Tag: Politics

Update from Crete.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Okay, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged here what with being on the island of Crete right now with no Internet connection here in our house, the Internet café in Sitia now a clothing shop selling expensive looking men’s jackets whilst another connection in the Status Bar in Makrigialos was just not functioning at all – a statement that also covers the condition of my brain about an hour or so later after our third carafe of white wine.

Having entered our house here to be greated with mud on the floors, water stains down a couple of walls, a strange furry object in the washing machine that might have been a flannel or a sock in a previous life, and a proliferation of mould elsewhere, things were pretty depressing at first. But, with a bit of clearing up, the Cretan sunshine kicking in, the garden dug, planted and already showing sprouts of rocket, things are gradually improving. In the intervening time I’ve taken the latest book up past 130,000 words and am on the home straight. I just need to research some stuff on the Internet, like Mars, like the effects of CO2 poisoning…

Since the only television here is obviously Greek, with maybe on English film or episode of some series each night interspersed with adverts that go on for long enough for you to not only make tea but make a sandwich, clean the windows and polish the cutlery, whilst forgetting what it was you were watching, I’ve also gone through a few books. These include three of which were each a firm index finger at political correctness and New Labour, being Littlejohn’s Britain and two by Jeremy Clarkeson: I know You got Soul and Born to be Riled.

The first of these wasn’t that great – far too many made-up songs or scripts that weren’t that funny and, frankly, enough about the insane way Britain is being run to just leave you angry. The first Clarkeson was enjoyable, what with him going on about his favourite machines, but didn’t have quite so much of his laugh-out-loud moments as The World According to Clarkeson. The second had those moments but since these were Top Gear articles in the main, they went on to stuff about 0 to 60, bhp and the like, and I started to lose the will to live. Some science fiction next, I think.

IRA Plonkers.

Posted on by Neal Asher

So, we have the ‘Continuity IRA’ and the ‘Real IRA’. You know, if they weren’t killing people this would almost be funny. Doesn’t all this remind you of something out of The Life of Brain

BRIAN: Are you the Judean People’s Front?
REG: Fuck off!
BRIAN: What?
REG: Judean People’s Front. We’re the People’s Front of Judea! Judean People’s Front. Cawk.
FRANCIS: Wankers.
BRIAN: Can I… join your group?
REG: No. Piss off.

Isn’t it a shame that some people’s existence only relates to the past, and never the future.

Red Wine and Cigarettes

Posted on by Neal Asher

Now I know why I enjoy both of them together!

For the study, Chao’s group collected data on 84,170 men who participated in the California Men’s Health Study. Among these men, the researchers identified 210 cases of lung cancer. The researchers found that there was, on average, a 2 percent lower risk of lung cancer associated with each glass of red wine consumed per month. The greatest reduction was among men who smoked and drank one to two glasses of red wine a day. These men lowered their risk for lung cancer by 60 percent, Chao’s group found.Of course this won’t be publicised by nanny government or its lickspittle BBC. And it definitely won’t be something temperance politicians in Scotland will be talking about.

Philip Pullman Article in Full.

Posted on by Neal Asher
Since the Times Online article has disappeared and the Google cache one is unavailable, here it is in full:

Malevolent Voices that Destroy our Freedoms
Philip Pullman
Times Online
Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:19 UTC

Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness – the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation – after all we have an Established Church – or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?

The new laws whisper:

You don’t know who you are

You’re mistaken about yourself

We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you

And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasizes about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:

Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

Whatever your opinions are, we don’t want to hear them

So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are

And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

What we want from you is acquiescence

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

We can see you have abandoned modesty

Some of our friends have seen to that

They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law

It is for us to know what your offence is

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Inconceivable.

And those laws say:

Sleep, you stinking cowards

Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms

Freedom is too hard for you

We shall decide what freedom is

Sleep, you vermin

Sleep, you scum.

Philip Pullman will deliver a keynote speech at the Convention on Modern Liberty at the Institute of Education in London tomorrow

Philip Pullman Article

Posted on by Neal Asher

Thanks to Phil Edwards for pointing this out to me on boingboing, the original article at The Times Online. Here we have Philip Pullman talking about how our freedoms are being destroyed:

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today. We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness – the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.
Go and read the whole thing.

Stem Cells.

Posted on by Neal Asher

I have to say that Obama took a little step upwards in my estimation when I read that he intends to take the religious right handcuffs off the stem cell researchers.
Stem cell research advocates have waited nearly eight years for the policy change President-elect Barack Obama has signaled he’ll make in the early days of his administration: lifting the restrictions imposed by President Bush on federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells.
And now it seems the FDA is approving trails for using stem cells to heal spinal cord injuries. A branch of research which is more than promising since the researchers have already used this technique to heal the spines of rats (listen to the animal rights protesters scream). This one has to be the first target to hit because, the moment the first cripple gets out of his wheelchair, it will tune down the loud objections of those ‘moralists’ with a direct line to their invisible friend in the sky.

But this stuff, objections or otherwise, is being pursued all across the world. Just the few I mention here are the tip of the iceberg and only today we hear about stem cell therapy being used on MS sufferers.

Not one of 21 adults with relapsing-remitting MS who had stem cells transplanted from their own bone marrow deteriorated over three years.
We very definitely need this research and it can be seen that moral objections will be falling by the wayside as researchers hack out a path to differentiating adult stem cells for such therapy, which has to be the ultimate goal.

Now, researchers at Northwestern University have found new evidence that hematopoietic stem cells, a type of adult stem cell derived from the bone marrow that gives rise to blood cells, are capable of undergoing more diverse transformations than previously thought and could be transformed into a wide variety of tissue types, not just blood cells.

Damn but it’s weird – every so often I discover my inner optimist.

Eric Hoffer

Posted on by Neal Asher

Interesting insight in this article by Thomas Sowell, here’s a sample:

Hoffer said: “The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are not the ones attracted to mass movements: “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding,” Hoffer said. “When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”

What Hoffer was describing was the political busybody, the zealot for a cause — the “true believer,” who filled the ranks of ideological movements that created the totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century.

Well, I wonder who those people who mind other people’s business might be? I declare the comment section open.

Here’s a further quote by Hoffer: “Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.”

£2,500 Golden Hello.

Posted on by Neal Asher

In an attempt to get long-term unemployed back to work, £2,500 is going to be paid to firms for every person, out of work for six months, they recruit and train. So, this is how it will work: firms struggling during this recession/depression/credit crunch are going to leap at this. £2,500 is not going to impel them to employ someone they don’t need or don’t want to employ. Such a quantity of money doesn’t go anywhere near covering a yearly wage or salary. But the firms will employ someone they wanted or needed, claim the money, and nothing will have changed. More useless ‘action’ because this government needs to be seen to be doing something and, doing something as far as Brown and crew are concerned, means throwing our money at it. Another £500 million down the plughole.