence which has been presented to the court so far or suggests a disagreement about the broader tactics of the defence approach.

As expected the Sheridan perjury trial is taking fascinating twists and turns. The trial was already expected to be the longest case of its kind in Scottish legal history and this further development now makes that almost a certainty.

Nobel Prizes by population size

2010-10-08T15:02:00.003Z

A BBC article compares the number of Nobel prizes won by countries. It is rubbish. The list they produced was;
1. US 323
2. UK 117
3 Germany 103
4 France 57
5 Sweden 28

The article suggests that this information produces "a definitive list of the nations with the biggest brains". Hmm.
It certainly produces a list showing which country generates the most Nobel prizes. It may even point to which country overall is producing the highest number of top scientists. But it doesn't in anyway allow us to compare the countries on a like for like basis because of the widely different populations of each country.

A fairer comparison would be to ask how many Nobel prizes each country produces on a per capita basis. This is a much better indicator of how well each country taps into the potential of it's population ( assuming that Nobel prizes actually measure that which is another issue of course.)

Comparing populations we get

1. US Pop 307M
2. Germany Pop 82M
3. France Pop 62M
4. UK Pop 61M
5. Sweden Pop 9M
( rounded figures )

Now we can calculate the number of Nobels awarded per Million head of population

1 Sweden 3.1 NpM
2 UK 1.92 NpM
3 Germany 1.26 NpM
4 US 1.05 NpM
5 France 0.92 NpM

What emerges is a very different picture. Sweden tops the list by a long way for the number of Nobel prizes per capita of population. One wonders if the origins of the Nobel prize are playing any influence here? Interestingly the UK has gained more Nobels per capita than the US which now trails in fourth place behind Germany.

This is still a very rough and ready approach of course. Population sizes are not static but it certainly gives a more accurate picture than the BBC one.

Geert Wilders Trial Fitna and Pat Condell

2010-10-07T13:37:00.000Z

With Geert Wilders currently on trial in Holland for the alleged crime of inciting racial hatred against Muslims I decided I would revisit "Fitna" the film he made that warned about the dangers of Islam and the Islamification of Europe. The film was widely banned and caused great controversy. If you havent seen it I strongly recommend a viewing ( it is available on YouTube)

Fitna is of course a polemic - it presents an argument about the link between the nature of the Quran and the violence around the world that we see perpetrated in the name of Islam. Fitna does not of course address the fact that most Muslims are peaceful. But does that mean that the arguments that it presents are incorrect?

Most Christians didn't join the medieval crusades but that doesn't mean that Christianity in those days was not - in its impact on the world - war like and often barbarous. There may have been Nazis who personally didn't murder Jews but that doesn't mean it wasn't valid to warn of the dangers of Nazism. Most right wing Christian creationists are probably well meaning people but that doesn't mean that their ideology can't be criticised as potentially destructive and backward looking.

We have experienced the strange phenomenon in recent years of liberal left commentators defending one of the most anti-female anti-semitic anti-progressive anti-free speech and homophobic political religious movements that any of us have seen in our lifetimes - political Islam and its violent "revolutionary" vanguard the Islamic Jihadists and fundamentalists.

Left wing socialists have become strange bedfellows with right wing Islamo-fascists as they seek to argue against "Islamophobia" but singularly fail to address the extreme anti-progressive nature of political Islam.

You don't need to agree with Geert Wilders completely to see that his attempts to address these issues stems , in part , from the failure of those who should be flying the flag for progressive thought to address the iniquity within political Islam. Their failure has left a vacuum and that vacuum will be filled dangerously by those on the right unless the left is more sophisticated in its response to Islam. In this case being sophisticated must mean defending individual Muslims against discrimination and hate while robustly challenging the influence of the medieval thinking of Islam on western culture.

One commentator from the left who always gets this right is Pat Condell. I have posted videos of his before and they never fail to be right on the button. He has earned himself much bile from some on the left for his outspoken views but I think much of this reaction is because he invariably exposes the weakness of the current thinking of many on the left on the subject of political Islam.

I came across a video from Pat Condell, which I had seen some time ago, on the subject of Fitna and Islam so I am posting it here so that I have ready access to it.
What do you think about what Condell says here?

Tommy Sheridan perjury trial day 1

2010-10-04T22:14:00.001Z

Tommy Sheridan and his wife Gail faced a seven page charge sheet on day one of their trial for perjury at Glasgow high court today. He was cheered into court by a small contingent of loyal supporters but the press clearly outnumbered them.

Sheridan and his supporters have been keen to paint the charges as a class war action but for many people the trial is simply about truth and lies. Did Sheridan perjure himself during his defamation case against the News of the World?

SSP members told the defamation trial that Sheridan had admitted visiting sex clubs at a meeting in Nov 2004 . There had been a minute taken of that meeting at which the discussion was minuted as beginning with Sheridan talking about a newspaper having got a story about him visiting a sex club. He is minuted as admitting the allegations but saying he would fight the newspaper and claiming the paper would be unable to prove it's allegations against him.

The jury of 13 women and two men heard today from a Scottish Socialist party (SSP) official, Barbara Scott, the member took the minutes at an emergency party executive meeting in November 2004 after the News of the World stories broke.
.
Scott today recalled that Sheridan, then a member of the Scottish parliament for Glasgow and the SSP's convener, had admitted at the meeting that he had twice visited Cupids " sex club" in Manchester in 1996 and 2002 and that he had admitted to it being a "weakness ".

Hitchens Secularism and Religious freedom

2010-10-04T17:10:00.000Z

In an Oxford University debate, with John Haldane, Christopher Hitchens makes a strong case that a secularist state , with strong separation between the state and specific religious interests, is the best guarantor of religious freedom. This video is one of a series of videos available covering this particular debate between Hitchens and Haldane

Small Business on the web

2010-10-03T12:13:00.000Z

I get asked often to review websites, online services and products. Usually I only agree to do this here or on my other sites if I feel I have something useful to say or it strikes an interest with me. Someone sent me a request the other day asking if I would review a horse riding equipment website but that's not my ( horse )bag.

Reviewing a web hosting provider is more my thing though so I was happy to take up a request to review www.superb.net; a web hosting provider that aims to provide services to small and medium sized businesses.

Let's be honest - there are a shed load of companies offering web-hosting and server facilities and it's sometimes hard to figure out what makes one stand out from the others. There are the biggies of course like Godaddy - I have four domains registered with them and still use them for hosting but to be honest I have always found their user interface quite poor. They seem to cram every square millimetre of space with promotional offers and I have always found navigating to manage my hosting not very intuitive.

www.superb.net offer a typical range of services for a company targeting small and medium sized businesses from standard web-hosting to colocation and managed hosting (for those who have more substantial online business needs and somewhat deeper pockets).

Unlike some web hosting companies they don't appear to offer a free start up web hosting account . I wonder if this is wise as I know from personal experience that many people grow their web businesses having started with small free accounts. Superb.net are I think though looking to by-pass this type of customer and reach for businesses who are already clear that they need a web presence and have some idea what they want. Even though this is their strategy they do offer a good value web-hosting starting option call GridLight for $4.99 per month. This allows hosting up to 11 domains on the account.

The control panel for the web-hosting account is called MyCP but unfortunately as there is no free account access I was unable to test it to see how good it is. I have had a few accounts that used the popular cPanel and found that easy to use. I assume MyCP is probably a bespoke control panel but I can't comment on how good it is without trying it.

Overall Superb.net look like a solid and reliable operation offering a full range of good value web-hosting and server solutions and any small or medium sized business looking to start or expand their internet presence would do well to check them out.

Tommy Sheridan Perjury Trial of the decade?

2010-10-02T23:05:00.005Z

The Tommy Sheridan perjury trial may be the Scottish trial of the decade.. Tommy Sheridan, salon-tanned poster boy of the Scottish political far left, and his wife , Gail , face the start of their trial for perjury at Glasgow High Court on Monday. If previous court cases involving Tommy and Gail Sheridan are any indication then the coming perjury trial will be fascinating.

Sheridan , who later appeared in the TV reality series Big Brother, brought a successful case of defamation against the News of the World newspaper in 2006. The News of the World had printed sensational and lurid allegations of extra-marital sexual activity with a former prostitute.

The case generated even more newsprint due to the in-fighting it exposed within the Scottish Socialist Party ( SSP). Sheridan sacked his legal team during the case and then represented himself.

The former call girl at the centre of the allegations told the court that she had a four year affair with Sheridan and organised a group sex party for him. She agreed with a description of him as a Champagne and Cocaine Socialist. [ref] Sheridan's wife gave evidence in the case and defended him stoutly as the trial generated massive publicity. Finally the jury found in his favour and awarded him £200,000 damages.

Sheridan was a former leader of the SSP and the most widely known member of the party and he had earned fame as a charismatic tub-thumping leader of an anti-poll tax rebellion. However as Sheridan prepared himself for the defamation case the executive committee of the party and some of his closest allies urged him to drop it. [ ref] When the case finished with a resounding victory Sheridan claimed that he had been completely vindicated.

Not everyone was happy with the outcome of the case though or convinced that all the witnesses had been truthful.

The News of the World published a transcript, said to be of a 40-minute meeting between Mr Sheridan and George McNeilage, the best man at his wedding in 2000, In the tape Mr Sheridan appeared to admit attending Cupid’s sex club in Manchester on two occasions, something he denied in court. Sheridan claimed the tape was fictitious.

Later the police launched a perjury investigation into those who had given witness at the trial. This investigation resulted in the present charges of perjury, and attempting to persuade another person to commit perjury.

In a further twist to the story , Andy Coulson the former editor of the News of the World could well be called to give evidence in the perjury trial. Coulson, currently the Prime Ministers Director of Communications, has also been embroiled in a continuing legal saga about illicit phone tapping, of famous figures, apparently organised and paid for from within the News of the World.

Tommy Sheridan ( 2007)

Regulation Financial Crisis and Fraud

2010-09-30T16:44:00.001Z

A very interesting interview with an ex senior fraud regulator from the US throwing light on the financial crisis and the role of outright fraud in creating the current financial crisis. If this guys take on things is correct we should be lining up many of the senior CEOs for long prison sentences. It also reveals the perils of governments trashing regulatory systems. This one is worth watching all the way through.

The secrets of Scientology and My Story Winner

2010-09-28T23:05:00.001Z

The BBC Panorama program "The Secrets of Scientology" that was aired tonight was a follow up to an earlier Panorma expose of the dangerous cult of Scientology. Reporter John Sweeney again confronted the reality of Scientology, an organisation that goes to incredible lengths to keep members from leaving. Unfortuntely the program is not available to watch again on the BBC iPlayer at this time.

In the previous program reporter John Sweeney was goaded by members of the cult until he lost his temper with them and this as much as the program itself ended up making the news.

The follow up program included interviews with ex-members of the cult who had operated at the very highest levels of Scientology.- essentially its enforcers. One of them openly admitted that he had been one of the senior church members who had organised harassment of the reporter with the specific intention of finding his emotional buttons and pressing them. These ex senior members of the church are now apparently part of a growing "reform" movement of people who do not reject Scientology itself but are rejecting the church.

The stories told by ex members showed how the church ostracised ex members from their families and followed, stalked them and harassed them. It told how the Church held detailed audio and video recordings of members undergoing "clearing sessions" ( including records of such sessions with Hollywood celebrity members) and how it wasn't averse to using this information to try to blacken the names of ex members or those who tried to leave.

None of the revelations were entirely new to anyone who knows something about the history of this very dangerous , and very rich, cult - what is new is that this cult is increasingly having its secrets and damnable methods of operating exposed.

Interestingly the program that immediately followed included the story of another woman who had a terrible time within a different type of religious cult - a christian cult. Lyndsey Rosa's story story is featured on the BBC My Story website and she has written a book about her experiences which can be downloaded in PDF format from that page. Her story showed what it was like inside such a strict religious cult and what it was like leaving. What struck me is the parallels between the controlling methods used by Scientology - a so called false religion - and the psychological and social controls often exercised on members of other religions. The aim of such controls is of course to make sure that people find it extremely hard to reject their religious brainwashing and think for themselves.

Blog Action Day 2010

2010-09-28T21:02:00.002Z

Blog Action Day is an annual event where bloggers from all over the world sign up to blog about a specific topic on one day of the year Blog Action Day is one way that ordinary bloggers can help to raise the profile of an issue and contribute their voice to the debate about a topic.

If you haven't participated before then don't worry because the whole thing is very easy.

The topic for Blog Action Day 2010 is WATER and everyone will be posting on this topic on 15th October 2010. Nearly one billion people in the world don't have access to clean water and around 42,000 people die each week from water-borne diseases. But water availability, or rather the lack of it, impacts a wide variety of issues from the environment to women's rights and from technology to fashion. So there are a really wide range of topics and angles to look at this years topic from.

If you are a blogger and you read this then please sign up for Blog Action Day here. Don't worry you wont be asked for money - just for some blogging effort to write a post on the subject of water.

Friendly Crocodile - maybes

2010-09-28T19:13:00.001Z

Ah isn't that cute! The guy in this video is a fisherman from Costa Rica who found a very ill crocodile and nursed it back to health. It seems the crocodile was so grateful for this act of kindness that it has decided not to eat the fisherman just yet despite the fact that the man seems to be going out of his way to present himself as a human ready meal.

Call me a cynic but I reckon one day the eat him / don't eat him equation will come out differently in the Crocs thought processes and instinct will take over.

RepairPal - can we have this please?

2010-09-28T17:05:00.003Z

We are all so dependant on our cars these days that having car problems is a real pain in the backside. Even more of a pain can be finding a car repair shop that you trust to give you a quote that you can be confident isn't overinflated. Well as usual US Internet entrepreneurs seem to be way ahead of us in using the web to solve these kinds of problems.

Repairpal is a site where you can get an auto repair estimate. You can compare any estimate that you have been given with their estimate and take account of the advice that they give on auto repair jobs. They have what looks like an extensive directory of US Auto Repair shops and searches that can be matched to car makes as well if your looking for a specialist. Checking, for example, their Chicago auto repair listings they had pages upon page of repair shops listed with information about the particular makes and types of servicing and repair they specialise in.

Another good feature of the site is their encyclopedia which allows you to search for problems and tips like , for example, a page describing how to check engine light.

I have searched for a UK equivalent of this site and I can't find one which seems a real gap. Possibly there may be something like this over here and they just haven't done enough marketing on it yet.

Ed Miliband Conference speech

2010-09-28T16:20:00.000Z

Here is the text of Ed Miliband's speech to the Labour Party Conference. A fairly balanced affair overall with some acknowledgment about issues that he thinks labour needs to put to bed and move on from and a clear marker to the unions that he is not going to be "Red Ed".

Ed Miliband Speech to Labour Conference;

Conference, I stand here today ready to lead: a new generation now leading Labour.

Be in no doubt. The new generation of Labour is different. Different attitudes, different ideas, different ways of doing politics.

Today I want to tell you who I am, what I believe and how we are going to do the most important thing we have to do - win back the trust of the country.

We all of us share a deep conviction which brought us into this party and into this hall.

But each of us has our own individual story.

And I want to tell you about mine.

In 1940, my grandfather, with my Dad, climbed onto one of the last boats out of Belgium.

They had to make a heart breaking decision – to leave behind my grandmother and my father's sister. They spent the war in hiding, in a village sheltered by a brave local farmer. Month after month, year upon year, they lived in fear of the knock at the door.

At the same time, on the other side of Europe, my mother, aged five, had seen Hitler's army march into Poland.

She spent the war on the run sheltering in a convent and then with a Catholic family that took her in. Her sister, her mother and her.

My love for this country comes from this story. Two young people fled the darkness that had engulfed the Jews across Europe and in Britain they found the light of liberty.

They arrived with nothing. This country gave them everything.

It gave them life and the things that make life worth living: hope, friendship, opportunity and family.

And they took hope and opportunity. They worked hard; they got on.

My Dad learnt English, paid his way moving furniture during the day, and studying at night at technical college. He joined the Navy to fight for our country and afterwards he wanted to go to university. He did.

My Mum built a life here after the war, for all of us. I know nobody more generous, nobody more kind, nobody more loving and nobody more relieved that this is contest is over, than my Mum.

The gift my parents gave to me and David are the things I want for every child in this country. A secure and loving home. Encouragement and the aspiration to succeed.

In those ways my family was just like every other. But in some ways it was different.

I suppose not everyone has a dad who wrote a book saying he didn't believe in the Parliamentary road to socialism.

But you know, it wasn't a cold house.

It was warm, full of the spirit of argument and conviction, the conviction that leads me to stand before you today, the conviction that people of courage and principle can make a huge difference to their world.

What my parents learnt in fear, they passed on to us in an environment of comfort and security.

And there was one more lesson that I learnt.

We do not have to accept the world as we find it. And we have a responsibility to leave our world a better place and never walk by on the other side of injustice.

Freedom and opportunity are precious gifts and the purpose of our politics is to expand them, for all our people.

That faith is not something I chose. It's not something I learned from books, even from my Dad's books.

It was something I was born into.

And that is why David and I have devoted our lives to politics.

And it is why I will commit to you here and now. My beliefs will run through everything I do. My beliefs, my values are my anchor and when people try to drag me, as I know they w ill, it is to that sense of right and wrong, that sense of who I am and what I believe, to which I will always hold.

Conference, I am so honoured that you chose me to lead your party and I know you share those values.

And I am proud that every day, day in and day out, in every village, and every town and city in the land, you work to put those values into practice.

Conference, can I thank you for the heroic work you did at the election.

The reason we denied the Conservative Party a majority was because of the incredible work of Labour and trade union members the length and breadth of our country.

From Birmingham Edgbaston to Westminster North and from Edinburgh South to the Vale of Clwyd, it was your dedication, your energy and your determination to fight for the communities you love that beat the Ashcroft millions.

And let me thank everyone, not just Labour Party members, but thousands of ordinary members of the public who drove the BNP out of Barking and Dagenham.

But let's face facts.

We had a bad result.

We had a very bad result.

And we are out of government.

And let me tell you, there is nothing good about opposition.

Every day out of power, another day when this coalition can wreak damage on our communities, another day when we cannot change our country for the better.

And let us resolve today that this will be a one-term government. That is the purpose of my leadership of this party.

But to achieve that we must go on our own journey.

And that is why the most important word in politics for us is humility.

We need to learn some painful truths about where we went wrong and how we lost touch.

We must not blame the electorate for ending up with a government we don't like, we should blame ourselves.

We have to understand why people felt they couldn't support us.

We have to show we understand the problems people face today.

This will require strong leadership. It won't always be easy. You might not always like what I have to say.

But you've elected me leader and lead I will.

This country faces some tough choices. And so do we. And we need to change.

You remember. We began as restless and radical. Remember the spirit of 1997, but by the end of our time in office we had lost our way.

The most important lesson of New Labour is this: Every time we made progress we did it by challenging the conventional wisdom.

Think of how we took on the idea that there was a public ownership solution to every problem our society faced.

We changed Clause 4. We were right to do so.

Think of how we emphasised being tough on crime was as important as being tough on the causes of crime. We were right to do so.

Think of how we challenged the impression that we taxed for its own sake and that we were hostile to business. We were right to change.
And think of how we challenged the idea of a male dominated Parliament with All-Women shortlists and made the cause of gender equality central to our government. We were right to do so.

And the reason Tony and Gordon took on conventional wisdom in our party was so they could change the country.

We forget too easily what a radical challenge their ideas were to established ways of thinking about Britain and how they reshaped the centre-ground of politics.

They were reforming, restless and radical.

The old way of thinking said that economic efficiency would always come at the price of social justice.

With the minimum wage, tax credits, the New Deal, they showed that was wrong.

I am proud that our government lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, hundreds of thousands of pensioners out of poverty, proud that we created the highest levels of employment in Britain's history.

The old way of thinking said that public services would always be second-class. But we defied the conventional wisdom.

I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining.

Our legacy is a generation for whom newly built schools and modernised hospitals are an everyday fact of life.

I am proud of the fact that because of what we did, yes we did save the National Health Service in this country.

The old way of thinking said that you couldn't change attitudes towards gay men and lesbians.

Let me tell you that last month I was privileged to be in this great city, at Pride, to see not just thousands of people marching but thousands of people lining the street in support.

We should be proud that our commitment to equality means we have couples forming civil partnerships across the country and celebrating with t heir family and friends.

The old thinking told us that for 300 years, the choice was either the break up of the United Kingdom or Scotland and Wales run from London.

We should be proud that Labour established the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. And we should make sure that after next May's elections we re-elect Carwyn Jones as the First Minister in Wales and we elect Iain Gray as the new First Minister in Scotland.

And I am so so proud that, against all the odds, we helped deliver peace in Northern Ireland. And it will be one of Tony Blair's great legacies to this country.

The old thinking told us that the challenges of the world were too big and our country too small to make a difference.

But thanks to our leadership around the world, development spending is now heading towards our goal, forty million more children are going to school each day, and two hundred million are protected from malaria. And that would never have happened without the leadership of Gordon Brown as Chancellor and then Prime Minister.

Tony and Gordon had the courage to take on established attitudes and institutions - and change Britain.

It is that courage that made us such a successful political force.

But our journey must also understand where it went wrong. I tell you, I believe that Britain is fairer and stronger than it was 13 years ago.

But we have to ask, how did a party with such achievements to its name end up losing five million votes between 1997 and 2010?

It didn't happen by accident.

The hard truth for all of us in this hall is that a party that started out taking on old thinking became the prisoner of its own certainties.

The world was changing all around us - from global finance to immigration to terrorism - New Labour, a political force founded on its ability to adapt and change lost its ability to do so.

The reason was that we too often bought old, established ways of thinking and over time we just looked more and more like a new establishment.

Let me say to the country:

You saw the worst financial crisis in a generation, and I understand your anger that Labour hadn't changed the old ways in the City which said deregulation was the answer.

You wanted your concerns about the impact of immigration on communities to be heard, and I understand your frustration that we didn't seem to be on your side.

And when you wanted to make it possible for your kids to get on in life, I understand why you felt that we were stuck in old thinking about higher and higher levels of personal debtpossible for your kids to get on in life, I understand why you felt that we were stuck in old thinking about higher and higher levels of personal debt, including from tuition fees.

You saw jobs disappear and economic security undermined, I understand your anger at a Labour government that claimed it could end boom and bust.

And I understand also that the promise of new politics of 1997 came to look hollow after the scandal of MPs' expenses. And we came to look like a new establishment in the company we kept, the style of our politics and our remoteness from people.

I stand before you, clear in my task: to once again make Labour a force that takes on established thinking, doesn't succumb to it, speaks for the majority and shapes the centre ground of politics.

And I tell you this: if we are not this party, nobody will be.

This new generation that leads our party is humble about our past and idealistic about our future.

It is a generation that will always stand up for the mainstream majority.

It is a generation that will fight for the centre ground, not allow it to be dominated or defined by our opponents.

And it is a generation which thirsts for change.

This week we embark on the journey back to power.

It will be a long journey involving hard thinking for our party.

We do not start that journey by claiming we know all the answers now.

We do so by setting a direction of change.

Let me tell you what kind of country I want to see:

This generation wants to change our economy so that it works better for working people and doesn't just serve the needs of the few at the top.

This generation wants to change our society so that it values community and family, not just work, because we understand there is more to life than the bottom line.

This generation wants to change the way government works because it understands the power of the state to change lives but also how frustrating it can be if not reformed.

This generation wants to change our foreign policy so that it's always based on values, not just alliances.

And this generation knows very profoundly that to change Britain we need a new politics.

Above all, I lead a new generation not bound by the fear or the ghosts of the past.

As we emerge from the global economic crisis, we face a choice: we can return to business as usual or we ca n challenge old thinking to build the new economy we need.

Let me say, I believe strongly that we need to reduce the deficit.

There will be cuts and there would have been if we had been in government.

Some of them will be painful and would have been if we were in government.

I won't oppose every cut the coalition proposes.

There will be some things the coalition does that we won't like as a party but we will have to support.

And come the next election there will be some things they have done that I will not be able to reverse.

I say this because the fiscal credibility we earned before 1997 was hard won and we must win it back by the time of the next general election.

I am serious about reducing our deficit.

But I am also serious about doing it in a way that learns the basic lessons of economics, fairness and history.

Economics teaches us that at times of recession governments run up deficits.

We were too exposed to financial services as an economy so the impact of the crash on the public finances was deeper on us than on others.

We should take responsibility for not building a more resilient economy.

But what we should not do as a country is make a bad situation worse by embarking on deficit reduction at a pace and in a way that endangers our recovery.

The starting point for a responsible plan is to halve the deficit over 4 years, but growth is our priority and we must remain vigilant against a downturn.

You see when you cancel thousands of new school buildings at a stroke, it isn't just bad for our kids, it's bad for construction companies at a time when their order books are empty.

It's not responsible, it's irresponsible.

When you deprive Sheffield Forgemasters of a loan, a loan from government which would be paid back, you deprive Britain of the ability to lead the world in new technology.

It's not responsible, it's irresponsible.

And when you reduce your economic policy simply to deficit reduction alone you leave Britain without a plan for growth.

It's not responsible, it's irresponsible and we should say so.

No plan for growth means no credible plan for deficit reduction.

And nor should we reduce the deficit without learning the basic lessons of fairness.

We must protect those on middle and low incomes. They did nothing to cause the crisis but are suffering the consequences.

I say the people who caused the crisis and can afford to do more should do more: with a higher bank levy allowing us to do more to protect the services and entitlements on which families depend.

And we should learn the basic lessons of history.

After 1945, we had the biggest debt we have ever had.

That generation cut the deficit but they had a bigger vision: for a new economy and a good society.

True patriotism is about reducing the debt burden we pass on to our kids.

But Mr Cameron, true patriotism is also about building an economy and a society fit for our kids to work and live in.

You were the optimist once but now all you offer is a miserable, pessimistic view of what we can achieve. And you hide behind the deficit to justify it.

But I have a different ambition, to emerge from the global economic crisis tackling the deficit, but also learning the much deeper lessons that this generation must learn.

It is a huge challenge to change our economy for the future and the same old thinking will lead to the same old results: an economy too dependent on financial services, too many people stuck in low pay and dead-end jobs and growing inequality.

We need a plan for change. A plan to reform the banks, invest in the industries of the future and support the small businesses and entrepreneurs who can be the lifeblood of our economy.

The new generation in my party understands the fundamental New Labour lesson that we must build prosperity as well as redistributing it.

And it also knows that there are huge vested interests and huge barriers to the wealth creators in this country, particularly small businesses and the self-employed.

These must be tackled. I tell you this, I will make Labour the party of enterprise and also the party of small business.

And I want British businesses, large and small, to be able to make the most of the advantages of globalisation.

New Labour was right to be enthusiastic about the opportunities that come in a more connected world: the movement of goods and services, the chance to travel, the new markets for our companies.

But this new generation recognises that we did not do enough to address concerns about some of the consequences of globalisation, including migration.

All of us heard it. Like the man I met in my constituency who told me he had seen his mates�€ ™ wages driven down by the consequences of migration.

If we don't understand why he would feel angry—and it wasn't about prejudice—then we are failing to serve those who we are in politics to represent.

I am the son of immigrants. I believe that Britain has benefited economically, culturally, socially from those who come to this country.

I don't believe either that we can turn back the clock on free movement of labour in Europe. But we should never have pretended it would not have consequences.

Consequences we should have dealt with.

We have to challenge the old thinking that flexible labour markets are always the answer.

Employers should not be allowed to exploit migrant labour in order to undercut wages.

And if we have free movement of labour across Europe we need proper labour standards in our economy, including real protection for agency workers.

And, as every democratic country recognises, it is vital that workers have a voice that speaks for them.

I remember during this campaign I met some school dinner ladies. They had to buy their own uniforms, their shift patterns were being changed at a moment's notice, frankly conference they were being exploited.

So they looked to their union to help them. They weren't interested in going on strike, they loved the kids they served and wanted to serve their schools. But they wanted someone to help them get basic standards of decency and fairness.

Responsible trade unions are part of a civilised society, every democratic country recognises that.

But all of us in this movement bear a heavy responsibility. We want to win an argument about the danger this coalition poses to our economy and our society.

To do so we must understand the lessons of history.

We need to win the public to our cause and what we must avoid at all costs is alienating them and adding to the book of historic union failures.
That is why I have no truck, and you should have no truck, with overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes.

The public won't support them. I won't support them. And you shouldn't support them either.

But it is not just from trade unions that I want to see responsibility.

This new generation demands responsibility from business too.

During this campaign, I have met some extraordinary people doing amazing service for our country.

I remember a care worker I met in Durham.

She worked hard and with dedication, looking after our Mums, Dads and grandparents when they couldn't look after themselves anymore.

She is doing one of the most important jobs in our society, and if it was my Mum or Dad, I would want anyone who cared for them to be paid a decent wage.

But she was barely paid the minimum wage – and barely a few pence extra for higher skills.

She told me that she thought a fair wage would be £7 an hour because after all she would get that for stacking shelves at the local supermarket.

I believe in responsibility in every part of our society.

That's why I believe in not just a minimum wage but the foundation of our economy in the future must be a living wage.

And we need a tax system for business that rewards responsibility:

To pay a living wage;

To provide high quality apprenticeships;

And family-friendly employment.

And we need responsibility at the top of society too. The gap between rich and poor does matter. It doesn't just harm the poor it harms us all.

What does it say about the values of our society, what have we become, that a banker can earn in a day what the care worker can earn in a year?

I say: responsibility in this country shouldn't just be about what you can get away with.

And that applies to every chief executive of every major company in this country.

And, just as businesses have responsibility to ensure fair pay, so those who can work have a responsibility to do so.

This is one of the hardest issues for our party because all of us know in our communities people who are in genuine need and who worry about the impact of new medical tests, or changes to rules on them.

At the same time, let's be honest, we also know there are those for whom the benefits system has become a trap.

That is not in their interests or the interests of us a society and we are right when we say it must be challenged.

Reforming our benefits system is not about stereotyping everybody out of work, it's about transforming their lives.

Real help matched with real responsibility.

That is why on welfare, I will look closely at whatever the government comes forward with: not arbitrary cuts to benefits but a genuine plan to make sure that those in need are protected and that those who can work have the help they need to ensure they do so.

Work is a central part of life. But it is not all that matters.

We all care about making a living but we don't just care about that.

Here is our generation's paradox: the biggest ever consumers of goods and services, but a generation that yearns so much for the things that business cannot provide.

Strong families.

Time with your children.

Green spaces.

Community life

Love and compassion.

New Labour embraced markets in our economy and was right to do so.

But lets be honest we became naïve about them.

We must never again give the impression that we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

We must be on the side of communities who want to save their local post office, not be the people trying to close it.

We must be on the side of people trying to protect their high street from looking like every other high street, not the people who say that's just the forces of progress.

And we must be on the side of those who are dismayed by the undermining of the local pub with cut-price alcohol from supermarkets.

We must shed old thinking and stand up for those who believe there is more to life than the bottom line.

We stand for these things not because we are social conservatives but because we believe in community, belonging and solidarity.

And I tell you this: the good life is about the things we do in our community and the time we spend with family.

I feel this so deeply since the birth of my son sixteen months ago.

As we rebuild our economy, we must think how we protect families up and down this country.

Families can't do the best job if they are stressed out, working 60 or 70 hours a week, can't be there when the kids get home from school, doing two or three jobs.

We've got to change our culture on working time not just for the good of families, but because it is through family that we learn right from wrong, develop ambitions for ourselves and show kindness and respect for others that is the foundation of our society.

When I look at some of the challenges we face as a country -from gangs to teenage pregnancy - it is only a government that stands up for families that are trying their best to bring up their kids that can offer answers.

So as we rebuild our economy we must think about how we protect and nourish the things that matter to families and to family life.

This new generation also wants to challenge the way we think about the state and what it can achieve.

I believe profoundly that government must play its part in creating the good society.

But our new generation also knows that government can itself become just such a vested interest. That unless reformed, unless accountable, unless responsive, government can impede the good society.

Our new generation, hungry for change, is unwilling to see that happen.

Like millions of people around the country, I went to my local comprehensive. I know the value of a good school, a good teacher.

And I know there are many parents frustrated, with a school that doesn't suit your child or live up to your hopes.

There are amazing secondary schools in my constituency and amazing teachers and head teachers. But one of them was consistently failing its pupils.

And it pained me as an MP to see those kids being consistently let down. Now that school has been taken over, the kids life chances transformed.

That is what good public service reform is all about.

My generation recognises too that government can itself become a vested interest when it comes to civil liberties.

I believe too in a society where individual freedom and liberty matter and should never be given away lightly.

The first job of government is the protection of its citizens. As Prime Minister I would never forget that.

And that means working with all the legitimate means at our disposal to disrupt and destroy terrorist networks.

But we must always remember that British liberties were hard fought and hard won over hundreds of years.

We should always take the greatest care in protecting them.

And too often we seemed casual about them.

Like the idea of locking someone away for 90 days - nearly three months in prison – without charging them with a crime.

Or the broad use of anti-terrorism measures for purposes for which they were not intended.

They just undermined the important things we did like CCTV and DNA testing.

Protecting the public involves protecting all their freedoms.

I won't let the Tories or the Liberals take ownership of the British tradition of liberty.

I want our party to reclaim that tradition.

So too in our foreign policy the new generation must challenge old thinking.

We are the generation that came of age at the end of the Cold War.

The generation that was taught that the end of history had arrived and then saw 9/11 shatter that illusion.

And we are the generation that recognises that we belong to a global community: we can't insulate ourselves from the world's problems.

For that reason, right now this country has troops engaged in Afghanistan.

They represent the very best of our country.

They and their families are making enormous sacrifices on our behalf and we should today acknowledge their service and their sacrifice.

Our troops are there to stabilise the country and enable a political settlement to be reached so that Afghanistan can be stable and we can be safe.

I will work in a bi-partisan way with the government to both support our mission and ensure Afghanistan is not a war without end.

But just as I support the mission in Afghanistan as a necessary response to terrorism, I've g ot to be honest with you about the lessons of Iraq.

Iraq was an issue that divided our party and our country. Many sincerely believed that the world faced a real threat. I criticise nobody faced with making the toughest of decisions and I honour our troops who fought and died there.

But I do believe that we were wrong. Wrong to take Britain to war and we need to be honest about that.

Wrong because that war was not a last resort, because we did not build sufficient alliances and because we undermined the United Nations.

America has drawn a line under Iraq and so must we.

Our alliance with America is incredibly important to us but we must always remember that our values must shape the alliances that we form and any military action that we take.

So many of the world's problems need functioning international institutions. The days in which any country could achieve their goals on their own are over.

There can be no solution to the conflicts of the Middle East without international action, providing support where it is needed, and pressure where it is right to do so.

And let me say this, as Israel ends the moratorium on settlement building, I will always defend the right of Israel to exist in peace and security. But Israel must accept and recognise in its actions the Palestinian right to statehood.

That is why the attack on the Gaza Flotilla was so wrong.

And that is why the Gaza blockade must be lifted and we must strain every sinew to work to make that happen.

The government must step up and work with our partners in Europe and around the world to help bring a just and lasting peace to the Middle East.

But to achieve all these things – a different economy, a different society and reform of the state we must change our politics too.

Let's be honest, politics isn't working.

People have lost faith in politicians and politics.

And trust is gone.

Politics is broken.

Its practice, its reputation and its institutions.

I'm in it and even I sometimes find it depressing.

This generation has a chance -----and a huge responsibility----to change our politics. We must seize it and meet the challenge.

So we need to reform our House of Commons and I support changing our voting system and will vote Yes in the referendum on AV.

Yes we need to finally elect the House of Lords after talking about it for so long – about a hundred years.

Yes we need more decisions to be made locally, with local democracy free of the constraints we have placed on it in the past and free of an attitude which has looked down its nose at local government.

And I want to congratulate all our local councillors and tell you: I will be shoulder to shoulder with you at next May's local elections.

And the following year, we will be proud not only of the Olympics in London, but proud too to see them presided over by the next Mayor of London. Ken Livingstone.

And let me also congratulate Oona on the campaign that she fought.

Let's be honest, changing our institutions won't be enough to restore trust on its own.

Look in the end, it's politicians who have to change.

This generation must reject the old ways of doing politics. And must speak to the issues our generation knows it must confront.

The focus groups will tell you that there's no votes in green issues.

Maybe not.

But taking the difficult steps to protect our planet for future generations is the greatest challenge our generation faces.

When I think about my son, I think what he will be asking me in twenty years time is whether I was part of the last generation not to get climate change or the first generation to get it.

And climate change, just like the aging society, can't be tackled by the politics we have.

They don't lend them selves to the politics of now: instant results, instant votes, instant popularity. X-factor politics.

So we can't be imprisoned by the focus groups.

Politics has to be about leadership or it is about nothing.

I also know something else. Wisdom is not the preserve of any one party. Some of the political figures in history who I admire most are Keynes, Lloyd George, Beveridge, who were not members of the Labour Party.

Frankly, the political establishment too often conducts debate in a way that insults the intelligence of the public.

We must change this for the good of the country.

I will be a responsible Leader of the Opposition.

What does that mean?

When I disagree with the government, as on the deficit, I will say so loud and clear and I will take the argument to them.

But when Ken Clarke says we need to look at short sentences in prison because of high re-offending rates, I'm not going to say he's soft on crime.

When Theresa May says we should review stop and search laws to prevent excessive use of state power, I'm not going to say she is soft on terrorism.

I tell you this conference, this new generation must find a new way of conducting politics.

And that brings me to some of the names I've been called...

Wallace out of Wallace and Gromit...I can see the resemblance

Forrest Gump...Not so much

And what about Red Ed?

Come off it.

Let's start to have a grown up debate in this country about who we are and where we want to go and what kind of country we want to leave for our kids.
A few days ago our contest came to an end and now the real contest has begun.

I relish the chance to take on David Cameron.

We may be of a similar age, but in my values and ideals I am of a different and new generation.

The new generation is not simply defined by age, but by attitudes and ideals.

And there is a defining difference between us and David Cameron…. and that is optimism.

We are the heirs to an extraordinary tradition, to great leaders who were above all the optimists of history.

The optimism of 1945 which built the National Health Service and the welfare state.

The optimism of Harold Wilson and the white heat of technology and the great social reforms of that government.

The optimism of Tony and Gordon who took on the established thinking and reshaped our country.

We are the optimists in politics today.

So let's be humble about our past.

Let's understand the need to change.

Let's inspire people with our vision of the good society.

Let the message go out, a new generation has taken charge of Labour.

Optimistic about our country.

Optimistic about our world.

Optimistic about the power of politics.

We are the optimists and together we will change Britain.

Ed Miliband wins labour party leadership election

2010-09-25T15:54:00.002Z

Ed Miliband has just been announced as the new leader of the Labour Party at the party conference. David Miliband was the front runner from the start but his brother Ed Milliband fought a good campaign and closed the gap on his older brother to the point where the Bookmakers gave him as the marginal favourite right at the wire. The election went to a fourth round and preference votes were distributed among the candidates. The final result saw Ed Miliband win with 51% of the vote.

The Conservative Party seem likely to see victory by Ed Miliband as the lesser challenge because of the perception that he is the less electable than his brother.

Ed Miliband must now lead the party that suffered a serious defeat at the last election after a major financial crisis overwhelmed the economy. He was heavily backed by the unions.

Of the two Miliband brothers David Miliband was the more experienced, more of a Blairite and the more experienced. In the eyes of some within the party though he was more tainted by association with what some inside the party see as major failures such as the Iraq Invasion. Ed Miliband ran a campaign that was more in tune with the older tradition of the party and as time went on seemed to be appealing to the parties traditional vote. He was many argued though, likely to prove less electable as a future Prime Minister precisely because of this.

Gateshead Six Arrested for burning Koran

2010-09-24T07:01:00.000Z

The arrest of six men by Gateshead Police for burning a Koran doesn't show the UK in a very favourable light for a number of reasons. The men have it seems been charged with "inciting racial hatred". Given that the only people who could logically have been the target of this book burning are Muslims this charge of inciting racial hatred is a strange one. I'm not the first one to point out that Islam and Muslims are not a racial group.

It seems to me that, unless this particular law is framed in a very loose way, these men will have a clear defence that there is no offence because no race can be identified which is the subject of any act of hatred. This will depend of course on the detail of what was actually said and done in the video.

I have mixed feelings about this whole affair though. Like PZ Myers over at Pharyngula I find myself quite disturbed not only by this ridiculous equating of race and religion but also by the special defence of religious symbols and religious sensitivity. Where I differ from Meyers is that while I think we should have the right of free speech and be able to burn books ( publicly or privately) as we wish that doesn't mean that it is a sensible or rational thing to be doing. Neither does it mean that there won't be consequences.

There are undoubtedly risks to Koran burning given the irrational and often violent reaction of some Muslims to this kind of thing, We have troops in Afghanistan who might be targeted. That for me is the main reason why the actions of these men is reckless.

Interestingly it's not actually the burning of the Koran that is the act that causes all the trouble or which may be prosecutable. Lets say that these men had burned the Koran privately and simply then told everyone about it in a blog post. Would that be inciting racial hatred? What if it turns out that the book which was burnt was not actually the Koran but some other book given a false cover to make it look like the Koran?

If it is only the actual Koran that when burnt gives rise to the offence of inciting racial hatred then are Gateshead police accepting that the Koran does in fact have some special properties? Would burning a Bible be an offence of racial hatred? If not then why is burning a Koran?

Clearly it's the public nature of the act which the police must rest their case on. The men though are reported to have claimed that it was a private act filmed for their own purpose and that they did not intend for it to go on YouTube.

I could claim here publicly that I had a Koran which I burnt some time ago. What is the essential difference between that "confession" and the posting of the video I wonder. Whatever the twists of the logic of all this I know that I am now much clearer about what is going on in the UK.
Big Brother is watching and the Thought Police will keep us safe......

Jesus on Toast and Islamic Miracle Pictures

2010-09-23T07:00:00.003Z

When I came back from a short bloggers break I had intended to not do as many posts about religion and atheism and such stuff. I am drawn though it seems, like a moth with a flame, to stories and Internet stuff which shows the whackier side of religion. At least I broke my run with my last post. So with apologies to myself here we go again.

You are bound to have seen stories in magazines and on the Internet about people finding "pictures of Jesus" burnt onto their morning toast and such-like. I had thought that this particular brand of religious fruit-and-nuttiness was confined to more eccentric Christians and , perhaps, attention seekers and out and out hoaxers.

It seems I was wrong. The predilection for seeing your own particular brand of holy symbol in some mundane everyday relic is not confined to Christians seeing Jesus. Muslims are it, it appears , determined not to be outdone in the religious wackiness and quackery. I must admit I was surprised by this.

Islam is a religion which doesn't go in much for humour. There are numerous quotes from imams and others urging the Islamic faithful to be careful about mirth and merriment. This made my surprise all the greater. I have always assumed that at least 90% of the people who claim to find religious symbols in vegetables were shall we say "having a laugh" and were not entirely serious.

So when I came across the same sorts of pictures posted on a site which is serious about Islam I could only conclude that these guys take this stuff seriously. That of course makes it all the more hilarious to me. They won't see the funny side of it I'm sure.

It got me thinking though. If Muslims threaten to behead people who burn the Koran what happens if I am eating my toast and discover, after having taken a bite , that some Islamic verse has spiritually manifested and seared itself beneath the strawberry jam. Will I be damned to eternity for eating the word of God? Is this grounds for me finding suicide bombers queuing at my front door? I hope not.

In future I must check my toast and all vegetables I consume very carefully to ensure that they are not manifesting some picture of a holy man, demi god or religious verse. Religious folk take this kind of stuff seriously you know.

Here is an example of the kind of thing I am talking about. I call this one Allah the Aubergine. I'll never touch another one again I promise.

Here is a link to a website which has quite a few similar ones - they appear to take this stuff seriously.
By the way - check out the Islamic Joke section - you'll see what I mean about Islamic humour.

For the sake of balance here is one I call "Jesus on toast"

An E-Prime Challenge

2010-09-22T13:13:00.011Z

When we express our thoughts in writing or speech the actual words that we choose to use clearly make a big difference to the quality of our communications. But what if there exist certain words in our language, indeed certain language concepts, expressed by particular words, that obscure good communication, clarity of thought and constructive debate?

The proponents of E-Prime appear to suggest that we should avoid using the verb "to be" because of this . Writing and speaking English without the use of the verb "to be" delivers our arguments with more clarity and transparency suggest the proponents of this form of English.

For anyone who hasn't come across E Prime Wikipedia has a good primer on the subject here and you can find another good article and links here. ( The article at the second link goes into more depth about the psychology, linguitics and philosophy of why using E-Prime improves clarity)

I pose a challenge to bloggers reading this article as follows. In your next post, on any subject, you should attempt to write the whole article using the E Prime approach. In other words you must not use the verb "to be", in any of its forms, in your article. I would ask that you then post a link back to your article here and leave a comment here. This will allow readers to see what sort of results you achieve when you follow the E Prime approach.

You will note that I have written this post using the E Prime approach and that the verb "to be" does not appear in this post except when quoted.

EDIT: I thought I had managed to write this whole post without using the verb to be and immediately after posting it I found two errors. I found it harder writing in this way than I imagined.

EDIT 2: Aagh ! I found yet another and had to amend again. Those "to be" verbs hide all over the place.

The end of God? Horizon

2010-09-22T00:05:00.004Z

The end of God? A Horizon guide to Science and Religion is a special programme produced in the famous BBC Horizon series tradition that appears to have been made to link with the Pope's visit to Britain. I'm not sure when this was first aired in the BBC schedule but I am about to watch it on BBC four in the rather early hours of the morning after completing some work.

The program is fronted by historian Dr Thomas Dixon and the write up blurb on the BBC site for the programme suggests that he has used BBC archive material to explore the developing relationship between science and religion over the years. He will apparently look at the development of science over the years and ask whether the expansion of scientific knowledge still leaves room for God. Should be interesting.

Here is the link to the BBC iPlayer page for the programme. I'm not sure if overseas readers will be able to use the iPlayer to view the programme.

Review / Update: The end of God? was an hour long trip through the archives of some of the most memorable Horizon programmes over the years put together as a reasonably good overview of the range of issues that the development of science has posed for religion over the centuries. The program ranged from the challenge posed by Aristotle to the geocentric view through the challenges posed by evolution and the attempts by fundamentalists to resist this particularly in the US through their insistence on Biblical creation and the whole Behe irreducible complexity of the flagellum nonsense and its defeat when challenged in a US court.

Towards the final part of the programme Dr Dixon presented the grander view of God which religions have adopted to avoid the pitfalls of the God of the gaps approach. This is the God as grand designer of the Universe approach. The need for such a grand designer God as an explanation was again recently challenged by Stephen Hawking so even here we seem to be driven towards a God of the gaps.

In the final part of the programme Dr Dixon looked at issues relating to the biological basis for religious belief. It was in this area that there was , if anywhere, some small comfort for believers in a God.

The programme showed excerpts from an older Horizon programme which looked at research which had used a "God Helmet". This helmet - which appeared to be simply a motorbike helmet with some electrical gubbins taped on it - produces a magnetic field across specific portions of the brain. These same portions of the brain have been noted to shut down during Buddhist meditation and when nuns undertake devout prayer.

The explanation was that this area of the brain is linked to our sense of time and place - our rootedness - and that the religious experience in many different cultures has the common feature that it tends to result in less activity in this area. The result is a sense of otherness, religious aura and often an sense of the "presence" of something outside oneself. The god helmet at the flick of a switch was able to reproduce this experience in around 80% of volunteers. They recruited Richard Dawkins to try it out but it didn't work on him. It was hard to tell if he was relieved or disappointed !

In his end note Dr Dixon suggested that because of our cultural history, our desire for grand explanations and meaning and possibly because of such biological proclivities we may never see the final disappearance of religious belief systems. In that sense it was a programme to cheer both the atheists and the believers among us. It showed the logical non-necessity for god belief and how science is by the year squeezing the gaps within which god can hide. At the same time there was some comfort for believers that science isn't yet about to demolish the cultural edifice we call religion.

Evidence of the relationship between Nazis and Religion

2010-09-19T19:20:00.000Z

In my previous post I addressed the Pope's assertion that the horrors of the Second World War and the holocaust could be put at the door of Atheism and secularism. Leaving aside the fact that the Pope makes a category error in his assertion I pointed out that his remarks are, to put it mildly, historically and politically illiterate. The articles I linked to have numerous references to scholarly analysis about the relationship between the Nazis and religion and the nature of twentieth century dictator movements as "political religions".

I just want here to record a few additional remarks on this subject and record an interesting link to some photographic evidence..

One of the facts about the rise of anti-semitic National Socialism in Germany that the Pope conveniently ignores is that National Socialism and anti-semitism , far from being forced on the German people by nasty German atheists, was sown into a Germanic cultural soil that was already fertile with a long history of clerically led anti-semitism going back centuries.

Had there not been a widespread church inspired anti-semitism it is unlikely that the full storm of anti-semitism that culminated in the Holocaust could ever have been unleashed.

We should pause also to consider the wider political / religious context of that terrible time. Consider, for example, which birds were actually flocking together. In Catholic Italy and Spain, Catholic Hungary and other Catholic European states there was either active assistance in the Nazi "solution" to the Jewish "problem" or sometimes a turning away of the eyes. Indeed Germany itself was were the horror was unleashed was reportedly one of the most actively religious countries in Europe at that time ( largely Catholic and Lutheran).

We should also recall that it was a ( supposedly ) atheist state - Russia - that bore the heaviest burden in wiping out the threat of the Nazis and stopping their anti-semitic holocaust. Not that the Soviet Union, with a political religion built around Marxism / Leninism , should serve us as any beacon of rationality of course. There is another country ravaged by a leader who was crazed - not by his atheism - but by his thirst for power and control. Features that we have witnessed all too often also in religious leaders. Therein lies , of course , the category mistake that the Pope makes.

They do say though that a picture is worth a thousand words. It's interesting to explore the poor logical and evidential base for the Popes recent assertions but to save another thousand words I give you here a link to a historical archive which shows some photographic evidence of the relationship between the Church and the Nazi state in Germany.

An atheist response to the Pope

2010-09-16T16:13:00.010Z

It seems the Pope doesn't entirely distance himself from the remarks made by Cardinal Kasper. The Pope wisely managed to avoid repeating the Cardinal's offensive reference to the UK being like a Third world country. It is clear though that the Cardinal was expressing Vatican views when he made reference to secularism in the UK.

The Pope said;

"Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society. In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate. Let it not obscure the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms; and may that patrimony, which has always served the nation well, constantly inform the example your Government and people set before the 2 billion members of the Commonwealth and the great family of English-speaking nations throughout the world." 1

This comes of course from the man who leads an organisation responsible for covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests and which has sheltered paedophile priests within it's cloisters. Clearly the man has some interest in getting the agenda onto a different subject.

His reference to "aggressive forms of secularism" is of course no accident. It is his intention that his flock and others listening should make the mental connection between atheism /secularism and aggression and violence. This might wash with religious adherents who are already dumbed down by the deadening hand of religious mumbo jumbo but it really doesn't wash as a peace of analysis.

The fact is that almost none of the violence that we see in the world around us today has roots in either secularism or atheism. The vast majority of the violence we see today appears to have it's roots in a tangle of religious and cultural issues.

Religionists love to give Nazism and Communism as examples of what happens when Atheists take control. Again this is simplistic nonsense. These movements , just like religions, had their own Holy Books - Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto, which the believers followed as though they were the words of some inspired being. They were in fact political religions. Indeed the record is clear that in Germany many churchmen provided moral and religious cover to the Nazi regime. So such arguments hold little weight and the Pope clearly doesn't understand his history. ( see for example the Wikipedia article on the religious aspects of Nazism )

In Pakistan, India , Northern Ireland and many other places we see terrorism and communal violence which comes from a tangle of religious and cultural issues. In the USA we have seen right wing Christians bomb and murder people involved with family planning clinics. I can't recall the last time I heard of an Atheist strapping on a suicide vest and blowing themselves up - possibly because they dont think they'll be met by scores of virgins in some fictional afterlife. Perhaps there is a secret cadre of "Darwinists " somewhere planning suicide attacks on Churches and Mosques?

The Pope will be happy of course for his flock to make simplistic connections between real violence and secularism or atheism but the Catholic Churches' real fear , and the fear of other religionists, isn't that Atheists are starting to hoard kalshnikovs for some mythical anti-religious revolution.

No my dear Pope, you see us as "aggressive" because we no longer sit passively and quietly while god-botherers like you have the stage of public discourse all to yourself. Secularists and Atheists are increasingly out there, in force, setting out the arguments for the irrationality of religion and pointing out the iniquity and hypocrisy that often accompany religions. That's what you and your like fear. That's why my dear Pope you see us as aggressive.

The problem is that we are parking our logical tanks on your theological lawns and taking you and other religionists on in a battle of rationality and reason. And you know you can't win in the long run. So you and other religious leaders must scare your flocks and make us bogeymen.

The reality is that no atheist or secularist that I know of talks about actually banning religion or religious observance or indeed trying to stop people enjoying their associated "cultural practices" - within reason. The trouble is that one man's religious cultural practice is anothers abuse of human rights.

If you are / were a believer in some forms of African witchcraft ( ** ) then you might think that abuse of so called witch children is religiously and culturally justified. I don't. Sorry - but you dont get to to do that in my country. (** I wonder if turning bread and wine into the body and blood of christ qualifies as witchcraft or sorcery?)

The Catholic Church has it's own set of backward religious / cultural practices - a primitive and repressive approach to birth control and attitudes to homosexuality that offend peoples sense of human rights. So the Church doesn't get to set the agenda in this country on these issues. If that counts as "aggressive" secularism then so be it. If pointing out the hypocrisy and evil of the Church covering up the sexual abuse of children makes us aggressive secularists then so be it. If we have you trembling in your Prada slippers worrying that your flocks may start to think for themselves rather than passively swallowing your religious nonsense then so be it. We need more such aggressive secularism - not less.

Hawking's God is a Dead Parrot

2010-09-12T21:07:00.004Z

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow write in the last chapter of their new book, "The Grand Design" , that;

"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist" and assert that "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

And with that they got themselves a shed -load of free publicity for their book as the media announced that Hawkins had proclaimed that creation is needless of a god - all is explained by M Theory apparently.

Now Ive never read M Theory but anyone who has followed the recent history of "Mathematical" Cosmology / Quantum Physics will be aware that as theories such a string theory, brane theory and so on have developed they have been characterised by two things. First is their often reported mathematical elegance but second is the reported disconnect between this theorising and real world evidential experimental proof.

A betting man would be forced to conclude that M Theory will in all probablity go some way towards a deeper explanation for existence but it will , probably sooner rather than later, be found to be incomplete.

Nevertheless there was much re-positioning evident from some senior clerics after the story broke claiming that their faith wasn't in a creating deity but rather in some form of personal deity - whatever that is.

It sounded to me like a bad case of panic.

But sleep easy my god-bothering friends. The chance is that M Theory as the Ultimate Theory of Everything is merely a further step on the path of our growing understanding and not the the final stop.

Our ever increasing ability to measure the complexity of the universe together with the way that mathematics continues to develop will ensure that further twists and turns on the path to understanding will be uncovered. M Theory like other theories before it will probably take us around some of these bends before it loses it's way.

I was reading a review of The Grand Design in The Guardian today and came across a real gem in the comments section posted by one Keith Robertson. This is the God is a Dead Parrot version of the famous Monty Python sketch. It got me chuckling and so I decided to share it.

Now this only works probably if you are actually familiar with the Monty Python sketch " The Dead Parrot" - a sketch about a man who takes a dead parrot back to the shop where he bought it. If you have seen that sketch then you will enjoy this version;

God is a Dead Parrot

"I wish to complain about this deity what I accepted not half an hour ago"

"Oh yes, the, uh, the {insert name of deity }... What's,uh...What's wrong with it?"
"I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. It don't exist, that's what's wrong with it!
"No, no, 'e's uh,...he's invisible"
"Look, matey, I know a non-existent deity when I don't see one, and I'm not looking at one right now"
"No no he exists, he's, he's hidin'! Remarkable deity, isn'it, ay? Beautiful stigmata!"
"The stigmata don't enter into it. It's not there."
"Nononono, no, no! 'E's hiding!"
"All right then, if he's hidin', I'll tempt him out!
'Ello, Mister Wrathful Deity! I've got a lovely fresh sinner for you if you show...
"There, he moved!"
"No, he didn't, that was you saying he did!"
"I never!!"
"Yes, you did!"
"I never, never did anything..."
"'ELLO GOD!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your end-of-the-world o'clock alarm call!"

"Now that's what I call a non-existent deity."

"No, no.....No, 'e's stunned!"

"STUNNED?!?"

" Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin' up! He stuns easily, major."

"Um...now look...now look, mate, I've definitely 'ad enough of this.

That god is definitely not there, and when I believed in it not 'alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of visibility was due to it being ethereal and movin' in a mysterious way."

"Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords.

"PININ' for the FJORDS?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did your reasoning fall flat on it's back the moment I used rational thought?"

"Religious reasoning prefers kippin' on it's back! Remarkable deity, isn't it, squire? Lovely stigmata!

"Look, I took the liberty of examining that deity when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting in its church in the first place was that it had been NAILED there."

(pause)

"Well, o'course it was nailed there! If they hadn't nailed that deity, it would not have been a symbol of ultimate sacrifice and ascension."

"ASCENSION"?!? Mate, this deity wouldn't "ascend" if you put four million volts through it! 'E's bleedin' not there!"

"No no! 'E's pining for the sins of mankind!"

"'E's not pinin'! 'E's gone! He has ceased to be credible!

Bereft of logic, 'e rests in nonsense!

THIS IS AN EX-GOD!!

(pause)

"Well, I'd better replace it, then. (he takes a quick peek behind the counter) Sorry squire, I've had a look 'round the back of the shop, and uh, we're right out of rational deities.

"I see. I see, I get the picture."

"I got science presented as faith".

(pause)

"Pray, does it demand belief without evidence or rational thought?"

"Nnnnot really."

"WELL IT'S HARDLY A BLOODY FAITH, IS IT?!!???!!?

"N-no, I guess not."
(gets ashamed, looks at his feet)

Remembering the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks

2010-09-11T12:58:00.000Z

No-one who witnessed the attacks on the twin towers as they were beamed live on TV around the world will ever forget the impact and horror of that event. It's also hard to forget the reaction in many parts of the Muslim world at the time - Muslims dancing in the streets, celebrating the horrific attacks and either excusing the terror perpetrated by their brethren or suggesting that the whole thing was some sort of western conspiracy.

The reaction to the proposals for building a mosque and Islamic centre near to the Twin Towers site is understandable. Not only were the attacks perpetrated by terrorists in the name of Islam but we witnessed people in many Islamic countries celebrating the horror.

One would think that Muslims in America would be sensitive to these issues and might have found a better location for their Islamic centre. Unfortunately sensitivity seems to be a one way street with Muslims. We must not prevent them building Mosques or burn their holy book but they are free to riot around the world. celebrate terrorist attacks on us, threaten to kill christians and burn bibles with impunity.

On this ninth anniversary of 9/11 I'll be remembering the dreadful events that lead to the deaths of almost 3000 innocent people as a result of the actions of Islamic fundamentalists. The saddest thing now is how little has changed - Muslims still are acting as though they are the only people in this world entitled to be treated with sensitivity. We must all bow the knee it seems to the religious sensitivities of Muslims but dare not demand of them that they show sensitivity in return.

In the nine years since those attacks one thing has become clearer and clearer - that Islam is not fundamentally a religion of peace but a religion that will seek to dominate all others. A religion that seeks to control and suppress hard won human rights and freedoms.

This year we are reminded though, through the actions of an obscure US pastor, that religious fanatics are not found exclusively within Islam. Here's to a more peaceful future which is less dominated by pompous self righteous god-bothering religious groups.

Christian and Muslim kooks out in force over Koran

2010-09-07T23:56:00.003Z

It seems to be the silly season again as a furore stirs over plans by an evangelist church in the USA to stage a "Koran Burning" on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Nothing quite demonstrates the lunancy of god-botherers so much as the spectacle of religious groups burning each others so called holy books.

Here is an ABC news video complete with "internet evangelist" Bill Keller claming " There is only one truth - it's in this book {waves Bible} .. if it's not in this book it's not true..."  . Which is of course exactly the same whacky belief system that Muslims have about their own "holy" book - the Koran.

Since Terry Jones the pastor of another evangelist Church - the Dove World Church - threatened to stage a "Koran burning day" on the anniversary of the World trade centre atrocity there have been Muslim protests in many places complete with - yes you guessed it - effigy and flag burning. It seems that there is nothing that the religious like better than a spot of symbolic burning. I suppose we should at least be grateful that these days it's confined to books and flags and not heretics. ( There is the occasional stoning and flogging of women in Muslim countries of course but I'm sure that Muslims would argue that doesn't count - hey it's only women after all !)

The fact that each side claims that it's Holy book contains the complete and unalterable truth and that the opposing side and it's "holy" book represents "evil" never causes any of these idiots to stop for a moment and think.  Perhaps, just perhaps, none of these holy books actually contains "divine" truth ? To an outsider they all sound as kooky as each other frankly. Admittedly in recent years it's been mostly Muslims who have been murdering and terrorising in the name of their religion but I wouldn't bet against Christian fundamentalists using the same kind of tactics given the right circumstances.

What is it with fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and other believers? Why can't they just practice their own particular brands of religious fetishism quietly in the privacy of their own homes and leave the rest of us to get on with our daily lives?   Frankly I could see the temptation to hold a general "Holy book Burning day" and put the whole lot on a big fire. That isn't going to happen of course because it's generally only people who are truly and utterly convinced that they have the inside word on some sort of divine destiny that resort to such tactics.

Geeky Wickerman

2010-08-19T18:32:00.001Z

Before I start posting about new stuff I should really give an update about what I've been up to during the period when this blog went quiet.

Most of my time as usual has been spent either directly doing my day job or travelling up and down Scotland to get to our main offices. There is a major re-organisation coming up for us and I have been part of a small team which has done some scenario planning for how we are going to operate in the future. I had to do the write up and pepare the scenario planning report which was a major task. In the current financial climate nothing is certain for anyone so we'll need to see what the next six months or so brings.

As part of some background preparations for that scenario planning task I started doing some background investigation of different modeling tools that might be useful for widening our understanding of the kind of data that we deal with. This has ended up being a really interesting journey ( well for a geek like me - ,maybe not for others).

I have had an interest in the whole subject of machine learning and data mining for some time and in particular I have dabbled with the use of neural nets and SVM's ( support vector machines ) before but over the last five or six months I have come across some excellent pieces of software ( most of it open source) that can be used for a range of modeling tasks.

In particular I have found excellent software for using bayesian networks, and a whole range of open source machine learning and data mining libraries and GUI's.

I know this isn't the sort of stuff that floats everyone's boat but on the off-chance that someone else might have some interest in it I may post a little more about this in future posts. I will probably not go into great detail in this blog though as I'm thinking I may start a separate blog where I can post more detailed stuff on these subjects.

A couple of weeks back I was at the Wickerman festival in Dumfrieshire. I guess I must look like a criminal because my car was stopped on the way in and we got the full police search with sniffer dogs and everything. I don't think I saw half the bands that were playing - it was my usual festival experience - wandering from stage to stage only to find that I catch the end song from the set - then wandering to the next stage and the same thing happens. Maybe that's just my luck at festivals - or maybe I should buy a programme! The Wickerman burning was spectacular though. I thought it was going to be a wickerman that was say about 50 ft high. Far from it. The Wickerman was HUGE and made an amazing sight as they set light to it at the end of the final night.

Wishing Marf Well

2010-08-12T16:51:00.000Z

I find it hard to believe that the last time I posted on this blog was in April, but post dates dont lie. All those interesting events in the world that have happened since I last posted and I missed my chance to pontificate about them ! I do like having the occassional short break from blogging though - it gives me a chance to sometimes come back with a slightly different angle on things.

The downside of taking a blogging break is that you take a serious risk with any regular readers who have shown loyalty to your blog. At times in the past I have had a good regular readership and then had to build it up again having taken a break. Here we go again then I guess.

I began by checking a couple of long standing blogging friends , Looney and Marf. Looney is a nice chap but we are like chalk and cheese on some fundamental issues and always will be. More of that anon I suspect. Marf is a young guy from Alaska and on checking his blog it looks like he's taking a break from blogging just as I'm getting back into the saddle. From the tone of his last post I'm not sure if he'll be blogging again which would be a great shame. On the other hand marf has always been clear that he was desparate to get away from his particular backwoods part of Alaska and it seems that he has now engineered his "great escape".

Marf will probably never read this but nevertheless I'd like to wish Marf bon voyage on his new venture in life - I have every confidence that having made the "leap" ( to Boise Idaho ) he will find a new confidence and direction in his life. Best wishes Marf and I hope we hear more from you once your settled.

Michael Caine supports Labour in Election at Tory event

2010-04-11T19:31:00.001Z

Michael Caine was recently asked by the Conservatives to support them in their Election camapign. Now not a lot of people know this but although David Cameron is a big man in the Tory party he's in bad shape - specifically he's not a very good judge when it comes to picking his supporters.

Michael Caine once said " I read books like mad, but I'm careful not to let anything I read influence me". Now that should have set some warning bells off for David Cameron - but it clearly didn't. Poor old Michael Caine clearly has trouble being influenced by anything that he reads these days, scripts , invitation notes etc etc.

The invitation from David Cameron clearly read ;

"Dear Michael, Please come and speak for us at an important event about young people and tell everyone that you support the Conservatives as we try to get elected to the government."

Michael, who tries not to be too influenced by what he reads, and who has practised the art of speed reading, clearly only retained the following from his reading of the message;

"Dear Michael, speak at... important event ... about young people ...support ... the government".

The result was this bit of politcal theatre where Michael Caine duly arrived at the Conservative event and spoke up - in support of the Labour government. Brilliant. You couldn't make this stuff up.

New Homind Fossil

2010-04-08T21:01:00.001Z

Another part of the jigsaw that is the Hominid fossil record may have been completed with the finding of an apparently new fossil hominid in South Africa.

The new hominid has been dubbed Australopithecus sediba and it is reported to have both human and ape traits. The estimated age for the new hominid is between 1.78 to 1.95 million years ago when australopithecines and early species of Homo seem to have been contemporaries.

The exact significance of the new fossils ( a boy and a woman) may not be clear for some time as is often the case with new finds but the fossils appear to be causing considerable interest and speculation.

Further reports are available at National Geographic and The New York Times

Same old Conservatives

2010-04-07T23:09:00.001Z

He's a nice man. He's a very very nice man. That at least is what David Cameron of the Conservatives seems to want the the public to think of him. He's has spent much time and energy trying to persuade us that he's just "dave" an ordinary bloke who will run the country for "ordinary" people. He must think we're daft.

The reality is that while on the surface the Tories have tried to shake of their image as the nasty party - the legacy of Thatcherism - they are still under the skin a party that will always put the interests of the rich and powerful before the interests of the ordinary working people of this country.

Whichever party wins the election it is certain that there will have to be action taken to reduce government borrowing. The question is not if this needs to be done but how quickly and where any budget cuts should be targeted.

The Conservatives have promised to reduce inheritance tax - a measure that will save money for relatively few individuals. This is merely a taste of what will be coming if the Tories get in. They will cut taxes for the rich and protect their perks while bearing down even harder on the rest of us by way of budget cuts and tax rises such as VAT.

The last time we had a conservative government they left this area a wasteland - devoid of industry and jobs. Hopefully people will see beyond the phony "nice Dave" image and remember that the conservatives are still in business to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

Proposed Ayrshire Power Coal Fired Station moves forward

2010-03-14T17:44:00.003Z

Ayrshire Power have confirmed that they are proceeding with an application to build a £3billion coal fired station in Ayrshire. The company claims that it will lodge plans to build the the 1.6 Gigawatt scheme shortly. A power plant of that size could supply around 3 million homes. The last coal fired power station built in Scotland was Longanett in 1973. Coal has been out of fashion in the drive to provide energy and much of this has been down to coals reputation as a dirty polluting fuel.

Environmentalists as expected are expressing great concern at this development as coal fired stations are heavy producers not only of CO2 but also of other pollutants.

The proposals include a commitment by the company to implement carbon sequestration for around 300Mw of the l.6Gw. That still means that three quarters of the production would be untouched by any carbon capture.

Personally I think that burning fossil fuels seems a very wasteful way of using key finite resources. At the same time there is a need to replace generating capacity so it's not easy for governments to ignore offers to build.

The inclusion of 300Mw of carbon sequestration in the proposal looks like a sweetener. The company will have done its sums and decided that it can afford more than this proportion and be profitable. They would be lousy negotiators if they haven't already factored in that they might have to increase the amount of carbon sequestration in the proposal.

To me the obvious solution would be to ask this company to demonstrate that it can get sizeable carbon sequestration working at the site before it is allowed any increase in capacity. Once they have such technology working then a station which burns coal cleanly might be tolerable as a part of the solution to our energy needs over the next 15 to 20 years.

Some would argue of course that there are major problems in the way our fuel economy works because it rewards large proposals like this rather than less glamourous proposals such as financing consumption and efficiency improvements. The reality is of course that both must be tackled - we do need more generating capacity but we should also be doing much more by driving fuel efficiency and developing more renewable supplies.

There is likely to be a great deal of opposition to this coal fired plant and it remains to be seen if it gets the go-ahead.

China oil demand rises by 28%

2010-03-12T23:20:00.000Z

In an interesting pointer to the world we face in the near future the IEA ( International Energy Agency) reports that demand for oil in China leapt by an incredible 28% in January compared to a year earlier while at the same time they are predicting that demand for oil in developed countries will fall marginally.

This is yet another sign of the tremendous pace at which countries like India and China are developing and the pace at which the balance of power in the world is beginning to shift.

In the West we have been living through the end of a period in which our development was largely driven by cheap readily available oil. But this finite natural resource is now likely to be subject to increasing demand in future years while at the same time the pace of finding new oil reserves is only likely to slow.

The concept of "peak oil" defines the assumed stage at which the point of maximum oil production is reached at which point oil extraction rates go into steady decline as reserves fall. Of course the point at which maximum production is reached depends on a number of factors including price and demand.

if demand goes up then one of two things can happen either producers pump more oil in which case the point of peak oil must be reached sooner ( assuming the rate of finding new reserves doesnt otherwise change) or alternatively producers hold production steady and the price rises.

The west seems ill prepared for either of these two scenarios. We have barely started on the road of alternative energy systems and our road transport systems are built around petroleum. If oil prices rise considerably due to rising demand from these developing countries then we in the west face an even greater challenge because our deficits are largely financed these days from these developing countries who have as I understand it been giving us loans as a way of investing their surplus cash.

Now Im no economist but none of this sounds like good news for us in the West. It seems to me that on the face of it the arguments for rapidly shifting our economies towards alternative energy systems become more compelling by the day.

Dumb and Dumberer Creationists are scary

2010-03-10T18:07:00.000Z

Its hard to know whether to laugh out loud or be really scared by the complete dumbness on show in this video of a group of creationist students and their teachers visiting a museum.

Among the gems of complete dumbness on offer is a "paleontology" teacher telling students that dinosaur fossils were laid down during the "late stages of Noahs Flood" and claiming they are around 4,000 years old. There is also a "Biology teacher" telling students that giraffes didnt evolve but were created directly as "giraffe types" using giraffe genes.

The scary thing is that these students aren't from some theocractic third world state but from the US - supposedly the leading state in the world. There are thousands and thousands of students at religious campuses in the US who are being taught such drivel which makes me wonder just how long the US will retain its pre-eminent position if this is the sort of stupidity they allow in their education system.

Whats the worst that could happen?

2010-03-05T23:35:00.001Z

I know it's a rather apocalyptic vision - but no one said that you cant exaggerate in a cartoon to make a point.
There was an interesting new study published today which reviewed a large number of studies from a range of disciplines all of which seem to be pointing to continuing rises in global temperatures. Still we shouldn't worry too much because there will still no doubt be life on this planet long after we have gone.

AGW Sceptics line up for poison and explosives here please

2010-03-01T12:24:00.005Z

While the debate about Global Warming and it's causes has become more heated in recent months that doesnt always mean that there is a great deal more light being shed on the whole subject. One of the most infuriating things is reading comments by people who clearly haven't thought about the logic of what they are saying.

Reading the comments on Global Warming stories can be a particularly depressing experience when you see people taking strong stances on the basis of arguments which are sometimes so patently ludicrous that you wonder how the person failed to understand this.

I came across the following comment in an online newspaper today

"Despite any increase, carbon dioxide remains less than one percent of the greenhouse gas content of the atmosphere. Increases in carbon dioxide are more a symptom of a warming trend than a cause."

I'm sure my readers being the smart bunch that they are will immediately see at least one fallacy in this statement but I'll lay it out anyway because this argument is trotted out so often by Global Warming scpetics that it's become a bit of a mantra.

I dont know if you have ever heard of something called Ricin - if you havent then its basically one of the most poisonous substances known to man. At the present moment I am fairly safe in saying that if you are reading this then you have no Ricin in your body at the moment.

If you will allow me to then I will adminsister to you ( virtually of course) a dose which is so small that it will not amount to even a fraction of 1 percent of the weight of your body. Anyone who thinks the Global Warming scpetics argument is a logical one must of course accept that there can be danger in me giving them such a small dose of Ricin. After all its going to be much much less that 1% of their body mass - so why worry?

CO2 is indeed a small fraction of the atmosphere but it is clearly a fallacy to conclude from this that it cannot have major effects on the way the atmosphere works.

But that is not the only thing implied by the sceptics statement above. There is also the implication that not only is the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere very small but that the changes to those levels that man is causing are a small amount of that already small fraction - so why worry? This also is illogical reasoning.

It is a trivial thing to find examples where a very small change in something can set off catastrophic changes. In nature there are many examples of state changes where only a very small change in for example the heat content of a material will lead to a sudden state change. As a more dramatic example consider (virtually) placing a small amount of high explosives in your basement. No problem there of course because the high explosive will only be a fraction of the volume of your house. Now we will apply a tiny increase in the energy of the high explosive. Here is the match. Just light it and apply it to the high explosive. I will be standing well back at the other end of the street of course. If you are a Global Warming sceptic who thinks that small increases in small things pose no dangers then I am sure you will be happy to stand there alone and apply the match yourself. No?

Perth and Inverness

2010-02-24T02:28:00.003Z

On the way up it was so cold in the Highlands between Perth and Inverness that the snow seemed to have crystalised into diamonds that twinkled in the headlights. It may have been a cold trip to Inverness but the Highlands were certainly looking their best. It's a trip I have made around this time of year for the last couple of years,to talk annual strategy and priorities with a staff group.

One guy said it had been -18c the night before. Not quite so cold were we were staying but even in Inverness it was -9c. Brrrr. The Drummossie is a nice hotel but my conscience about expenses, and my stomach, rebelled at the prices on the Hotel Menu , memories of "Nouvellle Cuisine" portions on a previous visit and a not wildly inspiring menu. So sod that. We went into Inverness and found an "all you can eat" Chinese Buffet at Jimmy Chungs for a tenner. There was a great variety of Chinese dishes - all well cooked.- and a goodly amount of it ended up in my stomach. We definitely made the right choice.

Coming back down in the car was glorious. The sky was crystal clear blue and the mountains had brilliant snowy pelts and waterfalls frozen like time was stood still. The Highlands really suite a winter dressing.

Hate crimes against the disabled

2010-02-15T21:46:00.003Z

I guess by my time in life and given the things that I have dealt with professionally then the despicable things that some human beings are capable of doing shouldn't really surprise me. In some ways then I wasn't surprised at the expose by BBC Panorama tonight on the hate crime that some disabled people are subject to. Not entirely surprised then perhaps, but nevertheless quite shocked. The disabled presenter had filmed secretly as he went out to a bar and showed the awful discriminatory remarks and threats of violence that he was subject to.

That was mild though compared to what some of the disabled people on the program had been putting up with. One poor wheelchair bound man had been firebombed out of his house by "anti-social" youths in his village. An elderly disabled lady and her daughter had been subject to over 60 episodes of attacks and harassment including one which they managed to film where a young local hooligan smashed every window in their disabled car. And the reaction of the police? Pathetic frankly. Their attitude appeared to be more to view the disabled lady and her daughter as a bit of a nuisance. The courts frankly arent much better.

Half the problem is that our politicians and the people in our criminal justice system are insulated from this kind of behaviour and so it is easy for them to dismiss it as mere "anti-social" behaviour rather than as the out and out criminality that it is. This Panorama program made very unsettling viewing.

The religious response to disasters

2010-02-01T23:18:00.000Z

There's a great article in the times online by Richard Dawkins about the loathsome attitudes of the religious when natural disasters happen such as the recent one in Haiti. Further religious loathsomeness was in evidence the other day also when a group of US baptists were caught trying to smuggle children out of Haiti no doubt to take them back tothe US to save their souls and have them adopted.

The fact that they had not bothered to check if all the children were in fact orphans or, even worse, follow the necessary procedures for getting approval to take the children out of the country illustrates once again the arrogance of the religious when they are "on gods mission". Law, morality, common sense , logic - none of it matters when the religious think they have Gods calling to do his work.

Fortunately these Baptists were caught before they could spirit the children away and they are going to be dealt with by the Haitian law. No doubt they will get a slap on the wrist and sent on their way given that the US is the major player in the disaster recovery operation. Haiti unfortunately simply cant afford to have problems with the US at this point. These child stealing baptists really deserve to be in jail for child abduction..

Atheism or Critical Thinking

2010-01-08T01:25:00.002Z

Is Atheism the same as Critical or Rational Thinking? Should atheists organise around atheism or around the ideas of rational thinking? It's a debate that crops up regularly in atheist circles. My view is that atheism and rational thinking are closely related but distinct things. Atheists should not therefore simply organise under a banner of "rational thinking" or "critical thinking".

Atheism at it's most basic is simply defined as an absence of belief in a god - any god of any kind. There can never be absolute proof or disproof of the existence of god. The non belief of Atheists is, in it's deepest roots, always a conclusion that rests on probabilities. Atheists see no evidence for the existence of a god and are unafraid to conclude that there is no probability worth speaking of that there is a God. Absence of evidence though is not conclusive evidence of absence. It does not prove that God is absent - it merely makes it highly unlikely that there is a God.

For most people who choose Atheism ( and few Atheists were brought up as Atheists) the lack of absolute proof either way is not a problem. Atheists by and large in my experience generally understand that the realm of absolute proof doesn't apply to the real world. The idea that humans may not posses the absolute truth is not one that many religious believers, and particularly fundamentalist literalists, are comfortable with. Their faith rests on believing that they have been handed down absolute truths - that our ancestors had dealings with gods and that we have been handed down holy works which contain absolute truths.

So atheism and rational or critical thinking are very closely related but even so I think it would be misleading to wholly equate the two. It is entirely possible for an Atheist to be less than rational on other issues.

The essential elements of critical or rational thinking is a willingness to examine arguments rationally and, importantly, a willingness to change your views if the evidence points in another direction.

This is the essential contrast between rational thinking and most fundamentalist type religious thinking. For believers faith is the key - not evidence. Religious faith without faith becomes merely the following of ceremonies and rules. The religious believer must have faith if they are to believe and faith is not the same as evidence.

Just like an atheist may be rational in their atheism but not rational on other subjects then also a god believer may be irrational in that respect but perfectly rational in the way they think about other issues.

A prime example of this is the way that most of the mainstream churches have accommodated to science over the last few hundred years. As the evidence about the real nature of the earth, the universe and man's place in it has stacked up so most non-fundmantalist believers have accepted this evidence.

If atheists try to grab for themselves the "rational thinking" label then we deny the rationality of the many millions of people around the world who are rational enough to understand basic scientific evidence and theories but who happen also to be less than rational in their god believing.

For me Atheism is the rational conclusion that I come to when I consider the evidence for and against the existence of a god - any god. I am also anti - religious because again I think that on balance religion is a more destructive force in the world than a constructive one. Not all religions or religious views however are equally damnable. I know that I share many political and ethical views with moderate believers of different faiths. There are also atheists whose political and ethical views I may not share.

Essentially Atheism is a subset of rational or critical thinking. It is rational or critical thinking as applied narrowly to one question - the existence or non existence of a god - any god.

The Atheist Ten Commandments

2010-01-05T17:38:00.002Z

1. Do not believe in any god or gods or be bound by any religious doctrine. Neither shall you make for yourself an idol in the form of a god or bow down to a god or worship any god whatever name they may go by.
2 You shall only say "oh Jebus" or OMG! when the car breaks down or in other severe circumstances.
3. Do not work everyday - take at least one day a week off work and chill out..
4 Honor your father ( if you know who he is) and your mother.
5 You shall not murder but you shall mock.
6 You shall not lust after re-touched photos of glamour models.
7 You shall not get caught downloading file shared copyrighted materials from the internet.
8 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour even if he is a lying toe-rag.
9 You shall not covet your neighbor’s MP3 player; your neighbor’s trophy wife, or your neighbours 4x4
10 Start again at commandment 1

As you can see my Atheist Ten commandments actually consist of nine commandments plus a tenth recursive commandment . This is in keeping with the spirit of the Biblical ten commandments which come in at least three different flavours ( two in Exodus and one in Deuteronomy) and also don't add up neatly to ten.

Help Save MySql from Oracle

2010-01-01T22:24:00.003Z

Please sign the petition to save MySql

If you are an ordinary Internet user then you may be in the dark about what LAMP is. But without doubt a large number of the sites that you visit would not have existed without this behind the scenes combination of software packages and in particular one part of it - the Open Source Database software MySql. MySql is now threatened with takeover by a large commercial rival and people are organising to counter this threat.

LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP(1) - a combination of software that provides the most common framework used for delivering internet services. These four parts of the LAMP package are Open Source software - free for anone to use or develop. This free Open source nature of the elements of the LAMP package is undoubtedly one of the things that has driven the incredible growth of the internet.
(1) Sometimes Pearl or Python rather than PHP

It is not difficult to understand in a simplified way the basic role that each of the elements in ths package plays. Linux provides the operating system that runs the computers that host the websites. Apache is the webserver software that controls the basic delivery of webpages to visitors, MySQL is database software which is used to store the information that the website serves to visitors and PHP is the software that is used to create the webpages and provides much of the "logic" of a site that glues these parts together.

Although there are other packages that provide these functions they are sually controlled by big corporations like Microsoft or Oracle. These other packages charge purchase and licence fees that are generally well outside the costs that any small to medium business or organisation can sustain.

Without Open Source Software the Internet would be a much smaller and less interesting world and those companies that could afford a web presence would almost certainly be under even greater pressure to charge for web services to recover the costs of software licences.

MySql currently faces the prospect of takeover by Oracle. The reason this is a problem is that Oracle already owns one of the most widely used database packages. It seems unlikely that Oracle has the intention of buying MySql in order to nurture and grow it's current Open Source competitor. No, Oracles purpose is clearly to remove Open Source database competition in one swoop.

Now maybe anti-competitive practice is not something that keeps you awake at night. It's a subject for courts and ministers. But it should worry you that major parts of the Interent run on LAMP and that if MySQL goes down to a commercial predator then the survival of the other parts must be in question.

I doubt that many people want an internet which is fully controlled by major corporations which start charging a fortune for their services. Please consider following the links in this story and adding your voice to the campaign to stop Oracle getting MySQL.

Here's the MySql petition link again

Light From Day to Night

2009-12-30T22:38:00.009Z

There's an interesting article in The Guardian which reports some developments in the field of new forms of lighting and display called OLED ( Organic Light Emitting Diode).

OLED is a leading edge technology that is being developed for the next generation of PC and TV screens but it has other potential uses for example as home lighting - an idea that Lomox, a small UK company is developing.

OLED is built upon the principle of exciting organic molecules by the application of a small electrical voltage. It is potentially a very flexible technology because of the prospect that OLED displays can be printed by laser jet technology. The most efficient form of OLED is Phophorescent OLED technology or PHOLED . OLED produces light very efficiently but at present OLED displays are still costly and have relatively short lifetimes.

Lomox reckon that their approach which is backed by seven patents deals with these problems and will let them produce lighting displays for indoor or outdoor use and deal with both of these problems.

There is an interesting convergence of two technologies now happening. More efficient Solar panels(1) together with increasingly commercial and efficient light production system means that it may soon be possible to realistically provide indoor or outdoor illumination at night from power collected from the sun during the day.

The day looks closer when it will become attractive to build these types of technologies into new build houses. The buyers will have the prospect of cheap and probably very flexible low voltage lighting systems. We may for example be able to buy GlowPaper to replace our wall coverings with flat panel lighting.

What will the house designer of the future do with these new forms of lighting I wonder?

How about a "forest" wallpaper that stretched around your room that glowed to give you the impression of sitting in a sunlight forest clearing?

If you had the chance to design your own wallpapers or panels what would you put on them?

(1) There were for example recent reports that good progress has been made on producing solar panels that collect nearer to the infrared and which are less dependent on direct sunlight.

Here's an Amazon link to the Sony OLED TV

The Day of the Triffids is a Primal Fright

2009-12-28T21:49:00.007Z

A great version of the Sci-fi classic "The Day of the Triffids", by John Wyndham has just been shown on BBC TV. This adaptation was well drawn from the start; there was good acting, well drawn storylines and good Triffid effects.

The Day of the Triffids is a Sci-fi standard that has had many adaptations. The story of mutated plants called Triffids stalking a blinded human population talks to us both of the vulnerability of humans in the face of nature and of the risks of tampering with her. To me the Triffid story always has echoes of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein - another tale of woe brought on by mans interference with nature.

One of our primal fears, almost an instinctual one, is that if we mess with "nature" she will turn round and bite us back.

These types of stories can be traced back through myths and fable to our hunter gatherer roots. Hunting tribes throughout the world will address the spirit of the animal in some way after they have killed it. These are "placatory" ceremonies - they restore order after humans disturb it.

Of course in the Day of the Triffids it's not the hunter killing an animal that unsettles nature; it's our meddling science. The placatory prayer no longer works though. In Sci-Fi, nature will no longer be placated. Man's interference has created implacable foes.

These days we still have our placatory ceremonies. People have their lucky charms, their prayers and other Joo-Joo devices.

Possibly I am performing some form of placatory Joo-Joo myself by participating in consuming such stories.

If so it is a ceremony that is only half consummated because I still need to watch Part 2 of this BBC Day of the Triffids.

White Christmas in Ayrshire

2009-12-25T14:24:00.014Z

Photographs of a frozen river and trees and some snow blanketed fields in Ayrshire. I like the way the milky winter sun comes through the trees. Taken just outside Ochiltree Ayrshire and between Cumnock and New Cumnock Ayrshire.

It's still hovering around 0c during the day and well below zero at night. there is more snow forecast for later today so I should get plenty more chances to take some more White Christmas photos before it thaws.

Although the snow is a bit of a nuisance for travelling it makes everything look wonderful particularly when the sun is shining and it's a nice crisp winters day.

Using these Photos?

One year Closes Another Year Beckons

2009-12-24T01:40:00.004Z

The closure of one year and the opening of another is always a bitter sweet time. One year has gone that we can never relive but another beckons us forward.

Though it is bitter sweet I think there are lots of reasons to be cheerful at this time of year and here's my quick list in no particular order;

Being warm inside when its cold outside.
Good food and drink
The company of family and friends
Christmas TV ( well some of it !)
Seeing people open their presents
Opening presents

While there is always a bitter sweet sense of closure and opening over the winter festival there are reasons to be cheerful. These days mark the closing of this year before the new year opens before us on New Years Day. That's always a reason to be cheerful.

Snow Sales and Spring Flowers

2009-12-22T19:03:00.004Z

The snow has been falling off and on here now for three days. The garden has a four inch covering of snow and the village I am posting this from was cut off from the rest of Ayrshire earlier today when the roads in and out of the village were closed by the police.

People up here generally cope fairly well with driving in the snow because we are more familiar with it than folk further south; but even here it has now got to the point where few people are venturing out in their cars. The temperature tonight in parts of Scotland is forecast to be as low as -15c so we are in for a very chilly night. It also seems that there may be no end to these conditions for at least another few days.

The snow makes the garden and the landscape here look really wonderful and I plan on getting my camera out tomorrow and posting some pictures. The kids in the village are of course having a great time out on sledges and having snowball fights. Snow is a magical thing for the children and they will stay out until they are soaked through and chilled to the bone if they are allowed to. There's a small quirky Snowman in the garden here at my partners house - he has hands made of pink plastic spatulas!

Christmas hasn't even got into full swing yet and already our emails are being bombarded with information about Shopping sales that are starting - with some such as Dorothy Perkins offering 50 % off in their sales. The shops seem really determined to keep us spending.

While we were stuck in today we started thinking about the Spring and some gardening improvements. We are thinking about putting in some window box planters this year and getting some more outdoor planters for the garden. The site I have linked to has some nice planters. My favourite style is a terracotta planter rather than some of the fancier ones. My partner has a real eye for gardening and often finds ways of using unusual things to make garden planters rather than buying shop made items.

Last year she bordered part of the garden with old tyres which she painted white and then planted up. I was a bit sceptical I must admit but as the spring and summer developed I had to hand it to her that the "tyre border" looked really unusual and really attractive - and hadn't cost a penny. Mind you this is the same woman who will buy clothes from the charity shops and whose friends often marvel at the top range clothes she manages to find there.

We have also been looking through some of the seed and plant catalogues to see what flowers and plants we will be ordering for the garden this year. It's been nice to be inside thinking of Spring flowers while the blizzards rage outside.

C, E-flat and G go into a bar

2009-12-21T23:30:00.008Z

I make no claims to be a brilliant guitarist but I do love playing and when I have time and practice regularly I am not so bad. I love to play in what is called jazz chord-melody style which requires a good understanding of scale and chordal relationships on the guitar.

There are quite a few good music sites on the Internet and I have found a few good ones. I am going to post a few of these in some later posts.

I'm posting this one because I just got the latest newsletter from one site which was a poem that might bring a smile to another musician. It made me smile so it's worth re-posting with a link back.

C, E-flat and G go into a bar.

The bartender says, "sorry,
but we don't serve minors." So E-flat leaves, and C and G
have an open fifth between them. After a few drinks, the
fifth is diminished and G is out flat. F comes in and tries
to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough.

D comes in and heads for the bathroom saying, "Excuse me.
I'll just be a second." Then A comes in, but the bartender
is not convinced that this relative of C is not a minor.
Then the bartender notices B-flat hiding at the end of the
bar and says, "Get out! You're the seventh minor I've found
in this bar tonight."

E-Flat comes back the next night in a three-piece suit with
nicely shined shoes. The bartender says, "you're looking
sharp tonight. Come on in, this could be a major
development." Sure enough, E-flat soon takes off his suit
and everything else, and is au natural.

Eventually C sobers up and realizes in horror that he's
under a rest. C is brought to trial, found guilty of
contributing to the diminution of a minor, and is sentenced
to 10 years of D.S. without Coda at an upscale correctional
facility.

The site is www.jazzguitar.be which is a Belgian site ( but in English). The guy that runs the site has some great jazz guitar resources there. If you are interested in Jazz Guitar it's worth a visit.

Winter White out Chaos

2009-12-21T11:02:00.004Z

Ayrshire and much of the rest of the UK had a white out weekend that caused travel chaos across the country with trains stranded in tunnels and road disruption. We haven't been spared the snow here in Ayrshire and many folk were unable to get to work this morning as the councils struggle to keep the roads clear as more snow fell.

Probably the biggest disruption was for hundreds of passengers on Eurostar trains which got stuck in the Channel Tunnel at the weekend. There are stories in the press of people becoming very distressed and some being taken ill as they waited hours and hours to be taken out of the tunnel.

Across the UK we have become so used to mild and relatively snow free winters that blizzards like these cause everything to grind to a halt. There are reports of airports closing runways and lorries jack-knifing on the roads.

There's always a silver lining though and so this morning after being unwell for a few days I was well enough to go out and have my first snow-ball fight for a few years. I have three weeks annual leave over the Christmas and the New Year so as far as I am concerned it can snow all it wants.

My Avatar Review - See it now

2009-12-20T21:04:00.003Z

There was lot of hype about Avatar this year but the early reviews published by some critics were lukewarm about James Cameron's long awaited 3D foray. There were reviews which suggested that it had a poor story line, that the dialogue was weak and that it was too "preachy" and "tree huggy".

Well it may or may not have some of these faults but after seeing Avatar in 3D today I can tell you one thing that Avatar certainly is - spectacular! If this is a taste of the direction that blockbusters are going then all I can say is bring it on - the sooner the better.

The story ( No spoilers here!) is a fairly basic one and it is true that there is no great depth for many of the characters. But it seems to me that those critics who have been lukewarm about Avatar have missed the point. This is a family adventure story par excellence and doesn't need complex characters or a complex storyline. It has a love story at it's core but it's stuffed full , like grandpa after Xmas lunch, of spectacular action scenes which are awesome visually.

One critic likened it to a Pocanhontas type story and I think that may be true. But that is not a criticism in my view. It's like criticising Raiders of the Lost Ark for lack of literary merit. It's a family blockbuster and if that is what you go expecting you will certainly not be disappointed.

People don't go to see films like this for their great artistic depth - they go to see a spectacular blockbusting adventure story that makes them care about the characters. Cameron delivers this in spades.

One critic said that it was "hard to empathise with blue people" but I wholly disagree. By the end of this film you will be empathising with the tall blue heroes as they fight to save their world from the destructive rampages of the "Company" and it's hired military force. If you aren't able to empathise with these blue people then you have no soul. If it doesn't make you think about how our use of the earths resources sometimes imposes a terrible cost on indigenous peoples then you have no conscience.

The indigenous blue people and the life-forms of the Planet Pandora where the action takes place are wonderfully rendered - with both realism and an almost fairy quality.

Like many fantasy type blockbusters, enjoying this film requires you to be able to suspend your disbelief for an hour or two. You have to be willing to allow yourself to be immersed in a strange but compelling new world.

This film is a real experience and NOT one that you should just wait to see on DVD. Go see this film!

Jobs Boost For Prestwick Ayrshire

2009-12-20T04:06:00.003Z

Some good news on the Ayrshire job front. Manchester's air traffic control centre will close in 2010 and 180 jobs will transfer to Prestwick, Ayrshire.

National Air Traffic Services (Nats) will leave only a few control tower staff at Manchester Airport as a new £170m Nats control centre in Prestwick, Ayrshire takes over all operations other than take-offs and landings.

180 of the 220 existing staff have opted to move north to Ayrshire while others have accepted redundancy or retirement.

The new centre at Prestwick, and one in Swanwick, Hampshire, will eventually control all UK airspace in a move designed to improve UK air traffic safety

Your learning style is hokum

2009-12-19T23:23:00.006Z

If you have ever spent any time with training consultants it is almost certain that you will have been exposed to the various ways in which they love to categorise us all into little boxes. You will be told you have this or that "emotional IQ" or that you are a person with a particular "learning style".

One trainer, used by an organisation I worked for, packaged his training pitch up with esoteric American Indian hokum. He basically took common sense notions such as learning to remain relaxed and focused in problematic leadership scenarios and packaged them up in "earth wind and fire" shamanic nonsense.

It may have been hokum - but it was very good paying hokum - something he seemed uncomfortable about acknowledging when I pointed it out while also informing him that what he was teaching was basically a variation of standard relaxation techniques.

Some recent research has now highlighted that another training theory used by many consultants has virtually no scientific evidence to support it.

Are you a Visual Learner or an Auditory Leaner? Which of these is your learning style? Well , if a report on a recent review of the literature on learning styles is to be believed you are simply just a learner - there is no evidence to support the view that people are mainly Visual or Auditory Learners.

Consultants have built whole careers around these types of "Learning Models", often claiming that their training material is artfully crafted to deal with peoples different learning styles.

I have even heard people in learning events claiming " I am a visual learner" or "I am an Auditory style person" as though this was some excuse for failing to grapple with material that had to be learned.

I don't suppose this research will stop training consultants peddling their "Learning models" and neither will it stop people claiming that the reason they didn't learn something was because it was presented in the "wrong" learning style.

Good trainers will I guess also continue to do what they have always done and try to present their material in an interesting and stimulating way.

I would be interested to hear what experiences readers have had with trainers and their teaching approaches.

Copenhagen Climate Changes Nothing

2009-12-19T00:59:00.003Z

It looks as if the climate change sceptics will be happy with the outcome of the Copenhagen summit because despite the warm words about a "compromise" having been reached at the summit it doesn't look as if an agreement with any real substance or real commitment to binding action has emerged.

Many people will be bitterly disappointed at a lack of decisive action by world leaders and now wonder if it is possible for the world to take effective concerted action on the issue or if we are simply going to now sleepwalk into what increasingly looks likely to be a dangerous future.

What is sad is the failure of imagination. A failure to grasp that there was an opportunity through action on climate change not only to put our use of resources onto a more long term sustainable footing but also to lay the foundations of more just and possibly more stable international relations built around real shared common interest for the future.

At this point I almost begin to hope that there has been a vast international conspiracy of science to "cook the books" on human driven climate change - because if there hasn't been such a conspiracy then future generations will inherit a very different and a much more unpleasant world.

Twitter is the new Spam

2009-12-18T23:05:00.005Z

I've been on Twitter now for a short while and I still find it a strange beast. There seem to be some folk who are incredibly addicted to using Twitter. One Twit called Military_mom is reported to have recently tweeted to her followers from the bedside of her dying son. This was greeted with shock, including by many in the Twitter community. My guess is that she viewed it as no different from keeping friends informed about about something terrible in her life and in one sense I can understand that. But to feel the urge to do this in the middle of her crisis with people who she has shared little more than a 140 character conversation with seems very strange to me.

Marf and I managed to locate each other in Twitter and I got a good tip from him which means that my Feedburner feed tweets a link to my latest post. Now all I need to do is to figure out a way to turn my tweets into posts to my blogs and I'll never need to touch the keyboard again.

Just think about it - I could make one post and Feedburner would then tweet this. My Tweet to blogpost software would then take the tweet of my post and post that. My Feedburner would then take the post of the tweeted post and tweet it. At this point I would have a tweet of a posted tweet of a post. I could set up a complete and continuous conversation with myself and never have to worry about having time to put up a new post. I could effectively spam myself into oblivion.

And getting spammed into oblivion seems to be one possible fate of Twitter. There are a lot of spammy tweets on twitter and indications are that people are expecting this to get worse. Given that Adwords cleared out a few hundred thousand spammy adword accounts only a week or two back then it wont be surprising if at least a few of these guys turn up there.

The big problem seems likely to be that some users are using bots to automate their tweets and that the only thing that they are posting is spam.

All of which makes me wonder if it is simply unavoidable that any new Internet technology will get swarmed upon by people wanting to use it for their commercial interests. I guess it's human nature.

We all seem to accept that big businesses will fill our lives with advertising but at the end of the day is their motivation much different from the people who are spamming twitter?

Comments Policy

2009-12-17T21:27:00.008Z

This post confirms the Comments Policy for this blog - The Ayrshire Blog. This policy also applies to other contributions including guest posts.

This is my personal blog. In my personal blog I get to express my opinions and I decide how I manage my blog.

I welcome readers with a wide range of backgrounds and views.

I manage contributions including comments to ensure that there is strong, sometimes pointed but always friendly debate on a range of subjects.

You are welcome here; pull up a chair and chip in your thoughts to the discussion, please. I will be visiting you in return and will get the same welcome I trust.

If your contribution contains swearing then I will likely delete it.

I may , occasionally, publish a post which contain some swearing if I feel it illustrates a point I am making. However, I will identify such material so that if others do not wish to read or view it they will be able to make the choice not to.

Bunc
AyrshireBlog

Lawyers Gag BBC over Trafigura Toxic Dump

2009-12-17T14:25:00.006Z

Lawyers for the multi-national firm Trafigura have gagged the BBC from reporting about the dumping of Toxic waste in the West African state of Ivory Coast. The problem for the firm is that once things are out on the Internet they are very difficult to control and in response to the ban many people are posting about this issue and posting links to the video. Here is a BBC Newsnight report on Trafigura's attempts to suppress media reporting of their Toxic Waste dumping;

And here is the original Newsnight report on the Toxic Dumping Affair

As you will see on the first report the firm even went so far as to try to gag Members of parliament from asking questions about the matter. Trafigura now appears to have been successfull in imposing injunctions on the media to prevent reporting of an investigation into the toxic dumping affair.

It's important that we all resist attempts by companies or governments to control the reporting of public interest stories such as this. This is a real strength of the Internet - it's use by ordinary citizens to keep watch on those who have power over us.

Reasons to be cheerful - Free WiFi

2009-12-17T12:11:00.003Z

Looking back on some of my older posts I have decided that sometimes I risk turning into a bit of a doom and gloom blogger, which isn't really what I am like at all. So I have decided that I will do some regular posts from here on in under the title " Reasons to be Cheerful" ( That should ring bells for any old Ian Dury fans out there).

So this first Reasons To Be Cheerfull post is about Free WiFi. Why? Well, for no particular reason other than I was browsing the news items today and I saw that McDonalds in the US is rolling out free WiFi to thousands of it's burger stores.

I don't live in the US and I am only occassionally in a MacDonalds burger store so what's the Reason to be Cheerfull?

Well it just struck me what a win-win Free WiFi is for all concerned. Average Joe laptop users like me get to be able to roam freely and still get on the Internet and the places that supply the Free WIFI attract more people because they are offering this free service. The fact that some Free WIFi hotspot providers are looking to inject a few ads into the service doesn't worry me at all and seems a fair deal for getting this service free.

In the UK there has been a big growth in the use of Broadband "dongles" to connect to the Internet but these are hideously expensive to use on a regular basis compared to the cost of home broadband. I have one of these dongles supplied by my work but the rate they negotiate for them is much cheaper than an ordinary user would pay - even so I try not to use it unless I have to.

Broadband is becoming increasingly such a vital part of our lives that it's great to see that there are ways of supplying this service to us all that arent going to cost us a fortune.

Hopefully MacDonalds will roll this out to the UK and then I will have even more Reasons To Be Cheerfull.

Rage against the X Factor Machine

2009-12-16T17:49:00.006Z

Here's a funny video of the X Factor stars doing Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name of". The X Factor is an incredibly popular talent show for singers here in the UK and last year it produced the unexpected singing sensation Susan Boyle. Many people though are unhappy at the success of the X Factor and it's "plastic pop" version of musical talent.

The X Factor presents itself as discovering undiscovered talent but many have argued that it is simply an overblown Karaoke program - because almost all the singers simply do cover versions of songs made famous by other musicians. the program has little if any room for real musical talent - the sort of talent that creates new musical genres and creates new music.

Simon Cowell, the owner of the X Factor Franchise and senior judge, has come to be seen as weilding an unhealthy influence over popular music in this country and he and his program, it is argued, are stifling the chance for real creative talent to come through.

Such is the dissatisfaction with this state of affairs that a viral movement has started on the Internet to try to ensure that the latest X-Factor winner does not get to number one in the Christmas charts with another piece of plastic unchallenging pop. It's not so much that people don't like festive number ones but more that they see this as an opportunity to stick one in the eye of the program and its overbearing owner Simon Cowell. It's a very British campaign - bring the big man down a peg or two...

This protest has taken the form of a campaign to get Rage Against The Machine to number one for Christmas- and judging by the way sales are going this campaign may well succeed. I must say I have some sympathy for this campaign.

One bright spark , who goes by the name of Mr Rageism, has used his talents to create a YouTube video of Rage Against the Machine using X Factor Footage so that the X Factor "stars " appear to be singing the song. Whether you agree or disagree with the campaign you should find this video amusing.
A warning to my more sensitive readers - the Rage Against the Machine Song does have some swearing - it was bleeped out when I posted this but I can't guarantee the bleeps will still be there when you watch it. I would still recommend it though because it is quite funny. or maybe that's just my sense of humour.
BTW - Rage Against the Machine royalties are being donated to children's charities so this bit of fun is in a good cause - keep the money out of Simon Cowells already well lined pockets and give it to charity this Xmas!

Personalised Search Fragments the Internet

2009-12-11T16:56:00.003Z

With little fanfare Google has just introduced "personalised search" ( personalized search if your from the US) for people using the Google search engine - even for users who don't have Google accounts or have one and aren't logged in. What's more you may not even realise that you are getting personalised results or see any obvious way to turn them off. But isn't personalised search a good thing I hear you say - my results will be more relevant to me! Hmm - well lets just consider the downside for a bit.

One of the joys of the Internet has always been surfing - the joy of doing a search on Google and then trawling through the results and perhaps coming across new gems of websites that you haven't come across before. Increasingly with personalised search you will start to see the same results that you have seen previously - you'll need to dig deeper to start seeing fresh stuff. Google holds your search pattern data for up to 180 days so what you see will reflect what you have already been looking at in that period.

Another problem is that search results reflect , in general terms, the popularity and relevance of websites and pages to a particular search term. But if my results are as much influenced by my previous searches as they are by these factors then how do I have any sense whether what I am seeing in the results is reflecting the most relevant sites or whether it is simply a reflection of my previous search behaviour?

Then of course there is the whole issue of only hearing what you want to hear. I suspect I am not alone in reading a much wider range of sources of news and information as a result of the Internet and in particle the use of Google and its news results. This exposes me to people and arguments from all sorts of points of view.

I don't end up going onto the Internet solely to confirm my existing source of knowledge and my existing prejudices. I would never typically buy the Telegraph newspaper for example. But since using Google news I do occasionally read their articles and now and then have bought the paper. But this won't happen with personalised results - the papers and news sources I read most will come to the top and I'll simply end up reading them more and more often. If we all do this the debate and exchange of ideas that is the joy of the Internet will be much curtailed.

Then of course there is the possibility for downright manipulation of our behaviour and thinking. Google is a private company and beholden to no one really. What if some political party manages to persuade the company in the future to deliver particular results to people whose search behaviour indicates particular political preferences. There are very serious possibilities for manipulation here.

The strength of the Internet has always been its universality coupled with the ability to drill down to things that are specific to your needs. That is that way that the Internet should continue to work.

If this model is stood on its head and we all start in our little boxes and have to look for links to turn off the personalised feature then many people will simply stay in their little boxes and never venture out. We would all be the poorer for that and the dialogue across barriers of belief , race, religion and nationality that the present approach encourages may one day disappear completely. Do we really want an Internet that will become so atomised and fragmented?

Have you ever done paid translation?

2009-12-09T23:46:00.006Z

As more and more people conduct their business over the Internet the opportunity to do business with people in other countries has opened up significantly. Even small businesses these days have the potential not only to sell their goods and services to people in their locality but to sell across national boundaries to people all around the world.

While the technology of the Internet has made operating business in this way very easy for businesses such as software companies there are still some barriers which the Internet does not completely overcome. One of these is the language barrier.

In English speaking countries we are relatively lucky because English has become the de facto Lingua Franca (!) of the business world and so in business to business interactions often there will be an ability to at least communicate at a reasonable level in a common language.

For a business that is really trying to expand its reach though it isn't enough these days just to rely on website visitors speaking English. Increasingly the Internet is moving away from being a largely English only medium. In China , India and other rapidly developing nations there is a growing appetite for the Internet to be delivered in the local languages and in ways that reflect local customs and culture.

Anyone who has used Google translator will understand that we are far from perfecting the art of automated translation yet. Sadly we don't yet have those Star Trek machines that will give us perfect translations. Google translator can often give you a broad sense for a translation but the translations it produces are often clumsy, poorly phrased and sometimes downright wrong.

So anyone needing a translation which really does work properly really has to rely on a translation service that uses real people. Obviously translators need to be good at their languages but it is also important, particularly for things such as business and legal translations that they also have some expertise in the subject matter they are translating. Translia is an interesting beta website that offers a wide range of translating services from "One word" translation through to very large translation projects. It claims to have built a very large translator network or community and to be able to cover all languages and all subjects.

One of the ways it is doing this is by actively recruiting translators and in particular people to translate who may have specific areas of expertise.

I couldn't readily locate any information on the site about what the costs of translation are or what fees are paid to translators. I suspect this information is probably made available after sign up but I also see that they refer to themselves as a "community" of translators and clients so I wonder if Translia acts more like the host and there is some direct negotiation of fees within the community. The material they initially sent me did refer to free translation but it can't be totally free or the translators won't get paid.

Given that my partner speaks good Italian I am tempted to get her to sign up to see what sort of rates they are offering. Although I speak fairly good Italian i am not sure it would be good enough to do translation work. I know there are other readers of this blog who have a good level of skill in more than one language so I'm interested to know if anyone has been paid as a translator and what sort of rates they think would be typical.

Why Twitter is doomed now I have joined

2009-12-07T23:34:00.007Z

It's the same old story for me - an Internet social media bandwagon comes along and by the time I overcome my distaste at being associated with anything too "trendy" the bandwagon has rolled on.

So this evening I joined Twitter. This of course means that the gold rush days of the Twitterati are truly over. The dust storms are blowing, the wells are running dry and even the homesteaders will be moving on soon.

I hope Twitter realise what they have unleashed allowing me to join their community. It means that there will be thousands of people just like me - "Twitter? - God no, thats just too popular for me!" - who are finally relenting and joining up only to post such inspirational tweets as "I am sitting eating my lunch and it is nice" or "Cool - I am now a follower of Stephen Fry!" ( Along with a million or so other little tweeters).

Well Im not going to follow Stephen Fry unless he follows me - you hear that Stephen Fry? Hmmm ... maybe I should tweet him just to make sure he's got the message....

Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising Review

2009-12-04T22:31:00.011Z

Although I wouldn't call myself a hardcore gamer, over the years I have played a fair number of PC games - mostly first person shooters and modern war sims. A few years back folk who liked war gaming found a real gem of a PC Game called Operation Flashpoint. It didn't have the best graphics in the world and it could be buggy - but it knocked the socks off other games with its realistic squad based tactical gameplay, free map movement and ( here's the killer) a great mission editor which allowed you to stage your own battles and missions.

Operation Flashpoint was PC only and gained a fanatical following of fairly serious war gamers who developed a large modding and mission creating community.

Sadly the original creators and publishers fell out - Bohemia Interactive undoubtedly walked away with much of the dedicated fan base and arguably the spirit of the game but Codemasters walked away with the rights to the name.

Fast forward to now and each has produced what they would like to claim is the genuine next generation war sim in the Operation Flashpoint tradition.

Bohemia Interactive produced ARMA and ARMAII for the PC and Codemasters released Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising not only in PC format but also for the major consoles.

I dont play much these days but have been tempted to see if these releases have kept up the promise of the original. So I bought OPDragon Rising it for an Xbox 360 gamer I know as an early Christmas present and watched him get to grips with it.

It was funny. Many XBox 360 First Person Shooters are sort of run-in-shoot-everything-in-sight-and -follow-this-route - in other words unrealistic, linear and too damn easy.

Not so Dragon Rising - it's very close to the tension and realism in the original, get shot and you are likely to die. You need to apply proper tactical choices and command your troops or you will not succeed. The graphics are awesome and the enemy is smart and loves to outflank you.

Gamers used to other war Sims get wiped out quickly when they first play this and need to adopt a more realistic approach to fighting and manoevering.

All in all Codemasters have on first impressions made a pretty good stab at creating a successor game to the original - despite reports that the game can be buggy sometimes.

The big problem for me would be the lack of a mission editor. Fair enough I suppose given that they are going more for the straightforward gamer market perhaps rather than the fan base of more serious war sim players.

If I personally owned an XBox I've no doubt I would get Dragon Rising. But I don't so I'll probably get ARMAII at some point. And ARMAII for the PC will give me a mission editor which was probably one of the most useful features in the original game.

SNP Blog the-Universality-of-cheese still available

2009-11-30T16:09:00.008Z

Update: Since I originally posted this the universality of cheese blog went back up after it's author Mark MacLachlan was revealed as its author and sacked from his post by SNP Minister Mike Russell. MacLachlan later posted e-mails on his blog to Russell implying that Russell had known about his "cybernat" blogging activities. SNP Minister Mike Russell then suggested he would consider suing if the allegations were not retracted.
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Original:

The Scottish Nationalists here in Scotland have for some time operated a "cybernat" strategy which involved regular and often anonymous posting on the Internet of material and comments attacking anyone who they thought opposed their aim of Scottish Independence. Go to the comments pages of any Scottish paper ( try the Scotsman) for example and you would find a small posse of Cybernats not only attacking other commenters but also often attacking journalists who did not toe their line.

The SNP has always distanced itself from the behaviours of the more rabid cybernats and claimed that they have no connection to the core of the party and do not represent them - but many suspected that the connection was much closer and that the "cybernat" program had at least the tacit endorsement of the SNP hierarchy or even that it was part of their strategy.

These suspicions have been confirmed with the exposure of the author of a well know cybernat blog - the-universality-of-cheese.blogspot.com

It turns out that the author of this blog was none other than Mark MacLachlan, an SNP aide and adviser to SNP minister Michael Russell. Mike Russell is at the heart of the SNP and has been closely associated with Alex Salmond’s White Paper on an independence referendum,

There have been apologies from MacLachlan who says he went too far online. The blog has been taken down and if you try to find it online Blogger reports that the blog is no longer available.

Little wonder that they moved quickly to take the blog down of course because it was full of bile and quite scurrilous lies about anyone that the SNP perceived as an opponent. They are not too keen, now that it is clear that this blog was associated with the core of the SNP, for everyone to starting looking again at the bile that they wrote.

But the Internet is a wonderful thing. It has archives and cached pages and even though the site has been taken down we can all still read the bile on the-universality-of-cheese.blogspot.com.

So if you are interested just Google the name of the blog and then select the "cached pages" link and you will find that many of the pages should still be available.

Just to give a flavor of the site I reproduce here, in the interests of fair and balanced reporting, an excerpt from the site and some of the comments;

The author uses the name Montague Burton and this clearly is what passes for political discourse inside the SNP. One hopes that the Paul McBride who was the subject of this scurrilous posting will consider the possibility of suing the author now his identity is known.

Just to be clear - I completely and utterly dissociate myself from the insinuations in the post below and I reproduce the post below simply to show the type of material that this SNP blogger and his NAT commenters were posting.

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Monday, 4 May 2009

Paul McBride - QC Still the biggest liar in the Scottish Legal System
http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2009/05/03/exclusive-legal-aid-chief-arrested-with-rent-boy-in-shopping-centre-toilet-78057-21328394/Sooooooo, the head of legal services at the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB) is caught by police getting interior design tips from a convicted rent boy inside a toilet cubicle built for one and Paul McBride QC thunders that there is not enough evidence to convict.Without being too graphic, the Legal Aid chappy was discovered by the Glasgow polis on his hunkers on a toilet floor presumably looking at the fine examples of art decor on the St Enoch centre bog tiles, whilst his young companion, in an excitable state of undress was gripped with the moment and explaining about how the colour of his home soft furnishing matched that of his boxer shorts. The polis and security guards obviously mistook the proximity of the two chappies in the loo for a passionate tryst, best kept for behind chintz curtains and not particularly best suited in a public place, and subsequently huckled them.Naturally the policemen and Security guards who gave their time to make witness statements and the rather hard pressed procurator fiscal who deemed there was a case to answer, must have been a tad nonplussed when McBride with his keen analytical mind trumped their eyewitness reports with the astounding revelation that there was "not enough evidence to convict!"The young scallywag who it is further alleged, was helping to clear a phlegm blockage in Mr Heggarty's windpipe with his priapic member was of course being defended by a run of the mill legal aid funded solicitor. Mr Heggarty was defended by McBride, the chap who Cathy Jamieson appointed to the legal Aid Board in 2007 for a four year term the remuneration for this hard job is a mere £8,328 for about three and a half days’ work a month. In 2006-7 McBride took £379,000 in legal aid fees.Nice to see that the legal world in Scotland has its priorities right. When one of it's number is caught up in a scandal, be it for smuggling drugs up your snatch into prison, drunk driving, serious assault, attempted murder, inciting religious intolerance by singing songs of bigotry or merely paying a young man for sex in a public toilet, they will always defend their own and deem the charge to have insufficient evidence for conviction...Ach well I suppose Mr Haggarty can frame his written warning and put it on his office wall when he returns to publicly funded work, he's only been off on a sicky since he was caught in this delicate situation in January.
Posted by Montague Burton at 5/04/2009 07:31:00 AM

10 comments:

subrosa said...
Very well written Monty. You make a sordid situation sound nearly poetic. There are more than McBride around I'm sure. The legal system needs a good clear out, so a retired lawyer friend of mine tells me.
04 May 2009 08:43

Aye We Can ! said...
MontyKeep them coming - of all the wings of the scottish establisment, I detest the legal profession mostThey give our bankers a good nameAnd I suspect - no know - there are worse than McBride
04 May 2009 16:08

Aye We Can ! said...
Watch you headline though - he'll sue - and you've left yourself open Your article is strong enough without it
04 May 2009 16:11

naldo said...
If Scotland made more sensible laws, there would be no need for grubbing around in public bogs. Men who wanted to pay for sex with other men would be able to go to a clean, safe and strictly regulated brothel to be parted from their cash.
04 May 2009 16:18

Montague Burton said...
Naldo, I hear Tesco are planning a move into this lucrative market and are planning their own brand cubicles for their new branches. 'TESCOCKS: Every Little Bit Helps.'Alan, I would relish the opportunity for McBride to attempt to sue me for asserting that he's the BIGGEST liar in the Scottish legal system. Obviously the onus is on him to prove he's not, and that A.N. Other QC is. I imagine it's quite a lucrative title. Perhaps Mr Anonymous could tell us who he deems worthy of the title.
04 May 2009 16:31

tris said...
That's a hell of a long time to be off work. Did he maybe catch a cold being undressed in the public toilets? Poor soul. They should heat these places better.
05 May 2009 23:50

scunnert said...
Disgusting
08 May 2009 06:29

Montague Burton said...
Thanks Scunnert. You have to wonder if McBride made that statement with his shiny new Tory wig on.
09 May 2009 12:57

Perpetually bemused said...
If Mr McBride did decide to sue you, it would unfortunately be you who had to prove that what you said was true.When an action for defamation (which is what McBride could potentially bring) is brought in Scotland, a defence is that the statement was true (this is known as the veritas defence).Once comments are shown to be defamatory (i.e. that they have the potential to harm the reputation of the person bringing the action), it is for the person who made the comments to prove that the statement was true (i.e. that the veritas defence applies).So your above assertion that McBride would have to prove that he is not the biggest liar, and that someone else is, in order to successfully sue you is wrong.You would have to prove that he is the biggest liar in order to succeed...
21 October 2009 12:06

Montague Burton said...
Dear perpetual, thanks for commenting. I relish the opportunity for Mr McBride to sue me, hopefully I'd be able to access Legal Aid and cost the state a fortune as Mr McBride's drug dealing violent scum clients do.As you're a chap in the know legally, can you tell me the difference between me asserting that McBride is the biggest liar in the High Court here on the internet and McBride bellowing at the top of his lungs at a witness after one question, that the witness was 'the biggest liar in the High Court'?

Royal Society Trailblazing Online archive

2009-11-30T11:04:00.005Z

If you are interested in Science and the history of science then you should check out the new online website from the Royal Society who have made some key papers available from the archive of the Journal Philosophical Transactions available. There are lots of fascinating papers available from very early papers in 1666 right up to more recent times.

One of the papers that caught my eye is by R A Fischer entitled "On the Mathematical Foundations of Theoretical Statistics". Fischer was a giant in the field of statistics and contributed significantly to the statistical foundations of modern biology.

There is also an interesting 1822 article ( Buckland) on the discovery of Elephant, Rhino and other fossilised remains in a cave in Yorkshire. Buckland was apparently a believer in the Noah Flood Bible story. He compares the findings to discoveries in other caves in the UK and on the continent.

This site is well worth a visit.

Climategate? Where now?

2009-11-29T00:30:00.003Z

The release of emails and some research code that was "hacked" from the CRU at East Anglia University is a severe blow to those who are looking to our politicians to make a rational response to climate change and concerns about the use of non-renewable resources.

For example some of the contents of the emails which have been uncovered appear to reveal a willingness on the part of the scientists involved to attempt to put pressure on scientific journals which attempted to publish scientific papers which were not supportive of AGW ( Anthropogenic Global Warming or Man made Global Warming). This is simply not acceptable and it is a betrayal of the scientific process.

There are legitimate areas of scientific debate around the exact balance of the causes of climate change and about such areas as the appropriate methods for constructing global temperature trends. It does science no credit if some of it's practitioners appear to be willing to countenance trying to stifle such debate. It makes no difference that they claim that such views were private expressions of "frustration" between like minded colleagues. It betrays a closed minded approach which is simply not acceptable on a matter which is potentially so weighty for all of us.

Other concerns are emerging from this episode.

Much is being made on some websites about how the raw data was cleansed and used to construct the historical global and northern temperature trend. I have been reading much of this stuff over recent days. Undoubtedly some on the "sceptics" side of the debate are making mountains of some issue that are in reality molehills. But there are also some issues of real concern that are emerging.

The one that concerns me the most has in fact received probably the least comment of all.

The CRU as I understand it is one of relatively few centres worldwide which has collated and stored data on temperature trends from a range of sources. Whatever your view of the current climate change debate it is clear that this type of raw data is immensely valuable for us all in the study of our earths climate. However what I have found utterly astonishing is that apparently the CRU lacked data storage capacity and appears to have been unable to store this historic raw data - it has in short been throwing it away.

This is truly astonishing. It is worth looking at this issue in the light of another concerning issue revealed by this episode.

The directly measured temperature data that is collected comes from a large number of stations all around the world. Some of these stations first began measuring temperature many decades ago but the understandng of the critical issues in the siting of such stations was much poorer then. In addition there has sometimes been urban development near to stations which risks interfering with the validity of the temperature measurements. Sometimes the concern about the validity of such stations measurements reached the point where the stations were moved to new locations.

An appropriate method for allowing continuity between the measurements from the original station and the new station was to calculate an offset in the measurements taken between the two. This would allow a valid adjustment to be made to the data. However in order to do this it would be important that the new station and the old station operated in parallel for a reasonable length of time so that the offset calculation was well informed. What is clear is that this often does not happen.

My overwhelming impression from my recent reading is that despite the level of Global concern about climate change issues ( from both sides) there is still no rigorous approach being taken around the world to collecting weather and climate data, storing the raw data and making it accessible to researchers. If this is true it is a truly scandalous state of affairs.

If our politicians do nothing else at Copenhagen they must agree to measures supported by all countries to institute a much more rigorous approach to measuring the key data about our climate, secure robust approaches to storing that raw data and open up the methods for making it accessible.

Watch out for the Chinese Spammer!

2009-11-27T22:26:00.009Z

The chinese spammer who left a comment on my previous post seems to have possibly somehow managed to inject some javascript into his comment as far as I can tell. it looks like he has used HTML entities to escape the code. the effect seems to be that I cant delete his comment and the comment footer has been turned into some form of javascript link. I am keeping comment moderation turned on meantime until I can get rid of his spam comment.

I may also turn the comments on and off on that post as I try to get rid of his comment - just in case your over for a look!

It's one of the perils of blogging.

Update: checked the blogger help group and others are reporting this issue over the last few days - again chinese spam.

Update: it seems it was possibly Korean rather than Chinese SPam that I got hit with from reading the blogger help forum. After trying numerous ways of getting rid of the spam comment the only method I could find that worked was to copy the original posts and the non spam comments to a new post, delete the original and then reset the copy back to the original date. Blogger would appear to have a vulnerability that is being exploited by this particular Korean spammer. He or they appear to have found a way to prevent their spam comments on posts being deleted.

The Global Warming Wait and See gamble

2009-11-27T18:34:00.007Z

In a previous post I reflected on the Cumbria Floods and went on to talk a little about Global warming and to look a little at some of the issues around the possible interactions between a human influenced global warming trend and the Solar Cycle. As I pointed out in that post there are those who argue that the Solar Cycle is a much more significant driver of climate than any man made contribution from Global warming gases.

I had pointed out that that I had been reading that the solar cycle is aparently currently approaching a minimum but I didnt in that article give any reference to the data on that. Partly for my own reference and in case anyone else is interested I have a found what looks like a reliable reference site for the Solar Cycle . The graphs presented there show the predictions for the coming phase of the Solar 24 Cycle.

Interestingly they are predicting that the next Solar maximum will be sometime in 2013 but also that it will be "below average in intensity". Now if my understanding is correct then this provides an interesting scenario. If the effects of human activity on climate have been suppressed recently due to the Solar minimum then we should see a warming trend kick in clearly as the Solar maximum is reached. if the Solar cycle is the key factor in any warming trend then warming is also likely but we should not expect this to be very significant if the expected Solar maximum is indeed "below average intensity".

In other words in both scenarios some warming greater than recently seen should be expected. The stronger the warming signal between now and say 2014/15 ( allowing that some delay in solar maxima effects may occur) then the stronger the signal that human influenced Global Warming is at play.

So of course we do nothing in the meantime and just wait and see then eh?

If only it were that simple. If we delay taking action to change our dependancy on fossil fuels for five years this means that either a) we may not then have the time to stop any warming trend that had become fully established and/or b) the time to take effective action has by then become so reduced that taking action would have a massive impact on our economies because they had less time to adjust.

If it turns out that we take action now and the human influence on climate change proves to be less than we currently think then what are the consequences? Well the earlier we make changes the less radically people will feel those changes because they will occur over a longer period of time. Jobs in "old" technology industries will have time to be adapted to "new" technologies in renewables. We will have extra time to make changes to our infrastructure eg possibly moving to electric forms of transport and the infrastucture to support this. We will also have massively reduced our dependancy on fossil fuels many of which come from those parts of the world which are highly volatile or even unfriendly.

Of course other data continues to come in and waiting to see the influence of the solar cycle is not the only game in town. There is for example regular monitoring of Arctic Sea Ice ( also here) and Antarctic Sea Ice. ( Select Monthly>Antarctic >concentration trends for the best illustration of trends.)

The Sea Ice information is interesting because it shows a very marked downward trend in Arctic Ice ( most Arctic ice is Sea ice) and a relatively flat to slightly positive trend in Antarctic Ice cover. ( It is worth recalling that changes in Sea Ice have no impact on sea level - changes in ice cover over Greenland and faster Glacier loss to the sea will impact sea level. Check out this study of glacial changes for example. )

There will be costs but also benefits if we act firmly and act soon. If we do nothing and wait then the potential downside is enormous. It's a gamble either way of course but in strategic decision making terms this is really a no-brainer. Hopefully the US and China are beginning to recognise this.

Do you hang or tumble?

2009-11-21T15:55:00.001Z

The differences in the way people live their lives in different parts of the world are fascinating and sometimes these differences are surprising and revealing about the way people think.

I heard a comment on the radio while driving this week which suggests that in most of the US no one would ever dream of hanging their washing out on a washing line to dry and that most people tumble dry their washing. According to the comments it was suggested that Americans somehow see hanging ones washing out as just not quite the done thing and if I picked it up right I think it was suggested that in some places there are even rules preventing people from hanging their washing out.

If this is true I wonder if it is rooted in what seems to be a common American mind set that somehow technology and technological solutions are always preferable to simpler and non technical solutions. I think in many countries people have something of this mind set but the yanks seem to have this in spades.

In these days of people beginning to think about how efficiently they are using the worlds resources it does seem a bit daft if people are using tumble dryers when there is free fresh wind just outside their doors. I can understand people in high rise apartments using tumble dryers but for people who have gardens it does seem an unnecessary waste and actually a second best solution to natural drying on a line.

Of course it could be that Americans are just a bit more easily embarrassed than the rest of us at letting anyone see their underwear hanging on the washing line.

Maybe any American readers can throw some light on this issue - is it true that no one hangs washing outside and if so why?

UK Biblical Flooding kills policeman

2009-11-21T01:11:00.010Z

The rain here in Ayrshire over the last few days has been incredible but not as bad as just a little further south in Dumfries and Galloway and the Cumbria area. In Cumbria there are reports on the TV that one of the weather stations recorded 12 ins of rain in a 24 hr period.

In Cumbria the town of Cockermouth was completely inundated and a policeman who was trying to prevent people driving over a bridge was washed away when the bridge collapsed into the raging river. His body was later found washed up on a local beach.

Cumbria is one of the wettest ( and most beautiful) parts of the UK but even a place used to to a good deal of rain could do little to cope with this amount of rain.

Some of the towns in that area such as Carlisle, had their flood defences improved after flooding in recent years but the flood defences in Cockermouth were designed for a once in a fifty year event and this weeks floods are being described as a one in a thousand years event. Such flooding appears to have become a regular feature somewhere in the UK each year recently. At the same time our winters have been very mild for a long time now.

No single weather event or even a run of weather events over a few years provides any evidence for Global warming of course. Still its hard not to note that the predictions for the type of weather change that the UK would experience in the event of Global Warming are exactly the type of change we have all noticed in the weather here.

What is interesting is that there have been suggestions by some scientists that solar sunspot cycles are a greater contributory factor to Global Warming than has been generally accepted

However I was reading that the sun is reaching one of the quietest periods of sunspot activity for hundreds of years. This of course may help to clarify evidence about just how strong the connection is between solar activity and global warming. A fairly widely accepted view is that the relative contribution of solar activity and global warming gas levels to overall warming is 25% to 75%.

El Nino events are known to be a significant contributor to weather patterns in various parts of the world and it seems we are currently building for an EL Nino. According to the World Meteorological Association in a report from August;

El Niño conditions have become established over the tropical Pacific, and it is very likely that these will continue at least through the remainder of 2009 and probably into the first quarter of 2010. The ocean surface and subsurface in the central and eastern Equatorial Pacific has been substantially warmer than normal during June and July, supporting the development of an El Niño event. Atmospheric conditions across the tropical Pacific are increasingly showing patterns typical of a developing El Niño event. The development of a basin-wide El Niño has implications for the expected climate patterns in many parts of the world. This information is therefore relevant to many climate-related risk management systems, and users are encouraged to seek detailed interpretations for their locations and sectors.

This is one of the reasons that short term weather variations are problematic as indicators of long terms trends. We have cycles of things like the El Nino and Solar Cycles most of which operate at very different cyclical frequencies. The short term weather variations are a complex mix of these types of cycles, chaotic features of the system and medium and long term influences.

Interestingly I also read in Scientific American this week that a group has just done an analysis of long term climate temperature changes using a method very different from the approach which has previously demonstrated the "hockeystick" rise in temperature. The new analysis used a very different statistical approach but confirmed this "hockeystick" change.

So what to make of all this? Well it certainly looks as if we are still in the middle of very unusual weather patterns that are consistent with the predictions of global warming. If Global Warming is the main influence over the general trend then we should hope that the solar cycle does indeed have an influence. If it does then the the solar minima while it lasts may moderate the trend. That would be fortunate because it might buy us a few years to move economies towards a much lower CO2 footprint.

The trouble is that we all have a tendancy to want to put off things that will be difficult and changing our economies is unlikely to be an easy process. So there is a good chance that any breathing space we might get from warming will not be taken advantage of and we will simply delay taking the significant decisions needed to move our economies to renewable and sustainable energy sources.

Personally I think the likelihood is that we will continue to see major flooding in the UK in the coming years. It's starting to sound silly when we have these floods year after year yet we still talk about one in a thousand year floods.

As the evacuated folk of Cockermouth go back to what's left of their houses and businesses and the local police mourn a lost colleague, they will all probably be a little more convinced than most of us that Climate Change is a reality.

Ukraine gripped by Swine Flu - possibly

2009-11-19T00:21:00.004Z

Not a long post on this one as I am still checking sources but there are reports that things are not going well in Ukraine over the Swine flu epidemic. Some sites have reported high death and hospitalisation rates and the BBC some days ago reported 60 deaths in one week and the imposition of some of the toughest measures in Europe to battle the epidemic including large scale school closures and severe travel restrictions.

Another report I have just read was even more alarming and was suggesting figures in the tens of thousands for people hospitalised with serious complications and hundreds dead in a short period. I am reluctant to link to this just now as I dont know if this was a reliable report.

The most recent WHO report on the swine flu situation in Ukraine seems to date around the end of Oct. It is written in the usual measured language of such reports but reading between the lines it is clear that the situation in Ukraine is far from well controlled. The more recent post I read which I'm not linking to suggested rapidly climbing death rates and the possibility that a more lethal strain has emerged. If there is a higher death rate there though it may well be that a lack of preparedness is more at the root of it. Lets hope so anyway.

Sarah Palins rogue redneck dumbness

2009-11-18T23:42:00.004Z

Sometimes when you look over at the US from this side of the Atlantic it's really hard to figure out just what makes many americans tick. The latest one that has me really puzzled is the broohaha over Sarah Palin and her recently released book "Going Rogue". This is the same woman remember who seemed to barely have a clue about how the Federal government worked and who couldn't describe the role of the US Vice President despite the fact that she was campaigning for the post on John McCains' ticket.

The fact that she stands up for the rights of Americans to own big guns and shoot living things has no doubt earned her a place in the heart of many Americans. Some of them do after all like to periodically take those big guns and shoot their fellow citizens and it is important that they defend their right to do this I guess.

Many countries sometimes get enthralled by politicians that to outside observers seem completely unfit for office. France has had her share of them and Italy seems so far unable to shake off its love affair with the buffoon sex addict Berlusconi. So we shouldnt be too hard on the US I suppose for its apparent infatuation with Sarah Palin and her brand of redneck dumbness.

Glasgow Anti Fascist Rally SDL No Show

2009-11-15T18:24:00.008Z

Well as I expected I had some mixed feelings about the anti-fascist demonstration that I took part in yesterday in Glasgow.

On the positive side the day appears to have ended as a more or less shambles for the Scottish Defence League - the group which had attempted to organise an "anti- jihadist" rally outside the Glasgow Mosque.

As I said in my previous post if I could believe that they were simply out to protest against Islamic fundamentalism then I would have a great deal of smpathy with them. The problem is that even if one believes that the founders and organisers of this group aren't looking to create a more Islamophobic agenda then at minumum the group certainly suffers from attracting out and out fascists and racists to its rallies.

One of the speakers (I believe it was Aamer Anwar) at the Anti -fascist rally made the point that if people have criticism of the Muslim community over the issue of terrorism or extremism then they should engage the Muslim community in debate and not seek to come out onto the streets and rally outside their Mosques to provoke them.

That is a sentiment that I wholly agree with. I have personally been very critical of Muslim thinking over recent years and the failure for a long time to take on fundamentalists. Its an entirely different thing though for people to take an issue like that to the streets. Its even more unacceptable when the clear intent is simply to provoke trouble.

I am sure Mr Anwar applies this same logic to extremists within his own community. I do wonder though as this is the same guy who, after the attempted terrorist bombing at Glasgow airport, made the disgraceful statement that ""A Stealth bomber in Iraq is the moral equivalent of a suicide bomber in Scotland". Hmm ....

The attempt by the SDL to organise a rally ended in abject failure anyway as the police used the Public Order Act to ensure that they would not rally outside the mosque. In the event a fairly small group appear to have met in a pub in the centre of Glasgow from where they were eventually bundled onto buses and shipped out of the city.

The turn out for the anti-fascism rally called by Scotland United was good given that the weather was awful on Saturday. The crowd really needed their umbrellas and waterproofs as they stood and listened to speakers from all the main political parties before the march began.

The presence of politicians from all the main parties was one of the most encouraging aspects of the event. When Annabelle Gouldie from the Scottish Conservatives took the stage there was a ripple of mumbling among what was a fairly partisan crowd. But she spoke forceably and the crowd showed their approval even for her as she finished her speech.

There were of course the usual political plonkers that these sort of events attract - not least in this case Tommy "Party Boy" Sheridan who readers of this blog will know has had lets say an "interesting" relationship with the Scottish Courts in recent years

Almost all the speakers stuck to the agenda for the day which was about rallying against Fascists and Rascists. Unfortunately Aamer Anwar, and Osama Saeed both tried to include Anti-war rhetoric in their speeches which I felt was uncalled for as by no means everyone who wants to protest about fascists agrees with their views on this.

One of them ( I believe it was Saeed) tried to suggest that Muslims were "being killed all round the world" and that Muslim extremism was entirely due to this. While this played well with a sizeable proportion of the crowd that does not of course mean that there his any logic in this assertion. Muslim extremeism was building in this country long before the war in Iraq or Afghanistan and most Muslim deaths around the world are clearly the result of Muslim on Muslim violence.

This is of course one of the perils of attending these types of events, there is a great deal of simplistic sloganising and it's difficult to distance yourself when the organisers of something that you basically support start spouting this kind of nonsense. Still in the greater cause of showing support for the anti-fascist cause I was prepared to stand and listen to such tosh - this time.

I have some photos from the rally which I'll add in here later.

Would you lie to save a Jew?

2009-11-15T00:16:00.004Z

PJ Meyers over at Pharyngula Blog has a great recent post which shows exactly the kind of nonsensical thinking that can come from religious literalism. He titles his post A moral Condundrum resolved but it could equally have been called "Would you lie to save a Jew".

Apparently not for at least one Biblical literalist writing on the laughable "Answers in Genesis " website. He reckons that the sin of telling a lie would have been far far worse than disclosing the whereabouts of a Jew to the Nazis.

Its worth reading the nonsense this Christian literalist wrote. If you ever thought these guys were just confused rather than mentally deranged then here's all the proof that you need. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so scary - because of course there is a long history of rabid anti-semitism among right wing Christians.

Of course I don't want to be unfair to literalist Christians here - there are fundamentalists in all religions who are as equally capable of tying themselves up in moral knots because of their literalism.

Genetic Evidence for Human Evolution 1

2009-11-13T19:34:00.005Z

One of the great things about science is that it never stands still and that evidence and observation is always emerging which either challenges existing theories or further supports them.

In the field of Biology the ability to rapidly sequence genomes is now providing vast new amounts of evidence about the relationship between the various forms of life on his planet, including humans, and showing us more clearly as time passes exactly how the various forms of life we see today evolved.

Its been known for a long time that Humans are genetically primates and most closely related to the Great Apes.

However before gene sequencing became available it was not possible to specify exactly the genetic changes that occurred in our common ancestor which led to the emergence of humans and the different great apes.

This video is worth watching because it explains very clearly the results of more recent genome sequencing and how this is throwing light on the relationship between man and the other primates.