When you get off the ferry at Le Harve in France, as you walk towards the town centre you are greeted by a huge statue of Napoleon on his horse.
It is not just Le Harve but all cities in France seem to have a statue dedicated to a megalomaniac who invaded and slaughtered his way across Europe and in whose footsteps Hitler trod a century later only with mechanised infantry rather than on horseback.
While Hitler is rightly reviled as evil, the equally vicious and repugnant Napoleon seems to have a
romanticised image and so statues of him are not treated the same as if statues of Adolf adorned the streets of Berlin.
That is the problem with statues, someone somewhere will be repulsed by them especially as in the UK we seem to have a penchant for erecting statues to military personnel, men such as the Dambusters of Bomber Command who have a memorial in London's Green Park.
The Dam's they busted resulted in almost 2000 civilian deaths so should we be building monuments to people like this which is behind the furore over the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University, a white supremist who wreaked havoc in Africa and represented Britain at it empirical worst.
In his time, when Britannia Ruled The Waves, anyone stomping around the globe and putting the natives down while they raped and pillaged the land for Blighty was a hero, in the cold light of the 21st Century we seem them for the hideous creatures that they were.
I imagine Napoleon was viewed the same way in France, today we may see a precursor of the great dictators of the 20th Century but in 19th Century France he was thought to be doing his part to turn France into a major European power.
What is wrong is when we can see how misguided our ancestors were but still keep the sculptures built in their honour and that is why i believe the Oxford University is wrong in their decision to not remove the Rhodes statue from the University.
What i would certainly avoid is building further remembrances to any more political or military personnel because who may seem perfectly worth celebrating today, may be seen in a very different light by future generations.
Saturday, 30 January 2016
Thursday, 28 January 2016
Is Trump A Fascist?
US presidential hopeful Donald Trump incites racism like fascist dictator Adolf Hitler according to Anne Frank’s stepsister and Auschwitz death camp survivor Eva Schloss.
Schloss warns that she sees similarities between the Nazi leader and the Republican who has been 'acting like another Hitler by inciting racism', referring to his comments regarding Mexicans as drug dealers, criminals and rapists and wanting to bar all Muslims from entering the United States.
As his former wife revealed during the divorce proceedings, the most thumbed book in the Trump library was the book of Hitler quotes, 'My New Order', and there was that infamous quote 'this guy Hitler had some good ideas' which doesn't do anything to dispel the myth that Trump is a wannabe fascist.
Holding extreme right wing views and blaming a specific group of immigrants for all the countries problems does not a fascist make but it is a great start.
Wednesday, 27 January 2016
Cameron's Dead Cat Manoeuvre
Not a good week so far for David Cameron and his Government and today he heaped even more brickbats to fall down on his head by dismissing refugees living in desperate conditions in French camps as a 'bunch of migrants'.
Not for the first time that the Prime Minister has used inflammatory language so you would have thought he would have learned by now but maybe he has which is exactly why he made such a comment.
While we are concentrating on that we are not discussing the uncomfortable things such as the Conservative Party flagship policy of the Bedroom Tax being declared 'discriminatory and unlawful' by the Court of Appeal or the the Google tax deal which saw the search engine pay a tenth of the amount tax it owed and the Chancellor describing it as a good thing.
Nor are we looking at how the Transparency International condemned the UK as 'extraordinarily inept' at tackling corruption and 'cosying up' unconditionally to states with appalling human rights records like Saudi Arabia and China.
The bunch of migrants speech also covers up the UN report that we have been implicit in Saudi Arabia targeting and killing civilians in Yemen and also selling spying equipment to repressive states such as Egypt.
Nor are we hearing much about how the government tried to redefine child poverty by changing how it is measured by measuring worklessness and children's performance at school rather than household income.
To use an Australian expression, Cameron is using the dead cat manoeuvre which involves throwing a defunct moggy into the room and everyone will shout about the dead cat you lobbed into the room but not about the issues that would otherwise cause him so much grief.
Sadly, it works every time.
Not for the first time that the Prime Minister has used inflammatory language so you would have thought he would have learned by now but maybe he has which is exactly why he made such a comment.
While we are concentrating on that we are not discussing the uncomfortable things such as the Conservative Party flagship policy of the Bedroom Tax being declared 'discriminatory and unlawful' by the Court of Appeal or the the Google tax deal which saw the search engine pay a tenth of the amount tax it owed and the Chancellor describing it as a good thing.
Nor are we looking at how the Transparency International condemned the UK as 'extraordinarily inept' at tackling corruption and 'cosying up' unconditionally to states with appalling human rights records like Saudi Arabia and China.
The bunch of migrants speech also covers up the UN report that we have been implicit in Saudi Arabia targeting and killing civilians in Yemen and also selling spying equipment to repressive states such as Egypt.
Nor are we hearing much about how the government tried to redefine child poverty by changing how it is measured by measuring worklessness and children's performance at school rather than household income.
To use an Australian expression, Cameron is using the dead cat manoeuvre which involves throwing a defunct moggy into the room and everyone will shout about the dead cat you lobbed into the room but not about the issues that would otherwise cause him so much grief.
Sadly, it works every time.
UK Role In Yemen
Britain’s role in exporting arms and providing military advisers for the Saudi Arabian-led bombing campaign in Yemen is under pressure today following a United Nations report which revealed widespread attacks on civilian targets, including refugee camps, civilian weddings, vehicles, medical facilities and schools in breach of International Law.
The UK sold over £1 billion worth of missiles, rockets and bombs to Saudi Arabia since last summer in a glorious bit of war profiteering as the Saudi military lurch into Yemen.
David Cameron has defended the arms sales to Saudi Arabia insisting the UK has the 'strictest arms controls of any country in the world' and that the UK 'carefully monitors how Saudis use British-made weapons in relation to Yemen'.
That's all okay then, none of that taking the matter to the UN Security Council on account of all the dead civilians at the hand of the Saudi military and call for sanctions or drumming up support to remove a a murderous regime.
Easier to just deny everything, carry on selling the weapons and counting just how much each dead Yemeni civilian is worth to the UK economy.
The UK sold over £1 billion worth of missiles, rockets and bombs to Saudi Arabia since last summer in a glorious bit of war profiteering as the Saudi military lurch into Yemen.
David Cameron has defended the arms sales to Saudi Arabia insisting the UK has the 'strictest arms controls of any country in the world' and that the UK 'carefully monitors how Saudis use British-made weapons in relation to Yemen'.
That's all okay then, none of that taking the matter to the UN Security Council on account of all the dead civilians at the hand of the Saudi military and call for sanctions or drumming up support to remove a a murderous regime.
Easier to just deny everything, carry on selling the weapons and counting just how much each dead Yemeni civilian is worth to the UK economy.
Zika Virus
There hasn't been a health scare story for a while in the newspapers so we were overdue one and on cue Zika Virus turns up to scare us all.
One person has tested positive in Denmark for the mosquito-borne virus along with Italy, Spain, UK and Switzerland registering several people infected with the disease.
U.S. public health officials have announced that the United States must prepare for the inevitable arrival of Zika virus that has spread to 21 countries in the Americas with 4,120 documented cases in Brazil alone.
In an effort to dampen any panic, the World Health Organisation have released a press release that advises the Zika virus is contracted through mosquito bites but cannot be spread by human contact.
Italy has reported several cases of the virus, saying that all the people infected had recently returned from Latin America and the Caribbean and the Danish tourist in today's case had recently visited South and Central America and suffered a high fever, headache and muscle pain.
Pregnant women are most at risk, as the virus has been linked to serious birth defects but i am sure that the press won't let a good health scare go to waste.
One person has tested positive in Denmark for the mosquito-borne virus along with Italy, Spain, UK and Switzerland registering several people infected with the disease.
U.S. public health officials have announced that the United States must prepare for the inevitable arrival of Zika virus that has spread to 21 countries in the Americas with 4,120 documented cases in Brazil alone.
In an effort to dampen any panic, the World Health Organisation have released a press release that advises the Zika virus is contracted through mosquito bites but cannot be spread by human contact.
Italy has reported several cases of the virus, saying that all the people infected had recently returned from Latin America and the Caribbean and the Danish tourist in today's case had recently visited South and Central America and suffered a high fever, headache and muscle pain.
Pregnant women are most at risk, as the virus has been linked to serious birth defects but i am sure that the press won't let a good health scare go to waste.
Tuesday, 26 January 2016
Mobile Phone Audio Quality
I have had far too many mobile phones to remember, from a brick sized monster back in the early 90s to a sleek Lumia Windows phone today and it is quite an amazing journey from a device that was purely used for the purpose that Alexander Graham Bell intended to one that are more like mini-computers.
What hasn't changed though is poor audio quality which is quite surprising when you consider the main purpose of telephones is to hold a conversation over them.
Trying to talk to someone on a smartphone can sometimes be like using two cans connected by a piece of string so while everything else about the mobile phone has got faster, and more powerful its primary function has stayed as spotty as it was when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular the first time around.
I am sure that some boffin could explain how the mobile signal works and how things like the weather can effect it's microwaves resulting in us having to walk around twisting to all points of the compass to hold a conversation but can play whatever Civilisation knockoff some big boobed model is selling us uninterrupted.
The mobile making companies seem to have gone down the profitable route of giving us shiny wonders which fit snugly in your hand or in the back pocket of your jeans but as regards to the original function, we are condemned to walking around in circles and from room to room listening to a muffled conversation from Virgin trying to get me to upgrade to a new mobile phone that has even more bells and whistles but will still be as difficult to listen to as a Best of Country & Western CD.
What hasn't changed though is poor audio quality which is quite surprising when you consider the main purpose of telephones is to hold a conversation over them.
Trying to talk to someone on a smartphone can sometimes be like using two cans connected by a piece of string so while everything else about the mobile phone has got faster, and more powerful its primary function has stayed as spotty as it was when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular the first time around.
I am sure that some boffin could explain how the mobile signal works and how things like the weather can effect it's microwaves resulting in us having to walk around twisting to all points of the compass to hold a conversation but can play whatever Civilisation knockoff some big boobed model is selling us uninterrupted.
The mobile making companies seem to have gone down the profitable route of giving us shiny wonders which fit snugly in your hand or in the back pocket of your jeans but as regards to the original function, we are condemned to walking around in circles and from room to room listening to a muffled conversation from Virgin trying to get me to upgrade to a new mobile phone that has even more bells and whistles but will still be as difficult to listen to as a Best of Country & Western CD.
Monday, 25 January 2016
Nothing Too See Here
You can always tell when it is a slow news day because you end up with headlines such as 'Dog Gets Head Stuck In Railings' or 'Squirrel Steals Knickers From Washing Line' because the rule is no matter what, no newspaper goes out with a blank page.
One paper in Canada decided to bend the rule slightly and went with the front page story that nothing was really happening.
'There isn’t really anything happening in the news this week' the Battlefords News-Optimist in Saskatchewan, Canada, told its readers, 'Not that it isn’t worth picking up the paper,” the lead
story continued, 'but, it’s January, the weather has taken a nasty turn and there just isn’t much happening'.
Very clever to make the lack of news a news story itself and the rule remains unbroken and everything in the Universe harmonises again but it’s not the first time an editor has made this decision.
On 18 April 1930, the BBC announced: 'There is no news today' and broadcasting ten minutes of piano music instead.
According to a computer algorithm the ultimate slow news day was 11 April 1954 which it has identified as the most boring day in history as there were absolutely no key news events or births and deaths of famous people.
Of course with all the social media and internet pages journalists have at our fingertips being unable to find a story is just lazy journalism because if you dig deep enough there's always a story out there and if not, just make something up about the weather and quote 'a source' but don't mention that your source was actually your Aunt Joan who said that it's going to be a wet summer because her budgie has been spending a lot of time at the bottom of it's cage recently.
One paper in Canada decided to bend the rule slightly and went with the front page story that nothing was really happening.
'There isn’t really anything happening in the news this week' the Battlefords News-Optimist in Saskatchewan, Canada, told its readers, 'Not that it isn’t worth picking up the paper,” the lead
story continued, 'but, it’s January, the weather has taken a nasty turn and there just isn’t much happening'.
Very clever to make the lack of news a news story itself and the rule remains unbroken and everything in the Universe harmonises again but it’s not the first time an editor has made this decision.
On 18 April 1930, the BBC announced: 'There is no news today' and broadcasting ten minutes of piano music instead.
According to a computer algorithm the ultimate slow news day was 11 April 1954 which it has identified as the most boring day in history as there were absolutely no key news events or births and deaths of famous people.
Of course with all the social media and internet pages journalists have at our fingertips being unable to find a story is just lazy journalism because if you dig deep enough there's always a story out there and if not, just make something up about the weather and quote 'a source' but don't mention that your source was actually your Aunt Joan who said that it's going to be a wet summer because her budgie has been spending a lot of time at the bottom of it's cage recently.
Sunday, 24 January 2016
Weather Systems Ramping Up
What some people do not understand in the climate change debate is that weather is not climate so to blame a bad spell of weather on climate change is as misleading as using a period of good weather to dispel the changes happening.
What climate change does do though is take what is already there and ramp it up so the rains are heavier, the winds stronger and the heatwaves hotter and longer and weather records tumble as we see in the eastern side of the United States where massive, unprecedented snowstorms have hit.
As America was for such a long time the Worlds premier polluter, fair enough you may say that they reap what they sowed for so long by devastating the atmosphere and you hope that it is the climate change deniers who are snowed in and sitting around a candle for warmth as the snowstorm knocks out their electricity.
It won't be though as the changing climate won't discriminate between those who are hard core environmentalists and those who refuse to accept what they see with their own eyes amongst the hundreds of thousands of homes without power.
The Met Centre are tracking the storm and predict that it will cross the Atlantic and hit Britain on Tuesday bringing bringing up to 8ins (20cm) of rain and prompting the issuing of severe flood warnings.
The weather system that has bought such devastation to America and is due to dump over half a foot of rain on the UK next week may well have happened anyway and we have been getting the tail end of Americas storms for centuries thanks to the Jet Stream but you would have to be wilfully blind or just plain ignorant to see that things on the weather front have shifted up a few levels.
What climate change does do though is take what is already there and ramp it up so the rains are heavier, the winds stronger and the heatwaves hotter and longer and weather records tumble as we see in the eastern side of the United States where massive, unprecedented snowstorms have hit.
As America was for such a long time the Worlds premier polluter, fair enough you may say that they reap what they sowed for so long by devastating the atmosphere and you hope that it is the climate change deniers who are snowed in and sitting around a candle for warmth as the snowstorm knocks out their electricity.
It won't be though as the changing climate won't discriminate between those who are hard core environmentalists and those who refuse to accept what they see with their own eyes amongst the hundreds of thousands of homes without power.
The Met Centre are tracking the storm and predict that it will cross the Atlantic and hit Britain on Tuesday bringing bringing up to 8ins (20cm) of rain and prompting the issuing of severe flood warnings.
The weather system that has bought such devastation to America and is due to dump over half a foot of rain on the UK next week may well have happened anyway and we have been getting the tail end of Americas storms for centuries thanks to the Jet Stream but you would have to be wilfully blind or just plain ignorant to see that things on the weather front have shifted up a few levels.
Saturday, 23 January 2016
Socialism Is The Devils Work
While some see left-wing ideology as a reflection of the teachings of Jesus, some right-wing Christians believe that socialism has its roots in Satan Worship, right wingers like the hard-right website Canada Free Press who tell it's readers that the foundations of socialism lie in the heresy of a fallen and bitter priest named Joachim of Flora who in the late 12th Century claimed that the church would wither away and leave a beautiful utopia.
The Christians see a link between the Joachim of Flora view and Karl Marx's who centuries later picked up the thread for his Communist Manifesto where the State would fade away and all people live in harmony, sharing everything and fighting over nothing, in a anti-religious, godless Communist paradise.
The loonies then state that Satan is a perfect symbol for socialism as it sets out to remake the world of
mankind without any reference to God.
After a lot of waffling the website deduces that Socialism was invented by Satan in an attempt to seize control of the Earth and Socialists are doing the work of the Devil when they push their satanic views on to others.
Blimey, i must have missed that memo but it is always nice when right wing religious nutters bring me up to speed.
The Christians see a link between the Joachim of Flora view and Karl Marx's who centuries later picked up the thread for his Communist Manifesto where the State would fade away and all people live in harmony, sharing everything and fighting over nothing, in a anti-religious, godless Communist paradise.
The loonies then state that Satan is a perfect symbol for socialism as it sets out to remake the world of
mankind without any reference to God.
After a lot of waffling the website deduces that Socialism was invented by Satan in an attempt to seize control of the Earth and Socialists are doing the work of the Devil when they push their satanic views on to others.
Blimey, i must have missed that memo but it is always nice when right wing religious nutters bring me up to speed.
Google Tax
A smiling Chancellor announced today that the Government has reached an agreement with Google to pay the British taxman £130m in back taxes.
Mr Osborne told the BBC that the agreement was 'a real vindication of this government's approach to tax avoidance' which is interesting as we may have puffed up the coffers by £130million but the actual amount Google owed in tax was 7 to 10 times more.
Mr Osborne has welcomed the agreement and suggested that it could see other large firms reaching similar deals with the taxman which appears to mean that Google may owe far much more but we will take whatever amount in a 'deal'.
The tax agreement comes after years of criticism of Google and other multinational firms such as Facebook, Amazon and Starbucks over their tax arrangement in the UK.
In 2010 Vodaphone and HMRC agreed a bill of £1.2 billion when the actual amount the phone operator was due to pay was £8 billion.
As many of us are due to have submitted our Tax Returns by the end of this month i am sure that HMRC will be okay if we agree to only pay a tenth of what we owe in light of this new Government approach to taxation. Won't they?
Mr Osborne told the BBC that the agreement was 'a real vindication of this government's approach to tax avoidance' which is interesting as we may have puffed up the coffers by £130million but the actual amount Google owed in tax was 7 to 10 times more.
Mr Osborne has welcomed the agreement and suggested that it could see other large firms reaching similar deals with the taxman which appears to mean that Google may owe far much more but we will take whatever amount in a 'deal'.
The tax agreement comes after years of criticism of Google and other multinational firms such as Facebook, Amazon and Starbucks over their tax arrangement in the UK.
In 2010 Vodaphone and HMRC agreed a bill of £1.2 billion when the actual amount the phone operator was due to pay was £8 billion.
As many of us are due to have submitted our Tax Returns by the end of this month i am sure that HMRC will be okay if we agree to only pay a tenth of what we owe in light of this new Government approach to taxation. Won't they?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)