2011 Report

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Iran Is Worried About Human Rights In Britain

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Iran has called on the British government to “restrain” the police and stop the “violent treatment” of rioters.

The foreign ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, said dialogue would calm the situation, and urged the UK to respond to the demands of the “protesters”. He also asked human rights organisations to investigate the death of Mark Duggan, which led to the riots. Hossein Ebrahimi, the deputy head of the parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy, said Britain should facilitate the visit of a group of experts to investigate “human rights violations” in the UK “without making false excuses”, according to the English-language state-run Press TV. Ebrahimi said that “the group of rapporteurs intend to interview political detainees and to give a report to international bodies on the treatment received by the protesters,” the report said.

Iranian media have presented the recent rioting and looting across London and other cities as social unrest fuelled by bad living conditions and police mistreatment of the poor. Iranian MPs condemned what they described as police violence. “An Iranian majlis [parliament] national security and foreign policy sub-committee has urged the UK to immediately stop violent treatment of people protesting the killing of a black man,” Press TV reported on Tuesday. Mohammad Karim Abedi, the vice-chairman of the parliamentary committee “urged London to order the police to stop treating protesters violently”.

Iran’s Fars news agency, mouthpiece of the revolutionary guards, has widely reported the rioting and looting across Britain. “We advise the monarchical regime of Britain to respect the rights of its people by avoiding savage behaviour,” Fars quoted Seyed Hossein Naqavi, an Iranian MP of the parliamentary human rights committee, as saying. Naqavi said: “The British people have come to the streets to protest at the security forces’ deliberate gunfire at Duggan.”

Iran is an ancient civilisation with a rich culture from which we could learn a lot. Unfortunately the bunch of thugs who seized power by force 30 years ago should hang their heads in shame at their sickening regime rather than preaching to other countries. The buffoon Ahmadinejad addressed the UN with the long dead ‘hidden imam’ looking over his shoulder. The guy who really runs the country, supreme leader Khamenei, claims to have met this imam who disappeared 1,000 years ago. It is bad enough that this dictatorship is headed by people who are delusional. What is more important is that they preside over murder, torture, rape and a system of unspeakable savagery.

Dozens of activists were killed and thousands detained after Iran’s disputed presidential elections in 2009, and there is widespread torture and rape inside the country’s prisons. Those detained often disappear completely so nobody knows whether they have been executed or remain imprisoned without charge or trial.

There is no proper judicial system in Iran, but in the name of sharia, they stone people to death and execute gay teenagers after savagely flogging them. Recently they sentenced a man to have his eyes destroyed with acid, but the victim of his crime decided not to carry out the punishment. This sickening barbarism is in the context of a society whose economy has been wrecked and the regime is kept in power by unaccountable thugs calling themselves revolutionary guards.

Of course we should have no regard for the criminal Iranian state suggesting how we might sort out our problems, but they feel they can make this suggestion because they are offended by British government calls for human rights enquiries in Iran. This should be a lesson to our government. Concentrate on curing the problems of the country you were elected to govern. I hope that the Iranian people will soon be able to choose a legitimate government of their own, but that is a matter for them to achieve.

Related articles

• UK riots: Iran condemns police ‘violence’ (guardian.co.uk)
• Iranians Use London Riots As Propaganda (news.sky.com)

Liquor, Lies and Lethal Illness

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Over 20 years ago the Royal College of Physicians set what it called safe limits for the consumption of alcohol. Since then the government has continuously pumped out the message that it is dangerous for men to drink more than 21 units and women 14 units each week. Ten years after this campaign started Dr Richard Smith said drinking guidelines were plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence it was “more of an intelligent guess.”

This made no difference whatever to the persistent, and expensive, nagging to stay within the limits or your health could be seriously damaged. Now MP‘s have decided that it is their turn to decide how much alcohol we ought to drink. The House of Commons Science & Technology Committee will be comparing UK guidance with that in other countries and examining the evidence base of these guidelines. What is the betting that the evidence used elsewhere for their propaganda campaigns is just the same as Dr Smith has told us was used in Britain.

When the MP’s, who do not have the medical or scientific knowledge to do what they say they are going to do, they will make recommendations to the chief medical officers. When they have made this new guess about what drinking levels to preach at us our Parliamentarians will “look at official attempts to educate the public about alcohol abuse.”

That could be a good idea. In the 20 years since the Department of Health has been throwing our taxes at pestering people to drink less, alcohol related deaths have doubled. This should be an extremely good lesson that this public ‘education’ is worse than useless.

People will always want to use alcohol because they have done so since the earliest information we have about humans. What is most likely to result in people drinking more than is good for them is that they are not content with their lives. Some causes of discontent are having less money than you would like because of high taxes; being bullied by a hectoring government into doing things differently than you would choose; being lied to by authority figures who claim knowledge of things that they do not know; and having a government wastes the money of its citizens instead of creating the conditions for them to be better off.

We know that booze has risks, now shut up and leave us to decide when we fancy a drink.

Justice or Lunacy

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A military court has sentenced Commander Anthony Gray to six months in gaol for fiddling £53,000 pounds of school fees grant. It isn’t important to go into the details of the crime which has come to light because of an acrimonious divorce.

Apart from the prison sentence Gray was required to repay the money that he fraudulently claimed. Quite right too of course. Where things start to get a bit crazy is in his being sacked from the Navy with his pension lump sum of £96,000 and annual income of £32,000 intact.

Gray is 49 years old, fit and with significant skills. He should be able to move onto another career in which he might be expected to be able to earn a healthy income. This man is quite obviously no danger to the public. He has broken the trust with his employers and it is right that he must lose his job, but why on earth do taxpayers have to be landed with the cost of keeping him in prison when he could be on the way to being a tax paying worker again.

Obviously he should pay back the money he fiddled. That’s not going to be a problem with his £96k lump sum is it? Instead of making this man more expensive to the public, why wasn’t his punishment a financial one? Instead of just paying back the cash that he ripped off from us it would be a more appropriate punishment for him to forfeit the whole of the £96k.

Instead of his silly piece of theatre in saying that Gray would be punished with ‘the clang of the prison door’, Judge Advocate Alistair McGrigor should have used his brain a bit and worked out what was in the best interests of society as well as penalising Gray appropriately.

Related articles

• Navy commander jailed for boarding school fraud (telegraph.co.uk)

Taking A Liberty

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As I frequently state, I am a Libertarian. I believe in individual rights and responsibilities. A couple of years ago I joined the Libertarian Party UK because they seemed to hold the same views as me and I would like to see those views expressed more widely in British politics.

I met some great people and I have made some firm friendships from being in the LPUK, but I found myself exposed to the darker side of politics as well.

A few months ago the Anna Raccoon blog posted a piece about how badly she had been treated by Andrew Withers, the leader of the LPUK. I already had some worries about him so this blog grabbed my attention and I started to look into the man and ask some questions.

Instead of getting answers to my questions I got some very abusive emails and then a campaign was started to try to smear my character. I won’t repeat the whole story, but what it amounts to is that the LPUK leader, Andrew Withers, has kept full control of all LPUK money throughout its existence. We don’t know how much that is, but it is certainly more than £15,000. There is no money left now and Withers has failed to account for what he has done with it.

Withers has form with money matters. He is disqualified from being a company director until 2016 because he carried on trading an insolvent company causing several people to lose a great deal of money. Check on the whole sorry story by visiting these two blogs:

http://outspokenrabbit.blogspot.com/2011/07/cult-of-andrew-withers-deserve-what.html?showComment=1311263093397#c8148848202897222596

http://www.annaraccoon.com/politics/libertarian-libertinage/

Boo Hoo! The Gull Stole My Chips.

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A couple of years ago Michael O’Leary got a lot of flak for suggesting that fat passengers on Ryanair should pay more. It didn’t happen of course. Either the human rights lobby swamped it or O’Leary was just getting a bit of free publicity again. Whatever the reason, I am disappointed.

Twice in recent flights I have had a very fat man sitting next to me, or more accurately, on me. Not the same man you understand. The first time, some pig featured giant levered himself into the seat, settled himself down and started the loud snoring that he would continue throughout the flight. Obviously I couldn’t use the arm rest on his side. In fact I couldn’t see the arm rest because of the rolls of fat flopping over it into my space.

The problem is not only with the overflowing gut. Because of his massive thighs, the guy couldn’t keep his legs together. One knee splayed into the aisle and the other was right across where my legs needed to go. He must have been accustomed to this situation because whenever the passing trolley full of exciting scratch cards and over priced perfume clouted his protruding leg the only effect was to raise the volume and pace of his snorts.

Just to add to the fun, my piggy companion poured with sweat the whole time and he stank.

You can imagine my pleasure when on the very next flight I was just settled into my seat when another hippopotamus started to lever his enormous bulk into the next seat and once again my armrest and leg space disappeared. This one didn’t smell or snore. I felt almost grateful.

Getting on the queue for the bag drop on my very next flight I was brought to edge of panic by a vast gutted bloke right in front of me. We had checked in online and already had our seat numbers so the chances of him being next to me can’t be all that high can they? After the fearful trip up the aircraft steps and the mechanical “good evenings” of the cabin staff I broke into a genuine smile to see a skinny kid of about nine already sitting in the seat next to mine.

All of this is very recent, but it was brought back to the forefront of my mind today when I saw a news clip about Bridlington chip shops putting up warning notices about seagulls nicking chips.

Chip shop owner Justin Carpenter said he was now losing money because of the number of chip thefts. Mr Carpenter said that the attacks were affecting his profits.

“The seagulls dive-bomb them, just take their food and there is nothing you can do about it,” he said.

“So the customers come back to us and we feel obliged to give them the food to reimburse them, and that’s us losing money.”

I don’t know if he was doing an O’Leary and just trying to get some free publicity, but I would like to tell Justin that he hasn’t thought this through. The only effect of his compassionate business model is that he is going to have a load of greedy guzzlers lining up for free seconds and modest sized transport users will be smothered by chip bloated bellies.

Don’t drive yourself bust Justin. If your customers can’t manage to keep out of the way of the gulls make them pay for their replacements. As for you Michael, have the courage of your convictions and follow through with your threats. If a passenger doesn’t fit into the space of one seat they need to pay for two.

Related articles

• VIDEO: Warning over gulls stealing chips (bbc.co.uk)

Forget it Jacob

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Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa has yet again announced that Gadaffi is willing to accept a truce.

This is a repeat performance of Zuma’s visit to Tripoli a few weeks ago when he could not even be bothered to go on to Benghazi and meet the Transitional Council.

The Anti-Gadaffi forces have consolidated their positions and Gadaffi has not moved an inch from his original position of staying in the power that he seized 42 years ago. He has sustained his leadership by murder, torture, bribery and repression. Why would anybody take seriously a ceasefire proposal proferred by the thug dictator and a buffoon president backed up by the entirely useless African Union.

Go home Jacob and try to do something useful for the country whose economy you have wrecked and whose young democracy you have insulted.

Splatter Blatter or Fuck FIFA

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I am not interested in football and don’t know anything about it, but it is a bank holiday and this evening the Weakest Link was not on so I ended up watching Blatter‘s news conference.

What I saw was the worst example of slimy politician responding to every question with evasion and irrelevance as well as playing stupid games with the questioning journalists by such inanities as:

“that’s more than one question, which do you want me to answer?”

This man has presided over world football for thirteen years. It is blindingly obvious that it is riddled with corruption and its members have been using it for their own benefit as well as advancing the cause of things they are associated with. What does Blatter say to all this?

“There is no crisis.”

“There are some problems which will be resolved in the FIFA family.”

Vomit, vomit.

According to Wikipedia, Blatter was once president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, an organisation which tried to stop women replacing suspender belts with pantyhose.

Perhaps it is time for him to return to his original calling.

Go on, go out and get bladdered. FIFA is already.

Bob Dylan

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Happy birthday Bob.

When Robert Zimmerman grew beyond channelling Woody Guthrie to become one of the great musical poets he brought us passion and meaning in music that was different from those who had gone before him.

Well done Bob.

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• Bob Dylan: Song to Woody (davidjmarkowitzmusic.wordpress.com)
• [Gallery] Bob Dylan Album Covers And Song Lists (wncx.radio.com)
• Seventy On Seventy: The 70 Best Bob Dylan Songs, A To Z (Part Two Of Two) (blogs.villagevoice.com)
• David Wild: “Forever Young”: A 70th Birthday Playlist For Bob Dylan (huffingtonpost.com)

Gil Scott-Heron

Goodbye Gil and thank you for what you have left us.

 

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