[king tut] will 2007 be like 1972 and 1923

"Death will come to those who disturb the sleep of the Pharaoh" was written over the tomb.

You know, the unsensational version of the story here reads almost as well as the sensational. However, time for some coincidences:

* Lord Carnarvon consulted mediums who all said not to enter Tut's tomb.

* 47 days after entering the tomb Carnarvon died at Hotel Continental in Cairo. The cause of death was unknown but a mosquito had bitten him where Tut himself had a cheek mark.

* Carnarvon's dog in England became agitated and died at the same time.

* The lights went out in Cairo for several minutes.

* Arthur Maze, another of the archeologists, died shortly afterwards, at the same hotel, complaining of tiredness and went into coma, never to come out.

* Archibald Reid, the team's radiologist returned to England after complaining of exhaustion. He died shortly afterwards.

* George Gould, friend of Carnarvon then travelled to Egypt, visited the tomb, collapsed of fever and died.

* Carnarvon's personal secretary, Richard Bethell, died of heart failure four months later.

* Howard Carter seemingly died of natural causes.

* Lord Carnarvon's half-brother committed suicide. The medics claimed temporary insanity as the cause.

* Mohammed Ibrahim, Egypt's director of antiquities, died in 1966. He begged Egyptian authorities not to let some of the relics leave the country for an exhibition in Paris. A car ran him down and he died.

* Richard Adamson, the expedition security chief not present at the opening, was the last survivor. In 1969 he reiterated his rejection of the "curse theory".

* His wife died less than 24 hours later, his son survived an aircraft crash, but broke his back.

* Adamson gave an interview on British television where he restated his denial most vehemently.

* His taxi crashed later that evening on his way from the studio and Adamson was almost decapitated by a passing truck.

* He gave another interview: "Until now I refused to believe that my family's misfortunes had anything to do with the curse. But now I am not so sure".

* In 1972, Tut and Co were flown to London with a Royal Air Force plane. Gamal Mehrez, Ibrahim's successor in Cairo ridiculed "curse talk" and died before the plane took off.

* Flight Lieutenant Rick Laurie suffered a heart-attack in 1976 and died, after having complained of "horrible visions and nightmares".

* Flight engineer, Ken Parkinson lived through heart-attacks each year at the same time the flight had commenced, until his fatal attack in 1978.

* Flight Lieutenant Jim Webb lost everything he owned during a fire.

My keyboard's keys have just changed positions, i.e. symbols are under their wrong keys since I began typing this and the internet just switched itself off.

All coincidence, of course.

* Now, "85 years later to the day after the pharoah's tomb was discovered", archaeologists have not only removed the face mask but also the linen shroud around the body. They claim it's to "preserve the body".

Am I the only one to think that this shows the same lack of respect our gallant leaders are currently showing us? Perhaps I'm mistaken - what's respect for the dead when there's a lot of money to be made?

Is Tut in good hands or is he in the hands of those he shouldn't be? How would he feel about being on public display like this? Would you like to see your grandfather's dead body exhumed and put on display, unadorned?

Will you go to look upon Tut uncovered?

[weblog awards] help us stop neil clark

Please, please, please, fellow readers - give Steve and myself enough votes to head off Neil Clark! We're not asking to win - the luscious lovely Kickette has that wrapped up as the greatest UK Blog ever, over Iain [who's just suffered a personal loss] but Neil Clark - help us to stop him.

:)

[snow] sky's full but turning to water

Can't claim our situation is like the one in the pic yet.

It's been wet snowing today, the air full of it but turning to water the moment it hits the path. It's also not sticking to branches, as in the photo. It's a rarity for that to happen in this climate because it goes dry so quickly and the powder fails to stick.

It's a small difference between our snow scenes and the traditional European postcard image. A nice summary is on the NSIDC site.

The last decent Labour man?

John Mortimer's writing room

A guest post from the esteemed Tom Paine on a man who does it his way - John Mortimer:

How the British Establishment hates John Mortimer. Mortimer has consistently critiqued the Blair/Brown Axis’s assaults on our freedoms. He has defended the presumption of innocence, which his most beloved character never failed to proclaim as “the golden thread that runs through British jurisprudence.” Though it is at the very heart of our civilisation - it is now nothing but a profound irritation to the men of power.

Horace Rumpole may, like Sherlock Holmes, have walked the pages of books rather than Literature. Worse, he appeared first as a character in TV comedy. Like Holmes, however, he transcends his origins. He is that rarity, a character with a life of his own. We all know what Rumpole would say and how he would behave in any situation. Rumpole is no suave hero, but he stands alone in modern British culture as a character who believes in freedom under the rule of law, not the terrifying "social justice" so beloved of our sparrow-brained politicians. Mortimer created a character who will live as long as English is read and the principles of the Common Law are understood.

Mortimer will be remembered for breathing life into Horace, but also as a humane, kindly, liberal man. This is more than enough motivation for Christopher Hart to do the most amazing hatchet job in the Times, while purporting to review Valerie Groves’ biography of this flawed, but charming man.

As ever, glimpses are to be seen of the Cromwellism that (much though I personally revere the memory of "our chief of men") I have to acknowledge underlies much that is wrong in British thought. Mortimer’s “affairs of the loins, rather than the heart” might equally have been characterized as free-thinking rejection of bourgeois values, had he not strayed from the paths of Socialist righteousness. How did he stray? He drew the lines of the State’s power rather closer to the individual than you or I might like, but still short of jackboot range.

The quote the sub-editors selected to summarise the attack on this innocent is telling;

The worst aspects of human nature are laughed away and the dark side is consistently whitewashed

Give me friends who laugh away my failings and look to the good in me, rather than the bad. Spare me, I beg, from the puritan who sees only the bad in me, and relishes the excuse it gives to make me a prisoner “for my own good.” In despising Mortimer, the British left/liberal statists let slip how much they despise us all. We are just potential transgressors to them, guilty until proven innocent.

That is the thread that runs through their thought and it is far from golden.

[micro-control 4] some eu plans for england and beyond

The disintegration of privacy within the sphere of the EU comes next post. This post just restates many things already known vis a vis England and might disappoint, in that it presents not a lot new.

So, first up, we're all agreed, aren't we, that the EU has England broken into nine administrative divisions, as seen on the map above? The only question is, post-Lisbon, when precisely this starts.

These nine regions, along with the Scottish and Welsh regions, have already entered the educational field both at senior level and junior as the current situation.

Further information is available here, here, here, and here, just to post a few. [Some government site links might not now work as they have been progressively deleted.]

Each region is a discreet adminstrative area with its own assembly already in situ, ready to activate. This much is easily accessible from government docs on the web. Winston Leonard commented, on October 15th, at my site:

You have to remember that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will disappear under the EU Constitution, with Brussels dealing with Foreign affairs, policy, and overseas embassies. In all probability, the Senior official concerned will be the one relocating to Brussels in 2010.
Same rule would apply to International Development, another area that will lose out to Brussels. So who will relocate? Malloch-Brown, or Milliband, or both?

The move to regionalization needs to be pretty well completed by post 2009 and it can be better observed in local issues, rather than at the national level, for example, on roads:

The new plan will be to let local governments price or otherwise regulate their bits of the road network as they see fit. So far the main example of this is the London congestion charge, which is enforced by using controversial Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR) technology to track vehicle movements.

Predictably, in the wake of recent clownish "carbomb" attempts, the government has granted terror police routine access to the London tracking system. This has confirmed the widely-held view that no matter the initial purpose of any vehicle-tracking technology, it will swiftly become an automated surveillance tool.

Naturally, once the populace is aware of what is happening, there will be a great deal of unrest - the blogosphere transferred to the general community but this has been factored in. An example is Lisbon itself:

Poland also wants to make sure that the charter of fundamental rights, which guarantees the right to strike among other measures, cannot apply in domestic courts. This is an opt-out already secured by the UK. Some in Brussels have questioned its legality but David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, termed it “silicon-sealed”.

The aim is to have the reform treaty ratified by all 27 member states ahead of elections to the European parliament in 2009.

To enforce both it's "entity" as a continental bloc and to snuff out local dissent, the Merkel initiated pan-EU militsia is already in training. And translated from the original here:

It will be the opening day of the command of Central European Gendarmerie (Eurogendfor), intranazionale new force established by the European Union in order to carry out "police missions in operations of crisis."

They'll naturally need some operational theatre of war for training so:

The EU is to examine the possibility of deploying a 3,000-strong force to Chad to contain spill-over from the Darfur conflict in neighbouring Sudan, foreign ministers agreed on Monday.

All of which is fine, of course, if the EU is a philanthropic and trustworthy body which looks after the best interests of its citizens. If that's the case, then the administrative infrastructure being rushed into place, with Common Purpose leadership, is in the best interests of all.

The litmus test, it seems to me, is whether you can believe the word of the EU. Ellee Seymour throws some light on that here, referring to Mandelson’s reneging on ACP trade agreements in favour of regional agreements.

Do read the whole piece to get some sort of idea how you feel about EU transparency and honesty.

Those whio have not already sighed and clicked out might be interested in one take on what the eventual plan entails. I don't mean the EU-ization of what was once Britain but the overall plan.

This is as good an article as any but the heading summary below does not do justice to the full explanation given at the site. Again, do read the whole thing. The process goes something like this:

1st Signpost: The Registration of Populations

2nd Signpost: The Creation of a Global Identification System

3rd Signpost: The Creation of an Infrastructure for the Global Surveillance of Movement

4th Signpost: The Creation of an Infrastructure for the Global Surveillance of Electronic Communications and Financial Transactions

5th Signpost: The Convergence of National and International Databases

6th Signpost: The Spread of the "Risk Assessment" Model

7th Signpost: Security-Force Integration and the Loss of Sovereign Checks and Balances

8th Signpost: The Corporate Security Complex

9th Signpost: The Erosion of Democratic Values

10th Signpost: Rendition, Torture, Death

Do you think this has gone off the deep end? Well, let me go further. The type of incompetence revealed by Dizzie in the losing of 15 000 personal records by courier I simply do not accept as accidental. Please see part 2 of this series.

Notes

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

[racism] we need to be careful about its definition

That promised article is coming but first, more controversy [H/T Witagamenot] on immigration:

Cameron was irritated by the behaviour of Hastilow, who will contest the marginal seat of Halesowen and Rowley Regis, which the Tories must win if they are to regain power, after he mounted a strong defence of his article. 'It is in line with Conservative policy,' he told The Observer. 'Uncontrolled immigration will do this country great damage. In the last 10 years we have had more or less uncontrolled immigration.'

But Hastilow won strong support from his local Tory association. 'Most certainly, yes,' said Mary Docker, chairman of the Halesowen and Rowley Regis association, when asked by The Observer if she would stand by Hastilow. 'He is a down-to-earth man who talks to people and doesn't talk at them. He is representative of the views of many Black Country people.'

My view is quite simple, you might say oversimplistic but I'd disagree:

If the racial, religious or national grouping has a history of non-assimilation into the local culture, then prospective immigrants need one-by-one scrutiny and interview as to their absorption into alien sub-communities within the larger nation.

This should also apply to those who have already got through the net.

If the grouping has a history of assimilation [e.g. a Canadian settling in Britain], then they get fast tracked but are subject to the usual police checks, vocational suitability etc.

Just seems common sense to me.