Sorry David Rathband, we failed you

I want to talk about PC David Rathband.

It is my policy not to mention the name of torturers or murderers, but to refer only to their victims.  I strongly believe that they lose the right to their own individual name once they've made the decision to kill somebody else. As an example, when one of the torturer/killers of Liverpool toddler James Bulger was in the news in recent years for committing more offences, I wrote about him by only referring to him as one of James's murderers.

PC David Rathband was shot twice in the face by a known nutter who went on the rampage, killing his ex-girlfriend's lover, maiming his ex-girlfriend and then, finding the first unarmed policeman he could just sitting in his patrol car, went up to him and shot him twice, instantly blinding him.

After a prolonged stand-off, the fucker who'd hurt PC Rathband then shot himself dead.

That was probably the only good thing he'd ever done in his entire life, thus saving us a fortune keeping him incarcerated for life, or letting him back out after a few years only to offend yet again.  Hey, we'd already done that once with him!

Now then.  David Rathband didn't decide one day to be blind.  He had no choice in the matter.  It was forced upon him.  It completely changed his life.  He had to try to learn how to exist in a brand new world of darkness.  He even said he could mentally deal with having been shot, but not with the darkness.

The in-depth interviews with him, notably with Victoria Derbyshire of Radio 5 Live and BBC TV News, showed him as a very optimistic man with a supportive wife and family, yet, with hindsight, he seemed to be struggling with everything, almost crying out for help.

He appears to have been a proud man, an independent man, suddenly plunged into a world of dependency on others.  One can only imagine the frustration.  He noted that help with things like cashflow and advice hadn't been given to him or his family immediately after he was shot, and so set up the Blue Lamp Foundation to help other victims working for the emergency services not suffer the same indignity.

He struggled to regain his composure and live a 'normal' life.  Maybe he couldn't accept his new 'normality', who could?  He probably became more frustrated and depressed.  I'm guessing he probably tried to hide this by immersing himself in other things, but within the home he lashed out, probably verbally and physically, and probably without meaning to.  In many ways he was already on a downward spiral.

Last year the police were called following a 'domestic incident' in the home, but the matter was settled and not taken any further.  Then he moved out, separating from his wife and children.

David Rathband spent some time in Australia with his brother.  Whilst there he had surgery to remove more of the shrapnel from his face and skull.  Then he returned to the UK and hanged himself.

His depression had shown itself to his followers on Twitter, and his tweets had become more 'down'.  Those that realised tried to reach out to him.  Police called him.  The proud man told them he was ok.  But he wasn't.

He was being tortured to death.  A slow, agonising torture, of a proud proud man, too proud to ask for real help.  It was a two year slow and painful torture forced upon him by a madman who'd been given light sentences for what he'd done to previous victims of his violence.

That has to be changed.  We must take more care of the future's victims.

David Rathband was a victim of an evil bastard who made the decision to sneak up on him and blind him just because he could.  David lost everything from that day onwards, and finally he lost the will to live.

But, at least his death was his own decision, and he was in control.  It wasn't anybody else's decision, forced upon him.  For the first time since he was shot, he was in control and making his own decision.

We have to respect that.

We have to learn from it.

Marrying a Northern girl

There is a difference in ability of the housewife when comparing marriages from the South to marriages from the North.  Three men were recently interviewed about their experiences.

The first man married a woman from Essex.  He told her that she was to do the dishes and house cleaning. It took a couple of days, but on the third day, he came home to see a clean house and dishes washed and put away.

The second man married a woman from Sussex. He gave his wife orders that she was to do all the cleaning, dishes and the cooking. The first day he didn't see any results, but the next day he saw it was better. By the third day, he saw his house was clean, the dishes were done and there was a huge dinner on the table.

The third man married a woman from the North, probably Liverpool.  He ordered her to keep the house cleaned, dishes washed, lawn mowed, laundry washed, and hot food on the table for every meal.  He said the first day he didn't see anything, the second day he didn't see anything but by the third day, some of the swelling had gone down and he could see a little out of his left eye, and his arm was healed enough that he could fix himself a sandwich and load the dishwasher.  He still has some difficulty when he visits the toilet though.

Dydd Gwŷl Dewi hapus

March is the month for the Irish to celebrate their Irishness.  They do this by getting very drunk on the 17th, St Patrick's Day.

(Please use your felt tip pens on your screen to colour me in)

Today, Welsh school children will be colouring in their pictures of dragons, and celebrating their Welshness, for St David's Day.  Well, apparently that's what I used to have to do as a child living just outside of Swansea many many years ago.

But.

When April 23rd comes English people will, as usual, stand around apologising for being English and anybody mentioning it being St George's Day will of course be screamed at and arrested for being a racist.

It would be nice if things were different and the English didn't feel any intimidation when it comes to celebrating their national day later this year.  It should be as fun as St David's Day is for the Welsh.

So then.  We've got just over a month to make things different this year.  Will we?  Naaaah.

February the 29th

Today doesn't exist most years.  It's Leap Year's Day.

I dunno if being born on February 29th is annoying or if it makes a person feel special as a 'leapling'.  I mean, let's face it, they'll have only had 10 actual birthdays when they look around, well, 40, if they stay true to their intercalary day of birth.  Or there's all that choice as to whether to celebrate their birthday on February 28th or March 1st during those non-leap years.  So much hassle.  Yet, sometimes I think it would have been cool to have been born on February 29th.

I do get giddy at pointless things.  Like recently watching an odometer click over to 25,000 miles.  Or noticing it was 2:22 overnight on February 22nd.

My giddiest time is, of course, the run up to the start of a new year.  New Year's Eve holds great excitement for me, especially compared to, say, Christmas Day.  It is literally the highlight of the year.  Sad, eh?

I guess we all like symmetry.  And of course, years ago when we were far more stupid as a species we used to fear numbers and measurement.  Actually, it wasn't so long ago.  Despite all our advancements in understanding of the world around us, we made complete anuses of ourselves when we all thought the world would end as the time clicked over from 1999 to 2000 and what people bizarrely mistook for the start of a new millennium (It actually started on January 1st, 2001, not 2000).

Followers of some of the Middle East religions originating from within the various feuding dessert tribes, such as Christianity, have this irrational fear of the number 666 or 13.  And, hey, Fridays.  Add the Friday to the 13th of a month and people fear getting out of bed, such is their stupidity!

But, when it comes to February the 29th, what have people started to imagine it holds?  Well, scariest for free men everywhere is that it is becoming a day upon which a woman can ask him to marry her.  Shudder.  And, tradition holds that his refusal can only be allowed if he buys her 12 pairs of gloves (A glove for each month of the following year that she has to hide her lack of engagement ring).

Now, my thinking is that they should be rubber gloves to enable her to get back in the kitchen where she belongs and to stop having ideas above her station!

Actually, guys, pretend you've become Scottish.  Leap years are unlucky in Scotland, and Scottish marriages are doomed.  Or, maybe that's just something put about by terrified men.

Anyway, Happy Leap Year's Day everybody.

The demonisation of carbon dioxide

We are starting to enter a period when, despite its teaching in schools as fact, voices are finally being heard that say all is not as it is being taught.  

No, I'm not taking about compulsory god-bothering or training young innocent minds to just accept the fairy-story of conventional and traditional Middle-eastern originating religious doctrine, but the new age religion of global warming.

Those who reject or question Christianity, for example, are mainly no longer hounded or put to death in most of Europe.  It is just about acceptable to be sceptical or even to have views that completely reject all the mumbo jumbo of the belief system and to be able to say this out loud without fear of being strapped to a ducking stool by the Catholic Church.

This freedom of thought is less available to those who don't fall for the green religions.  Those who dare question or even reject the new age doctrine of the self-appointed eco-warriors, are being subjected to terrible acts against them. 

When the emails from the server of the publicly funded Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia were released into the public domain (known as 'Climategate') back in 2009, with more released in 2011, we learned so much.  It was a tipping point for the truth.  Not only was there still complete confusion within the climate scientists and their results, evidence of desperate efforts to try to fix the results to fit a particular 'cause' as they called it, instructions from non-scientists on what needed to be 'proved' by their work and what need to be suppressed, but also a world full of bullying and intimidation.  What an eye-opener.

They hounded anybody who dared to publish papers that didn't echo the mantra that had been pre-decided by the multi-Billion Dollar funded Greenpeace and other oppressive 'non-governmental organisations' carrying their common agenda of centralising control over the world via the invention of the demonisation of carbon dioxide.  Publications were threatened, Editors attacked and abused, and attempts were made to cut off funding for any scientist daring to publish research not agreeing with 'the cause'.  It also appeared that they were refusing to share or show their raw datasets with anybody, despite it being required by law.  

The bottom line is that the advocates of the global warming scam have no shame in their attempts to push their religion on the world, and to intimidate anybody who might wish to make a stand against their 'cause'.  

Opposing them there are a few small private institutions dotted around the world, there to give a focus for the sceptical voice, and to challenge the 'faith' and dogma.  People can donate money to such institutions in order to fund their work.  One such organisation in America is the Heartland Institute.

The Heartland Institute is a 'conservative' think-tank that deals with a range of subjects, only one of which is the search for truth about climate change.  However, some years ago in order to protect them, it stopped publishing the names of those who were funding it.  Previous funders having been subjected to intimidation and abuse from the eco-warriors, of course, since that is their way.

Despite operating with quite a modest income compared to the multi-Billion Dollar gravy train of the Global Warming industry, the Heartland Institute was gaining headway in the promotion of the alternative scientific views on Global Warming / Climate Change and its opposition to the growing global centralisation of control over taxation and laws governing our reaction to the Global Warming / 'Carbon' taxation scam. 

This headway particularly angered one very vocal leftie called Doctor Peter Gleick who decided to attack Heartland from the inside.

Now, Gleick used to be on a number of different highly influential scientific bodies and institutions, and is an accepted expert on water.  However, his new religion meant that he would appear wherever he could, attempting to argue down or shout at climate change sceptics.  Most notable he would also lecture about scientific integrity.

One day Gleick decided to impersonate a Heartland Institute board member and opened a false Gmail account in the name of the man he was impersonating.  From this he wrote to administrative staff within Heartland asking that his new email address be added to the central address book so that he receive copies of everything going to members of the board.  He also asked for various internal documents to be forwarded to him.

Not finding any smoking gun he could use against Heartland, he added these documents to a completely fabricated 'Strategy' document, and released them to various blogs and media outlets that are pro the new religion.  They, of course, had a field day, especially as what was written in the false document was deliberately very damaging.  In addition, some of the funders and some of the projects to be funded were also now in the public domain, again putting people in the firing line for more personal abuse and attacks from eco-warriors.

Gleick eventually confessed and resigned from various positions of influence, leaving the faithful with extreme egg-on-face, yet somehow trying to justify their mentor's actions.  The evidence of style and content points to Gleick having fabricated the fake strategy document, but he has not yet admitted this, saying instead that he received it anonymously through the post, honest gov, and so went phishng for the other documents with the false Gmail account.

Of course this gave the climate sceptic community a field day.  Well, a field fortnight.  Many many words have been written about the whole affair, and it does have a lot of detail, a lot of twists and turns to it.  More details are here.

However, here's the big thing for me.  If the case for man-made disastrous climate change is proven, then why the need for this kind of subterfuge?  I mean, take a more conventional religion like Christianity. Sceptics of the Christian religion would soon shut the fuck up and have no leg to stand on were a 'god' to suddenly appear in the sky amid lightening bolts and claps of thunder and introduce their son Jesus. There would no longer be a debate, game over for the sceptics!

So, why isn't the global warming religion, with 'carbon' as its version of Satan, hitting us with something that cannot be disputed?  

Why are all its predictions turning out to be wrong?  

And, most importantly, apart from us no longer having control at a democratic level, why are we being put into poverty to pay some people to get so very rich out of it all?

Proof that we can never trust journalists

I’m supposed to be able to trust my local (well, regional) paper to tell me the truth and to be accurate about stuff. But I can’t.

Newspapers being useful - used to build a house!

Newspapers are written by journalists who are dominated by the middle-class, well-bred quite wealthy intellectuals and chattering classes who’ve been bred to have centre-left to left-wing political beliefs. Rarely are they ‘Conservative’, instead usually aligning with the left of the Liberal-Democrats. These days, with the coalition government to confuse their pretty little minds (Journos love to hilariously call them the "Con-dem"s), they have been pushed even further to the left than ever. Sometimes they are very open about being anti-“the right”, and yet I’m supposed to trust them when it comes to providing me with untainted facts.

True, not all journalists are bad. But they do have among them a very high number of drug and drink abusers. This must additionally distort anything they have to say or their actual understanding of the world around them. I mean, would you really trust a drunk to tell you the clear facts about anything? These journalists see the world around them and write about it through their haze. Unlike with broadcast media, there is no requirement that articles be written from a factual and neutral position. Their bias or their misunderstanding, however subtle, is ever present and they are not bound by law to seek the truth or balance. Their inability to be in touch with the people they ‘serve’ is astounding.

A classic example of how my regional Labour-supporting paper is put together by people with no understanding or grasp on the world immediately around them can be demonstrated by the TV listings. The North-West does not have analogue TV (it is nearly completely phased out across the rest of the country too) which consisted of only 5 channels. Instead, the barest minimum that anybody will have is via standard ‘Freeview’ and is around 30 channels. A huge number will also have the many more that Virgin cable or Sky brings, since large parts of the area are infested by the voluntarily unemployed for whom Sky or cable TV is an essential.

However, for reasons that make no sense to anybody, the regional paper’s TV listings are dominated by BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4, and Channel 5. Details of programmes to be broadcast on these five stations will be given liberal space in the paper with the title of each programme and a synopsis. Indeed, lots of nice unused white space exists in this area where these listings are. Then, on the next page, all scrunched together and titled “Freeview and Satellite” are the listings for only a few of the 25 remaining channels.

The first ignorance here is to title this tiny section “Freeview” as if it is somehow something different to the 5 channels being given the huge space, which are also “Freeview”. There is only “Freeview” upon which all channels are equal and there are over 30 of them. Secondly, each channel under this section has in a tiny font just the times and the names of the programmes scheduled with no synopsis or explanation unlike those kindly given to the five channels singled out for some weird special attention.

In other words they list all the other channels beyond the random five they’ve decided to give nice details for, as if they are some kind of after-thought or even unavailable to the bulk of the population. Why? They are all the norm for everybody.

It can only be because they have no concept or finger on the pulse of what is truly happening around them. It also demonstrates my points precisely about how we can’t and shouldn’t ever trust journalists to tell us the truth or to see our world and how different it is to theirs.

Universal Truth Number One

A lot of people say that Christopher England is from another planet.  I've no idea how they found out, but hey, humans miss out on so much!

I have this brilliant poster on the wall of my home office y'know. Makes me smile and puts me in my place.  

Well, sort of.