A Step Too Far By China

Chinese authorities are known for strictly censoring newspapers, film and TV programs and they have now
banned programmes and movies with story lines involving time travel as they 'lack positive thoughts and meaning'.
The guidance, issued by the powerful State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT), will deny the Chinese population of some of the best story lines ever to come from the mind of a writer. And Star Trek IV.
Some of the best movies of the 80s had Time Travel as the central theme, namely the Back to the Future trilogy which i watched recently and enjoyed as much on the 100th viewing as i did sat in a cinema in 1985.
Everyones favourite Christmas movie, A Christmas Carol, will be removed from the tv guide as will both the Bill and Ted films which are silly but have Abraham Lincoln telling us to be excellent to each other and that's pretty cool in any language. Also missing will be films such as The Time Traveler's Wife, Planet of the Apes, The Terminator, Peggy Sue got Married, Evil Dead 3 and Hot Tub Time Machine.
One of the most underrated shows on British television, Goodnight Sweetheart, was about a man who travelled between the 1990's and the East end during WW2 and Dr Who skips across the time space continuum as do Time Squad, Tru Calling and the criminally cut short First Edition.
Probably the greatest time travel programme ever featured Dr. Sam Beckett, a physicist who becomes lost in time following a time travel experiment, temporarily taking the places of other people to put right what once went wrong.
To deny the Chinese people the Back to the Future films and Quantum Leap must surely come under some Human Rights treaty and even being spared those awful Star Trek movies doesn't begin to compensate for it.
Get on it Ban Ki-moon.

Why Are All The Nutters Republican?

America has an election in 2012 and their elections always seem more entertaining than our own staid affair.
One reason is the characters that American politics has in the early stages of their elections.
For whatever reason, it seems that the Republicans draw more than their fair share of nutters and fruitcakes like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and the latest fruityloop, Donald Trump.
Palin hasn't said if she will run for the Republican candidacy yet but it is expected she will throw her hat into the ring. Kim Jong Il will be happy, considering her utterances that America will stand by there North Korean allies.
Michelle Bachmann is being called the heir to Palin. She once tried to stop Aladdin being shown in a local school on religious grounds, stating that it endorsed witchcraft and promoted paganism.
At a protest of her proposed ban of same-sex marriage in Minnesota, Bachmann was photographed hiding in bushes, spying on the rally. Bachmann's explanation was that her feet were sore, saying she was wearing high heels and she just couldn't stand anymore although she later acknowledged that she was actually spying on the rally. Perhaps she had heard of a secret Aladdin screening.
She has also said it was an interesting coincidence that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents and claims 'there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas' to defend her position that climate change is a hoax.
A Gallup poll shows Donald Trump is the current favourite out of the current crop of 2012 Republican candidates.
Since announcing his campaign to run as the Republican nominee to take on Obama, the strange haired billionaire has laid out his political thinking with lines such as "I would go in and take the oil' when asked about Libya, On Iraq, he says 'We stay there, and we take the oil. In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours.'
Trump won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans, because 'you catch all sorts of things from them'.
The unfortunate thing is that Obama needs serious opposition, he has been a massive disappointment, but faced with such sheer lunacy on the opposition side, all he has to do is show up and collect the keys for another 4 years.

It's Started

We are only 4 months into the year and already mother nature has shown she is not happy and bared her teeth.
Major earthquakes in Japan, Argentina, New Zealand, Iran and Chile. Floods in Australia, Brazil and Indonesia and swathes of tornadoes sweeping across America this week killing over 200 people.
Earthquakes really are just things that happen and we cannot be blamed for them but floods and tornadoes can simply be put at the doorstep of a reaction to what we have done to our planet.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the ‘dramatic weather patterns are consistent with changes in the climate caused by mankind'.
Dr Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the Met Office, called it 'clear evidence of an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events because of climate change. The odds of such extreme events are rapidly shortening and could become considered the norm by the middle of this century'.
Unbelievably, there are still some people that deny climate change is happening, useful idiots of the companies that want us to believe climate change is a conspiracy theory rather trust the thousands of climate scientists of the IPCC, NASA and the World Meteorological Organization.
What is happening around the world due to global warming should be an alarm call because we have moved on from warning what may happen to it now actually happening.

Bored Of The Royal Wedding

I'm not much of a Royalist, to my mind if we got rid of them tomorrow nothing would change except we would be a few million pound better off. Maybe we should suggest it to Dave Cameron next time he announces the next round of austerity cuts.
It seems that we cannot turn on our televisions or open a newspaper without Prince William or Kate Middleton peering out at us and from what i am hearing, while the majority of British people are thankful for another bank holiday, they are planning to steer clear of a television on Friday.
The Royals don't have a great track record when it comes to marriages. Of the queens 4 children, 3 of them are divorcee's so all the best to Kate for marrying into that particular family.
The American media seems particularly taken with the whole event which is ironic as they fought so hard to keep the British monarchy away from them. If they are so keen for a bit of pomp and circumstance then they shouldn't have thrown our tea into the Boston harbour all those years ago.
The argument made by Royalists for keeping the monarchy is that they bring in the tourists which is a rubbish argument because the Association of Leading Visitors Attractions doesn't even include Buckingham Palace in the top 20 of most visited places in the UK. That honour goes to the museums, galleries and cathedrals which attracts millions of visitors per site each year while the Queens residence had it's best ever year in 2010 with 413,000 visitors which is only slightly more than the Beaulieu car museum.
The Royals receive £8m annually from the civil list, £14m for the upkeep of their properties and then another £100m from the public purse for security.
St James's Palace says the couple are going to have an austere wedding, which will not weigh too heavily on taxpayers. But the Royals' understanding of the word austere is likely to be somewhat different to yours and mine.
Even the small wedding of Charles and Camilla in 2005 cost £5 million, and estimates put the cost of this Friday's shindig at around £50 million. Top-end estimates have come in closer to £100 million.
The bulk of the wedding cost is going to be met by the Royals but the security bill is falling to us, and with the country on high terror alert and more of the great and the good hitting London than during the average G20 meeting, that bill is going to be fairly hefty. Some put it at as much as somewhere around £50 million.
All the best to Wills and Kate, nothing personal but i can't get excited about a posh couple's wedding day that is costing us millions. Thanks for the day off though.

Hotel California

I do plan, at some point in the future, to write a book. An epic tale that will stand alongside some of the great literary efforts of the past.
The only problem is i have many half ideas that i never work up into full length because i get a flash of inspiration and the last idea is quickly pushed aside.
I did have an idea sparked by the song Hotel California and the final lines 'You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave'.
A hotel, out in the desert that nobody can ever leave? Why that could be a place where famous people go after they fake their own deaths to avoid their suffocating fame, founded by Glen Miller or Buddy Holly and they spend the day entertaining themselves with music and plays and are joined by other famous people like Kurt Cobain, Princess Diana and Tupac and then a reporter stumbles across it and threatens to breaks the story and...but the story got pushed aside for something else and it joins the many others in the past ideas bin.
The Hotel California storyline came back to me when i saw a story concerning president of Uruguay José Mujica.
I don't know what José has been up to because i was far to busy thinking blimey, that's Scotty from Star Trek.
Now we thought James Doohan died in 2005, the story went that his ashes were even blasted into space. But did he really go to the big Starship in the sky?
By the way, if i ever read a story about a hotel full of celebrities that have faked there own deaths and live in the Californian desert in a place run by Glen Miller or Buddy Holly and it isn't my face on the dustcover, i will seek royalties.

A Message For Atheists

A few years ago i was at a funeral of a friend and was consoling her understandably very upset young daughter at the wake afterwards.
'Is mummy up in heaven with Jesus?' she asked me and i didn't hesitate in answering yes she was and she was with her grandad and grandma and they would all be looking down very proud of her and saying how pretty she looked.
She told me how she had been praying and i explained to her that her although her mum probably wouldn't be able to answer her, she could hear her and to pray every night and tell her what she had been doing that day.
This short exchange turned out to be quite a turning point for me because i'm an atheist and had no conscience previously to telling people God didn't exist and arguing my point.
It took a 7 year old girl to open my eyes to the fact that even if i don't believe it, what i was doing was trying to deny comfort to anyone who has lost someone and i felt lousy about all those years i had dismissed other people's ideas as deluded.
If it comforts someone that their partner, son, daughter or even their pet is in heaven, who am i to try and take that away from them. It doesn't harm me or anyone else in any way so let them believe what they like if it helps them through life's toughest ordeal.
I now cringe when i hear other atheists arguing against a God as i used to argue, my mind goes back to poor Amy and how my mind told me to tell her one thing and my heart another even if i never believed it myself and how my heart was always going to win that argument and nobody should have been ruthless enough to tell her anything different.
I thought of that moment today when a 7 year old Japanese girl, obviously confused about her faith, asked the Pope during the live Good Friday question and answer session why did God let so many children die in the Japan Tsunami.
"I also have the same questions: Why is it this way?' he answered, 'Why do you have to suffer so much while others live in ease?" And we do not have the answers but we know that Jesus suffered as you do, an innocent."
That isn't really much of an answer to give the confused child but i was actually quite glad that she asked it to a religious person and got a sort-of answer rather than the type of atheist i used to be who may have given her a different answer altogether.
Religion becomes a problem when it becomes a tool in the hands of the powerful, not the people we meet everyday just trying to get along as best they can the same as us and we should remember that and consider the reasons behind a persons faith the next time we feel like picking up the atheist gauntlet.

Why I learned To Love Charlie Chaplin

It would be Charlie Chaplin's 122nd birthday today. When i was young they would show his films on the television along with Harold Lloyd and other silent films and i was never very impressed, Laurel and Hardy hitting each other with ladders or Abbot and Costello being chased by a werewolf were much funnier.
It wasn't until i got older and found out what Charlie Chaplin stood for that i watched his films in an admirable light.
To many Charlie Chaplin was a comedy actor but when you find out he was a Communist, you see his films as he intended them as well aimed shots against poverty and inequality. Ironic as it was that at at his height he was the second largest earner in America, $13,000 a week from the Mutual Film Corporation.
Once he got to write and produce his own films, the common theme was always the poor guy handing it to the wealthy and powerful. This slipped under the radar as possibly Communist, as did his friendship with William Z. Foster, who would go on to become general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
It wasn't until he gave a speech in San Francisco which he addressed the audience as comrades several times and his powerful speech from The Dictator where Chaplin raged against world governments was reprinted in leaflets by the Communist Party that the FBI began taking a closer look at the Chaplin file.
Joe McCarthy's Un-American Committee and the Immigration and Naturalization Service interviewed him about his Communist links and while he was on a ship travelling to England to promote a film, he received a telegram informing him that his re-entry visa had been rescinded due to 'being a member of the Communist Party, with grave moral charges and with making statements that would indicate a leering, sneering attitude toward a country whose hospitality has enriched him.'
When you know all this and hear the Great Dictator speech where he has lines such as: 'In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone' and 'Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security', you realise that far from just being that man with a Hitler moustache who fell over a lot, he was subliminally showing pro-Communist messages to millions of Americans in the most anti-Communist country in the World and got paid $13,000 a week to do it.
Got to love that and now, if you didn't know of Chaplin's Communist leanings, and you have stumbled across this post and have read it down to here, you can never watch a Chaplin film ever again without his pro-Communist messages hitting you squarely between the eyes at every turn. What a stinker.

Gagarin, Armstrong & Laika

It's a shame that what Yuri Gagarin achieved will forever be equated with the Cold War and the Soviets and Americans ideological tussle rather than as one of our greatest achievements.
On the news channel RT (Russia Today) they were describing Gagarin's double of being the first human in space and the first human to orbit the earth as the most important achievement in the space race. As they would being proud Russians.
Over on CNN, it was acknowledged as a great achievement but they argued that the Apollo 11 mission and Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon as the pinnacle of the space race. As they would being rightly proud Americans.
Neil Armstrong is undoubtedly the more famous and his actions more symbolic but without Gagarin, Armstrong wouldn't have been stepping off that lander and into the history books.
Yuri’s space flight ensured that President John F Kennedy pushed the USA’s space ambitions up the list of priorities and there probably wouldn’t have been a man on the Moon just nine years later. Gagarin’s achievement could be said to have changed the course of world history.
Gagarin's could be the most important for mankind, he paved the way for every astronaut that followed, but Armstrong's the more significant because it showed man can leave our own planet, stand on other bodies in the solar system and return safely.
Unfortunately, once the moon was landed upon the space program cooled and the next giant step of a man on Mars, never materialised and due to financial constraints, is unlikely to be revived in our lifetime.
So instead of regressing back to the days of the Cold War we should celebrate both the Soviet and Americans feats, both as hugely important as each other and spare a sad thought for little Laika too who beat them both out of the Earths atmosphere.

There IS Something Out There

Anyone who has been watching the excellent 'Wonders of the Universe' would have heard Professor Brian Cox explain how our own galaxy contains billions of stars, and there are billions of other galaxies swirling around.
That's an extraordinary amount of planets orbiting those billions and billions of stars and potential homes of other forms of life.
I have always maintained the odds of their not being other life out there on other planets must be minuscule, it happened here so why not on any of those billions and billions of other solar systems?
Stories of little green men visiting us and inserting probes in unspeakable places has always generated rolling eyes and sniggering and probably the most debated extra-terrestrial event happened in 1947 when either a UFO or a weather balloon crash-landed on a farm near Roswell Air Base.
A press release put out by the Military Authorities at the time stated that they had recovered a UFO only for it to then be retracted 24 hours later.
Lieutenant Walter Haut, who was the PR man at the base in 1947, and who issued both the press releases after the crash, died and left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death which explained that the weather balloon claim was a cover story, and described seeing not just the crashed craft, but alien bodies.
Local undertaker Glenn Dennis has claimed that he was contacted by authorities at Roswell shortly after the crash and asked to provide a number of child-sized coffins.
Now documents released by the FBI make the story even more intriguing.
One document dated 22 March 1950, special agent Guy Hottel, head of the FBI's Washington field office, wrote to Hoover with information on three "so-called flying saucers" that had crash-landed in New Mexico.
According to the memo above (click to enlarge), an air force investigator stated that three flying saucers had been recovered in the area, along with the bodies of the alien crews. The memo goes on to add: "Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots."
More Marvin the Martian than Ming the Merciless i agree but there seems to be something out there visiting us.
I just hope they left the probes at home.

Apologising For The British Empire

There are not many countries in the World who have not, at some point in their history, been a bit evil and had a slash and a hack at the population of some other country. Usually in order to take land or take the other countries resources. When a particular country takes over enough countries, it has itself an empire and as far back as the Assyrians in 2000 BC. there have been empire builders.
Britain at its peak, controlled the largest empire that the world had ever known, stretching all over the globe from North America to Australia and from Canada to the southern tip of Africa. These huge landmasses, their people and their natural resources were controlled and dominated by Britain.
Now some people will argue, and they do, that the British Empire was a force for good, dragging otherwise backward nations into the modern era and giving the world a unifying language and that is not really in dispute.
The truth behind the highly polished image is the ugly reality that the British Empire invaded, oppressed and oversaw countless atrocities and to agree with our Prime Minister, we are to blame for many of the current conflicts of the Worlds trouble spots.
Critics argue that there is nothing to be guilty about ignoring the recent exposure of a 50-year British government cover-up of official documents detailing the brutalisation, starvation, torture and castration of thousands of Kenyans in the 1950's and ignoring the coincidence that many of the world's conflicts are in former British colonies from Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, Kurdistan, Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Cyprus so you have to be wearing the most thickest of blinkers to dispute what Cameron said in Islamabad.
Of course, Britain's is only one of the colonial empires whose destructive inheritance can be felt across the world but the failure in modern Britain to recognise the empire for the murderous exploitation that it was is to excuse our disgraceful past behaviour while condemning others that did, or attempted to do, the same.
Histories most reviled imperialists were the Nazis and while we were probably not as bad as the Nazis, the British empire has done far greater and lasting damage than the Nazis by the very virtue of our being around for so much longer.
One does not need much of an imagination to realise the damage the British empire wreaked, glancing at the British Empire map and looking at where the problems are today should be obvious, but it amazes and saddens me that some people on my island are still of the opinion that Britain did these countries a big favour by ruling over them.
Should we apologise for our imperial legacy? Yes but saying sorry just doesn't seem enough somehow.