Today's News Stories

The Daily Mail included a true piece of investigative, correct journalism.
Richard Dawkins converted to Fundamentalist Christianity.
And Emile Heskey scored a Premier League goal.

"The first 2 I might believe...but the last one? Come off it!"

In case you are wondering what I have against Emile Heskey, in the season we were relegated he missed craploads of good chances which was a major factor in our relegation...

Britain and Gay Executions In Iran...

On Thursday, The Independent newspaper ran a story about a gay Iranian teenager, Medhi Kazemi, whom Britain refused to grant asylum to despite the fact that if he is sent home he will probably be executed. (link.) Obviously, if this is the case, it is terrible that Britain would allow such injustice.
But I want to talk about Britain's policy on these matters. According to the Independent again:
"The Home Office's own guidance issued to immigration officers concedes that Iran executes homosexual men but, unaccountably, rejects the claim that there is a systematic repression of gay men and lesbians." (see link above) and "In turning down Ms Emambakhsh [another similar case] and Mr Kazemi's asylum applications, the Home Office has said that, provided Iranians are discreet about their homosexuality, they will not be persecuted." (link)
That's absolutely awful, in my opinion. Translation: "Why can't you homos get back in the closet where you belong?!" I mean, are the Home Office incapable of understanding that homosexual people need love, intimacy and sex the same as everybody else or something? Very few people are able to remain completely celibate. This dictum has been proven again and again for gay people both throughout history and in the modern world, in the Middle East and in The West. Obviously, if gay people did not have this need, no-one would have gay sex in Iran in the first place due to the harsh punishments for it. And the social stigma and threat to their careers was not enough to deter neither Ted Haggard, nor Larry Craig, nor Bob Allen. I'm pretty sure forcing us to suppress this harmless part of our being counts as persecution in itself. Love and intimacy are supposed to be one of the most wonderful things that human beings can feel, to deny that to parts of the population for no reason other than disgust or religious dogma is a cruel punishment.

I think something needs to be done about these kinds of things that happen in other countries. We cannot just ignore it and say it's not our business because it's not our country. In a way, it is xenophobic to be isolationist - "you were born X in country Y, deal with your lot!". I appreciate that this is going to be difficult to achieve, but we have no other choice but to try. Unfortunatly, I have very few ideas about how we can make this work. I would rather avoid going to war for obvious reasons as well as the fact that forcing democracy on a country that doesn't appear to want it is going to end in either a religious fundamentalist being elected or somebody overthrowing the Constitution(more on this later in a post coming soon). "Liberating" Iraq didn't work and neither will this. Dialogue is always worth trying, but I cannot see them listening to us, especially as they are Islamic radicals who believe non-Muslims are the enemies of God. The only ideas I have are to impose sanctions on the countr(ies) responsible, or refusing to trade with them. Obviously, these will have their own implications that will need considering. Of course, even if we did get Iran and other countries like it to change their laws, we'd still have a big problem with people carrying out their own justice(particularly regarding anything like "honour" killings) and the government turing a blind eye to it because they agree with what they are doing. I fear it may be hopeless. Maybe someone else has some good ideas as to how to deal with this?

Why Do Tories Have A Hard-On For Low Inheritance Tax?

Low inheritance tax - conservative voters love it. But why? I mean, isn't it pretty inconsistent with the conservative ethos? Let's face it, Daily Mail readers- THERE IS GOING TO HAVE TO BE SOME TAXES. Get over it. And inheritance tax is a logical place to put tax if you're of the Tory persuasion. Why? Because conservatives are always bitching about welfare, evil evil people who scrounge of welfare and are lazy buggers. "Get a job, yer Polish wanker!" they cry. But is scrounging off your parents' inheritance really that different from scrounging on welfare? Yes, I know you don't cost the taxpayer directly if you do it, but the ethos is pretty much the same. Particularly if you want "Brits to be able to keep their hard-earned money" you can jack up inheritance tax and then cut income tax instead, which actually allows Brits to keep their own hard-earned money rather than some wealthy guy keeping his parents'.
So there you have it.

Birmingham City Vs. Arsenal - Match Report

I suppose I should explain what the premise of this whole thing is. One of my faviourite websites is a cartoon match report website called HTFC-World(www.htfc-world.com), which does match reports for Huddersfield Town. I have fancied having a bit of a go for a while(though mine will be nowhere NEAR as technical) and after the Arsenal match I thought that it would be the perfect match to do for reasons that will become apparent, as well as the reason that it was up first on Match of the Day so there was actually decent highlights for once. Oh, and when you have a guy with Sagna's haircut in the opposing team, there's endless oppotunities for comedy! :)
I'd just like to say that although for some of these incidents I had the benefit of match highlights, others I did not. I may be wrong about some of these incidents, but I'm just callin' em as I see em from where I sit in the ground...so don't kill me, Arsenal fans! I bet there's lots of errors in this too...you're just going to have to live with it, human memory is fallible...
The game starts off and Wenger settles in for a good afternoon...

...a perfectly logical and cogent explanation as to why Wenger actually saw the incidents this week!
He looks up just in time to see this, THE Martin Taylor tackle on Eduardo:

The ref reaches for his pocket...

Bugger!
Eduardo had to be substiuted, with what we later found out was a broken leg. Just another person who would like to wish a quick recovery to Eduardo here, it really was a sickening injury and they refused to show the replays on Sky Sports.
I think that everybody has been a bit quick to vilify Taylor over this tackle. It was bad, and mistimed, but people have been talking as if Taylor lunged in two-footed with the intent to injure Eduardo, which I can confirm he did not. The tackle did not look that bad in real-time at the ground and while I was there I was surprised to see a red, although I obviously could not see how badly Eduardo was injured. Taylor has also recieved death threats from Croatian fans annoyed at the fact Eduardo will be out for the Euro Championships...

Presumbaly that's what they looked like!
Some Craotian journalists also tried to get into Martin's car when he was leaving training. I mean, this chap has just seriously injured a fellow professional, are you SURE it's a good idea to be breaking into his car?!
Arsenal had a very lacklustre first half. They really did not look intent on having a go, even though we had ten men. We changed the formation to 4-4-1, taking off Forssell for Parnaby. McFadden looked a bit lonely up there but he was prepared to have a go, and wins a free kick on the edge of the area.
Can't score from here, surely?

Haha! One-nil up with 10 men against the Arsenal! Another McFadden chance...2-0?

...Guess not. We managed to keep it 1-0 until half time. Just one more notable incident from the half...

Same old Arsenal, always cheating! i think Senderos was going for a last minute nomination for the Oscars...

Second Half
Arsenal came out looking a lot better than before in the second half. Taylor was forced into 2 great saves from a couple of Arsenal shots:

From the resulting corner, Taylor comes off his line and...

Arse...nal! Ridgewell then makes an ass out of himself...chests the ball down from a wayward pass only to chest it into the path of Theo Walcott...

Then...

Adeboyor comes through on goal... pass to Bendtner for 3-1, surely? No, apparently not, as Adebayor takes the shot(and doesn't score).
Feud or just striking selfishness...you decide!

After a while, Arsenal rested on their laurels a bit at 2-1. It seems they flicked into, "It's only Birmingham with 10 men" mode, very similar to Birmingham's "It's only bloody Derby at home" mode. They could have come out and murdered us, if they had really wanted to, but near the end of the game it seemed like they had a lot of possession but couldn't quite be arsed. We, by this point, were looking very tired(pretty understandable). Then, in the last 5 mins of the game, we decide to go an the attack, and we discover that Gael Clichy definetly has gone into "it's only Birmingham with 10 men" mode, as well as "that chap I've been marking has disappeared off the face of the planet" mode...

Parnaby thinks, "well, I'll have that mate"...

Parnaby gets the ball and then Clichy sticks a foot out to try and get possession back...penalty given! McFadden steps up to take it...

2-2! In the last minute of the game! What a result!

(NB. I think the above diagram of the McFadden penalty is incorrectly drawn, but I'm lazy).

Not to mention Gallas, who'd stormed off after the penalty was given, presumably to chuck a few toys around. He sat on the pitch at the end of the game looking pissed off.

Arsene Wenger then made some comments at the end of the game which made him look like a complete arse...

Let's also bear in mind that Tiny Taylor, in his career previous to this match had only been sent off once before(and his tally of bookings was also very low especially for a centre defender)...he ain't a dirty player.
Fair enough, he later rescinded his comments, calling them "excessive". So what DO you actually think about Taylor(Tiny) then?

The rest of his match comments were a load of arse too. Whining about the ref? I can understand where Wenger is coming from, but BOTH sides could have grievances with the ref: although Wenger would argue that our set pieces shouldn't have been, I could say that Adebayor fouled the goalkeeper for Arsenal's first, and that Taylor shouldn't have been sent off because his tackle was only one footed and mistimed one footed challenges don't usually warrant a red.(For example in the Johnstone's Paint Trophy one Swansea player did one a bit similar to Taylor's(in fact the commentator referred to it as such, too) and only got booked. "One of the Swansea players" shows the high level of research I put into this, doesn't it?)

As for "To beat Arsenal, you have to kick Arsenal", let's have a look at some match stats:

So, Mr. Wenger, I vote you're talking crap.

In my humble opinion, Arsenal have themselves to blame that they didn't win. If they'd have wanted to, they could have slaughtered us second half. But they didn't. Maybe the ref didn't help much, but Arsenal are supposed to be top of the league!

A great point off Arsenal, then, and we were to play their Larrrndon rivals next...Tottenham Hotspur. We won that game 4-1 courtesy of a Forssell hattrick. That's the double we've done over Spurs, then. Cheers for the points, Londoners! See you in the Premier League again next season(I hope).

There were so many incidents in this match it would have taken an age to cover them all, and I actually wanted to get the report up sometime within remembering time of the match. Incidents no covered here included: Adebayor chance in the first half, some more Arsenal second half chances, one they had going just past the post, Nafti pulling Adebayor's shirt in the box, 2 other great saves by Not Tiny Taylor.

God Strikes Again!

A rather crappy earthquake that occured in Britain last night has been linked with the omnipotent deity of all, God. Religious leaders have speculated that God sent the earthquake as a punishment for Britain's legalisation of same-sex civil unions. "God is annoyed at Britain's tolerance for the sodomites," said one religious preacher, "and I just know that this was a punishment. Yes, I know same sex civil perversions were legalised in 2004, but sometimes it takes God a while to catch up on current events, being as he's got to keep an eye on the whole world 'n' all."
Prominent atheists have criticised the religious rhetoric as being plain wrong at full of hot air. A spokesperson for the British Atheists said that "God is supposed to be omnipotent, and all he can do is send a pathetic little earthquake that didn't even wake me up in the night. Honestly, they criticise us for pigeonholing their God into big, bad vengeance man in the sky but do the same thing themselves. The hypocrisy is, as always, breathtaking."
The Anglican Church has been split into warring factions over the incident. Although the main group is convinced that this was God's punishment for homosexuals, a faction of Anglicans are convinced that the incident was related to God's dislike of equality between the different races on Earth. "White men are of God," said a prominent Anglican and B.N.P.* member, "but these depraved negroes can go back where they belong."

*British National[istic] Party, for any non-Brits who don't know what I'm on about.

Apologies For The Break In Posting

...I've been channelling a lot of my efforts into musical leanings recently, as opposed to articles for this blog. I am, however, working on a couple of things: A match report of the Birmingham v Arsenal game(which had everything), hopefully, HTFC-World style if I can manage it, and an article on foreign policy and the potential for democracy in the Middle East.

Kansas Votes For Huckabee

The Republicans of Kansas have come out with overwhelming support for the intolerant Baptist preacher candidate, Mike Huckabee. This has cemented fears among the slightly more reasonable Republican base that they believe McCain to be too liberal. "Seriously, he's not that liberal, folks." a McCain spokesman said today.
The populace of Kansas obviously disagree. "McCain is far too liberal. I mean, he only wants to stay in Iraq for a million years. That is just nowhere near conservative enough." Another Huckabee supporter had this to say: "Despite the fact that God's messenger on Earth Fred Phelps protested a recent speech by Huckabee, he is still by far the most Godly candidate on the ballot. I mean, who else wants to protect us from the AIDS menace by segregating the sodomites?!"
McCain has tried to beef up his conservative image by getting positive remarks from George "Dubya" Bush. "He stands for military intervention and action and admits he knows nothing about the economy. He is a true conservative." said Bush at a recent speech.