Thought Conviction

The thought police aren’t just out there, they’re getting convictions.

A Scottish man who made a website with sick jokes about blacks, Muslims, homosexuals, disabled peopled pleaded guilty to committing a racially aggravated breach of the peace by producing and managing the website.  He only avoided jail by having no previous convictions and quickly admitting his guilt. Instead he gave 160 hours of community service. That’s a month of full-time unpaid work. Plus, he forfeited 12 pieces of computer equipment.

He didn’t make fun of any specific people, other than Simon Weston, the disfigured Falklands War veteran.

I’ve just been reading up on that amorphous area of the common law called “breach of the peace” and even as ambiguous at it can be, I can’t see how the website breached the peace. Breach of the peace is a catchall that the police seem to use when they have nothing else to go on to accomplish their goal. In this case, Andrew Love seems to have done something people find really distasteful, but he didn’t actually do it to anyone.

No one is forced to see his website and they are certainly free to immediately surf away from it the moment they find something they don’t like. No children or animals were harmed in the making of the website.

 According to the Daily Telegraph, ‘Alistair McSporran, prosecuting, said officers found “numerous” items on the website “that had gone beyond the realms of bad taste”. These included a phoney Islamic jihad group and a picture which showed an American police officer being offensive to a young black child in a toy car.’ This is beyond the realm of bad taste?

While I don’t condone Mr Love’s choice of humour, neither do I think it should be a criminal offence.

Three Strikes and You’re Out

The day after two car bombs we found in London, both by providential observers, a blazing car has been driven at the main terminal building of Glasgow Airport.

It appears to me to be a car bomb gone “wrong”. The car was already on fire and one of the occupants was on fire, jumped from the car, but was stopped by members of the public until he was detained by the police.  The other was pulled from the car by police, even as he was trying to fight them off. Both were of South Asian ethnicity.
The car never had the chance to explode and as far as news reports indicate, no one was killed or injured.  So far this week, even when they’ve made an attack, terrorists have been unsuccessful.

The terrorists will have to realise this ain’t Bagdad. We won’t be cowed by their bullying.

Clothes Police

If you’ve heard of the clothes police, but never thought this referred to an actual law enforcement body, you may soon be wrong. It may soon refer to any constabulary in Scotland.

Under proposed Scottish legislation, unlicensed kilt wearers could face a £5,000 fine and six months in jail. Don’t worry about wearing the wrong tartan. It all has to do with the sporran – the pouch worn over the unmentionables due to the lack of pockets in a kilt.

Sporrans are traditionally made from leather or fur. Applicants for a license had better know the provenance of their sporran. The animal providing the materials must have been killed lawfully. That means it if it is made from badger, otter, deer, or a number of other animals, it must have been made before 1994.  It’s always a good idea to keep those receipts.

If you can’t prove how old it is (or that it is disgracefully made from non-traditional materials), not only will you have a criminal record and possibly a cellmate, but you will also have your sporran confiscated.

This crazy legislation is not entirely from the deranged collective mind of the Scottish government. It has been proposed to conform to the rest of the European Union.

Our Father Among the Saints Columba

Today is the 1410th anniversary of the repose of Columba of Iona, one of the patron saints of Scotland. He is by no means one of the earliest bishops in Scotland. St Ninian first worked in Scotland in the 4th century. Nonetheless, Columba’s missionary work amongst the Picts was one of the great evangelistic efforts in this island.

Though like Jesus he began his Scottish mission with twelve disciples, Columba turned Iona into a school for missionaries to the Picts, much as my own patron St Dyfrig did for the Welsh at Hentland and Moccas.

I went to Iona 17 years ago. Wow. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long ago. Anyhow, it would be a great place to be a monk, because there’s not much to do there other than pray. And you have to want to get there. Even today as a tourist attraction and place of pilgrimage, you have to want to get there. It’s not on the way to anywhere else.

Likewise, if you were going to be a missionary to the mainland or any of the other islands in the Hebrides in the 6th century, you would have to want to get there. You would have to be pretty committed to evangelism.

Columba would have probably never imagined that his rebuilt abbey and the community associated with it would be run by a woman and espouse liberal politics and theology, and pan-sexual ecumenism.

Adomnán’s Vita Columbae is one of the great hagiographies of the British church, written within first hundred years after Columba’s death. As the ninth abbot of Iona, Adomnán had access to those who knew Columba, so it is much more difficult to discount the stories told, as is often the habit of modern scholars when dealing with hagiographical literature. They have to find other ways of explaining away his prophetic gift and the miracles performed by him through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Because this aspect of his ministry is so well know, Columba is a popular figure with charismatics who have dabbled in Celtic Christian history. The only difference between them and the Orthodox is that as Orthodox, we don’t see the ministry of Columba as finished, but merely translated from this life to the next, where he prays for us as part of the great cloud of witnesses.

In response we sing:

By thy God-inspired life/ thou didst embody both the mission and the dispersion of the Church,/ most glorious Father Colum Cille./ Using thy repentance and voluntary exile,/ Christ our God raised thee up as a beacon of the True Faith,/ an Apostle to the heathen and an indicator of the Way of salvation./ Wherefore O holy one, cease not to intercede for us/ that our souls may be saved.

Airlift

The popular image of overweight Americans has not been improved by a man who fell ill on a cruise ship anchored in Scotland.

He could not be removed from the ship and taken to hospital by ordinary means. When the 450 lb man succumbed to stomach problems (wow – there’s a surprise), he had to be winched off the ship by an RAF Sea King helicopter. He was then transported to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

He had emergency surgery and is recovering. Soon he’ll be back to eating at full strength again.

Governing on Eggshells

A minority government is a fragile thing. Nonetheless, the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, Alex Salmond, has been eleced First Minister of Scotland.

This means he probably won’t be in power very long – at least not without another election. The SNP is have to negotiate hard for every piece of legislation. They are is a kind of issue by issue coalition with that flakiest of parties, the Greens. I’m guessing they won’t even be hinting that anthropogenic global warming is load of anti-capitalist propaganda.

Not that the SNP would ever decry anything as anti-capitalist. They are to the left of Labour. Strange as it may seem, Scotland had to ditch Labour to get a socialist government.

The Price of an NICE English Postcode

The postcode lottery strikes again.

One of the advatages of devolution for Scots is that they may no longer be tied to England for the worst cancer survival rates in Western Europe. The approval of drugs available on the NHS is down to the Scottish Medicines Consortium. England and Wales is governed by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

The Scots have approved the use of cetuximab and docetaxel for head and neck cancer. Drug trials have shown that cetuximab (also know by the brand name Erbitux) plus radiotherapy survive for an average of just over 4 years, compared with less than two and a half years for those treated with radiation alone. Nice says it costs too much for what you get. Tough luck.

As I mentioned back in January, Erbitux has already been rejected by NICE for use in bowel cancer. It seems that Nice and the NHS have found a good way to keep the socialised medicine fiscally viable. All you have to do is let all the cancer patients die off and there are fewer people putting a drain on resources.

When I hear about how much more compassionate enlightened British socialism is when compared with the big bad USA, I just think of all the people here who die due to rationed health care. And if you are in the US, remember that this is what Hillary wants for you, too.

Anti-climax

I just find it hard to get exicted about the election results across the country. Here in the Shire, there were some welcomed wins and losses, but our joy is based on local issues and not on party affiliation.

The Tories gained control with 32 out of 58 seats, but it’s never been a fight with Labour here. We are one of the battlegrounds between the Tories and the Lib-Dems. Lib-Dem losses meant the Tories no longer have to coalition with Independents. We are represented by the only two Labour councillors in the county. Before last night there were four.

Everyone was a expecting a Labour meltdown across the country. Though I wasn’t particularly excited at the prospect of a Tory landslide, I did want to see Labour lose. In most places, the Labour losses were not terribly significant. In the Welsh Assembly, they lost four seats, with leftwing Plaid Cymru gaining three of those and the Tories one.

In Scotand, the SNP, which was just a fringe party not too many years ago, gained the largest number of seats in the Scottish Parliament. But don’t expect Scotland to declare independence just yet. The Nationalists have one more seat than Labour, but no majority. Labour have run Scotland in coalition with the Lib-Dems. The SNP have no natural coalition partners. They may very well find themselves a plurality party in Opposition. We won’t know for a few days.

We will never know what the Scottish electorate wanted. 100,000 votes were lost due to either invalid ballots because people didn’t understand how many boxes they could tick in a complicated multi-tiered system or because the electronic voting machines experienced major failures in their first outing.

In other parts of the country the electorate simply didn’t want anything. In our ward, less than 20% over the registered voters cast a ballot. People just couldn’t be bothered.

They probably realise that for the most part, even with a few more Conservative councils, it will be political business as usual.

No More Skye Blues

Though I haven’t seen it mentioned in the press, you can depend on your faithful reporter to dig out new news. I went to the Highland Council website and found assurance that the renaming of Skye will only effect it as an electoral council ward. In a statement issued on Monday,

The Highland Council has assured the public that Skye will continue to be known as, and referred to, as Skye in Council business, literature and road signage and has dismissed suggestions that the island will have a new Gaelic name from Thursday, when Council elections are held.

While on the council website, I also learned that the Highland Region comprises 11.4% of the area of Great Britain. It is 20% larger than Wales. It had a population in 2004 of 211,340. (By contrast, Wales has 3 million people.) It has a population density of 7.9 persons per sq. kilometre. England has a density of 388.7/km². In other words, people are pretty sparse up there.

Having travelled up the east coast, across the top, and down the west coast, I can testify that it is rather desolate, and the coasts are where the population is concentrated.

Over the Sea to Where?

I’m glad I visited the Isle of Skye when I had the chance. Thursday it will be no more.

The jewel of the Hebrides will not sink beneath the waves, but rather under the weight of political correctness. The Highland Council has decreed that the island should shed it’s “Anglicised slave name” and now only be known as Eilean a’ Cheo.

This follows the Western Isles changing its name to Comhairle nan Eilean Siar. I didn’t even know about this until I read about Skye. But then I’ve never been known to be one for political correctness.

If you think Eilean a’ Cheo is the ancient name for the island, you’d be wrong. Most Gaelic speakers call it An t-Eilean Sgitheanach. The latter means “Winged Isle” while the new adopted name means “Isle of Mists”, previously used as a poetic nickname for Skye.

Not everyone on Skye is happy about this. Less than half the island speaks Gaelic. It would be like everyone in Welsh-speaking West Wales telling the majority English speakers of Pembrokeshire they would no longer being able to refer to Pembroke or Milford Haven or Haverfordwest. It would even be like not calling them Penfro or Aberdaugleddau or Hwlffordd but rather giving them new names out of the Mabinogion or The Book of Taliesin.

The unhappiness is more practical as well. Each year 250,000 tourists bring in £90 million to Skye. This is what keeps Skye alive. Go changing the name and people may have just a little trouble finding their destination or even booking their holidays, especially since the council is changing the name on all of their documents and tourists inquiring about travelling to Skye will be encouraged to use the new name. Political correctness may come at a high price.

End of Days

As noted by the Daily Telegraph, Tony Blair’s days as Prime Minister are at an end. As much as I’m sure he hoped to go out on top, it appears that he is rather floating away in a dinghy as the ship of state sinks.

The upcoming local elections will likely be the final nail in his polical coffin. I don’t view them with quite the dire ramification of the Brit. The Scottish Nationalist are likely to win a plurality up north. Breaking up is hard to do, but sometimes it’s for the best.

We probably won’t have Scottish prime minster of England while Scotland goes independent under the Scottish Nationalists. If the SNP gain control of Holyrood they won’t get a referendum together until 2010.  Gordon Brown has to call a General Election to be held by April 29 of that year, though it could come as early as 2009. That’s when the Tony Blair clone, David Cameron will probably get into Number 10.

I don’t think the Tories will do that much better than Labour. They have a virtually identical fiscally moderate capitalist/socialist blend with a liberal social policy accepting of anything and without moral constraint.