British man said to be mentally ill executed in China

Such is the title of an article on the BBC website decrying the execution of a British national for smuggling drugs.

"The execution took place despite repeated calls from his family and the British government for clemency," bleats the BBC. There follows a set of, frankly, completely unbelievable excuses apparently invented by his family, as well as the claim that he was mentally ill. Quotes are also supplied from the British Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, who seem to believe that a British national should not have to suffer the same fate as, say, a Chinese national convicted of the same offense.

Oh come on! Just because British criminals can expect to be wilfully coddled by their courts (one of which recently ruled that an asylum seeker who had run over and killed a child in a driving accident while drunk could not be repatriated because it would breach his human rights), this does not mean that they can expect the same treatment from a country not yet mired in suicidal self-loathing.

No, to see at once the relevant facts of this case, just note that this man's name is Akmal Shaikh and that he was arrested in the city of Urumqi in possession of 4kg of heroin. Yes, that Urumqi, the one with the recent murderous muslim riots against the Han Chinese. The likelihood seems to be that this man was part of a criminal gang involved in smuggling drugs in order to finance jihad against the Chinese state.

Swine Flu, Egypt, slaughter

Apparently the Egyptian government have had all the pigs in the country slaughtered, some 400,000 of them (according to the Times).

I wonder who owned all those pigs? It seems unlikely that the owners will be followers of Egypt's majority religion, since pig products are forbidden to them. It seems likely then that the livelihoods principally affected will belong to members of Egypt's minority religions — a doubtless unintended consequence. I wonder how well they will be compensated?

Peter Thiel - The Education of a Libertarian

Just read his post. It neatly sums up several themes that have occupied my thoughts recently (by which I mean the last year or two) and it's pushed me to write my own thoughts down. That's probably going to take the better part of a day, so this post is going to start short and get longer as the day goes on...

The case of the curious graffiti

Tonight's Channel Four news provided an amazing hate-fest against Israel. I had thought better of Channel Four, but apparently not.

It was always the case of course that the TV journalists, who'd been denied access to Gaza while the Israelis were actually there, would be shepherded in [and I use the word advisedly] by photogenic Palestinians and encouraged to vent their spite. What amazed me though was that they would apparently believe everything that the people they met told them without even attempting to verify them.

The most interesting was the graffiti that we saw in a building [or was it several different buildings? I'm not sure, but the handwriting all looked curiously similar to me, so it must have been just the one building mustn't it?] that had been used as a base by the Israeli military. There it was, evidence of the evil Joos' pathological hatred of the Palestinians, plain for all to see. I can't remember the exact words now, but it was all along the lines of "The only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian". Remarkable that soldiers in a life and death situation would take the time out to chisel their evil mottoes into the stone of the buildings. Even more remarkable that they would do it in English, for the convenience of an international audience, rather than in their native Hebrew.