Still Changing my Supplier

As expected, this was a dead man walking affair before it even got underway. I have spent hours on the phone and spoken with countless “technicians”. All to no avail, so far.

I am currently blogging from a borrowed computer and have to be brief. Hopefully the line will be available tomorrow at the latest.

Please be as patient as I am forced to be.

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Changing My Supplier

This has nothing to do with drug pushers! The simple fact is that my present internet provider is costing a bit more than my wifes employers are willing to pay. We are amongst those that are lucky enough to have an employer who sees the internet as a personal fringe benefit and, therefore, we have a paid internet connection to use as freely as we want. Which is nice. Or at least, it was. Now they have found a cheaper alternative. The good news is, that the new connection is faster than the old one. Ah, the power of bargaining. We have x-amount of employees. How much for , whatever, service per employee?

Tomorrow I have to reconfigure the computer here and find out how to make the connection wireless. I have little idea of how this works but they have provided me with a do-it-yourself DVD-CD and a mountain of technical manuals which I won’t read and don’t understand. My wife is relying on my superior technical know-how to solve any problems. A very trusting lady. After all, she says, if you can change the light bulb in the halogen lamps, you can do this too.

This may be a blessing in disguise. I have long wondered about the wireless angle and thought that if I bought the laptop of my dreams, how would I hook it up from my living room when the internet outlet is in my den? Wi-Fi is the way forward.

There may be a short break in service tomorrow and who knows how long that may take? I don’t. The old connection disappears tomorrow at 16:30. After that, it’s up to me and my technical understanding.

For now then, a fond farewell and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Whenever that may be.

Protect Your Local Terrorist

Six months ago, 18 year old Abdul Abu-Lifa was found guilty of terrorist activity by Denmarks highest court. The courts are still discussing whether or not to revoke his Danish citizenship. This is necessary if he is to be deported to wherever he comes from and should be sent back to. The reason for this delay? The court that has to handle the case says it is overworked and has a huge case load. Maybe they can get round to it in August. The prosecuting attorney says that this case isn’t going anywhere, neither is Abdul, and the court has to prioritise what it thinks is most pressing and what isn’t. At the moment, the court is busy with violent crime cases and doesn’t consider the citizenship, or deportation, of a terrorist as important as the hearing of a local bully.

A lot of cases like this go nowhere. Literally, nowhere. And even when they do, they are they invariably go against all common sense. They lie around and are deliberately left to be forgotten. For example, Said Mansour, propagandist and recruiter. Found guilty of similar charges and sentenced to three and a half years behind bars, the Copenhagen City court refused to revoke his citizenship because they feared he would be subjected to some brutality on returning to Morocco, where he is also wanted for terrorist activity. Nice chap. International terrorist. Have bomb, will travel. Just the kind of average Joe you would all like to have in your neighborhood.  

Who really cares? These two here are terrorists or are connected with them. They would not worry a moment over our rights and would not raise an eyebrow at our demise or injury. Quite the reverse. They plan on doing just that. Killing or injuring is their stock in trade. That is why they are here. I don’t care if they get hooked up by the genitals to a car battery in Morocco or Jordan or anywhere else for that matter, as long as they don’t get to stay here. They mean us no good. This is human rights gone mad.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only sane, right minded person in Denmark to think that way either.

And then along came the politicians.

The government is considering moves to strengthen the position of these people in cases where the police intelligence services have caught these bastards and will then have them sent out of the country on suspicion of terrorist activity. This will no longer be an administrative process. Now it must go to court.

Who said prevention was better than cure?

I give up!

Food Fight

We won’t have to worry about global warming much longer. The political focus is shifting to another more worrying and more pressing problem. Food. Or the lack of it. Not to mention the cost. I’ve been reading a lot lately about rising food prices coupled to rising oil prices and the growing demand for ethanol. In short , it is more lucrative for some suppliers to sell their grain to ethanol distillers than millers and bakers. The demand is growing so quickly that some exporters of grain products have set a limitation on exports. For example, China, India, Pakistan, Cambodia and Vietnam have curbed rice exports to ensure that there is enough food for their own people. America has also cut its exports and is diverting corn to fuel distillation. The sad truth is, according one source I read, we could send the entire corn production of the USA to fuel distillation and only cover 18% of our oil needs. Even now, with the present production of bio fuels, we are only covering 3% of our oil needs. As we all know, supply is related to demand, and the common denominator is the price. Oil prices go up, so food prices go up. But now, for the first time in history, the relationship between food and oil is direct simply because we are looking for solutions to both demands from the same supply. And our food reserves are at an historic low.

This will hit the third world hard. Not simply because they can’t pay for imports, but because there will not be anything to import. Both France and the USA have agreed to raise their foreign aid to compensate for the price rise, but if things continue as they are doing, then there will soon be no excess corn in the world to buy. Some countries have felt the effects of this dilemma already. There have been food riots in Egypt. Rising food costs have been blamed for violent unrest in Haiti, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal. Protests have also occurred in Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bolivia,  Mexico, Italy and Indonesia. This will spread. People will perhaps be able to avoid filling the tanks of  their cars, but cannot avoid filling their bellies.

Predictably, this has been blamed on the present rise in oil prices and is being compared to the oil price rises in the last two years. Actually the trend goes back longer than that. The UN and Agricultural World Food Price Index closed on december the 31st 2007 at 186,3. In the middle of the year 2002, the index was 90, having fallen steadily since 1996. Prices have risen steadily since then but have accelerated drastically in the past two years. Doubled, in fact, since 2002. That trend is going to continue. Undiminished.

Add the growing population of the earth to this and one has a cocktail for catastrophe of biblical proportions. At the moment there have only been sporadic outbreaks of food related unrest in isolated countries. Wait until an entire continent is starving.

Maybe Einstein was wrong. He said that he did not know how a third world war would be fought, but he knew that the fourth would be fought with bows, arrows, sticks and stones. I suppose he assumed we would have enough oil to keep modern armies rolling, aircraft flying and ships at sea as we removed the greater part of mankind from the earth with nuclear weapons.

It may just be that the third world war will be fought with spades and pitchforks. It will not be countries fighting each other. They will not have the fuel resources to do that. It will be neighbours fighting over corn fields in their attempts to feed their families. The eradication of half of mankind will be by starvation, not radioactive poisoning.  

Religiously Unreligious

The ever growing relationship between the muslim community and its political champions on the left wing of the political arena in Denmark, is about to be set on end. It is no secret here that the Socialist Peoples Party, SF, has achieved a certain stature in the past few weeks due to the anti-islamic stance of its present party chairman, Willy Søvndal. The SF has been poaching voters from its ally, the Social Democrats at an alarming rate. At least, as far as the soc. dem’s are concerned.

Another left wing party has virtually been wiped off the face of Danish politics recently. The Unity Party. Enhedslisten.

Strangely enough, the party that sprang from and embraces the communist dogma of the sixties, fronted a muslim as a parliamentary candidate in the last general election. Now it would appear, that some of the more socialist people in the party are having second thoughts about this foray into the world of  the intangible.
Enhedslisten is to hold a theme party of its own tomorrow, the theme being the stance of the party on religion. They are having a simple identity crisis. Party delegates will be discussing the party line with respect to religion. They will have to debate past remarks from various party leaders that the party “is not a religious party” and that the party “is a direct opponent of all religion including christianity, islam and everything else in between”.
The main proponents of the latter statement is the Anti-religious Network that was born out of resistance to the choice of the muslim Asmaa Abdol-Hamid as a parliamentary candidate. The network is adamant that the party remains atheistic and should not present religious candidates for election.

I hope they tear their own hearts out.

I do not despair at the demise of the left wing. If it was up to me, they would all wither on the political vine. It was the left who brought our present unhappiness upon us by allowing all and sundry to invade this land and it was also the left wing that tried to make us toe the multicultural and strictly EU dictated line. Many of us resent them for just that. And they can see the results of that folly now as the right wing government continues to strengthen its position. Sucking up to islam has made them unpopular.

However, having said that, I find myself, for once, in agreement with the old communist brigade. Religion and politics should be strictly separated. The one is a matter for personal intrerpretation and superstition, the other is a device for the government of an entire country of individuals with differing beliefs and must be built on fact and common sense.

I remember the words of my father. “You have to be fair, honest and reasonable to get through life. Religion doesn’t enter into it.”

He was right. If our politicians were simply fair, honest and reasonable, leaving religion aside where it belongs, we wouldn’t be where we are now. 

My Long Goodbye

It would appear that my days as a fully functional human being are numbered. I am destroying my body and mind on a daily basis. Alas, I am undone! My very lifestyle is going to see me in my grave sooner than I care to think about. Luckily, I won’t know much about it, if I am to believe the latest outpourings from the health gurus, because I will be suffering from an over developed bout of Alzheimers.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to lose my mind over this. And even if I do, then I won’t be in a condition to care.

Two reports, released simultaneously from the Wien Centre for Alzheimer’s Disease at Mount Sinai Medical Centre, Miami Beach, Florida and the University of Kuopio in Finland, inform me that smoking, drinking and junk food are likely to increase my chances of going ga-ga somewhat more prematurely than I otherwise would, if I ever should. Not only that, I may even be genetically predisposed to the disease. That isn’t my fault, it just is. I didn’t pick my genes. I inherited them. I find that all a bit academic anyway as I am not immortal and I know it and as I grow older in this world, a visit to “cloud cuckoo land” might even be seen as a welcome break for the weekend for the struggling pensioner that I am destined to become.

The article in The Times has this to say;

“Heavy drinkers and smokers develop Alzheimer’s disease up to eight years earlier than those with healthier lifestyles, research has shown.

A junk food diet which causes high cholesterol levels in middle age also leads to a higher risk of the disease, say scientists.

The lifestyle links to Alzheimer’s were revealed today in two separate studies presented to neurologists in the US.

One team looked at 938 Alzheimer’s patients aged 60 and above. The researchers asked family members about the patients’ drinking and smoking history, and found that heavy drinkers – those who consumed more than two alcoholic drinks a day – developed Alzheimer’s nearly five years earlier on average than non-heavy drinkers.

Smokers who got through at least 20 cigarettes a day developed the disease 2.3 years sooner than patients who smoked less or were non-smokers.

Participants with a particular mutant form of the gene ApoE showed symptoms of Alzheimer’s three years earlier than those without the gene variant.

Adding the three risk factors together led to considerably earlier onset of the disease, with patients with all three developing Alzheimer’s 8.5 years sooner than those with none.”

That’s my lot then. I’m done for. I may as well just shoot myself now and get it over with. I had hoped that I would first develop the disease at around 98 years of age. Now I risk getting it at 90. Having planned to live until I am 110, I may just have to rethink my situation.

I will not be relinquishing my beloved pipe or tobacco. My Sunday scotch is not up for negotiation either. My daily sticky bar, usually Mars or Snickers, is my one habit that may be adjustable. But don’t count on it. I don’t believe that I would live any longer if I gave these things up, but it surely would feel that way.

How do we cope then?

For those that smoke cigarettes, as I am forced to do at work because my boss doesn’t appreciate me taking hour long smoke breaks while I smoke a pipe, my advice would be to limit yourselves to nineteen a day thereby coming under the magic number twenty. Two alcoholic beverages a day is also putting you at risk. My advice is to save them up for the weekend and only drink thirteen pints instead of fourteen and thereby defeat the average. If you do eat burgers on a regular basis, don’t forget the fried onions. Vegetables are important in a well rounded diet.

On the other hand, one could just ignore this latest round of lifestyle disease bullshit and get on with living ones life as one sees fit for as long as one can. Until euthanasia is governmental policy, I don’t think we have to concern ourselves too much.

As for the Wien Centre for Alzheimer’s Disease at Mount Sinai Medical Centre, Miami Beach, Florida and the University of Kuopio in Finland, well, thanks for sharing. I don’t know who is funding your research but I can smell something distinctly familiar. I haven’t given one of these out for a while but I’m going to let you have one. You have just earned yourselves a Bullshit Award.

Times on line.

Of Lunatics and Asylum Seekers

A European Parliament civil liberties delegation has been carrying out its inspections of Danish asylum centres. They are welcome to do this. It’s no big deal. But one can question perhaps, why they should think it necessary. After all, this Denmark, not Darfur. Reading an article in Jyllands Postens “News in English”, I found this little collection of snippets;

After inspecting the Sandholm and Kongelunden asylum centres on 11 April, the delegation concluded that conditions were ‘generally satisfactory, although the milieu for children, forced to live in the centres for years, gave reason for concern’.

[….]

Panayiotis Demetriou, leader of the delegation, was especially angry over conditions for children at the centres. ‘They should at least be treated like human beings,’ he told TV2 News.

[….]

EP Vice-President Martine Roure told the Kuwait News Agency that the Danish asylum system ‘creates children who are born in Denmark and speak nothing but Danish, but who are not accepted in society’. She criticized the fact that asylum seekers must remain in the centres for years without having permission to work or receive an education.

Now, one might be tempted to believe that the children are kept in cages like animals if one was to take Mr. Demetriou at his word but that just isn’t so. And  EP Vice-President Martine Roure is marching off in the wrong direction too.

I am not often at odds with the revered JP, publisher of infamous cartoons and defender of free speech, but this time they have rather conveniently omitted to give us the whole story. The people in these so called asylum centres are there “for years” for one simple reason. They have been through the legal system. Their case has been heard. They were found not to be genuine asylum cases. Therefore, they are not allowed into Denmark. They are free to leave. They are not prisoners, political or otherwise. They can simply leave the country. No one will stop them. In fact, we will even help them on their way with huge cash benefits filling their pockets. But no. They aren’t going. Why? Obviously because the thought of all that free income for life that is to be had in Denmark, which is what brought them here in the first place, is just too damn good to give up and leave. Not only that, but if the centres were so bad, and the conditions so unbearable, one would have thought that having the freedom to leave would make it almost imperative in the interests of ones children.
Apparently, some people just can’t take no for an answer, especially when it comes to asylum.

Left to the likes of Mr. Dimitriou and Ms. Vice President Roure, there would be no asylum laws. The country would open to all who were able to make the trip to our borders and simply claim the right to be here. A truly lunatic approach to the whole idea of asylum. Asylum is for the true refugee, the threatened, the truly oppressed. It should not be a comfort-blanket for the simply poor and over expectant masses of the third world, paid for by the efforts of generations of Europeans and their struggle to achieve some form of social welfare for their own children. This welfare should not be open to massive plunder by those who envy us and the social security that we and our forefathers have worked so hard for, not forgetting two European wars and a lot of blood and sweat.

Luckily, we do have checks and balances in Denmark and they work. Unfortunately, we do not yet have politicians who are willing to take the consequences of those checks and balances and force people out of the country if the grounds for their being here are proven not worthy. Which is partly why those people are living for years in asylum centres.

That is the true shame of these places. It is not that people are living there for years, but that we allow them to do so. And, I might add, at our expense.

JP News in English article.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

A mosque in the town of Shiraz in Iran blew up yesterday. One would suspect a bomb or some other infernal machine or maybe even a suicide bomber. But no. No bomb. No act of terror. According to the police chief in the town the explosion was caused by an accident in an ammunition depot inside the mosque.
Ammunition depot? In a mosque? So much for the religion of peace. I ask myself, is this normal only in Iran or do all mosques have an ammunition depot as part of the inventory and holy artifacts?

I was just wondering…

Comparing that to other news I found today, I felt a little shiver of disbelief as I read about the efforts of the intelligence services in the United Kingdom. According to the Home Secretary, there are thirty active terror plots going on in the UK and the police intelligence agencies are surveilling some 22,000 people and 200 networks.
Something is terribly wrong here. How on earth can there be 22,000 people that need constant surveillance if multiculturalism is as successful as Gordon Brown and his government would have us believe? 30 active terror plots? And no arrests yet? Police taking a day off, are they? Or is it just that the present laws are making it impossible to hinder these fanatics? Who are they?

Once again, just wondering…

How many ammunition depots mosques are there in the UK?

 

Authors note: “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” is a patriotic song written by Frank Loesser and published as sheet music in 1942 by Famous Music Corp. The song was a response to the Attack on Pearl Harbor that marked United States involvement in World War II.

Why I Drink Gin

The WHO has been in the news lately after holding World Malaria Day. As we all know, the fictive anthropogenic global warming, which is now being politically correctly called “climate change”, is the official font of all ills known to modern man, but did you know that it is also proving to be beneficial to at least one creature? The mosquito. And according to the WHO that will spread malaria over the whole of the known world within a very short period of geological time.

Interested in my own well being, I decided to go off to the WHO website and do a bit of digging. It is mostly repetitious in its commentaries and the report to which everybody is referring is not available for public view as far as I can see. Which is a bit strange as this should be on public display, if we are to believe the threat to those billions of people that are now supposedly destined to get the dreaded insect borne disease.

However, there is a little to be gleaned.

From the WHO media centre, on discussing deaths from tropical diseases we read the following:

…malnutrition, which causes over 3.5 million deaths per year, diarrhoeal diseases, which kill over 1.8 million, and malaria, which kills almost 1 million.

1 million deaths a year. Wow.

You have to have something to compare that with to get a perspective. So just how “deadly” is the disease? Back to the WHO media centre then, where I found this;

Approximately, 40% of the world’s population, mostly those living in the world’s poorest countries, are at risk of malaria. Every year, more than 500 million people become severely ill with malaria. Most cases and deaths are in sub-Saharan Africa. However, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Europe are also affected. Travellers from malaria-free regions going to areas where there is malaria transmission are highly vulnerable – they have little or no immunity and are often exposed to delayed or wrong malaria diagnosis when returning to their home country.

Hmmm.. 500 million become seriously ill with the disease.. 1 million die. That’s 1 in 500. 0.2%. Not very scary, is it? Less than influenza. Waves of relief wash over my troubled soul.

So what are the odds of malaria coming here to northern Europe? Well, bad news for the WHO. See, it’s been here before. In the middle ages, Europe was rife with malaria. It was also warmer in Europe then too, but let’s not discuss that, it only confuses the global warming freaks who haven’t a clue what their own history books tell them. But someone else in a high place knows this too. I found this little article in the Wall Street Journal;

It may come as a surprise that malaria was once common in most of Europe and North America. In parts of England, mortality from “the ague” was comparable to that in sub-Saharan Africa today. William Shakespeare was born at the start of the especially cold period that climatologists call the “Little Ice Age,” yet he was aware enough of the ravages of the disease to mention it in eight of his plays.

Malaria disappeared from much of Western Europe during the second half of the 19th century. Changes in agriculture, living conditions and a drop in the price of quinine, a cure still used today, all helped eradicate it. However, in some regions it persisted until the insecticide DDT wiped it out. Temperate Holland was not certified malaria-free by the WHO until 1970.

The concept of malaria as a “tropical” infection is nonsense. It is a disease of the poor. Alarmists in the richest countries peddle the notion that the increase in malaria in poor countries is due to global warming and that this will eventually cause malaria to spread to areas that were “previously malaria free.” That’s a misrepresentation of the facts and disingenuous when packaged with opposition to the cheapest and best insecticide to combat malaria – DDT.

Now there’s a couple of things mentioned there that need further attention. DDT, for example. The single most effective killer of mosquitoes. So lets stock up on it now while the going is good.

The second thing is Quinine. A well known anti-malarial drug. The British drank gallons of it in their conquests of Africa and India. Especially India. Quinine is bitter to the taste buds. Awful. Foul stuff. So to ease the taking of it, the British echelons mixed it with sugar and water. It still wasn’t exactly palatable but it was better than the raw fluid.

Enter a little chap with a big idea. He mixed the water, sugar and quinine with other better tasting liquids and added bubbles. His name was Schweppes. The now world famous Indian Tonic Water was born. One glass a day provided you with all the quinine you needed to keep the malaria away. The East Indian Trading Company shipped gallon after gallon of the stuff out to “the Raj”.

The British, who were having the time of their lives in India and looking for any excuse to enjoy themselves, even while taking medicine, found it a perfect mixer for gin. And it still is.

Which is why I drink gin and tonic, to ward off the effects of malaria and why I don’t give a hoot for the WHO and their global warming malarial piffle. 

Any questions?

Vote Mugabe – Or Die

Here’s a little glimpse into daily life in the once flourishing country of Zimbabwe, twelve days after an election which Mugabe clearly lost;

‘Vote Mugabe or you die’. Inside Zimbabwe, the backlash begins

The patients at Louisa Guidotti hospital said there were eight men, one carrying a shotgun, another with an AK-47, others with pistols, and they went from bed to bed forcing out anyone who could walk.

Nurses were dragged away from the sick. Motorists driving by the hospital, 87 miles north-east of Harare, were stopped and taken from their cars. About 70 people were gathered in the grounds. Then the lecture began. “This is your last chance,” said one of the armed men. “You messed up when you voted. Next time you vote you must get it right or you will die.”

One of the men selected people to stand and shout slogans of Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF party and to sing songs from the liberation war . Those who did not do so enthusiastically were beaten. Another cocked his gun and told the crowd to point out opposition supporters.

Sandati Kuratidzi lives on the hospital grounds because his wife is a physiotherapist there. He is an activist with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change which stunned Zanu-PF by apparently defeating Robert Mugabe in the presidential election, although the electoral commission has still to release the official result 12 days later.

When Kuratidzi saw the pick-up with the armed men draw up, he knew what was coming and hid on top of a cupboard.

“They warned people that if they voted for the opposition they would be killed. They had AK-47s, shotguns, guns in their belts. People were very afraid,” he said. “They were saying they were going to show an example to anyone supporting MDC and they asked the people to point out who they were but no one did. Their behavior was inhuman.”

[…]

The armed men had already visited Kotwa. “They ordered people out of buses, out of shops, gathered them together,” he added. “One of the men was cocking a rifle to scare people. They told the people they’d messed up by voting MDC and they weren’t going to let people make that mistake again. They said they wouldn’t entertain even one opposition vote. They told people to shout slogans and those who couldn’t do it were slapped.

If anyone was in any doubt about what Mugabe meant when he said “We only used 25% of our energy on the election”, this is what the other 75% is going to be. Mugabe is demanding a presidential run-off. The MDC refuse to go along with this, knowing that they won outright.

It is time someone stepped in. This corruption has been going on for too long. But as there is no oil in Zimbabwe, I suppose the whole world will sit back and enjoy the ensuing carnage that is just getting started in that country.

Poor Zimbabwe. 

Read the article from The Guardian