Weeding The Human Plant From The Garden Of Eden

Move over, Leni Riefenstahl, you now have serious competition indeed, courtesy of the smiling eugenicists at 1010 and their catechism of cataclysm, "No Pressure":



The green thumb of the left hand of environmentalism is soaked with crimson this week, as a British taxpayer-supported group's attempt to bring attention to their upcoming advertising campaign got a little more attention than they bargained for. Against all reason, they packaged their appeal to conservation within a despicable gorefest launched with a preview in the UK-based Guardian newspaper, whose readers were given the first look at this "edgy" ecology lesson last Thursday, reminding us all that we can't expect to make omelettes without first breaking a few eggs:

[W]hy take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask [director Franny Armstrong]: "Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that's not worth jumping up and down about, I don't know what is."
"We 'killed' five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change," she adds.
Jamie Glover, the child-actor who plays the part of Philip and gets blown up, has similarly few qualms: "I was very happy to get blown up to save the world."

Two reactions. One, it's yet another example of how the well-intentioned animists who can successfully see the spark of the divine Creator in slugs and bugs, seem to have exhausted that insight by the time they get around to seeing their fellow human beings. No wonder we can be treated as just so much collateral damage, our tilling is merely part of the toil that goes into preparing the soil of any field for planting, a necessary evil familiar to every hopeful gardener.

Two: is this film really aimed at the increasing number of blaspheming skeptics no longer holding their iron-clad faith in the man-made religion of man-made global warming? My sense is that it's real target audience are the fellow travelers who might be straying from the party line. Tithing must be in serious decline for No Pressure to warrant shot after shot of terrified blood-stained survivors of each explosive purge. Death comes quickly, after all, to the characters in the vignettes who disagree; the terror is reserved for those left behind, haunted by the shocking price to be paid for free will. Beyond the purported conservationist message of the film, isn't it also whispering:

"When you join this club, you never leave."

No pressure, because there's no real freedom to choose in the first place.

The artful photography, the studied realism of the special effects, the impressive acting (is there anything harder to pull off than acting natural..?), all this and more reveal how much thought, labor, and talent must have gone into the creation of this monstrosity. There was just one thing missing: moral judgment. An admission agreed to by the sponsors of the film, who upon seeing it were reported to be "absolutely appalled" at the result of their good faith. Thankfully, the backers have come to their senses, so that the film will no longer be distributed to UK theaters, as originally planned. (!)

"Many people found the resulting film extremely funny", the filmmakers contend in their eventual apology. This is absolutely true, as we may read, with mounting horror, as the initial article in the Guardian fills with reader comments rising to the defense of the indefensible, revealing all the more clearly how far Great Britain has fallen in our lifetime. Where once there were giants like William Wilberforce, capable of seeking justice for people and animals both, now there remains caricatures of his shadow, willing to see people as animals, ready for herding... and culling.

The sickest joke seems to have turned out to be in the apology:

At 10:10 we're all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.

"Live and learn"... a priviledge not extended to the heretical characters of their macabre video.

Twilight of the old party system?

Belmont Club » That’s the Way You Do It

The situation in which Britain finds itself is so dire that the Governor of the Bank of England told an American economist that whichever party won the current general election it would be “out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be.” David Cameron may find, immediately after taking control of the ship of state that he has been promoted to the captaincy of the Titanic.

That makes me feel a bit better about watching the UK election results tomorrow.

In the meantime, you might be interested in Adam K's analysis of how, in an America where the political center has all but been abandoned, politics is becoming a fight in which each of the two major parties seeks to destroy its rival in order to institute some new kind of political center and debate on new terms. However, the more a party is expressly aware of and publicly vocal about its desire to destroy the other party, the less successful it can be. Adam thus looks for the political issues that, if fought seriously, may nonetheless have the pragmatic effect of destroying the "criminal cult" that is today's Democratic Party.

The insanity of Jew/Israel Phobia

A Chinese friend asked me the other day if British people were antisemitic. I explained that a prejudice against Jews is common there but that traditionally it is not stated forcefully but is just part of the culture's undercurrent. He said he understood exactly what I meant - that's what the British are like. I wonder, however, how much of humanity can see through the absurd antisemitism in this video or how subtle will have to be the future that inherits this mindlessness:CAMERA responds:

The Economist, with Al Jazeera hot on its heels, has dug up a new Israeli villain: traffic lights.

This joins aphrodisiac bubble gum, poisonous candy, super rats, and stripper assassins in Israel's purported arsenal of tools to oppress Arabs.

According to a March 6, 2010 article in the mainstream British news magazine, traffic lights in Jerusalem "flick green only briefly for cars from Palestinian districts while staying green for cars from Jewish settlements for minutes."

When pressed by CAMERA to provide evidence for this wild charge, the Economist provided a list of intersections at which drivers from Arab neighborhoods are allegedly forced to wait at long red lights to make way for those from Jewish neighborhoods. Shortly afterward — coincidentally, or not — Al Jazeera English broadcast a short news segment purportedly demonstrating the discrimination at one of the intersections named by the Economist.

A CAMERA field investigation reveals that the Economist and Al Jazeera claims are absurdly false — the latest examples of how even the most benign irritations encountered in quotidian life are manipulated to demonize the Jewish state. In fact, the discrepancy between the timing of red and green lights is related, as in cities across the world, to street size and traffic flow, affecting cars from both Arab and Jewish neighborhoods equally.

Beit Hanina Junction

The Economist's first example was an intersection in northern Jerusalem near the Arab neighborhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanina and the predominantly Jewish neighborhoods of Neve Yaakov and Pisgat Zeev. This same area was the subject of the Al Jazeera feature.

According to the Economist, traffic lights for cars approaching Jerusalem from the Arab areas remained green for 18 seconds, while traffic from the Jewish neighborhoods toward Tel Aviv enjoy the benefit of a one-minute-and-30-second green light.
This comparison is highly disingenuous, as it does not compare apples to apples.
The image [above] shows the neighborhoods mentioned by the Economist. The intersection best matching the magazine's description is shown in the highlighted square.

The road from Pisgat Zeev and Neve Yaakov to Tel Aviv is Route 1, a major thoroughfare that crosses Israel. Traffic on this busy highway naturally has priority at junctions with smaller roads such as Derech Shua'fat, which comes south to Route 1 from the Arab neighborhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanina.

A more apt equivalent to Derech Shua'fat at this intersection is Rechov Sheshet Hayamim, the road leading north to Route 1 from the Jewish neighborhoods of Givat Hamivtar and Ramat Eshkol. At this intersection, travelers encounter similar wait times to those on Derech Shuafat — a green light for 16 seconds and a red light for one minute and 41 seconds.

Another comparable intersection can be found less than two kilometers to the west, at the junction of the road from the Jewish neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo and Route 1. Here, motorists encounter a much shorter green light then do those at the Derech Shuafat intersection.

Clearly, then, the discrepancy between red- and green-light times at the intersection is a function of road size and not ethnicity. Traffic on larger roads have priority over smaller roads that intersect it, whether those roads are from the Arab neighborhoods or Jewish neighborhoods.

Of course, the major arteries into downtown Jerusalem are open to all travelers. Motorists from the Arab neighborhoods are certainly able to use any of the larger roads crossing Route 1. For example, it is a mere half kilometer detour for Beit Hanina residents opting to skip the allegedly-racist traffic light by using the overpass highway crossing Route 1 (Route 60/Derech Ha'aluf Uzi Narkis).
[...]
Unsurprisingly, Al Jazeera bombarded viewers with additional outrageous fabrications. Reporter Jacky Rowland alleged:

The settlers journey to work will soon be even easier, because the municipality is building a tramway for them. The rail lines have robbed the Palestinians of two lanes of traffic.

The absurdity and hypocrisy of this charge is dumbfounding. The tramway is not being built for "settlers," but for all Jerusalem's residents, both Jewish and Arab. In fact, there will be numerous stations serving Arab neighborhoods. This is precisely why it "robs" Palestinians of traffic lanes — just as it robs Jews of traffic lanes where the rail is being built in Jewish neighborhoods.

Once a people become so averse to asking sane questions in an attempt to actually understand reality, how low can their culture go before it self-destructs? Next time, you think you can't be bothered to stand up to the epidemic of Jew/Israel hatred, ask yourself if this sinkhole is where you want our culture and intellectual leadership to go. And what about the police?

You know what the problem with Jews is? They just own too many cars, create too much economic hussle and bustle wherever they "settle". How dare they!

Out, damned spot! out, I say!

Gordon Brown heard on mic calling a voter a 'bigot' | The Sun |News|Election 2010

BLUNDERING Gordon Brown has been caught on microphone calling a voter a "bigot".

The Prime Minister was heard describing an exchange he had just had with lifelong Labour supporter Gillian Duffy, 65 — on the campaign trail in Rochdale, Lancs, today — as a "disaster".

He made the comments as he got into his car after speaking to Mrs Duffy — not realising that he still had the Sky News mic pinned to his shirt.

He told an aide: "That was a disaster - they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? It's just ridiculous."

Asked what she had said, he replied: "Everything, she was just a bigoted woman."

The PM was approached by the grandmother in the street after visiting a community payback scheme in Rochdale.

She tackled him on a series of issues including the national debt, taxes, student financing and immigration.

Mrs Duffy, a widow, said she was "very disappointed" with Mr Brown's remarks.

After hearing what the Prime Minister had said about her, she said it was "very upsetting".

She added: "He's an educated person, why has he come out with words like that?

Well Mrs. Duffy, this reminds me of something one of the more learned people Canada has ever produced, Northrop Frye, once wrote: education doesn't make bad people good; it makes them more dangerous.

In the world view of the most dangerous people in the West, a woman politely raising concerns about immigration becomes a disaster and a bigot. Pretty much sums up the Gnostic's war against the common people and the nation which can never live up to his world-transforming fantasies. However, it seems that Gordon Brown is now learning what all Gnostics are fated to experience: humiliation at the hands of the unaccomodating reality of ordinary people

Mrs. Duffy has declared she won't vote in this election. Her longtime Labourite faith has been dashed. Too much reality all around. And as Duffy notes the would-be elect are not even trying to transform the most unbending object:

he's not doing anything about the national debt and it's going to be tax, tax, tax for another 20 years to get out of this mess - and he's calling me a bigot.

(Mrs. Duffy on hearing what Gordon Brown thinks of her - from video here)
More Video and commentary.

RELATED (Roger L. Simon):

I have said something like this before, but at the risk of being a bore, and because of the times in which we live, I will repeat myself:

The real reason liberals accuse Tea Partiers of racism is that contemporary American-style liberalism is in rigor mortis. Liberals have nothing else to say or do. Accusations of racism are their last resort.

The European debt crisis — first Greece, then Portugal and now Spain (and Belgium, Ireland and Italy, evidently) — has shown the welfare state to be an unsustainable economic system. The US, UK and Japan, according to the same Financial Times report, are also on similar paths of impoverishment through entitlements.

Many of us have known this for a long time, just from simple math. Entitlements are in essence a Ponzi scheme. Now we have to face that and do something serious about it or our economy (the world economy) will fall apart.

Liberals, leftists or progressives — whatever they choose to call themselves — have a great deal of trouble accepting this. To do so they would have to question a host of positions they have not examined for years, if ever, not to mention have to engage in discussions that could threaten their livelihood and jeopardize their personal and family associations...

Britain's terminal flight from reality

Don't let the voters know we face bankruptcy - Telegraph
Clearly, with no serious political opposition, with the nation-destroying Labour Party still an electoral contender, the UK is dead (it's like British Columbia, which has a mad hatter as its Premier, because no intelligent opposition can emerge in a corrupt post-national culture); can any rebirth occur once the inevitable crisis can no longer be postponed, or will there only be years of ransacking to come? And will Canada offer sanctuary to our Head of State and Her clan, let alone the millions of others who will soon want to escape? I weep.

The problem of inviting immigrants when you don't know who you are...

BBC News - Hardtalk - Bishop Nazir-Ali: 'Multiculturalism was a mistake'. A friend sends us this link to a video clip of Bishop Nazir-Ali. Short and sweet. However, while appearing to talk tough on "Hardtalk" his may be a charitable interpretation of the mistake of British multiculturalism now that we know it has been a conscious policy of the Labour party to destroy traditional British culture, the culture that is alleged by Labour to be the evil basis of the "right's" electoral support.

Great Moments In British Journalism: "What's That On His Head?"

A sobering glimpse into the state of religious education in modern Great Britain, courtesy of two British reporters baffled by the sight of Catholic Vice-President Joe Biden giving a press conference on Ash Wednesday.



Notice the little dig they try to get in at Vancouver's expense, in the following transcribed excerpt:

[0:28] British reporterette: "What's happened to his head? I'm sure that's what everyone is asking at home."

British reporter: "Yes, I don't know. That's the simple answer."

British reporterette: "It looks like he's walked into a door, doesn't he! [laughs] Yeah, I'm sure that's one of the questions that the networks will be asking."

British reporter: "He's been up in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics, and was the face of the administration there, so whether there was some accident on what little ice there's been up in Vancouver, we don't know. But no doubt as a result of this appearance, we will get an opportunity to ask his spokespeople, what the cause of that is."

British reporterette: [giggles]

I'd make a snide comment of my own, but the weather is so beautiful today, I'm instead going to take advantage of the "little ice there's been up in Vancouver", debate which sweater I should wear as I go for a walk under yet another cloudless sky, bask in the warm sunshine and buy a hotdog from the friendly couple on the corner.

[Hat Tip to this morning's episode of my favorite Minnesota radio show, the First Team of the Patriot's Northern Alliance Radio Network]

Saturday Stories

Stories fished out from troubled waters, on a cold rainy Saturday.

Slave nation’s lucrative export of freedom monuments: A North Korea-based company is being increasingly tapped by African nations to build cut-rate large statues devoted to the theme of freedom. The WSJ has the story on the 164-foot tall statue currently nearing completion in Senegal:

North Korea is mainly known for a totalitarian regime overseeing economic failure. But it has also produced a successful export business—building monuments to freedom and independence. The statues' selling point: They are big, simple and cheap.
Over the past decade, Mansudae has built dozens of statues and monuments for cash-strapped African countries. Botswana cut the ribbon on a memorial to three tribal chiefs in 2005. Neighboring Namibia boasts a bronze of its founding president wielding an AK-47.
…
The statue depicts a father holding a baby in his left arm. The man's right arm is around the waist of the baby's mother. The three are reaching out to the sky and out to the ocean.
"Its message is about Africa emerging from the darkness, from five centuries of slavery and two centuries of colonialism," says [Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade].
…[T]he statue has been a beacon of discontent, sparking angry newspaper editorials and protests from religious leaders. The statue's sultry mother figure, dressed in a wisp of fabric that reveals part of a breast and a bare leg, has offended imams in this majority-Muslim country.
... Financing details for the project have been murky, and some taxpayers are outraged by the very idea of it when power outages occur daily and university students strike over rising fees. Mr. Wade had no budget for the African Renaissance, so instead offered a prime chunk of state-owned land in exchange, which North Korea has since resold at a large profit, he says.
…
After all the criticism, Mr. Wade is now getting some compliments. He says he recently received a letter from Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi asking how he could get a similar statue.

I wonder if Senegal’s freedom monument is visible to neighbors living in the Islamic republic of Mauritania, a country that still continues its pre-colonial tradition of chattel slavery...

Inclusive Britain: The city of Portsmouth now makes its taxi-driver license applications available in braille! Prompting Daily Mail reader Peter from Gloucester to remark:

Should I ever be in Portsmouth, I think I'll just take the bus.

Egypt-Algerian Soccer War: Last year Egyptian football fans launched firebombs at the Algerian Embassy in Cairo, following Algeria's win over Egypt in a World Cup qualifying match. France has been seeing similar spill-over violence between fans of the rival teams, violence which flared up again dramatically this past week.

Le Parisien reports that last Thursday night, a mob of 30 Algerian youths went on a rampage after Algeria lost to Egypt 4-0 in the Africa Cup of Nations final. The youth vandalized an Egyptian bar/club the paper names as the Cultural and Social Association Center for western youth, on Rue Joseph-Dijon. (A photo of the damage can be seen at Le Parisien) "They arrived a bit after the end of the match", said one of the Egyptians who was in the bar Thursday night. "We saw the window shatter... they even threw a firebomb. We were very scared. But since we didn't say anything things didn't get out of control."

The police were called to the scene but were not able to catch the youth, who left with the cash register.

The manager's son says, "I just do not understand what happened. Here, everyone lives side by side, Algerians, Egyptians... There are never any problems." An Algerian passerby seemed despondant at the sight of the local club's smashed window: "It's true [that since the start of the Africa Cup three weeks ago], relations have been tense. At Boulevard Ornano's market, some were not willing to buy vegetables from Egyptians. Stupid things like that. It's a real shame!"

[Translated from the French account at Le Parisien]

Rescued By Faith: A Haitian teenage choir singer is pulled from her cousin's home two weeks after the earthquake, when rescue teams were no longer supposed to be still searching for survivors. "We are very surprised at the fact that she is still alive," says the French doctor treating the rescued 16-year old:

[O]n Wednesday -- 15 days later -- neighbors heard a voice weakly calling from the rubble and alerted authorities, who brought in the French rescue squad. The team dug a hole to give her oxygen and water, and within 45 minutes they managed to remove her.

"They should not have been working anymore," said French Ambassador Didier le Bret. The Haitian government had declared an end to the search phase, but the French team was stubborn. "They felt that some lives still are to be saved," he said.

"Anti-Zionist" clergyman in UK convinces police to visit blogger exposing church man's associations

We Are All Seismic Shock. Freedom only survives if we share a covenant to defend each other's liberty. Police have no business mediating political disputes unless they make it clear they suspect a law may have been broken. This does not appear to have been done in this case, notwithstanding the police now asserting that they were investigating a claim of "harassment". Is it just my impression, or do the UK police seem to be doing rather too much lately to suggest that when push comes to shove, they will aim to protect their monopoly on violence by siding with the more combustible forces of anti-Western hatred?

Two stories that must be related; but how?

Story 1) (HT: Sassywire):

Teenagers have been warned they are becoming unemployable because they use a vocabulary of just 800 words.

The limited linguistic range also consists of many made up words and 'teenspeak' which has developed through modern communication methods such as text messaging and social networking sites.

Today Jean Gross, who advises the Government on children's speech, said urgent action was required to prevent children failing to find jobs because they are unable to communicate.

[...]

'We need to help today's teenagers understand the difference between their textspeak and the formal language they need to succeed in life — 800 words will not get you a job.'

The majority of teenagers should have developed a broad vocabulary of 40,000 words by the time they reach 16.

Linguists have found, however, that although they may understand thousands of words, many choose to limit themselves to a much smaller range in regular conversation and on a daily basis could use as few as 800 terms.(Daily Mail)

Now here's a brain teaser for you: are kids maybe illiterate because they see how stark raving bonkers their "literate" "betters" are and so naturally isolate themselves in their cybershells? or are kids illiterate because under the new and ever yet more crazy welfare state socialism there actually are "jobs" for illiterates who only know One Dumb Word/Thing (it begins with r!)? Story 2 (HT: Walker:)

A wealthy businessman was arrested at home in front of his wife and young son over an email which council officials deemed ‘offensive’ to gipsies – but which he had not even written.

The email, concerning a planning appeal by a gipsy, included the phrase: ‘It’s the ‘do as you likey’ attitude that I am against.’

Council staff believed the email was offensive because ‘likey’ rhymes with the derogatory term ‘pikey’.

The 45-year-old IT boss was held in a police cell for four hours until it was established he had nothing to do with the email, which had been sent by one of his then workers, Paul Osmond.

But police had taken his DNA and later confirmed they would be holding it indefinitely.(Daily Mail)

UPDATE: this just in via Belmont Club:

The British government has decided to go ahead with its plans under what it calls the Intercept Modernisation Programme to force every telecommunication company and Internet service provider to keep a record of all its customers’ personal communications, showing whom they have contacted and when and where, as well as the Web sites they have visited, according to The Daily Telegraph and various other British papers.

The information gathered, The Telegraph says, will be accessible to 653 public bodies, ”including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.

”They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority,” The Telegraph says.

The only bit of good news, if you can call it that, is that the information won’t be held in a central database because of privacy concerns (that seems a bit oxymoronic to me), and the full rollout will be delayed until after the next election.
[...]
The British government is also going ahead with ContactPoint, a database containing the details of England’s 11 million children. As described in a 7 November Telegraph story,

The computerised database contains a record for each of the 11m under-18s living in England, containing their name, address, gender, date of birth and a unique identifying number. It also holds information on their parents, their nursery or school, their GP and whether they have a social worker, health visitor or probation officer assigned to them. If the young person consents, it will also give details of sexual health or drug abuse counsellors.

Interestingly, this database is assumed by the government to be secure and private. So secure and private, in fact, that the children of celebrities and certain others—for example, the children of government officials—are to be excluded from it.

It has not passed without notice on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall the irony of the British government’s dogged efforts to spy on its own people in a way that would make the Stasi envious.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s remarks marking the anniversary included this:

What has happened here in Berlin tells the world that the tides of history may ebb and flow, but that across the ages history is moving towards our best hopes, not our worst fears; towards light not darkness; and towards the fulfillment of our humanity, not its denial.

So governmental spying is moving toward our best hopes, toward light not darkness, and toward the fulfillment of our humanity? George Orwell, who once wrote, ”To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” would probably be very depressed by the state of affairs in the United Kingdom—but probably not very surprised

It strikes me that the unnamed writer at IEEE Spectrum doesn't quite get what is Orwellian here. If the internet means that our lives are going to become more and more transparent to others, freedom actually requires something like a central data base. I do not think i want to see the collecting of information on web browsing without search warrants. But if we are going to have it, freedom requires that I be able to search Gordon Brown's habits just as easily as he searches mine. Then we can all be equally transparent and accountable to each other and discover a new kind of freedom without privacy. What is Orwellian is when all the power is in the hands of the Stasi; but when we can call out any cop for his bad habits, or when we can discover Gordon Brown's porn addiction, should he have ever had one, then we are free to develop a new sense of tolerance and standards and name-calling and scapegoating in full view of what we are doing to each other. It might make us capable of relearning what really matters. Then again, maybe not.

European Forecast: Cloudy With Occasional Signs Of Kindness

A collection of some small news stories hidden behind the dominant headlines on a wistful Thursday morning.

21st Century Book-Burning: UK pensioners are resorting to buying books as fuel for home fireplaces and stoves in order to keep from freezing to death:

Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13ºC in the Scottish Highlands, with the mercury falling to -6ºC in London, -5ºC in Birmingham and -7ºC in Manchester as one of the coldest winters in years continues to bite.
Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.
...
A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5.

UK Garbage Wars: There's no money for pensioners to heat their homes but there's plenty of time and money to keep track of trash collectors who are caught in the act of taking out too much trash on their neighborhood routes: Hard-working binman Albert Stewart was been disciplined for helping residents by taking away extra bin bags left beside overflowing wheelie bins.

[H]is obliging nature has angered his employers at West Lancashire Borough Council who've accused him breaking strict refuse rules.
They say binmen should only empty wheelie bins and must leave other rubbish dumped beside the bins behind.
...
[Mr Stewart] accused the council of "spying” on its own binmen and said bosses were being motivated by money.
"I have done the same round for over 30 years, and now, just because I took some side waste, I’m being punished," he said.
"All I was doing was helping people out by taking the odd black bag or two from beside their full wheelie bins.
"The council found out because they've had people going around spying on their own dustmen. It’s ridiculous.
"Personally, I think it is for financial reasons. People can get fined for putting out too much rubbish and the council didn’t like me being helpful because it meant they were missing out on money."
Householders caught leaving extra waste beside their wheelie bin are issued with a £100 fixed penalty notice but repeat offenders can be taken to court and given a £1,000 fine.

As penance for his efforts the 30-year trashman has been made to work another route, much to the frustration of the families who got to know him over the years he served them:

"Albert was not just a binman he’s also a friend. He was always willing to help and it’s very sad that he has been taken off his route. I’m not the only one – everyone appreciated him when he came round."

Maybe one of the reasons his compassionate attitude was so appreciated is revealed in a Daily Mail story from the day before: UK trashmen are not required to pick up refuse from bins if they are open more than a quarter of an inch, and are issued tape measures to assist them in determining whether they should bother taking out the trash or not:

Bill Gough, a 54-year-old office manager, confronted the collectors when they refused to empty his bin on Tuesday.
"I’d stamped on my rubbish to get it as flat as possible but the lid was still a little open," he said.
"I’d managed to wheel it down to the bottom of my driveway without any spillages and was shocked when a binman told me they couldn’t empty it because the lid was more than quarter of an inch open.
"I thought he was joking but then he got his measuring tape out and showed me. They said they had no choice for health and safety reasons.
"I’m asking them to take away a few bits of extra wrapping paper – not dispose of nuclear waste."
...
Grandmother Doreen Stubbs, 66, said: "The binmen were totally obnoxious and swore at my son when he asked why they hadn’t collected the rubbish. There was no talking to them, they were like the Gestapo.
"If little old ladies can drag their bins then surely men, who we pay to do their jobs, can use a bit of common sense and compassion.
"There are people around here who are disabled. Some of them have no transport, how are they expected to take their rubbish to the tip?"

Germany's Soldiers Fight Alone: Reinhold Robbe, the German Parliament’s military commissioner, is struck by the differences he sees while visiting the US. Americans greet returning servicemen with applause and offers to buy them a beer, while back home in Europe, “There’s no real empathy in Germany toward the soldiers who risk life and limb every day...”:

A staff sergeant, who had been risking his life almost daily outside Kunduz, recalled a trip to Berlin during which he was wearing his uniform at a train stop. He was told to make himself scarce or he would be beaten up.
“It was shocking,” said the sergeant... “We’re looked down on. With American soldiers, they tell me how they receive recognition, how people just come up to them and say they’re doing good.”
...
"This sense of appreciation, you don’t get that, the feeling that wearing your uniform people are going to be proud of you,” said Heike Groos, who has written about her time as a German military doctor in Afghanistan. “Young people die. Young people are badly wounded and one feels out of place and lonely when one thinks, ‘No one in Germany understands and no one in Germany is even interested.' ”

On the burning of a British mosque...

To my friends who aren't convinced by arguments that the human historical process is in theory infinitely expandable, or inexhaustibly open-ended, that the scenes on which we live can be ever novel, I give you the unprecedented words of the Flea:

My only surprise is it has taken ten years for the great unwashed to stop trusting their future to an anti-Semitic Establishment...

Saturday Night Stirrings

A sobering shower of grey stories, fallen from the margins of headline news, for late-night contemplation on a wet autumn evening.

Generation Of Ingrates: Shocking statistics from the UK, with the infuriating revelation that Britain's war memorials are being increasingly desecrated by thieves and vandals at the rate of more than one a week:

Most of the vandals are never caught, and those who are face little deterrent. Offenders found guilty of criminal damage under £5,000 can only be dealt with in a magistrates' court, where the maximum sentence is six months' jail.
MPs and military campaigners yesterday voiced disgust at the trend and expressed concern that the incidence of desecration is growing when British soldiers are fighting and dying on the front line in Afghanistan.
The figures have been compiled by the Tories. Defence spokesman Dr Liam Fox said: 'At a time when we are honouring those who have sacrificed themselves for our security, this sick and despicable trend is a miserable commentary on contemporary Britain.'

Islamists' War On Women: While US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was visiting Pakistan in late October, a car bomb targeting Peshawar's women erupted in the Mina Bazaar, a market selling wedding dresses, toys and food to the poorer residents of the northern city. Over 100 people were killed, of which at least 60 were women and their children.

This grim figure is double that of the death toll from a car bomb driven by an islamist through Peshawar's busy Khyber Bazaar in early October. 49 people were killed and over a hundred wounded when explosives diabolically laced with bearings and shells erupted next to a bus filled with women and children.

In reading the regional media we can see how the scale of the islamists' attacks may change, but the hatred towards the intented targets remains the same.

Two girls' school were bombed last week in Pakistan's Khyber Agency; it's startling to learn how common such horrors have now become:

Militants have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in the northwest of the country in recent years.
Nearly 200 schools were destroyed in the Swat valley alone during a two-year Taliban uprising to enforce sharia law in the district.

On Wednesday, two women teachers driving home from school were dragged from their car and sprayed with machine gun fire in the Bajaur Agency, in the northwestern corner of the FATA, Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

Earlier Saturday, "suspected militants" threw a grenade into a girls' school in a Quetta suburb, injuring two teachers and an 8-year old student.

Grenade and bomb explosions and drive-by shootings are fairly frequent in impoverished Baluchistan province, which is gripped by an insurgency.

16 bodies are still missing from the forementioned late October Peshawar market bombing. It takes a strong heart to read through recent accounts of loved ones still holding out hope that they might recover the remains of their missing families. It is feared that the massive fire unleashed in the crowded marketplace as a result of the bombing has probably burned the missing bodies to unrecognizeable ashes.

"Finding the dead bodies of these missing people is equal to impossible", says a Peshawar public official. Finding a way to understand the depth of the evil triggering these innumerable cruelties seems equally impossible.

Teaching Amnesia To British Youth

"Our face is our autobiography", historian Will Durant remarked in one of his 1,000-page volumes on the Story of Civilization. This observation compliments one made by another Will -- William Shakespeare, in As You Like It:
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts..."

As we make our own individual entrances we are arriving at a mid-way point in an ongoing story. The players we see looking out at us when we face ourselves in the mirror can delude themselves into believing that the play began with the rise of their own individual curtain, but a more humble, and honest, recounting would reveal that the clock started ticking long before our arrival into the scene.

What story are we joining? What role is missing in the play, that we can fulfill? What are the hopes, and regrets, of those already having passed through the drama before us, from which we may take our cues?

Looking into their own mirrors, I wonder what the youth of Great Britain are seeing written into their autobiographies, now that they are no longer being taught about the story they are joining:

History Vanishes From One In 20 Schools

[Michael Gove, the Conservative shadow schools secretary] said: “History is effectively disappearing from some secondary schools. Giving children a proper knowledge of our island story so they can take pride in our historic achievements is the best way to build a modern, inclusive future for our country.
“But after a decade of decline under Labour less than a third of children now take the subject, and yet again we see that it is poorest pupils that are disproportionately missing out.”

Given how history's being taught when it is being taught, maybe it's disappearance is becoming the lesser of evils..?

[T]here is no doubt that something has gone badly wrong when seven out of 10 schoolchildren are no longer studying history at the age of 16, when two out of 10 think Britain was once occupied by the Spanish, and when some identify Sir Winston Churchill as the first man on the moon. And the blame lies at the very top, shared by politicians of both parties, who have been systematically cheating and betraying our children since the 1980s.

During the Thatcher years, it was meddling from the top that downgraded history from a compulsory to an optional subject at the age of 16 – which, because it was seen as "difficult", made it easy pickings for Mickey Mouse subjects such as Beauty Therapy. It was supposedly "progressive" interference, meanwhile, that did away with old-fashioned essay questions and replaced them with empathy exercises and multiple-choice quizzes that sacrificed any sense of intellectual depth or discipline.

And perhaps above all, it was in Westminster and Whitehall that officials designed our absurd Yo! Sushi approach to history, in which schools randomly pick unrelated historical topics like saucers from a conveyor belt, instead of studying our national story as a continuous narrative, which is how any sensible person sees it.

One student survived his youthful education with his curiosity intact, and pursued history as a more serious subject in university, but now admits he seems to spend more time defending his favorite topic than studying it:

Whenever I tell someone outside university that I'm taking history, they look puzzled, suppress a giggle, and ask "Why?"
...
People assume I'm deranged (or just a bit simple) when I mumble my reason for studying history: I enjoy it. I like reading and writing about history.
Basically, I'm doing a hobby degree. "But what will you do with a history degree when you graduate?" is often the next question.

Here's how you answer them: we study history as a precursor to greater understanding of other subjects, not just for its own sake; it helps us recognize the existence of cause-and-effect relationships, the fallibility of Man, the possibility of unintended consequences, and most especially, it teaches us how to learn, so long as history is approached as the study of stories... as learning from experience.

Sadly, in the UK such wisdom is fast becoming history.

How could you see a future, when you don't see a past?

Thursday Sights

Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst while threading one's way along life's stream of bitter truths on an overcast Thursday morning.

"Golden Age" Of Islamic Spain: Using hard truths to shine some light on popular utopian myths:

Few of those who want to emphasize the Golden Age of Spain and how it was a land of "tolerance" want to recall that Maimonides and his family were forced to leave Spain in 1148 because the fanatic Muslim rulers, known as the Almohades, gave Jews and other non-Muslims the choice of conversion, exile or death.
Yet this expulsion was never remembered. Is this the place of "humanistic beauty" that Western scholars want us to recall? Was this the "bastion of culture, commerce and beauty"? Western historians have presented this as "the intellectual community which the northern [European] scholars found in Spain was so far superior to what they had at home that it left a lasting jealousy of Arab culture."
Most have forgotten that this Arab culture in Spain was one that included slavery. People speak of Spain as a "Convivencia" or coexistence society. This coexistence society we imagine as a utopia resembles the American antebellum South, with slavery and large wealthy estates.

Today's Great Britain, Where Violent Assault Is Not Necessarily A Crime: The Chief Inspector of Constabulary reports that thousands of violent assaults and domestic attacks are being recorded by investigating police officers as "no crime".

The police inspectorate found one in three decisions to record a violent incident as no crime were wrong.
If the findings, based on a sample, are repeated across all forces, it would mean at least 5,000 victims of violence being ignored.
...
As well as disguising the true extent of violent crime, a wrong "no crime" decision affects the help given to the victim.
...
Among the cases was a woman left battered and bruised after her partner slapped her, grabbed her by the neck and threw her on the floor.
The force, which has not been named, recorded no crime as having taken
place.
The officers wrote that the victim would say she injured herself and that her partner's account was "more accurate".

Preying and Praying: Indianapolis cashier Angela Montez tries to dissuade an armed robber from committing his crime, and -- who knows? -- may have found the words to save him from pursuing a more violent life, if he ends up taking her advice to heart.


The thief's mother identified him from news broadcasts of the security video, and the man has turned himself in to police.

UK Neighbors Engaged In Illegal Babysitting

Here's a story I wasn't expecting to see: West Michigan's bias against babysitting was preposterous enough, but it seems positively libertarian when compared to the rules babysitters have to follow in the UK.

Whether it's because statist busybodies who have so little faith in themselves project their own inadequacies onto the rest of their nation, or whether they believe themselves possessing the rare wisdom to form laws that result in "perfect" societies, the end result is the same: ignoring the possibility of genuinely good neighbors, and winding up with nonsense like "illegal" babysitting:

The government has ordered a review of the case of two police officers who were told they had to stop looking after each others' children or face prosecution.
Detective Constable Leanne Shepherd, from Milton Keynes, was warned by Ofsted [Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills] that she could be prosecuted if she did not end the "illegal" reciprocal arrangement with her friend, DC Lucy Jarrett.
The women, both 32, have taken turns looking after each other's daughters twice a week for the last two and a half years while they worked a ten-hour shift at Aylesbury police station in Buckinghamshire.
... New legislation means that people who baby-sit for more than two hours at a time or on more than 14 days a year should be registered and follow childminder rules, including undertaking first aid training and following the so-called "nappy curriculum" for under-fives.
According to the education watchdog, the rules apply in cases where parents receive a "reward" for the child care – which can include money or simply free baby-sitting in return. Ofsted is now in discussions with the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) about the interpretation of the word "reward".
...
DC Shepherd said she had received a surprise visit from an Ofsted inspector who said she had received reports that an illegal childminding business was being run. Despite explaining that the arrangement was between two friends who were helping each other out, DC Shepherd was told that she was breaking the law and had to stop immediately. "I was stunned, completely devastated. I spent the whole day crying because I couldn't see how I could continue working," she told the Mail on Sunday.

Friday Shadows

Unearthing a few small stories lurking in the shadows of bigger news on a sunny Friday morning.

Feral: The rise of an alarming new trend in the UK, as dogs are increasingly being used as weapons by Britain's new generation of thugs.

It's been obvious to those working in animal welfare that this has been an increasing trend, and recent statistics produced by the RSPCA put an objective slant on the issue. Sixty-six per cent of all calls to the RSPCA about dog fighting last year involved youths fighting their animals in public places. This compares with 37 per cent in 2007.
... The figures tie in with the increasing trend amongst teenagers and young males for using stereotypically macho-type dogs as weapons of intimidation in urban areas of England and Wales.
...
The problem isn't limited to London. Areas including Merseyside, West Yorkshire, and the West Midlands have also seen a trend for young people using dogs to intimidate or attack other people and animals.

Initiative: The case for private solutions to the public problem of Somali piracy.

The international effort to combat piracy involves many navies operating in separate alliances, working with different rules of engagement in poorly coordinated operations. As governments fail, private security companies move to fill the void.
One such company, US-based Phoenix Intelligence Support, initiated a private sector conference in Cairo this week to discuss what it calls "real solutions" to the piracy threat. Speaking on phone from Cairo, Phoenix managing director William Fielding said so far a group of companies operating almost 1,000 ships have expressed interest in his protection services.
"The ideal situation would be to never have a pirate come on board a ship at all," Mr. Fielding said. "We are looking at the most humane ways to deter anyone from getting on board the ship, but we need to be true to our customers as well."
Mr Fielding said his company plans to install teams on board vessels, armed with high pressure hoses, long range acoustical devices and, as a last resort, conventional weaponry. The company also intends to employ airplanes to spot pirates at sea.
"We want our philosophy to be, just keep them off board the ship the gentlest way possible."
Mr Fielding argues the private sector can thwart pirates in a simple and cost-effective manner, while navies lack the resources to patrol enough ocean.

Synaesthesia: Hearing shapes? Tasting sounds? Just how separate do our senses remain as we navigate our way through life's challenges? Interesting article studying our capacity to blend sensory experiences together when we try and figure out what's going on around us.

It seems our brains may use these synaesthetic associations, says Professor Spence, "to combine all of the different sensory cues that are hitting our receptors at any one time".
"If there are lots of other visual events at the same time, for example, if I'm at a noisy party, how do I know which face goes with which voice?" he asked.

Saturday Stories

A pretty picture to introduce some ugly news spotted while reading the British press on a cloudy Saturday morning.

Undelivered: Neither rain, nor sleet, nor dark of night... only political beliefs can stop the UK mail, as Britain's postal union workers decide not to distribute BNP election leaflets:

The Communication Workers Union says that Royal Mail is breaking a “conscience clause” agreed four years ago that allows staff to refuse to deliver literature they find offensive.
...
"...The clause says members don’t have to deliver material if they feel threatened or if it is against their personal beliefs."
...
One postman working in the Fishponds area of Bristol, said that his route bordered two ethnic-minority areas and it was “concerning” to be made to deliver inflammatory material.
He told the Western Daily Press: “We are being forced by management to give out the BNP material even though it’s against my beliefs — everyone knows what they stand for.
“We are being made to dish out this rubbish. I’ve read the BNP literature and although there isn’t anything racist or fascist on it, it does say ‘No to immigration’.”

Menace: A perennial danger is finally being addressed, as British school uniforms dispense with... ties:

Concerns over accidental strangling, playground games in which pupils yank each others' ties and fears that ties might catch fire in science lessons have seen the classroom institution fall victim to its clip-on cousin.
...
Clip-ons have also been credited with improving pupils' behaviour at Arthur Terry School, in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands.
Head Christopher Stone said: 'It's a mess when you walk around town and you see children with their buttons undone and their ties all over the place. Both attendance and behaviour had improved since the ties were brought in.'

Guilty: Great Britain's grim statistics in their war on terror: Out of 1,471 suspects detained in counter-terrorism operations, only 521 - just over a third - were charged with a crime. Of these, 340 were accused of terror-related offences, with 196 later being found guilty in court.
Fortunately they can add one more to their guilty column:

A man was convicted Friday of involvement in firebombing a London publisher behind "The Jewel of Medina", a controversial book about the child bride of the Islamic prophet Mohammed.
Minicab driver Abbas Taj, 31, drove two men to the offices of Gibson Square publishers last September who poured diesel through the letter box and set it alight.
...
"These men planned to carry out arson as a violent reaction and protest against the publishing of a book," said John McDowall, head of counter terrorism command at London's Metropolitan Police, after the trial.
"They did not care whether anybody would be killed or injured when they poured diesel through the letterbox and set fire to it.
"Photographs, tapes and documents found at their homes showed the violent mindset of this trio of arsonists."

Priorities: North Wales tells its police to focus law enforcement manpower towards dog owners who don't clean up after their dogs and people who litter on the street, instead of actual criminals:

Police in North Wales, where serious crime has rocketed year-on-year, have this week been told they need to “up the number” of people they stop for littering offences.
PC Richard Eccles, the General Secretary of the North Wales Police Federation, said: “Police officers act as litter-spotters but because they cannot issue the fines they have to detain the offender and wait for the PCSO to arrive. They feel like idiots.”
...
“We should be more focused on more serious crime like burglaries, violent crimes and theft rather than being tasked with offences more suitably dealt with by the local council,” he said.
Compared with the same period last year, violent crime in North Wales has increased by 18 per cent, burglaries have risen by nearly 8 per cent and robberies have rocketed by an astonishing 115 per cent.

Surprise: I find myself reading the British press every morning, despite an almost daily oath to include it less frequently in my news reading; it's just too depressing and infuriating to be consumed in such regular doses. Fortunately, I have an ocean between me and these dispirIting stories; I can't imagine what it's like when this upside-down world is the one right outside your front door. Is this new poll, therefore, really all that shocking:

British people, long known for their pragmatism and "stiff upper-lip," have surprisingly come out on top in a poll to find the angriest nation in Europe, it was revealed Friday.
The survey, commissioned for comedy channel Gold, found that Brits on average get angry four times a day, while the supposedly hot-headed Italians only admit to 3.5 bouts of fury over the same period.

Friday Bulletins

Chomping at the bit to start our three-day weekend, we steer towards our Victoria Day holiday with a sampling of stories pawed from the margins of this morning's news headlines.

Rise: I never realized how a lifetime playing chess affected my thinking until a former supervisor pointed it out to me in a friendly review: "You're a chessplayer", he declared, "you run that department like a chess game, trying to foresee the upcoming moves, all these contingency plans you keep coming up with in your spare time, how you do this and your habit for that..." On he went with the many chess analogies he had noticed in my work habits. I was a fascinated audience for these observations, as I had never even told him about how many hours I had spent as a young man playing against people much better than I was... which was just about everybody!

That meeting taught me how much I seem to have learned through my youthful fondness for chess, which is why I was very pleased to discover this story about how chess is making a comeback with young people: "Wendi Fischer, executive director of America's Foundation for Chess, says she's seen a 'huge increase' in the number of schools and students interested in chess."

Fischer says the aim of the [First Move] program is to teach critical thinking skills that will help students succeed academically and socially.
"In the very first lesson we study board basics. One of the basics of the chess board is that it uses a coordinate system, and the coordinate system is the basis of algebra."
Marlie Buehler is the founder of Abundant Waters, an after-school program that operates out of PS 51 in New York. She says chess is one of the activities that is part of the program, adding that it teaches children many important skills, including how to take notes.
"I firmly believe everybody should have to take it," she says. "It's teaching the mind how to think."
...
"I think that parents are starting to see chess as an extracurricular activity that has some benefits other than just learning how to play chess," he says. "It sort of carries over into other aspects when it comes to logical thinking and process of events."
Rex Sinquefield, founder and president of the St. Louis Chess Club and Scholastic Center, which is hosting the tournament, says one of the main reasons scholastic chess is becoming so popular is that there's an interest on the part of the top chess players to get kids involved in the game.
Sinquefield's group is working on a study of how kids benefit academically from chess. "It's definitely an exercise of the brain. They also learn that you can improve by studying and that you go to books to learn."

Fall: A day in the life of Post-Christian Great Britain, courtesy of a photographer's four year-long chronicle of binge-drinking debauchery in the Welsh town of Cardiff: "The unique collection from amateur cameraman Maciej Dakowicz is aptly named 'Cardiff At Night' and features scenes of late night drunken carnage."

Hope: On the opposite end of the scale, a story about a penniless single mom who faced a tough choice, and decided to report the clerical error her bank made in mistakenly placing over $200,000 in her account:

"It's a struggle, we're human but a child of God and gotta do the right thing even though I have nothing," Regis said.
...
"At the end of the day, are you gonna sell your soul for $271,366.01?" she said.

Faith: "Believing you are ill can make you ill", reports New Scientist magazine in an article on the undeniable potential power of mind over body:

"Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame - yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. "He didn't die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer," says Meador. "If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying."
...
The placebo effect has an evil twin: the nocebo effect, in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects. The term "nocebo", which means "I will harm", was not coined until the 1960s, and the phenomenon has been far less studied than the placebo effect. It's not easy, after all, to get ethical approval for studies designed to make people feel worse.
What we do know suggests the impact of nocebo is far-reaching. "Voodoo death, if it exists, may represent an extreme form of the nocebo phenomenon..."
...
The ultimate cause of the nocebo effect, however, is not neurochemistry but belief. [S]urgeons are often wary of operating on people who think they will die - because such patients often do. And the mere belief that one is susceptible to a heart attack is itself a risk factor. One study found that women who believed they are particularly prone to heart attack are nearly four times as likely to die from coronary conditions than other women with the same risk factors.

...

"I don't think there's anything mystical about it. We're uncomfortable with the idea that words or symbolic actions can cause death because it challenges our biomolecular model of the world."

UK's Ingratitude To Gurkha Veterans: "It's Absolutely Shocking"

Another example of the UK's growing ingratitude towards its veterans. In February we blogged on Once-Great Britain's unwillingness to sponsor a group of surviving D-Day veterans in their hope to return to France one more time -- for many maybe the last time -- to the 65th anniversary of their great act of courage in participating in the liberation of Europe.

Last week, it was the turn of the loyal Gurkhas to see the current value placed on their service:

Thousands of Gurkhas were yesterday shut out of the UK in what was described as 'shameful betrayal' by the Government.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas claimed changes in the rules would allow 4,300 more former Gurkhas to settle here out of the 36,000 who served in the British Army before July 1997.

But lawyers battling for the Gurkhas said they believed only around 100 would benefit. Hundreds of former rank-and-file soldiers will face deportation while thousands more will be barred from entering the country.

Under the new rules, former Gurkhas must prove they have either served more than 20 years or have won one of the top four medals for gallantry: the Victoria Cross; the Distinguished Service Order; the Distinguished Conduct Medal; or the Military Cross.
...
Campaigners said it was virtually impossible for ordinary Gurkhas to meet those conditions.

The vast majority - 98 per cent - are rank-and-file soldiers who are permitted to serve for only 15 years. Only officers are allowed to serve for longer.

Top-level gallantry awards are given to a tiny minority of soldiers. Only one living Gurkha would qualify for entry on the basis of his medal alone.

Lawyer Martin Howe said that of more than 2,000 Gurkha veterans refused entry to Britain, only Military Cross-holder Lalit Bahadur Gurung would be eligible.

Mr Gurung, 81, who was awarded the cross in 1964, was refused entry to Britain for medical treatment last year.

Most Gurkhas who retired before 1997 were based in Hong Kong, so they will be unable to prove they have lived in Britain for three years, or that they have family settled here.

And for the oldest veterans living in poverty in Nepal - the fourth-poorest country in the world - it will be difficult to prove that their injuries and illnesses were caused by their Army service.

British actress Joanna Lumley , whose father fought alongside the Gurkhas in Burma during World War II, has taken a strong stand in support of the Gurkhas' cause, becoming the public face of the Gurkha Justice Campaign. Her disgust with the guidelines is palpable:

[1:30] "I'm sick of the insulting size of this ghastly little document. Most of the second page is just 'if you need more help or contacts...' This has taken them four months to come up with this, they've answered none of our letters, they've allowed us into no briefings. [pause] It's absolutely shocking."

The BBC offers the government's side of the story:

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas denied he had betrayed the Gurkhas, adding: "This improves the situation."

He said: "It has never been the case that all Gurkhas pre-1997 were to be allowed to stay in the country. With their dependants you could be looking at 100,000 people."
...
[P]rime Minister Gordon Brown insisted the new rules were fair and took into account "the responsibilities we have accepted" towards the Gurkhas.

"To go back 20 years from 1997 is something that's a major change in policy and will help a large number of Gurkhas if they wish to make the decision to come to Britain," he said.

"And remember that there are costs involved in that decision that we have got to meet."

It's too bad that the one cost referenced by Judge Justice Blake in his ruling last September, does not seem to weigh heavily on Gordon Brown's conscience:

The Home Office will doubtless wish to consult with the MOD [Ministry Of Defence], but if Home Office policy to discharged veterans does not impede military effectiveness, and there are no international law or foreign policy constraints, it is difficult to see why the MOD should not itself welcome clarity and the honouring of a historic debt. The court is conscious that at the heart of military life and the sacrifices that soldiers make in the discharge of their duties is the Military Covenant. This reads:

"Soldiers will be called upon to make personal sacrifices – including the ultimate sacrifice – in the service of the Nation. In putting the needs of the Nation and the Army before their own, they forego some of the rights enjoyed by those outside the Armed Forces. In return, British Soldiers must be able to always expect fair treatment, to be valued and respected as individuals, and that they (and their families) will be sustained and rewarded by commensurate terms and conditions of service".

Rewarding long and distinguished service by the grant of residence in the country for which the service was performed would, in my judgment, be a vindication and an enhancement of this covenant.