Nazis: alive and well in Jerusalem right now

You won't have heard about this on any of the standard media outlets; indeed it doesn't even seem to have made it to Al Jazeira for some reason, but yesterday in Jerusalem the Max Rayne Hand in Hand Bilingual school was subject to yet another arson attack, only the latest in a series of such attacks against the school which has been targeted by ultra-right wing Israeli groups. Nazis. They sought out all the bilingual books they could find and burnt them first. Does this remind you of anything?


What they don't like is that by promoting education as a means to achieving understanding and tolerance between Arabs and Jews in Israel, the school might actually bring about peace between the two groups. And they don't want that. They want the utter destruction of the Palestinian peoples. You  think I exaggerate perhaps? Then consider this graffito which was scrawled on one of the school's walls which was not destroyed:


                                    "There's no co-existing with cancer"


I don't know about you, but whenever I hear about books being burnt I feel a great cry of anger rise up from deep inside me. I first felt this when I was a teenager and learnt about the great Nazi book burnings in the 1930s. They didn't just burn anti-Nazi propaganda,  they burnt anything they didn't like: Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, many other works of literature now thought to represent the finest distillation of human thought ever put on paper. What they didn't understand, and what the latter-day Nazis in Jerusalem also fail to appreciate is:


                                           YOU CAN'T BURN AN IDEA


Hang in there you brave men and women who run that school. You are the future of Israel and I salute you.

If Jeremy Hunt can't get it right, can we blame anyone else for getting it wrong?

Yesterday in the House of Commons health secretary Jeremy Hunt admitted that he had taken one of his children to A and E, rather than waiting until "later on" (sic) to attend the GP out-of-hours service.
Moreover it seems he has received a good measure of support for his actions in the social media. Clearly I am not in tune with the hive mind of the Twittersphere, because I think it stinks.


Jeremy Hunt himself has bemoaned the unacceptable waiting times at A and E, and warned of the imminent meltdown of the whole system when winter kicks in properly, yet he seems to have no problem encouraging the general population to abuse the service in exactly the way he has done. I am perfectly well aware of the deficiencies of GP out-of-hours services in parts of the country, though here in South Wales the system works extremely well, with waiting times well below what you will find if you take your sore throat or feverish child to the Casualty department.


I have said in the past that part of the congestion in A and E departments comes from an immigrant population who are insufficiently versed in how things work here- that and a cohort of people who do know perfectly well how it works but flagrantly ignore all the protocols in order to "save time"- exactly as Jeremy Hunt did. These people should be told how the system works and directed to the appropriate service, which in many cities, including Cardiff may be found right next door. Which is what they should have done to Jeremy Hunt:
"The relevant place to deal with your problem is right over there, sir. At the door marked "GP OUT OF HOURS SERVICE". Byee!"

The Big Muddy

Yesterday my wife and I embarked on a walk in the Vale of Glamorgan, the attractive rolling countryside to the west of Cardiff. Called the "Three Saints Walk" it featured three ancient churches dedicated to St Bride (Bridget), St Peter and St George. However by the third church we were so beside ourselves with exhaustion and drenching we barely paid it any attention at all.


Uploaded from the internet, the walk was measured at nine miles, but after various detours made necessary due to poor route description and also, I believe, alteration by local farmers who had either moved or removed altogether a number of stiles, it turned out to be more than eleven miles.


 As for the conditions, well, to be fair, the description did warn that some sections were liable to be muddy and "sometimes flooded"; this description was certainly apt in the event. Bogs, mud slides, paths which in the event were swollen streams and some areas that could only be described as full-on quagmire were the order of the day, which at least remained rainless. As it turned out we couldn't have got much wetter if there had been a cloudburst. At one point my wife recklessly attempted to ford a small river that wasn't even mentioned on the map and found herself thigh-deep in fast flowing water. "Give me a hand you idiot" she yelled while stranded half way across, while I simply looked on in a kind of paralysed horror. For a moment relations became a little strained.


These were repaired before long though. There's nothing like facing adversity together to enhance the bonding process...  And when we reached the occasional parts of the route that were on paved roads it was like walking the streets of Paradise.


I pronounce this one of our most difficult walks to date, and certainly the wettest and muddiest. Were we ever glad to get home at last and get under a hot shower and warm our hands around a cup of well deserved tomato soup! Yet this morning I do not find myself overly stiff, which says something about my general fitness level. Must be all the recycling...

Sure, Julian Blanc is a twat. But should we ban him?

You know the guy. He's made a large sum of cash explaining how men can best score with women.
"If you're a white male in Tokyo, you can do pretty much anything. Just grab 'em."
Another of his pronouncements gives tips on that most annoying scenario: when a woman has agreed to have sex but then most unreasonably removes her permission.


These and other obnoxious pieces of counselling have caused him to be banned from entering the U.K. Women's rights workers have said that if you are going to ban Islamic clerics because of their hate-filled rhetoric, then Julian Blanc falls into the same category. This is hard to argue against, though libertarians, of which I humbly count myself as one, counter that by banning him we are infringing on the right to free speech.


So I think he should be allowed in to preach his disgraceful credo, and that we in turn should be allowed to heckle him furiously, hurl jelly, rotten eggs and whatever else comes to hand at this disgusting little creep. While we're about it, how about mounting a twitter campaign against him.? Give him a taste of his own medicine, as it were.


Here's the news Julian. What works best with women in my experience is taking an interest in their lives, rather than going on and on about yourself like so many men do in the mistaken belief women give a toss. Give good eye contact, try not to go on about your work, and develop some interesting hobbies. I have always found that women find juggling sexy for some reason. Give that a try, and don't grope them unless they have indicated that that's what they actually want. Got it? Good. Now fuck off back where you came from.

Jerusalem attack: can you blame the Palestinians?

Damn right you can, if you're an Israeli, (Netenyahu has warned of dire consequences, and you can be sure they will not be long in coming) or come to that a Brit or a Yank. Around the world of Israel supporters, there has been a great cry of outrage at the murders in Jerusalem. Yet these voices were mute during the genocidal violence committed in Gaza just a few brief months ago. I am no supporter of violence, but I can at least go some way to understanding the circumstances which led to the attack.


Have you wondered what's been happening in Gaza since the bombing stopped? The answer is absolutely nothing. The blockade remains in place, meaning that no new building materials have been permitted to enter that stricken area. So those parts of Gaza which by the end of August resembled nothing so much as Berlin at the end of World War II, remain in exactly the same condition as they were when the Israelis decided they had achieved their ends and ceased their bombing campaign. In the West Bank the illegal settlement building programme goes on unabated, despite the agonised protest of the Palestinians who are being pushed aside to make way for them.
 In Jerusalem, the Israeli authorities continue their extremely provocative posture of claiming the right to worship on what they call the Temple Mount, despite this area being for many centuries the domain of Islam. Anyone with any knowledge of the situation there will tell you that this is a deliberate and cynical provocation on the part of the Israelis. They want to goad the Palestinians into a response, and look at that! They got one. Now they can use that good old argument of "See?  We're dealing with a bunch of murderous terrorists here. Now let us handle the situation in whatever way we see fit, to keep our people safe."


The defence of "extreme provocation" is rightly seen as exculpatory in the judicial systems of many civilised countries. Hence we should use extreme caution before condemning the actions of some angry and desperate Palestinians, determined to strike back against a regime which has dominated and subjugated their people for over sixty years.

Bravo Rosetta!

The success of the Rosetta mission has demonstrated, and quite marvellously so, that ESA (the European Space Agency) has finally come of age. In soft-landing a probe on the surface of a speeding comet they have achieved a feat equal to, or even greater than, say, NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover. After all Mars is a rather larger target (by a factor of several billion) as well as being a helluva lot closer. The most recent reports do suggest problems have arisen, which is scarcely surprising. First, its anchoring hooks failed to deploy, causing the probe to bounce more than a kilometre back into space. And when it finally fell back down it was in the lee of a steep cliff which shaded it from the sunlight it needs to keep its batteries charged.


You might be wondering why it bounced so high when it landed the first time, but the answer is simple. The escape velocity on Comet 67P Churimov-Gerasimenko, as it is charmingly named (after the Russian astronomers who discovered it in 1969), is just 3 feet per second. (compare that with the escape velocity here on Earth, which is 7 miles a second), which means a man standing on it could easily jump off it and head out into space. Another problem is the extraordinary topography of the "dirty snowball" in question, which by the way remains as good a definition of what a comet is made up of as anything else. It is riven with deep canyons and vertiginous mesas and pinnacles; indeed, the astounding photographs already sent back from Rosetta show a world remarkably similar in appearance to the comet visited by messrs. Willis, Affleck et al in the film Armageddon. Made in 1996, that film, which amongst other things featured cinema's most improbable astronaut in the shape of Steve Buscemi, seemed at the time to lack authenticity in a number of aspects. Strange then, that one of the unexpected results of the Rosetta mission has been to vindicate that film's (at the time) absurd vision of what the surface of a comet might look like.


It seems Rosetta has now gone into hibernation, though ESA mission control say it might rejuvenate when the comet draws nearer to the Sun. But even if we never hear another word from it, the mission will to me still have been a resounding success.


In  his book 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C Clarke looked forward to a world where the people of the World had finally found something as interesting and exciting as war: space exploration. We aren't there yet, by a long way unfortunately. But we are allowed to dream. One day I can envisage a world where the wealthy nations come together to build a permanent colony on the Moon, send men and women to Mars, and one day even search for life on places like Europa and Enceladus. The technology to do things like this exists already, but we are too busy trying to screw each other every chance we get to devote the energy and will to mount such ambitious projects. But in the future... None of this will happen in my lifetime but it is coming, and children born today will, with any luck, see the first two of these great projects get under way. And their grandchildren could even see the human race reaching for the stars...

Leave Ed alone!

Poor Ed Miliband has been having a hard time of late. The right wing press have been going after him in a campaign of almost unprecedented hatred for some time, and it may be working. There was the incident of him "forgetting" to mention the deficit in his speech to the labour party conference. Then there was the shot of him giving money to a beggar, though the way it was photographed made him look like he wished he was a thousand miles away. Then that shot of him going in for a kiss with his wife, who was clearly not up for it. All this is to say nothing of the disgraceful piece in the Daily Mail filled with irrational vitriol, not about him, but his father! Then of course, there was the embarrassment of that teeshirt...


Fact is, there are issues about his presentation. He looks a little, well, odd; he speaks a little, well, oddly, and perhaps most importantly, the way politics has shifted in the last 20 years means his policies often look not wholly dissimilar to his opponents. In short, he comes over as awkward, louche and wholly unsuited for the high office he already holds, and even less worthy of the even higher office to which he aspires. All this, and more, has conspired to make him the most unpopular labour leader since Neil Kinnock on a bad day. Worse, we are told, he is seen as electoral cyanide to Labour's hopes of winning the next election.


But is it really true? I can't help feeling that much of this is indeed down to the right-wing gutter press, who don't want to see him, or any other labour figure, lead Labour into power next year. And thus they have mounted a highly successful hatchet job on someone who is actually a highly skilled operator whose heart is actually in the right place.


Today's politics is all about soundbites. But I have to say I liked his latest pronouncement. He said he wanted to see the end of zero hours contracts at one end of the economic spectrum, and the end of zero taxes at the other. If he and his mates really are going to do something substantive about those worst excesses of capitalism if they get into power next year, they'd have my vote, right there.

Grief: worse- and stranger, than you can imagine

I was watching the American series Hoarders today. One of the cases featured a woman who had filled her house with all the usual clutter, but among the wall-to-ceiling piles of unusable rubbish that she was nonetheless unable to throw away was a vast collection of dead things: dead rats, dead cats, a dead owl she had found in the street. All had been carefully wrapped in cling film, many had been consigned to a huge freezer. One drawer was found to be stuffed with the husks of dead cicadas, thousands of them. The resident  psychologist dared to ask her why she saved these things, and she replied "to make their deaths less meaningless".


It then emerged that she had been widowed some years before, losing her husband aged 41 to a massive coronary. Ah so! The psychologist, bless her, again dared to go there and invite her to consider that her bereavement and her bizarre practices with dead things might in fact be related. And more kudos to the lady, she eventually got to the point where she was able to acknowledge this.


When my son died suddenly in 2006, my own life began to fall apart. I started to indulge in a series of self destructive behaviours, some of which got me in very serious trouble  With agonising guilt dominating my life, it was almost as if I needed to punish myself for my failures in parenting- surely if I had done my job as a parent properly; if I had simply loved him more, he would be alive today. And I have held to this view despite the best efforts of my wife, my friends and my psychiatrist. Don't try to take my guilt away! I cry- it keeps me warm at night.


I know some people resolve their grief in a meaningful way and go forward to lead useful lives in a reasonably well adjusted way. Good for them. For me, I remain damaged goods, leading a quiet, almost reclusive life where I rarely go out, see my friends seldom and spend the majority of my time reading, recycling and watching the TV. Occasionally I try to write but it is an excruciatingly difficult effort. At least I am now avoiding self-harming behaviour except in minor ways like cigarette smoking and drinking whisky. I expect to continue living this way until my dying day. It isn't so bad, really. But I will never be a whole man again. Don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining. Compared to some my life has a lot going for it. Many, many people have a much worse life than I do. The people of Gaza, the people of West Africa and indeed not a few people right here in Britain would doubtless exchange their miserable lives for mine in a heartbeat.

30,000 research papers show global warming is real: happy now?

You should be. The UN having announced that a meta-analysis of no less than 30,000 research papers confirms that global warming is real and that human activity is contributing to it should be proof enough for anyone with half a brain. Unless of course that brain is under the influence of the vested interests of the fossil fuel business.
The rest of us, hopefully, now see what an enormous problem the Erath is dealing with. Unless CO2 emissions are virtually eliminated by 2100 it seems we will be more or less fucked.


I hear you muttering, if Britain gets a bit warmer that ain't such a bad thing, right? I mean, we could have vineyards like France has now- that's a good thing surely. I wouldn't be too sure. Yes, Britain might get warmer, but it will also get wetter and windier (last winter should serve as an example of how that will work). Far worse is the strong possibility that it could actually get a lot colder in north-western Europe. At the moment we enjoy a far balmier climate than we have any right to considering our high latitude, courtesy of the Gulf Stream, or Atlantic Conveyor as scientists like to call it these days. But as the Greenland icecap melts, which it is already doing at an alarming rate, cool water will flood down from the far north, and this could easily disrupt or even destroy the Gulf Stream. Then we could find ourselves no warmer than say, Newfoundland. FYI, Newfoundland has the same sort of climate as central Norway. So don't start planting those vineyards just yet.


For me, the first thing to do is to completely abandon ALL plans for fracking- not just in the UK but around the world. Instead, let's start looking at sustainable energy sources on the kind of scale which will be needed when oil and gas become anathema. There are plenty out there already, but using some of the massive resources we would have sunk into fracking could bring about revolutionary developments hitherto undreamed of. Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, and boy, do we ever have a necessity right now...