Quake!

Was on my PC around 1am last night and suddenly the house started to wobble a little. It was quite windy outside so figured it may have been a strong gust. Then the wobbling got worse and everything in my room was rocking like crazy. After about 15 seconds it stopped.

Apparently there was an earth movement measuring up to 5.0 on the Richter scale with its epicentre near Hull. Hull was in ruins but there was almost no damage at all...

I'm not a plate tectonics expert, but I do know that the UK is not near the edge of a plate and so the world wasn't about to open up and suck us in.

Still, it's quite unusual for the UK to feel the earth move. I don't think there will be a tsunami but if there is, maybe it will help refloat the Riverdance.

Taxed to death

Our justice system was yet again shown as a complete embarassment when 76 year old Richard Fitzmaurice was locked up for 34 days for refusing to pay his Council Tax. Mr Fitzmaurice owes West Norfolk Council about £1600.

In 2005, 73 year old Sylvia Hardy was jailed for 7 days for refusing to pay Devon County Council the sum of £63.71 which was owed on her Council Tax for the previous year.

First point to be made is that it is unbelievable that these people have been put in prison when extremely dangerous criminals and repeat offenders continue to get pathetic community sentences because "there isn't enough space in prison".

Personally I class violence against a person or against property as quite serious offences, but there are plenty of cases where vicious assaults or robberies are committed and the offender walks away with a week of gardening or scrubbing graffiti off walls as punishment. But for a minor offence like avoiding the Council Tax they can easily find a jail space for an old age pensioner? It's pretty crazy to me.

I guess this isn't really the main point. These two Council Tax crusaders have stated that the reason they wont pay is because it's an unfair tax. I think most people would agree with that but what can you do about it? Most people have a lot to lose and can't think about contesting it, but pensioners can: they are also the ones hit hardest by the Council Tax.

Council Tax is supposed to support local amenities, rubbish collection, transport, Police, and so on. The problem is that it's calculated in a completely unfair way: it's based on the value of your home.

Given huge increases in fuel and electricity bills its easy to see how pensioners are being hammered by this tax, because pensions are not increasing at the rate of Council Tax. If you're a pensioner on a normal state pension but you're living in your family home that has been passed down through the generations you will struggle to pay because your home may be worth a lot. How can councils justify increases of up to 20% per year when the old age pension increases by around 3%?

It's pretty simple to me - they can't justify it at all but they don't need to either. I can't actually think of any improvements our local council has made except to build a leisure centre near my house. The roads are awful, the traffic management is a joke and only assists frustration rather than congestion, there are roadworks everywhere all the time. To park in the town is an absolute rip off and streets are littered with parking meters and little Hitlers to slap tickets on cars.

As an aside, in the centre of Glasgow it costs £1.20 to park your car for 2 hours. In the centre of Wigan it's apparently 50 pence to park for 2 hours. Centre of Blackpool? £2.20. Rip off. You could understand it if it was worth it but it isn't. The buildings of the town are really, really poor and the selection of shops is pathetic. When you can go to the centre of a big city and pay less to park and have a nice modern and clean experience with lots of choices of shop, why would anyone want to come to old and dilapidated Blackpool?

A couple of years ago we had our rubbish bins collected every week and they would take whatever you left out. Now it's every two weeks, you have to have 4 different wheelie bins and seperate your rubbish into them for recycling and they wont collect the bins if they are over a certain weight. Furthermore they only take one bin per week.

This is the case amongst almost every council and must save them an absolute fortune considering they also profit from your waste now that you so kindly seperated it for recycling. Council tax time and boom, 8% increase.

There's more antisocial behaviour than ever before, amenities such as local swimming pools and gardens are being closed down due to "lack of money". Everywhere you look the council are cutting back. So where's all the Council Tax going?

Simple. Like MP's, Councillors are fuelling their space rockets with it and passing the bill on to members of the local area. Our local Council employs some people on £250,000 per year contracts to basically bullshit about nothing. We've had a million white elephants proposed such as "Storm City" which completely failed when it was first brought out in the Midlands, the Super Casino which wont ever happen plus endless Las Vegas style revamps which wont ever happen. Revamps of the bus station that wont happen, Pharaoh's Palace and international hotels along the sea front that wont ever happen. A world class conference centre which wont ever happen.

All these artists impressions to deceive the council tax payer that the council wants to improve. Unfortunately I look at the facts not the propaganda that hits the front page of the local newspaper (the Evening Gazette).

Absolutely loads of money was creamed off by the Councillors and their cronies beneath that Super Casino umbrella. They must have spent about £50,000 on free holidays to Las Vegas under the guise of factfinding. Casino "consultants" were employed on huge contracts to do the best part of nothing.

Money is leaking everywhere within Councils. Fylde council has been slammed for wasting over £600,000 on a waste disposal project because it's causing two local attractions as well as a swimming pool in a nearby suburb to face closure due to lack of money.

How can these muppets come up with this nonsense? Sure you save money by closing swimming pools, leisure centres, lakeside attractions, parks, gardens, and so on. But then you don't have any services. And Council Tax would still go up. Maybe closing the town hall down would work.

Our local town hall planned to waste almost £1million on a Lowry painting "for the people of Blackpool to enjoy". What a load of bollocks. They would stick it in the town hall where they can wank themselves silly over it. Whichever stupid twat came up with that idea should be fired on the spot. If they can afford that painting, they can afford to keep our services going.

They have even closed all the public toilets and a private company called Danfo has been contracted to provide them. You now have to pay to use the toilet because the Council wanted to save some money on staff. It's indirect taxation.

Council tax pays for all the misdemeanours of the local authorites in Britain and is utterly and completely unfair. It should be scrapped immediately. The much hated Poll Tax - a personal tax rather than one based on the value of your house - was far fairer.

I believe they should implement a local income tax for local services. I believe the Police should be paid out of national income tax. I certainly don't think councils should be able to waste all our Council Tax money and slap a bill for more on your doorstep every year. I think better controls and management of council spending is needed. More efficiency is needed to keep council spending down and give value for money.

Their jailing might be a sad reflection on our "justice" system but I don't feel sorry for the two Council Tax evaders, Sylvia and Richard. I believe their cause is just and that sooner or later the camel's back will break on this issue. MPs are starting to get rumbled with their hands in the coffers and it's time to start slamming Councillors for the same and bring shame upon this archaic tax.

These people were all voted in by you and I yet they continue to flaunt our trust by selfishly lining their own pockets or pursuing their own self-benefitting agendas. It doesn't even seem to be about Government or Local Government: you can see this by the crazy schemes they implement which don't benefit anyone whilst letting core services and building rot. Pandering to pressure groups and corporations instead of practising the will of the people.

My town, formerly the UK's premium tourist resort, is in freefall. But all the fat cats in the Council care about is making more money for themselves to waste.

Share the love

There's a device known as the "Mosquito" which has been around for a while here. Essentially it is a high frequency sound emitter that only people under the age of 25 can hear due to hearing degradation as people get older. It's installed outside off licenses and known places where hoodies hang around and is used to disperse them. But now one council that used them has banned them because a hoodie decided to complain that it gave him a headache. How ridiculous.

Unsurprisingly various idiots have come out in the press bleating about human rights, including Shami Chakrabarti who always seems to get her opinion into the media despite being a nobody. They brought racism into it by talking about a device that only emitted high pitch sounds to black people. I don't know why, I guess there was some point there but I couldn't see it. It's always the same in this country, the vandals and hoodies that are antisocial and commit offences get all the support and the shopkeeper gets no protection.

Similarly, drugs-cheat Dwain Chambers today was included in the British World Indoor Athletics team despite UK Athletics saying they didn't want him in. Chambers was rumbled in 2003 for knowingly taking performance enchancing drugs and advocated drug use afterwards saying that you need to take drugs to win. It is frankly unbelievable that he is allowed to come back. However I do believe that a very large majority of athletes are on some kind of drugs.

I was reading some opinions about Chambers and one in particular made me laugh simply because of its complete irrelevance. An athletics follower named "Darren" commented on the Sky News website that those that are slamming Chambers for being a druggie shouldn't buy records from artists that use drugs and if they did they would be a hypocrite.

I don't know what planet "Darren" is on, but knowingly setting out to use banned drugs to cheat in competitive sport like Chambers could not be further apart from taking drugs for whatever pleasure these musicians get out of it.

Those kids that booted Gary Newlove to death got "life" sentences adding up to about 17 years in jail each. This means they will be out when they are 35 if they serve the full sentence (which they wont). Anywhere else they'd have got death.

One-legged former hardcore porn star Heather Mills is still trying to milk McCartney's millions it seems. They're in court again trying to thrash out a divorce settlement. Mills is a gold digging attention seeker. Anyone that saw her pathetic rant on national TV a few months back can see how false and two-faced she is. I read somewhere that she wouldn't accept £50 million but wanted £100 million. How is fifty million not enough?

Go away Galloway

I'm getting a bit tired of George Galloway and his apparently goggled vision of Western life. For example, I'm listening to his radio show at the moment and someone e-mailed in commenting that Muslims should be brought more into British society rather than given reasons to exclude themselves from it. This was obviously in relation to the Sharia thing I have already commented on. I agree pretty much with this. If people want to live seperately I don't see why Britain should have its culture carved up to suit them.

Galloway replied putting down the e-mailer, asking whether Muslims should be forced to go to the pub on Friday nights, get drunk, then go outside and piss on the wall on their way home to beat up their wife.

I know he's spent loads of time in Glasgow but bloody hell is that what George believes is commonplace in British society? Is he really trying to suggest that normal Brits are ALL alcoholic antisocial wife beaters? He always cracks down when someone makes a sweeping comment about Muslims but he's quite happy to dish out the same crap against normal non-Muslim British people.

Another stupid one is the way he bleats that abortion is "the law" in this country and that if he were a Jewish doctor he could say he wouldn't do one because of religious beliefs. This seemed to be about all he could come up with to justify his view that Sharia should be implemented here. Problem is, abortion isn't the law here. Sure it's legal, but its a choice on a case by case basis. I don't see the link between the UK law permitting abortion and implementing Sharia for divorces, marriages and any other family cases. Apples and oranges.

I also don't understand why certain bits of Sharia can be picked and chosen either. Why's Glasgow George not supporting the criminal aspect too?

He is a self confessed anti-capitalist which I find hilarious given that he's profited from the very thing he hates. The show he presents on commercial radio station Talksport nets him £100,000 per year for one night per week. In addition he pockets the standard MP's wage of about £70,000 per year plus a further £100,000+ of expenses.

Hypocrite!

Bashing the Bishop

Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams came out with yet another load of crap in a lecture the other day. He reckons that Islamic Sharia law should be implemented into UK law.

Is he completely out of his mind? I know it sometimes feels like it but you cannot have one law for one group of people and one law for everyone else.

If every different religion were allowed to implement its own laws, we might as well split Britain up into Little India, Little Pakistan, Little China, Little Saudi, Little Iran and so on. There might be a Little Britain somewhere, but it'd probably be banned.

We already suck up to Islam far more than we ever have for any other culture or belief. I don't mind allowing Muslims to do whatever their religion says provided it never affects me and is never inflicted upon me.

When immigrants from Asia were first encouraged to come to Britain fifty or sixty years ago it was under the condition that they 'acculturise'. Basically they had to accept and embrace British culture.

Didn't happen. In Britain today we have two seperate societies. We have the indigenous population that go about their lives as best they can and we have the Muslim society that aims to turn Britain into an Islamic state. They will never associate or mix with the normal Brits due to the nature of Islam. They do not want to associate with normal non-Muslim Brits. The Koran tells them to destroy us.

Islam is a very very extreme religion based on a core of fear and violence. It has no empathy, sympathy or forgiveness. Consider Gillian Gibbons that was jailed in Sudan because she allowed a pupil in the school she was teaching at to call his teddy bear Mohammed. I was not surprised to see that it took weeks to get her out and the idiot that leads Sudan would only negotiate with Muslims.

Appeasement of any religion makes me sick. At the moment it's Islam but it doesn't really matter which one. Sudan should have had trade embargos immediately and all aid withdrawn immediately. Why can't we have the conviction that Muslims do when they run into a supermarket and blow themselves sky high?

I personally think all religious fanatics should be booted out of Britain, including Rowan Williams and his ilk. Christianity and Islam have the same goal - they want the whole world to be the same religion. The difference is Christianity is far older than Islam and yes 800 years ago Christians were doing all the violent things the Muslims are doing now.

Britain is pretty much secular now. Church of England is dying out and due to all the negativity in the media about religion I believe most people that were born here are not interested in it. I'm not just talking about 'white people'. There are obviously exceptions including those with an Asian parentage that can't let go of Islam.

Im astounded how Williams can throw away all his beliefs, get on his knees and try to appease Muslims with this rubbish. Maybe he's doing it to remind people that he hasn't died yet, because lets face it - what else does this muppet do?

Whats next, I wonder. Will he be advocating honor killings and public stoning in accordance with Sharia?

Now he must resign.

Osama Mubarack

Super Tuesday has come and gone but you still can't avoid the footage and stories about the US Democrat race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and this should calm down a bit today when it's effectively decided who gets the nomination. I'm not really bothered who gets it - they're both in support of the same things and both are candidates that will appeal to specific demographics.

Their last Democrat competitor, John Edwards, pulled out of the presidential election last Wednesday and I watched his departure speech. I hadn't seen him before but if you imagine a stereotypical American lawyer then John's your man. He also had an unusual accent. His speech was mostly political rhetoric but what he did say was that he hoped to remove poverty from the USA and both Clinton and Obama had pledged to make this one of their main policies.

I think he suffered because he was competing with "celebrity" candidates but was essentially the same as them politically. He didn't have the money or the fame to generate as much support, and although he beat Clinton by a fraction of a percent in the Iowa caucuses he got hammered everywhere else.

Obama obviously is aiming for the younger vote as well as the "black" vote as they distastefully call it. Apparently he's done quite well in the southern states which has surprised many people, but has not managed to win as many young voters as originally expected. I find the concept of black people voting for the black candidate because of skin colour pretty shallow and futhermore I believe Obama is part of a religion that has anti-white undertones which might cost him in the end.

I've seen Clinton a couple of times on TV over the last few days and she just looks old and nasty, like a witch. Everything she said was boring rhetoric. Obviously she will get a chunk of people voting for her just because she's female which I believe is pretty pathetic. She'll pick up more voters because some will believe it's like voting for Bill again (when it's not). I personally can't stand her patronising speeches. She seems to be ahead of Obama slightly in the current Super Tuesday results.

America is a weird place. You have the big prosperous cities that everyone knows. In the south you have poverty and deep rooted racism. It's quite a contrast: as if parts of the great US of A are living centuries in the past both technologically and culturally.

It seems, though, that the politicians are finally pledging to do something about it assuming they have the courage to back up their rhetoric. As I have mentioned already, Edwards got Obama and Clinton to pledge support to his campaign to remove poverty from America. A pretty honourable campaign but sad that it does indeed exist.

In the British media there has been very little mention of the Republican candidates because of the domination of the celebrity Democrat candidates. I'd heard of someone called McLean but that was all. John McCain is his name and today he's announced himself as the frontrunner, ahead of both Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee by quite a distance.

I heard a speech from Mitt Romney yesterday and I thought it was very good. He accepted there was a serious problem with their economy: more serious than they realise. He pledged a return to the times of Ronald Reagan whilst putting McCain down as too liberal. As soon as he mentioned controlling illegal immigration the crowd went wild. There were religious undertones in some of the stuff he said and the fact that he is a Mormon effectively rules him out. I can't be bothered with people that want to ram their religion down your throat. I don't think anyone wants another bible basher like George W Bush in control of American's nuclear arsenal anyway.

Names are important: I don't think anyone with the name Mitt can become President. The only Republican with a remotely powerful name is John McCain but his problem is he's so old and his speeches are honest but weak. He drones on and never gets animated, I guess because he reads word-for-word from a script. He seems like a relatively normal guy though and isn't spewing out religious clap-trap. There is an air of Iain Duncan Smith about him: perhaps because both are ex-military and have axes to grind regarding that. IDS was hopeless and I think McCain would be. The Yanks seem to like him but unfortunately for him anyone can see that he has no chance whatsoever when it comes to the crunch against Obama or Clinton. Mind you, Hillary is a bit of a rubbish name as well.

America probably needs a Labour (Democrat) based President now that it's economy is fucked, but that means taxes will go up. The Republicans (Bush) tend to do stupid things like reduce taxes on wealthy people which makes no sense in the crisis that the Yanks' economy is in. People are already complaining about their lives becoming more expensive - they only need to look at the UK for an example of Labour's Robin Hood taxation - taxing anyone with a job to pay for the lifestyle of those that don't.

Out of Clinton, Obama and McCain I don't really know who I'd go for. McCain would naturally be my choice if I were going based on alignment, as he's the furthest right. However like many have said he's liberal on a lot of issues and he has voted in agreement with the Democrats on a lot of issues. I don't like Clinton just because she seems like an old witch.

I guess that leaves Osama. The one thing he has going for him is that he is young and you'd think he would be more in touch with current generations. There are many issues which I don't really think any of the others would ever have been exposed to and ever be able to form an opinion that isn't based on a viewpoint of a biased, corporation-funded "advisor", such as issues of modern technology, intellectual property, copyright law and so on. However I suppose it's not a perfect world and most Governments are run by big business now. Freedom, choice and creativity are things of the past - the only thing of relevance these days is money.

An example of this is that you have to be a very rich American to run for President. How is this remotely fair or balanced? Apparently Mitt Romney has sunk $40 million of his own money into the Presidential campaign he has no chance of winning. Obama is apparently making $1 million per day from donations to his campaign. It's big bucks. The whole concept of representation in Government is flawed in almost all so-called democracies around the world and everything seems to revolve around money and money alone.

These Yanks that are voting frantically now think they have a say in how their country moves forward and develops over the coming years. But do they?

Jekyll and Hyde

I regularly read the blogs on TorrentFreak as a source of amusement and amazement and one particular blog cracked me up.

In the UK there is an organisation called FAST - the Federation Against Software Theft. They started out as a non-profit organisation in the mid to late 1980's when piracy of Commodore Amiga and Atari ST games began to kick off. Most people involved with the whole Amiga/Atari culture had heard of FAST.

At the time "warez" (a name synonymous with any kind of cracked software) were distributed via bulletin boards (BBSs). These were basically a piece of terminal software - often Amiexpress or "/X" - running on a computer at someone's house or office that people could connect to remotely via their dialup modems, which at the time were 14400 bps maximum.

BBSs tended to have an upload to download ratio of around 10 to 1, so for every megabyte you uploaded you could download ten (a megabyte was a lot - I had a 60 megabyte hard drive in my Amiga at the time!). The more elite "0-day" boards used to have lower ratios because the games on there were newer.

Anyway, FAST managed to close a few minor BBSs down and busted a few car boot sales and thats all I really heard about them until a couple of years ago when they started to phone me up at work.

I took the call from this guy and after he had introduced himself the first question he asked was, "have you heard of The Federation before?". I said, "What?". At that point I realised he had actually called them The Federation and started to laugh and just said, "oh right, yeah I have".

His next line was that he wanted to send an agent to meet with me at my office. A fucking agent. I agreed since I thought it would be a bit of a laugh to see what these dicks were really like. I obviously was aware that there must be some financial motivation behind them sending someone to see me, but figured it would just be threats of fines based on a fallacy that "a company like yours in this area" got busted with a few unlicensed copies of Windows from years ago that they didn't use and had to pay some fairytale amount of money to FAST.

We arranged the meeting for 9.30 in the morning, but their agent didn't show up until 10.15. Since the meeting was with my boss and he had a meeting at 10.45, the FAST guy was a bit disappointed to be told he had half an hour maximum.

First questions was what server OS are you using, to which I told him Linux. You should have seen his face. It was like someone had just robbed his family heirlooms. Think of all those MS licenses I could have had, but don't! He was then desperate to jump into his well rehearsed routine about how FAST campaigns for legislative changes to benefit software developers and so on. I knew all this, but what I didn't know and came to realise was that FAST also wants to sell you stuff. How can this be when they are non-profit?

Simple. They created a commercial arm, they called it FAST Limited and all their representatives, er sorry, agents, talk as if they are from the investigative part when they aren't. The cold callers are not from the Federation Against Software Theft at all, they are from FAST Limited that wants to sell you services you don't need by threatening you with investigations from it's sister organisation. I didn't know any of this until afterwards - the salesman certainly didn't tell me that he wasn't from the investigative non-profit FAST. Maybe he worked for both companies.

So what are they selling? Unsurprisingly, they want to audit your software so that you can get a FAST certification that you're not a pirate. It costs a very large amount of money for them to do this and the salesman probably gets a rather nice slice of the cake. The upside for you is that you wont have harassment from the real FAST if you sign up with them.

I find it absolutely appalling that they operate in this way. It's like paying a protection racket:

"If you pay Da Big Boss, you get no problems from Da Cops. Nobody fucks with 'The Federation', capiche?"


Guilty until proven innocent

FAST started phoning me again relatively recently and one of their messages they left was quite amusing. After the guy had left his name and number, he said "it's very important that you get back to us as soon as possible". Dot dot dot. Or what. Are "The Federation" going to bust me? I didn't bother ringing him back. After a couple of weeks they stopped harassing me.

It's quite important to remember that the investigative arm of FAST has absolutely no power whatsoever anyway.. They are paid for by software houses to attempt to disrupt piracy. They are similar in some ways to the TV licensing heavies employed by Capita that come round trying to talk their way into your house to get evidence that you have a television. They apply pressure, they tell you a story of a situation remarkably similar to your own followed by talk of huge fines and try to convince you that you have to let them inspect your premises.

If you crack and let them in, they gather evidence against you and attempt to milk whatever money they can out of you because they can cream commission from it.

Love Shack, baby!

If you check the blog from TorrentFreak you can see the laughable propaganda FAST are spewing out now. The director of FAST, John Lovelock, claims to have developed the "CCTV of the Internet" which as mentioned in the blog will simply be a BitTorrent client with extra logging. Operation Tracker plans on busting companies that are allowing their staff to use BitTorrent.

I just love these names they use that imply that they are the secret service and are watching your every move when they aren't.

You have to wonder where he's going with this. So he gets his BitTorrent client and manages to find your IP seeding. I am guessing that they can't charge you with anything unless they are able to prove that they downloaded, say, an entire game from your IP address. I guess they would have to download a few hundred for it to be worth them trying to prosecute you. No wonder he says Operation Tracker isn't going to produce instant results. Note that it's the Federation Against Software Theft - not against music theft or movie theft or book theft so get them torrents with all the latest tunes pumping at work because FAST isn't bothered about that.

What I find pretty pathetic about this is that I could be sat in Microsofts offices in London with my USB 1000GB drive plugged into a PC. I could download hundreds of gigabytes of warez using an unrestricted news feed such as Giganews in conjunction with a newsgroup search site such as Newzbin, yet the teenager sharing one or two files she downloaded from The Pirate Bay gets the knock on the door not me. Easy targets are what keep these organisations like FAST alive.

Back in the day were they busting the source of so-called stolen software? No, they were busting the guy that downloaded a few games for his own pleasure and decided to make a couple of extra quid at the car boot sale. FAST seems to be a sad joke compared to the likes of the all powerful but unsubstanstial IFPI.

But it's a futile exercise anyway. Everything that can be copied is copied. Sure some people might make a small amount of profit by selling copied stuff but does FAST have any impact on global software piracy?

About as much as this.

Praise the lawd

Suicide bombers back in the news again. Yesterday Israel suffered two bombings killing one person and wounding six others. Hamas has claimed "credit" for them, enforcing the apparent truth that they don't want peace in the region.

In Iraq last week there were two bombings in Baghdad where two mentally disabled women were strapped up with explosive vests and sent into two busy markets. They were blown up remotely. Pretty appalling.

It seems a bit crazy over there. One minute they are having these peace talks and George W Bush is pictured shaking hands with the two warring factions with that smug grin on his face, and next they are sending martyrs to their death by remote control.

This isn't a normal war and isn't based on the factors that might cause another war, for example conquering for land or profit. During the World Wars, British people didn't hate the German people and German people didn't hate us. Hitler admitted that he admired the British people. He only invaded us because he wanted to control our land.

You could say he hated Jews so much that he sent thousands to their death - but you can look at it another way. There was a method to his madness: he felt Jews were inferior to the "Aryan" - tall, blonde, heterosexual, Teutonic - indigenous German population and he didn't want Jewish people to breed with his Aryans. It's a bullshit reason but at least he had a reason.

No, before the tears start to flow I don't agree with it and I'm not a Neo-Nazi, but compare this with the problems in the Middle East now. These people hate each other. They don't know why they hate each other but they just do. Is it possible to create peace between two factions that hate each other so much? I don't think it is.

You have to wonder what the thought process was when Hezbollah decided to launch some rockets into Israel from the borders of Lebanon. The Hezbollah leader waking up one day and thinking, "I know, I'll procure some rockets and fire them into Israel, because that will, by some random act of God, turn Lebanon into an Islamic state then I will have served the purpose of my organisation"?

Who knows. But it's safe to say that one reason they did it was because they hate whomever the rockets may kill or injure. I don't blame Israel for sending their army in: anyone else would have done the same and even in this world of constant politically correct Muslim appeasement it was pretty ridiculous how they got lambasted for it. Maybe some of them drew cartoons of Mohammed.

One point that was raised to me was that these splinter groups such as Hezbollah or Hamas don't exist through their own conviction. Their simple foot soldiers are fighting for their group and because the group is against Israel, so are the people on the ground. They don't know what the bigger picture is. They don't know what the ultimate aim is. They just know they they must destroy those that their group calls enemies. Hezbollah for example wants an Islamic government within Lebanon. But why?

Many, if not all terror groups are motivated by the agendas of other governments and wealthy businesspeople. Just as Syria is funding Hamas, the USA is funding Israel. It suits them to have constant violence in the area. Iran is quite happy for groups to attack Israel because it's an indirect attack on the USA. It also turns heads away from activity within Iran. The United States is happy for the media to be talking about Iran and it's nuclear weapons or suicide boat stunts because it means less is said about Iraq. Add into the mix the fact that most of the countries in the middle east have a decent percentage of fanatical Muslims that want to exterminate the Western world and you have one hell of a melting pot.

If you consider the problems we're having with both localised and global Islamic terrorism you have to ask yourself, "is this ever going to go away?". I don't think it is. Will they ever accept people as they themselves have been accepted in many Western countries? I don't really think so: their utopia is a world of fanatical Muslims.

You can't make peace when the ultimate aspiration of one side is the destruction and eradication of the other. You can't negotiate with those that are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to achieve their aspiration. There will always be fanatical Muslims and they will always wish death upon the infidels.

In the UK at the moment there are some bodies trying to bring about Sharia Law. Apparently in some cities there are Muslim groups that actually have their own - entirely illegal I might add - Sharia courts. As a tolerant Western society we permit this, but you have to think ahead. Have we really cracked down on this attempt to impose Islamic culture upon our own? Not really, and it seems to be accelerating steadily.

We could all always just give in, do an Yvonne Ridley and live unhappily ever after under Sharia law. Yvonne is a former tabloid journalist that suffered Stockholm syndrome. After the Taliban captured her she converted to Islam and as a result was released and is now a fanatical Islamist propaganda tool. Even some Muslims have laughed at her charade - she flouts certain laws in the Koran such as drinking coffee (which is a stimulant) but is a staunch defender of the burqa. She seems to publicise the fanatical ideology that Muslims are perfect and everyone else is wrong. Think for yourself, please, Yvonne.

How much pressure from these Islamist cultures and ideologies can the Western zeitgeist take? Will the camel's back ever be broken?

I do sometimes wonder at what stage we are at in this society. J Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project to the invention and production of devices that can annihilate civilisation. To achieve the ultimate goal of fanatical Islam, what would it take? How many of these would they need to get? I think one would do it. In the centre of New York. Then bring on the Nuclear holocaust. There is no winner. Islam loses. Western capitalist culture loses. We all lose.

As Oppenheimer himself famously said, "I am become death, destroyer of worlds".