I read in the Telegraph that Henri Roussel, an eighty year old founding member of Charlie Hebdo, criticises the murdered editor Stéphane Charbonnier for leading the magazine into last week's disaster. 'What made him feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it?' 'Charbonnier was a 'great lad' but a 'blockhead' and he 'shouldn't have done it,' he wrote in the left-wing magazine Nouvel Obs. In the piece, he tells how he wrote some time ago to Charbonier telling him, 'I really hold it against you,' presumably in connection with the provocative Mohammed cartoons, published in 2011 and 2012.
Well, in the light of our focus on freedom of speech, Roussel is entitled to his view and to have it printed in a magazine, but I really disagree with him. People who come to live in modern, Europe need to understand that this is how we are; rude, irreverent, outspoken. They live in, or have come to live in Europe. We did not ask them to come here in the main, and they must accept us as we are. The difference between the victims of Charlie Hebdo's mockery who were Catholics, Jews, drug addled professional cyclists, politicians, and the Muslims, is that although they were all embarrassed, offended and even angered, none of them were moved to barbarism but the Muslims. Burning down magazine offices and murdering cartoonists is not what we class as acceptable discourse in Europe. The offended, had better learn that quickly.
Events at Charlie Hebdo will prove to be a watershed. There will be no more tolerance of extremism. If you want to live in the west, even if like the murderers you were born here, you had better accept us as we are. If you don't like us; if you are scandalised by our behaviour, our clothes, the fact that our women are our equals, then move to the lands where your sensibilities will be respected. Here Mohammed is just a violent Dark Age thug who rode about the deserts of Arabia, forcing others to respect his made up revelations. Get used to that opinion, because it isn't going to change.
This morning I read an article in the Daily Telegraph by Adrian Berry which contained the assertion that unlike the other solar system moons, Titan was not barren..... I wonder if Adrian has the same understanding of the term 'barren' as I do. I think not. Barren to me means devoid of abundant life, plants, the potential to grow things. I'd say that deep frozen Titan was pretty much more barren than any spot on earth.
Underneath Adrian's piece were various nonsensical discussions contributed by random posters suggesting that as the sun moved towards its future red giant stage, people might be able to move there and so continue our species. When do they think this is going to be needed? It will be at least five hundred million years in the future when the sun becomes too hot for us. Need I point out that our species has only been in its current form for about fifty thousand years - a hundred thousand at a stretch and that a million years ago, our ancestors had much more in common with the apes than with ourselves. The idea that homo sapiens will exist in five million years time is almost ridiculous. If we have not wiped ourselves out through germ warfare or some other form of self created catastrophe in the next twenty thousand years, we will have been done away with by some yet unknown plague. If not, I would be most surprised. After that, evolution will have destroyed us. Our own tendency to foster far from perfect specimens will in any case degenerate our species into a far less robust version of ourselves.
The idea that we can move to a horrid, hydrocarbon swamped place like frozen Titan is utterly ridiculous. I just wish some of these sci-fi fantasists would think a bit about what they are proposing. Which of these planets looks like the best bet for you?
