That would be a very cynical attitude to take; but there is mounting evidence that global warming may not be happening after all. Indeed, the average temperature of the Earth has fallen every year for the last 10 years. This is, to recycle a phrase, “an inconvenient truth” and one that all the policy makers would prefer to ignore, or to dismiss as merely a delay in the inevitable process of global warming. This would have nothing to do with their vested interests, of course. The same scientific policy makers projected a huge rise in global temperature related to the increase in CO2 in our atmosphere, but while CO2 has continued to rise to match expectations, the global average temperature has not risen at anywhere near the projected rate: this would tend to suggest that the study linking CO2 to global warming should be revisited. In fact, some senior physicists have subjected the IPCC’s working to a bit of analysis and have cast doubts over the data used, the way it has been interpreted and the conclusions drawn from these studies.

Finally, just to add a bit more doubt to the whole global warming issue: a new study suggests that as polar ice melts it allows billions of tonnes of phytoplankton to bloom in previously ice-bound seas. These phytoplankton might be a more efficient carbon store than all the rainforests of the world put together, which may well lead to a dramatic drop in the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere. This remains to be seen, but it is clear that whilst melting ice-sheets are bad for polar bears, they may not be bad for the Earth as a whole.

I, personally, don’t believe that the whole global warming issue is as bad as has been made out, and I think that profit and the benefit of a worried and guilty society are the main reasons that this has been pushed into the mainstream media and so onto an unwitting public. I don’t believe that it is coincidence that global warming became the main threat to the world at around the same time that the Cold War finished: governments like their populace to have something other than government to worry about, and so give the government an opportunity to show itself as protecting it’s people. We currently have global warming and terrorists to keep us worried, and I’m certain that there is a killer disease, potential natural disaster or even alien attack waiting in the background, just in case any of the current sources of threat are disproved. Maybe I’m too cynical, but it stops me having to worry.

My fiancee has a Chinese restaurant in a slightly poorer area of town – which is actually a good place to sell fast food. The restaurant does OK, quiet in the week and busy on the weekends, but recently the weekends have not been as busy as they used to be and week nights are also quieter. The food’s the same and the same people are still living here, but luxuries like a Chinese takeaway are not very high on people’s lists of priorities any more. I was speaking to a lorry driver recently, and he mentioned that his firm have just sold off a quarter of their lorries and laid of the drivers as well. The lorries were relatively new, and that’s a big investment to lay off, more along the lines of taking a relatively small loss now to prevent a larger loss in the future. The company just cannot see any work for those vehicles over the next couple of years – mainly because the housing market is slumping.

There are a lot of builders, scaffolders and other tradesman living in our area, and they’re all saying that work is not as regular as it was, and the money just isn’t there either. If these guys aren’t earning the money then they’re not spending it in restaurants, pubs, cinemas, shops or anywhere else. If the money isn’t being spent then businesses lay people off or shut completely, so lessening the amount of spending money available. It’s a downward spiral that looks to be just starting to pick up speed at the moment. According to Deloitte house prices could drop by 20% over the next 18 months, and “The UK economy is on course for a very deep and prolonged economic downturn, if not an outright recession.”

I doubt there’s anything you or I could do about this, but there are some steps we could take that would make a difference. Most importantly don’t stop spending, just spend wisely. Buy what you need and try to enjoy a little luxury every now and then – but spend your money in local businesses and not in the supermarket. If any business can weather a recession it’s a giant supermarket chain, whereas local businesses can often be teetering on the brink of collapse, which would just add to our problems. Now, more than ever, where you spend your money could make a big difference.

I was lucky enough to become friends with the staff and managers of one of the best arcades in Swansea, at Mumbles Pier, and spent many an hour there honing my skills on hundreds of video games. I even went to the Earls Court trade show, around 1993 or 1994, and saw an incredible amount of video games that were being developed and tested. But this was about the time when the industry was really starting to suffer, and of the hundreds of new games I saw in that show, I only saw 4 or 5 afterwards.

It’s terrible to think that this world has gone, probably for good. The rise of the games console marked the end for arcades, but whilst arcade machines had more processing power, memory and far superior graphics the arcades still had a chance. When consoles matched, or even exceeded arcade games in these capacities then the days of the arcade was numbered. I think what finally sounded the death knell was the rise of online gaming. One thing arcades were good for was showing off to friends: if you could do all the ending moves in Mortal Combat then you could walk tall and proud. Now you can defeat people around the world without leaving the comfort of your own home, and it’s possible to gain more recognition online than you would ever gain in an arcade.

It saddens me to see arcades closing, but I’m as guilty as anyone of preferring to sit on my comfy sofa and play my PS3 on my nice LCD TV, without the smells and the noise of an arcade, and without having to relinquish the game to someone else waiting for their turn. I will miss arcades, but more out of nostalgia than from any desire to return to them again.

This story appears to be typical of the way Israel wages a war of terrorism against Palestinians living in the Gaza strip. I firmly believe that the creation of the state of Israel after the Second World War was the worst mistake ever made in the 20th Century. Without such a decision being made, by people who had no relation or connection to the area, and who had very little understanding of the Middle East, then we would probably be living in far more peaceful times. Militant Islamic groups would have had far less fuel for their cause, Palestine would be a peaceful settled country, and the whole Middle East vs West thing could have been avoided. Unfortunately Israel was conjured out of thin air as a sop to the remaining European Jews, and things have not been the same since.

For a people who hold such a horrific event as the holocaust in their recent memory, I find it hard to understand how they could persecute the Palestinian people to such an extent. If I had been treated the way Jews were by the Nazis then I would ahve every sympathy for others who might be in the same situation, and would go out of my way to ensure that I did not do anything that would put another group of people into such an horrific situation. However, the Israeli people seem to be happy to oppress the Muslim people within their borders, and to harass, terrorise and bully those outside their borders.

I understand that the article I am quoting in this instance is written by Muslims, for a Muslim news site, and so may be biased. However, my take on the whole Israeli situation is that the people of Israel have been completely two-faced and have used their race’s persecution by the Nazis as an excuse to be able to carry out such persecution themselves in order to expand their state and to empower themselves. I would be quite happy for the Jewish state of Israel to be removed from the map and for the land to be returned to either a non-religious state that allowed Arabs, Christians and Jews to live freely, or for the land to be returned to the Palestinians who have lived there continuously for far longer than then Jewish people who have always had a tendency to roam. What’s even more ironic is that there has never, historically, been a clearly defined land of Israel – although various texts suggest a kingdom of Israel did exist for a brief time after the exodus from Egypt, various other states invaded and controlled the are for the last 2,500 years – and as such any claim to being an existing land/state fails. Claiming such a state historically would be like Italy claiming most of Europe (including southern Britain) due to the Roman occupation of this territory. Time moves on and situations change.

Anyway, back to the point: and that is that I am disgusted that Israel still has such support from Western countries when it is willing to commit atrocities such as this. Crossing a border to wantonly destroy the livelihood of a member of another state is not only tantamount to war, it is also against the Geneva convention and is something that the Western states were only to happy to support Kuwait on, and to invade Iraq as a result. There are double standards at play in the world today, and I, for one, would like to see Israel treated equally in the UN – then they would start to receive punishments and probation from the rest of the world. If the USA could stop subsidising them then maybe we could start to get some peace in the Middle East.

Better at “fun stuff”, my arse.

The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye.

I do agree with a lot of the points made in this article, especially the bit about Mac users claiming that Macs are “just better” than PC’s – and so, in order to counter that argument, I hereby include a link to an article on how to build the equivalent of a Mac for not a lot of money.

I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest:

‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’

‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’

‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’

~ Annie Dillard

I believe that the blame for this lies at the feet of the educational reformists of the last 20 years. How can they say that a huge increase in children passing their GCSE’s and A-Levels is down to an improvement in teaching, and is definitely not due to the exams becoming easier? Why allow comprehensive students to use calculators for all their lessons containing mathematics, when this produces students with no knowledge of how these calculations are actually carried out? Why move the emphasis on teaching away from hard knowledge and toward practical based, non-competitive learning styles that just don’t teach the kids anything?

The UK’s school system was once something that the rest of the world aspired to, but over the last quarter of a century the high values it once embodied have been eaten away by reforms that make teachers spend more time doing paperwork than teaching; that stop children competing in the classroom of on the sports field – as competition breeds aggression (no it doesn’t – it’s a release for aggression); that dumb down the knowledge that children receive, and the exams that they sit, as this improves school performance. Competition in schools has now moved to school versus school, with each establishment competing for an increased headcount in order to secure more funding. This is not necessarily good for the schoolchildren as this encourages schools to groom their pupils solely to pass the exams that they know are going to be set, and doesn’t encourage any depth or breadth of knowledge.

My niece is a bright young lady of 11 years, who has recently moved up to comprehensive school. She is good at mathematics, reasonable at science, and can speak 2 languages fluently and is learning a third. However, she was absolutely shocked the other day to discover that Catholics were Christians. This just didn’t make any sense to her, and she had even less knowledge of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism. It took a while to explain that there were different types of Christians: protestant, catholic, orthodox, etc; and she had heard of Jews, but knew nothing of their religion or it’s relationship to Christianity, let alone how Islam was also related to both Judaism and Christianity. this shocked me, as I’d have thought that at least a small amount of other religions would have been discussed in the RE lessons she would have had prior to joining this school.

Even worse, she has learnt her multiplication tables by rote, and has a basic knowledge of additions, subtraction and multiplication, but she cannot do long division on paper or in her head – she’s not even been taught how to approximate in division to at least get close to the answer. When I ribbed her about this, gently, then she replied that she didn’t need to know how to do this as she could use a calculator at any time. I’m really not sure how her generation of kids are going to cope with any form of original science research, computer programming, accountancy or even working out how much change to give if they work a till. If the machines they are being taught to rely on ever broke down, what would they do? It truly scares me, and not just for these kids sake: ill-education has got to be a factor in the current rise of loutish behaviour, as lack of breadth of knowledge leads to lack of empathy with anyone different from you and your peers. It also doesn’t help that of the kids who are now going through school (ie those aged between 5 and 16), at least a reasonable proportion will have parents in their early 20′s, and these would also have been through a school system that had just stopped caring about really educating it’s children. If the parents lack knowledge, and interest in gaining knowledge, then why should anyone expect their children to be any different?

I realise that I’m turning into a grumpy old man, and that I’m giving the impression that things were so much better in my day, but I really think that the standard of education in the UK has fallen dramatically since I was in school. I learnt how to do basic math before moving on to algebra and statistics; I learnt spelling, how to use English correctly, and how to use punctuation as well; I learnt comparative religions alongside the basics of Christianity, and was not forced into assuming that any one religion was right, or was better than another; and I learnt that I had to learn to pass tests and exams, and that I could not go home and cheat by using the Internet to do my homework for me. I wish that these kind of values could be brought back to modern schools:

• that teachers could have more time to prepare for their lessons and actually teach, rather than have to complete reams of paperwork;
• that competitive sports were considered good for kids, rather than frowned upon for teaching that some kids are better than others (but let’s be fair, some kids really are better than others, as the world is not a fair place);
• that children were made to do more actual learning in the classroom, rather than having more, and more work set as homework – as everyone knows that they just use the Internet, and in doing so don’t really learn anything. (I understand there is an argument that these kids are learning research skills by using the Internet, but in reality they are just using Google, copying down the answers provided, and then switching their attention back to whatever game they are currently playing on their PC);
• that calculators were only to be used for advanced math tests, which would not be set until the children had proved that they understood the basics of mathematics;
• that geography and history were compulsory throughout school, until the age of 16, so that ids would have an idea of where we are in the world, how we relate to other nations, and how our past has shaped both our nation and our relationship with other nations as well. (If ever a nation had to understand it’s relationship with the rest of the world, it’s the UK – for at one point we owned, or had major influence on, almost every major nation);
• and that religion could be taught impartially, with equal emphasis being given to all major world religions, and the relationships of these religions explained both historically, and in terms of the world today.

OK. Rant over, and if you’ve read all that then I apologise for having bombarded you with my opinion for this length of time. However, this is my blog, and so I’m entitled to vent my feelings though it, every now and then.