AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Doro produces mobile phones which are supposed to be for people who want a simple device. I have had one since August. It must be the worst mobile phone I have ever owned. The model I purchased was a Phoneasy in gloss red with a camera. The message facility is awful. Very poor predictive text with limited vocabulary. Cannot change language without closing and changing Settings, and it is difficult to find. It takes EIGHT key presses to delete each and every message. Calendar fixtures cannot be copied to another day or time. The online backup facility did not work. Battery life not good considering it is just a phone. Microphone aperture is in the corner exactly where it will be covered when holding the phone. Very poor build quality. Squidgy keys - have to be pressed on exactly the right spot. Red lacquer scratches easily and has started to wear through to the grey plastic underneath. The back detachable cover has started to split at the corners. There is more but that i...

Following the recent shooting, I got involved in a discussion on the Guardian's web site.This was the response I got to my question about when does a clump of cells become a person. "At conception. However, being a person does not provide the right to use another person's body. Born humans can't demand the use of other people's organs - even those of their own parents, even if they will die without them. Why should unborn people have more rights than anyone else?" This raises an interesting issue. If we laid eggs it would make matters so much simpler. They could be kept in the fridge or sold on ebay. Or eaten. It is something for genetic engineers to get working on. They could try inserting a few chicken genes to see what happens.

Sweden has now closed its "open door" to refugees and people who purport to be refugees. The details are not clear yet but this is obviously a complete about-turn. It is an admission of a gross error of judgement on the part of the Swedish government. There is a lot to be said in this kind of situation for the robust style of British parliamentary debate. In a similar situation there would have been several minutes of booing and jeering the the Commons. It would have been well deserved. The Swedes can be too polite. There are times when it is necessary to be forthright.

It is amazing the number of people who apply the label "bigot" to those who try to warn them about the essentially intolerant nature of Islam. They will have to learn the hard way. The Syrian refugee crisis has brought this to the surface. There is a genuine desire to extend feelings of compassion, expressed in the phrase "what would Jesus have done?" The majority of the refugees - at least 90% - are Muslims. Surveys suggest that between 20% and 40% of Muslims take their religion seriously, This means that there is always a reservoir of individuals who are radicalised or could become radicalised. That risk continues from generation to generation as relatively few from this group assimilate by intermarriage; in the UK, the radical Muslims are the grandchildren of the original immigrants. Radical Muslim is a misnomer, for these are nothing more than individuals who take seriously one of the fundamental tenets of Islam - Jihad. Thus, an open-doors policy is exposing ...

Even after the Paris bombings, people are still going around in public with clothing which marks them out as Muslims. Have they no sense of shame at all? Do they lack any sensitivity? Or do they quietly approve of the massacre? What a display of brass neck. Have they failed to notice that Islam has become a toxic brand?

The other evening I had a long telephone conversation with a left-wing friend. This is what she did not want to hear. I am shocked at how the left in general are welcoming an influx of people who espouse the most reactionary, racist and illiberal views circulating on the planet.Antisemitism is embedded within Islam.Committed Muslims worship a man who personally ordered the massacre by beheading of 600 Jews and the enslavement of their wives and children. In the Koran, Jews are referred to many times as pigs who need to be killed. Objecting to this kind of thing is not racist, but they should no more be welcomed than one would welcome an army of Waffen SS. It is a continuation of the process which began with the ethnic cleansing of Christians and Jews from the Saudi-Arabian peninsula in the seventh century. The first victims of this, are, as always, the Jews. Both in Malmö and here in Gothenburg, they face constant harrassment, violence and threats of violence (including death an...

It is not generally known that Merkel was brought up in East Germany. This could explain quite a lot. Here is part of the Wikpedia entry. Like most young people in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Merkel was a member of the Free German Youth (FDJ), the official youth movement sponsored by the ruling Socialist Unity Party. Membership was nominally voluntary, but those who did not join found it all but impossible to gain admission to higher education. She did not participate in the secular coming of age ceremony Jugendweihe, however, which was common in East Germany. Instead, she was confirmed. Later, at the Academy of Sciences, she became a member of the FDJ district board and secretary for "Agitprop" (Agitation and Propaganda). Merkel claimed that she was secretary for culture. When Merkel's one-time FDJ district chairman contradicted her, she insisted that: "According to my memory, I was secretary for culture. But what do I know? I believe I won'...

 A pleasanter subject altogether - the Presces and Responses by William Smith, Cathedral organist at Durham.

There is a flood of what are described as "lone refugee children" arriving in Sweden. Most of them are male and appear to be in their mid-twenties. Some of them have undoubtedly been through the mill, but whatever else they are, they are not children. One must also ask where are the girls? This is not to say that they should not be given refuge but to describe them as children is misleading and destroys trust in the the authorities and media who persist in using the term. One wonders what else is being hidden. Who is a refugee and who has been sent to form part of a terrorist sleeper cell? It is not as if it is difficult to establish someone's age if they are between 14 and 20. X-rays of wrists and teeth, and a dental examination will reveal how old they are. Some of these "children" have receding hairlines which means that it is highly improbable that they are not at least 25 years old.

Titta på bilden av detta "flyktingbarn"  Artikeln i Metro beskriver honom som 18 år gammal. Hans historien är visserligen hemsk, men värför beskriver honom som "barn"? Detta är löjligt. Den vikande hårfäste och skrynklig pannan gör att killen ser ut som om han är 25-30 år gammal. Stackars barnet börjar bli skalligt! Ålder kan konstateras genom röntgenering av handled, tänder och undersökning av tänder. Stoppa denna påstående att unga män är "barn". Folk är inte idioter. Och var finns flickorna, förresten?

Turkey's election result gives the lie to the claim that Islam and a liberal democracy are compatible. If only they were. The root of this is the religion's theology and the relationship between man and God - slave and master. That is not conducive to democracy in the way that the Trinitarian Christian concept of God is - the Christian God becomes man and in doing so, humanity is divinised. So different are the two concepts of God as to make nonsense of the claim that "we worship the same God". Sadly we do not. The result is also bad for Turkey from another point of view. Erdogan is a committed anti-semite; this follows logically from the numerous statements in the Koran that Jews are variously pigs, or descendants of pigs. Anti-semitism can be regarded as some kind of mental illness, or a symptom of mental illness, that either affects the sufferers' inability to think rationally, or is a symptom of a general inability to think rationally. Anti-semites make t...

Swedish texts have been set to Gregorian chant both for the Catholic and national Lutheran churches, as well as for religious communities, although there are important gaps. There is no setting for the Creed, nor for the Entrance or Communion antiphons, or the Alleluia verses. All of the settings appear to have been written in five-line notation instead of the four-line neum notation which was invented for Gregorian chant. This gives rise to difficulties. (A) With five-line notation the lines must be closer together. It is more difficult to see a note on a four-line stave than a five-line one. In most cases the upper line, and often the two upper lines, are redundant because Gregorian music does not normally extend over the range provided by a five-line stave. (B) A five-line stave with clef mark indicates an absolute pitch, whereas the four-line Gregorian notation has a doh or fa clef and indicates relative pitch, like tonic solfa notation. This allows choirs to decide where to ...