Punching above their weight

Watching the outlandish brutal behaviour in the Ukraine Parliament, where the countries Prime Minister Arsney Yayseniyk was manhandled from the rostrum as he was speaking to the assembly was such a strange sight. The slight, balding PM was standing, seemingly nonplussed as a man approached the rostrum with a bouquet  of flowers and then, laying the flowers to one side, went behind Yayseniyk, placing his arm through his legs attempted to carry him off. The oddest thing was the demeanour of Yayseniyk  he didn't seem at all phased by what was happening to him his face never reflected any emotion and he simply, like a five year old child hung on to the rostrum whilst the man tried to drag him away. Then of course all hell broke loose and a violent fist fight broke out between the parliamentarians. These chaps are not fragile violets when it comes to a punch up and blows were reigning in at a rate seldom seen outside a boxing ring. You could see the dislike, one party group for the other, it seemed tribal in its ferocity.
We in this country are so far removed from this sort of extreme behaviour by our elected parliamentarians that it is one more element in the argument that people, or should I say cultures are so displaced, one wonders how each can align one with the other. 
And yet across Europe one sees many varied societies lining up within the EU to discuss  the rights and wrongs of some of the most sensitive issues in a spirit and a willingness and civility to carry out the business.

They come from the political 'left and right', with their diametrically opposed views to debate their beliefs and it all seems very grown up and civilised. If there is one fly in the ointment it is the British with the boorish taunting from Nigel Farage about the whole EU procedure (the similarity to Donald Trump comes to mind). He is a one trick pony when he takes his seat in Brussels, his grinning demeanour hurling insults at the organisation is not a pleasant sight. There are many things that need attending to not least the lack of financial transparency when it comes to accountability. But Farage is the equivalent of the Ukraine bosh bash bosh style of politics without the fisticuffs.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump is one of those anomalies that capitalism throws up, a very rich, very self opinionated, and very uncouth, brutish man who's riches allow him a platform to spout what ever comes into his mind.
He isn't stupid he's a deal maker, deal breaker who will glad hand an audience of Jewish financial backers but who if you cross him will take you apart, either through the courts or if he has a chance, with his fists or more likely his hired fists.
I find him repugnant in so many ways but he has a following and if one is to believe the reports, he leads the Republican challenge for the White House. Heaven help us if he were to get his fat pudgy fingers on the nuclear button.
Yesterday he said at a rally of his faithful. "Muslims should be barred entry into the United States".
He didn't advocate that the ones inside the stockade should be thrown out only that anyone of the Islamic faith should not be allowed in, perhaps with the rider "until they have learnt to behave".
Our Media over here are up in arms because this sort of thing flys under the banner of "Racist",  "Politically Incorrect", being unfair to a "Minority" within ones own country and being Islamo-phobic just one of the many phobic issues that have their followers.
The problem as I see it is, it's as if the mayhem that is acted out in virtually every Muslim/Islamic country across the world and which spills over to catch innocent citizens is not happening.
The conflict between the Shia and the Sunni, the suicide bombers, the hit gangs in Europe who act on the so called, slight to the Islamic faith, the unleashing of death upon the Kafr for not being of the faith, the spread of ideological disharmony amongst the Muslim youth, non of this has any cogency amongst the inner world of the intelligentsia which control our media or if it does they are terrified to speak their mind.
We know it's the job of the government and the diplomats to play down anything which could cause unrest amongst the populous but the blind-sighting of the potential threat when a faith is used as a preempting  argument, a faith which is so deeply entrenched within the fabric of everyday life, a faith which is so all encompassing that any national affiliations take second preference to the collective of being Muslim with a special, God given purpose.
There is no secular argument that can get close to the word of Allah in determining what is right or wrong and we are foolish if we believe the articulate words of the Muslim Council since these same men who proclaim equality and fairness, hold sway in their mosque and their home life with a resolute regime and methodology dating back to before the Middle Ages.
And yet we do.  We try to marry our decadent un-godly life with people who do not, for one minute of the day, stray far from the dictates of their faith. Talk about black and white !!!
To live in harmony is to recognise that people are different and that we understand those differences but when those differences fly in the face of faith and the responsibility to develop Caliphates or States of religious and domestic uniformity, then it is no longer a laughing matter unless you are of the persuasion that the Muslim way of life is better. The conversion rate in this country is higher than we would care to admit, particularly amongst women which is strange considering they are joining an overtly patriarchal society but putting that aside the vast majority who believe that their leaders have a handle on it should know that their leaders are like headless chickens unable to comprehend and if they do comprehend unable to offer any suggestion other than the one offered by Donald Trump yesterday.

Happy snapper

It was an interesting question. Why do people these days tend to view things through a secondary medium such as a smartphone camera. They go to an event but watch much of the event staring at the screen of their phone whilst recording. Where does this urge to capture the moment come from and why.
I have always taken pictures. Friends and places I have visited, I would snap away as if the scene or the event would disintegrate if I didn't. The urge to stop the bus as it were and hold onto the moment is part of it. 

Photography is addictive especially when there was so much in taking a photo, not like today where it is simply point and shoot and the camera does the rest. Way back then you measured the light with a separate metre, you measured the distance with another gadget (or in both case you used your experience and guessed) you adjusted the speed, you adjusted the aperture, you estimated the depth of field to compose the picture and then if the subject hadn't skedaddled you pressed the button.
Apart from the art form of creative photography, which I am sure isn't in the minds of most of the people taking the pictures, why do they do it ?
I remember lugging a huge Video camera, (the type that a normal sized VCR tape fitted into the camera), around the UK and America back in 1987. 
I was obsessed with capturing everything of our extended holiday. The kids were of an age when everything was new but probably a little was taken in. But I captured that holiday to a tee and I can still watch with great pleasure the trip to Yorkshire, Norwich to visit friends, Cornwall, London and our visit to America also to stay with Marie's Family, visit Disney, Washington and finally New York. I was laughed at and sometimes derided for having the camera on my shoulder (it was so big and heavy I stressed my neck muscles) but the obsession to capture the moment was so strong. I have loverly creative moments, both indoors and outside, of the family, mine and the larger family.  A special moment when we the older ones were not cursed with aches and pains and the younger ones were totally natural, playing out their childhood.
In Washington I would get up at at 6.00am and sneak out of the hotel so I could wander freely amongst the monuments and buildings of State. I would return to the hotel just as they were waking up, feeling very satisfied with myself of the footage I had captured, able as it were to close that particular chapter of the trip. I can well imagine the Director of a "shoot" doing a film when he has at last captured what's in his mind of a scene and the story it told.
Perhaps that's it. We are trying to tell a story, we are trying to impart what it means to us behind the camera immersed as we are in the larger picture, hoping that others will be as interested as we are, saving for posterity that very special event which if portrayed properly is watcher-able for a whole array of reasons not just those that were in our minds when we went out filming. 

Who am I

What distinguishes me from the person across the road or the one I met in Sainsbury's yesterday. It isn't the body since my body is much the same as anyone else's given my age a little less wear and tear or a little more, but largely we are governed by the same or similar mechanical features such as heart beat, lungs inhaling and exhaling, all the organs doing what ever they do but each body of each person is roughly the same. Our brains are also much the same. Some seem to have developed faculties which provide us with the tools to excel in certain things but on the whole our brains are much the same performing the same tasks. What is it then that defines me.
The me that I think about when I "think" of myself. 

The brain has within its electrical impulses and millions of synaptic connections a thing we call the mind and its this thing called the mind which identifies us. From the mind we have a sense of our position and perspective of everything else we can know and our relationship to that which we know. Much of what we know is an amalgam of what we sense and see mixed in with a memory which refers us to what we had understood at a time in the past when a similar event occurred. We rationalise that event and its outcome with the current one and expect the same to happen. When it doesn't we assimilate both experiences to give us wider options as what to do and think in the future if the same thing happens again.
In a broad sense this is called experience and our understanding of life is based on our experience.
So in a way our mind is fed its signals from the stimulus around it and it makes sense of that stimulus from the memories we have stored from moments past.
Our individuality comes from those moments past since without their reference we would be faced with a uniquely new set of cognitive experience which would have no meaning. Not having meaning our reaction would be unpredictable and it's the predictability which makes us who we are and identifies us from others.
Clearly there are pools of similarity but each with their own unique path, each person treading a separate path depending on their exposure to this and that, then in small but special ways, we are all different. 

Lock the doors

It was 10.30 pm. "Lock the doors" is the call to parliamentarians for the voting to start. Although tired many were happy to have secured the win and laughed with each other they shuffled off "to the right". The ones "to the left" we're more sombre, some quite grim faced as they realised they had lost and the "war coalition " had won the day as they often do. 
It's easier to decide on a full stomach and half a bottle of Beaujolais. One is reminded of the phrase,  'silver headed assassins' as the front bench had argued the importance of our joining in to drop bombs on a collection of mud dwellings where it was known the enemy lay. The information was available and the bombers were on their way, not half an hour had a lapsed after the vote was counted in "the Mother of Parliaments" such was the haste to kill.
We haven't the will or the money to help Mrs Wilkinson in number 67 Oldham Place, Leeds but we have the desire and the money to kill Mrs Abdula in Ibrahim St,  Raqqa. 
Both women were sleeping at 2.30 am only a few hours after the vote but only one would open her eyes to see the start of a new day. Mrs Wilkinson would face the prospect of going down to the 'Food Kitchen' in town because the money she had received from the cash strapped government had been stopped "we are living beyond our means" said Mr Osborn and yet we have enough to load expensive weapons onto our thirsty expensive planes, not as in the 'Battle of Britain' to fight for survival but "on intelligence", the house Mrs Abdula occupied needed to be destroyed. 


Mrs Abdula was about to become "collateral damage", she awoke to hear a noise in the sky as the plane banked to start its run onto the target. Mrs Abdula and her family. Young Mohamed just 14, Ishmael 12, Amilah 8 the oldest girl in the family, Darrah 7, Raffe 5 and the latest Taalea the baby in the family not 8 months old who's name translates to "fortunate" but she was not very fortunate that night as the bomb obliterated them all in a second of mayhem.
Mrs Wilkinson will wake up this morning to the news that 4 tornado bombers had successfully returned from their mission, a mission voted on in Parliament to the sound of barracking and shouts of ridicule as the Leader of the Opposition had asked for mercy for Mrs Abdula and the many like her but the game was on, the blood was rising, the war drums were beating and there is no gainsaying a call to arms when some one else bears the weight of your decision !!

The elephant in the room

Why would we wish to ignore the fact that with a spectacular birth rate, those following the Muslim faith will, without resort any antagonistic behaviour, become the definitive force in this country by 2050 and more importantly, will this matter?

If the Muslim society were actually more closely aligned with the present majority and the differences only portrayed themselves in the places that people choose to worship, then there would be no cause for concern. But if, within the root of the religious teaching, a teaching which demands total adherence,there were strict norms about the social and democratic opportunities, including a legal framework which dictates obedience to God and severe punishment for non-conformity, then we have to think twice before we allow this quasi fascism to get out of hand. 

To those who do not understand what fascism means, the dictionary says. 

Fascism is :- "an authoritarian, right wing system of government and social organisation". 

We have grown up thinking the word belongs to dictatorial governments like the Nazi party in Germany or the communist parties of Stalinist Russia or Moe's China and that the word only described the dictatorial oppression of the people living in those countries.

It's hard not to describe the governments of Saudi Arabia or Iran as not practicing fascism.  

Its hard not to describe the totalitarianism of the Muslim faith, it's practices and its oppression of women as not being fascist. 

If that is true (sadly our leaders are strangely quite on the issue) do we really want a fascist state in this country by 2050, with sharia law being the law of the land.  Was this what the founders of Magna Carter envisaged. Do the custodians of the keys to our secular freedom not need to wake up and stop being so laid back. Perhaps we need a period where we put our humanity on hold and start laying down a few ground rules for those who wish to live here to stop being a melting pot and become profoundly undemocratic for a while so as to ensure that long term democracy is upheld. 

Why are we sleepwalking towards a Middle Eastern way of life where the patriarch holds all the cards.

We pride ourselves on being good, multicultural humanitarians but no one can align this, other than with twisted logic, the structure laid down by Mohamed which amongst other things defines non Muslims as Kafir, an inferior person. 

And even accepting the moderation of the assimilators who only see good in people whilst ignoring mans innate propensity for bad as the goal to aim for the price of ignoring the objective of the Muslim faith, that of world domination are we crazy to ignore the elephant in the room.

Its only a game

I can't imagine eight guys sitting down in a restaurant to eat a meal and ordering eight glasses and two jugs of water. The women who had gathered were full of smiles as they grouped together, laughing and clearly enjoying each other's company. Given the unlikely event of having eight men sitting down to have a meal I would think alcohol would have to be served to loosen the inhibiting stance that men assume, other than at a football game. 

The women were soon into discussing what ever was on their mind, peeling off into smaller more manageably audible  groups, chatting away two to the dozen. Men are much more withdrawn until the alcohol kicks in and having hosted a number of men only Christmas Parties I know what a pain it is to get them all in the mood to converse, unless of course it's about football. Invite a couple of women into the mix and the mood immediately changes.

The English are inhibited in all kinds of ways. Watching the waitresses going about their business one sees the young English lass not really comfortable in the general setting of a restaurant . They don't have the natural communication skills of the foreign waitress who instinctively knows her job, not only to serve the food but to be able, in a subtle way to boss the situation. Maturity comes to mind and an understanding of their femininity, not the flaunting of their sexuality but a subtle acknowledgement of the part they play in this human game of recognition.