England's England

Female Muslim prisoners in education

This is the time of year that confuses those involved in education not ‘in the know’ about the life of an average Muslim girl in their early 20s or late teens.

Muslim girls are a strictly guarded commodity ‘jailed’ by their fathers and brothers until it is time to sell them off to the family of a young lad who wants them to be their son’s wife.

For these girls the first taste of ‘freedom’ is when they are allowed from the home to go to school. Later this becomes college or university, but the weekends, and when schooling is done for the day, their lives are spent in the home. They are trusted to make the journey to and from their place of learning on their own, although often this is by means of being dropped off or collected by car. Outside of educational hours, any journeys in the outside world are strictly chaperoned and surrounded by family. They are not allowed to go to events on their own, and certainly not allowed to mix with non-family members.

So, as they grow older and more mature they recognise that their true freedom exists only whilst officially at their place of education. It is here that they meet and form natural relationships with people from outside of their sect, some even non-Muslim, and a few even form highly forbidden sexual relationships, usually with young Muslim guys from their own sect studying in the same institution.

Indeed, most colleges and universities turn a blind eye to areas of their buildings being used for sexual intercourse during the term time when Muslim girls are involved.

What confuses college and university staff, however, is why after the courses and terms are finished, probably with Grade A results, the girls keep on coming back and using facilities such as libraries, free study areas or internet access. Again, this is the only way the girls have to escape the prison that is their home. They will lie and pretend that they still need to attend their place of learning in order to get moments to themselves. In most cases they aren’t even meeting ‘illegal’ friends, just searching for a few moments of solace and a chance to breathe freely.

When they can no longer pad out this freedom, they then spend their summer locked back in the confines of their family growing older (but not too old) and waiting to be handed on to their appointed husband.

Why educate these prisoners when all they are being groomed for is wife and motherhood duties? Simple. They need to be able to help their eventual male offspring do their homework and get qualifications and excellent careers. That is the sole purpose of their education, it’s not for their own benefit or career.

Time keeps on slipping slipping into…

The Passage of Time: Time and time again I hear people discussing how fast time seems to be going. They have a whole range of theories as to why this seems to be happening, from the speeding up of the general exploding outwards that is the Universe, to end of the world alien intervention.

Years and years ago I remember my granny saying, “Oh Christopher, just look at you. Haven’t you grown! My, it only seems like yesterday that I stood you in the sink and washed you down. I can’t believe you’re out of nappies and such a grown man.” I used to think she was a stupid old biddy, plot to remove her vocal chords, and I’ve no idea why she eventually went missing presumed dead, honestly officer.

Anyway, here I am a number of years later, and what can I say. I met up with someone I’d not seen for over 10 years, and they had a 12 year old son. I immediately found myself thinking, “God, doesn’t time fly. I can’t believe you’re out of nappies and such a grown man.” Luckily I was able to hold my tongue so this evil statement didn’t slip out to prove that I was a nerdy old person in the eyes of this poor fella.

But it got me thinking, didn’t it. Why does time seem to go so fast the older you get? Being your planet’s most intelligent item meant that it wasn’t long before I came up with the answer. So, if anybody ever engages you in this conversation about time flying, tell them this:-

Your mind has a finite depth. Imagine it is a piece of A4 paper. It has a fixed length and width. Imagine that it takes 10 seconds to scan and read everything on that piece of A4 paper. Regardless of what’s on it, it takes 10 seconds to scan from one side to the other.

Now, as soon as you are born, or maybe even before that, all of your experiences fill that piece of A4 paper. There are never any gaps, the paper is always completely full. There are no empty bits waiting to be filled. It doesn’t work like that. One day’s worth of experiences, if that’s all you’ve had, will fill the entire paper. One century’s worth of experiences, if that’s what you’ve had, will fill the entire paper. As more experiences are added, the size of the space being taken up by the previous experiences reduces in size to accommodate the recording of the additional experiences. Existing experiences are always reducing in size to allow the new experiences in.

So, you get the idea that the size of the container stays the same, but the concentrate within the container increases. Looking at the piece of A4 paper concept, right, it still takes 10 seconds to completely scan from one side to the other. That scanning speed can’t alter. However, far more information will have sped past during that 10 seconds if the paper contains a century’s worth of experiences than if it only contains a day’s worth. Thus, the perception will be that the same 10 second scan from one side to the other will be faster the more experience that’s recorded there. The perception will be that time has moved faster the fuller that page is of information, when comparing a 10 second scan taken when you are a day old to a 10 second scan when you are a hundred years old. So, it’s the comparison between how much information you used to pick up during the 10 second scan, compared to the huge amount more you pick up nowadays, that makes you think time seems to be getting faster.

I’ve cracked it. Time isn’t moving faster, I’m just getting a whole lot older!

Damn.

And god so loved, erm, nobody?

With love and respect to the victims of the recent earthquake, the tsumami, or the humans that are destroyed on mass by cyclones or any other natural disasters, and inspired (if that’s the right word) me to think about them, let’s talk about these natural disasters. As in, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, cyclones, etc., etc. When the initial time spent telling the horror stories is over, we enter the phase where we more rationally(?) look for who to blame. Not unsurprisingly ‘god’ has his head on the chopping block on this one.

It’s interesting watching religious leaders and their various takes on it. On the one extreme you have them saying that it makes them question their own belief in a god, and on the other extreme you have those who are quite happy that it was all a punishment for being evil and nasty human beings breaking some of the god’s rules. Quite what the babies and toddlers who are crushed or swept to a most horrifying death were being punished for having done I don’t quite get, but then I exist outside of the need to look to a god to help brush stuff I don’t understand under the carpet.

Believers will of course say that I am blind because I cannot see the god that is so clearly all around us (he’s bouncing up and down on a pogo stick right in front of you as we speak, and he’s about to spray you with spray string, not that you’d notice) yet there are some obvious theological explanations for the cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis that they will simply not consider (because they just don’t want to):

1. God is an utter bastard. He did it all right, because he’s horrible.

2. God is impotent (maybe that whole omnipotence thing was a typo). He didn’t do it, but neither was he able to stop it. Sure, he designed the universe, but he did a bloody awful bodge job of it and has since washed his hands of the whole project.

3. God couldn’t give a fuck about any of us, especially anyone in Burma, or near the Indian Ocean (and Mexico, Krakatoa, Pompeii, Mount St. Helens, etc…). He didn’t cause the disasters, but he couldn’t be arsed to stop them. Or even to telephone ahead with a three hour warning. Bastard, eh?

4. God doesn’t exist. Earthquakes are merely a seismological thing, cyclones are part of a naturally occuring weather system and the reason nobody/nothing stopped it is that there is nobody/nothing clever enough/in place to properly predict it, let alone prevent it.

I only hope the whole continuing series of tragedies will make the god-botherers turn from blind unquestioning faith and look at the reality. Will they? Nargh.

Why people hate commercial radio

Why does commercial radio do everything so boringly?  What are they afraid of?  Here’s an example of some programming elements and how they are put together by the BBC or how they’d be put together by the commercial sector.

Ok, let’s have: A 15 minute news bulletin, followed by 3 records as good as segued back-to-back. Before that let’s have a presenter coming to the end of their show and a new presenter taking over after the news.  

So then, how would Radio 1 do this?  Aha, let’s look at the 12:30pm to 1:15pm sweep on a weekday.  

Fearne Cotton’s show is coming to the end, and Greg James will be taking over.  

At around 12:30pm Fearne has a short ‘handover style’ chat with Greg, obviously talking briefly about how awesome something that happened in Fearne’s show was (usually this is the ‘live’ artist who was singing for them) and forward promoting any features or guests in Greg’s show.  Then a song plays.  After the song, Fearne says a quick goodbye forward promoting tomorrow’s show, and plays a song. This song finishes at 12:45pm and Greg appears, talking for 4 or 5 seconds to thank Fearne and forward promote features in his show, and the 15 minute “Newsbeat” starts.  Mid-way through this, inbetween stories, Greg pops up again with a forward promotion for his show, usually the first few songs to be played, ending with (say) “but first there’s more on school meals in Lancashire”, which then goes straight into the next news story.

When, at approximately 1pm, the 15 minute “Newsbeat” has finished a jingle or two play and the first song starts. This segues to the second and then the third song.  Inbetween the songs Greg will link with no more than 2 seconds of voice over the top of the ‘intro’ of each, before doing his first ‘full’ link at the end of the three songs.

The net result is that the listener feels that the presenter is there for them, is interested and enthusiastic about what’s coming out of the radio and is slickly and unobtrusively ‘jocking’ the whole output to make it tight and fun.  I always refer to this as the stitching that firmly holds the squares of the patchwork quilt together. The changeover between the presenters is interesting and plausible and the human sounding ‘team’ atmosphere of the station is maintained for the listener to be part of.  In other words, it works and it sounds good.

But, how would the commerical sector handle this?  Well, obviously compared to the BBC, there would also be as many commercials to put in as possible, but it would be probably something like this:

At 12:30pm for no obvious reason songs would be segued. At 12:40, the outgoing presenter wouldn’t say goodbye, because some mad person from madland has decided that saying goodbye is negative and might make people switch off.  Instead, the outgoing presenter might vaguely refer in an abstract guarded and careful way to ‘tomorrow’ and would then play the adverts, with no goodbye. The stream of tedious jarring adverts would play one after the other and then the news programme would start at 12:45pm.  The news programme may contain unannounced commercial breaks ahead of any weather forecast, and it would end and further commercials would play.  At 1:03pm after the obligatory trailer for tomorrow’s breakfast show (a trailer that includes those hilarious spontaneous clips from this morning’s breakfast show that must be repeated every 20 minutes during the rest of the day’s output) and a jingle, the three segued songs would play.  At the junction of each song a pre-recorded male or maybe female voice shouting in a strange style as if they are severely constipated and recorded whilst sitting on a toilet, will say station liners with maybe some pointless spacey zappy sound effects underscoring their words.

At 1:15pm the new presenter would not say hello because he, according to the mad people from madland, might remind people that things had changed, but he’d speak his first link maybe forward promoting what was to be in his show especailly if it was a sponsored feature, he’d mention how wonderful the morning’s breakfast show (from hours ago) was and tease about the next song, which of course telegraphs the next 3 minutes of commercials before said song.

The net result of this is that there is no stitching holding the patchwork together.  Material is just laid out next to each other with nothing giving it continuity or holding it together or giving it a commonality or overall impact.  The listener is left alone and lonely as they are barraged by the different elements without an explanation or any overlording personality and humour to make them feel part of something.  They feel abused and left out in the cold.

Why does commercial radio have to behave like this and then moan about the lack of people listening for more than 15 minutes?  It can’t be difficult to make commercial radio entertaining and to give it a hook for listeners to enjoy hanging from, surely?    

July will be mega-wet. Or will it?

As I’ve mentioned before, I have limited trust in any organisation, like the Meteorological Office, that consistently fails to provide the service that they charge Millions of Pounds each year to provide. Despite their huge and expensive computer modelling equipment the Met Office has been unable to provide much more than a ‘now cast’ and certainly has been proved to be so bad at long range seasonal forecasting that with tail between their legs they’ve now refused to even try.

The huge neon sign pointing to the failure of any weather prediction provider is when they peddle the lie of man made global warming/climate change.  The Met Office does this nonsense.  Fail.

Success on weather prediction is now in the hands of a number of the smaller more specialist organisations, especially those who study the relationship between the sun activity and weather trends on Earth.  My favourite of these is http://weatheraction.com who have stuck their neck out and made warnings about July.

If what they are saying about July comes to pass then surely it’s time to hand over the nation’s weather forecasting business to organisations like Weather Action, and to shuffle the Met Office out into the wasteland of sooth-sayers and mediums or others getting their weather and climate information from a tombola drum.

Here’s what Weather Action tell us:

“July 2010 in Britain & Ireland (& around the world) will include extreme deluges, thunderstorms and major floods. These deluges, torrential rain and floods will pose significant danger and will catch standard computer model forecasts by surprise even from a day ahead and will require warnings, preparation and rapid responses by authorities.

“Local Authorities and the new Government would be ill-advised not to study our forecast forthwith and act upon it. If they refuse to consider this forecast which will help with detailed preparations the public will be put through unnecessary suffering and danger and lives could well be lost - as they were when the UK ran out of road salt last winter because authorities ignored our forecasts and warnings, having been misled by the Met Office forecast for a mild winter.

“Judgement day is now approaching for local authorities and government, whose reliance on failed computer models and the disreputable ‘science’ of global warming dogma is causing misery and costing lives. They must chose between their duty to the public or continuing support for baseless dogma.”

The great water hysteria

A few years ago (before the years when it was doing nothing but non-stop raining!), we were having to watch mass hysteria in London. It was about water.

Apparently we needed to save it or the world would end.

We were given lots of advice about how to save it. Yeah, there’s the usual about not leaving a hose-pipe emptying non-stop into a garden – and that kind of makes sense – but the mad people have taken it further than that.

We must reduce the water in our baths, kettles, and dishwashers, and stop flushing our toilets. Sticky stinky poohs must fester away for days before being guiltily flushed away. We must clean our teeth with sand, never leave the tap running, and use dry stones to beat the dirt out of our clothes.

Of course, the non-freethinkers get caught up in this madness and believe it all. They want to do their bit. They believe we are at some point of crisis, and, as I said, the world is about to end.

So. Time for the reality check.

Ok, first thing is we live on a planet which has over 70% of the surface covered in water. Yep, water is the stuff that dominates. It ain’t going away anytime soon. There’s 1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of it (give or take a few bottles).

Next, we live in a country, and a part of that country which has a huge amount of rainfall annually. We are not in a place where water rarely drops. It comes down by the bucket load. Trust me, I know. I’ve got a large hole in my roof. Even if we accept that cyclically there is slightly less rainfall from one year to another, there is still more than enough rainfall to drown every human being in London

Now, there have been traditional methods used to suck up this water and squeeze it into pipes to get it into people’s homes. But, surprise surprise, the high profit-making water utility companies haven’t kept up with the changes needed to continue to capture said water. Too late they have realised that their sources are ‘drying up’. Of course, making proper provision for this and building alternative methods of capturing adequate supplies of the water that falls down upon us would have cost money. The constant chasing of the constant changing sources of water should be their job. It’s what we pay them to do. But no, they did nothing, until they’d sucked the old wells and places previously full of water dry.

To hide from their responsibility, the old chestnut of global warming/climate change has been trotted out as the ’cause’. And we know how the mad people love to fear global warming! Hence why the naughty water utility companies are able to hide the truth of how the chasing of their millions in profit has been the single cause of their inability to meet the demands for water consumption in the UK. It’s absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with global warming, climate change, or pygmies from space. Yet, the mad people don’t want to believe that, they love the idea that some natural (or preferably man-made) disaster is taking all the water away from us. Moreover, they believe we are all doomed.

For my part in this hysteria, well, I’m flushing that loo as often as I want. When I clean the last remaining teeth in my mouth, wow do I leave that tap running on full. As for the shower, the bath, yep you got it, full on, full up to the brim, overflowing and cascading onto the rooms below. I refuse to be conned and sucked into this madness and collection of lies.