Juice direct from the tree.

Belize in October is not the coolest place to be but the Mayan Mountains do provide the occasional breeze that makes some attempt to cool the human torso otherwise dripping with perspiration after every little effort.

Three cheers for OrangeX, a simple though powerful way to extract juice from citrus fruits. The story of how this particular specimen found its way here is for another time.

The orchard is begging to be picked, oranges and lemons, lime and grapefruit. A sackful of the former was sitting there waiting patiently for some tlc. In half an hour, the fruit enough for a gallon of juice was cut in half and squeezed, tasted, and stored in the fridge ready for breakfasts and/or glasses holding a modicum of rum to add to the juice. No shop-bought juice resembles this nectar.

We have arrived back in this small corner of heaven.

Kung Fu Shu

Confucious, he say:

Man likely to put foot in own mouth should bite tongue instead.

Browned off and irresponsible, a pop-u-list view.

That deeply-revered politician, Gorgon Brown, has just set out two new doctrines in the same breath:

There must be more accountability to Joe Public for public services and,
There must be formed a new body to take responsibility management of the National Health Service .

So while the PM and his subordinate clique will continue to lord it over the NHS, they will cease to be responsible for any of its failings?

Does anyone apart from me view this ploy with the darkest cynicism? If government ministers are to cease being responsible for anything, perhaps it is time we got rid of the lot of them, it would certainly save us a huge wodge of taxes.

They don't like it up 'em.

Dad's Army's Cpl Jones had a way of describing fundamental but unpalateable truths that conveyed succinct meaning.

Our own dearly beloved Home Secretary tried the same thing on a selected sample of the Moslem 'community' in London, yesterday. He had the temerity to suggest that if the 'community' paid more attention to the ways they were raising their children, they would be doing the 'wider community' a service by detecting and disarming earlier, signs of terrorist inclinations.

To judge only by the howls of recriminatory indignation that followed his speech, one could be led to believe that young Moslems had no part in the London bombings, the shoe-bomber was not a Moslem, and those currently charged with terrorist planning were merely victims of mistaken identity.

At a time when the 'wider community' is clearly failing to discipline its own family members (probably because a succession of hearts-on-sleeve do-gooder governments have made it illegal to apply corrective pain upon transgressors) and cure the prevailing disinterest in overcoming spiralling lawlessness, to see the Moslem 'community' so determinedly in denial is but one more example of the rottenness that pervades our society.

National Service was recognised as an excellent way to instil discipline into the recalcitrant and law-abiding alike. Perhaps it should be reintroduced and the newly-tamed sent to bring order to Afghanistan and Iraq? Killing two birds with one stone?

Crackers?

Biofuels, don't you just love the wealth of expertise that flaunts itself as often as possible on the telly?

So we decided we had better have a bash at making some.

What better place to start than with the cohune nuts that are abundantly strewn all over the local jungle? The things are so oil-rich the Mayans reputedly used to make a hole in the nut shell and use them like candles.

The 'experts' tell us the process is simple:
Collect the nuts,
Crack the nuts,
Remove the kernel from the shell,
Crush the kernels,
Collect the oil,
Break the shells down and use as a mulch,
Convert the oil to biodiesel.
Use the nut kernel residue to feed livestock.

So as all thirsters-after-knowledge do, we went on the web to find out what machinery is around the place to do all that (except the feed-to-livestock bit).

Plenty to convert from oil to biodiesel, plenty to crush the nut kernels and produce the oil, absolutely zilch to deal with the nut casings. So we could do everything except start at the beginning after collecting the nuts. Shame, really, but nil desperandum.

So we looked again and all over India there seemed to be firms offering equipment of various sorts able to sustain small-village-level techniques and volumes. So we asked them. No replies. So we asked the Indian Trade Office. No replies.

In a world with no shortages of experts, actually doing something surely shouldn't be such an impossibility, one might think. Pity our workshop facilities don't (yet) run to messing about with hydraulic crushers. Meantime, if there are any practical geniuses out there???

Politically incorrect thoughts R us.

According to Tom Lehrer's song, 'the whole world is festering with unhappy souls'.

I am not a professing Christian, not an adherent to Islam, not to Hinduism, Buddhism, nor any other religious 'ism'. I am, however, interested in and concerned by the historic and current mass-movement reactions to events, real or imagined, in the name of one religion or another. I am also interested and concerned by the actions of demagogues who whip up frenzied mobs in the name of religion.

In the good old days of Genghis Khan, it was considered not unmerciful to offer 'death or the Koran' to conquered peoples. As a way of converting the hearts and minds of the masses, this was a considerable success. The conquering Conquistadores covertly made similar offers of conversion to Christianity to those they conquered. Nebuchadnezzar didn't bother, he merely carted off some of the Israelites to slavery. Communist revolutionists pretended not to be driven by such fervour but their requirements for slavish subservience to self-appointed oligarchs bore most of the trappings of religion, with the mystical 'state' taking the place of the deity as something above question.

The recent attempts at genocide in Ruanda seem not to have as its root cause the religious beliefs of the murdering hordes. However, it seems to me that the overwhelming majority of today's oppressors use religion as an excuse for violent action. Those that protest they are not doing so make overt references to 'terrorists' instead. But nobody I know pretends the genocide being perpetrated in Sudan is anything other than under the auspices of the 'Islamic' government of Sudan.

One thing common to all the attempts by the promoters of violence to gain control of others seems to be the wish to establish hegemony over others with different professed religious beliefs. To do this, the fomenters need to discover, or invent, recognisable differences. Hence, in the past, the wars between differing sects of what had started out as one religion, such as those between Catholics and Protestants, both of which vehemently insist upon themselves being sole practitioners of the 'one true' religion; and those between Sunni and Shia sects of Islam.

Now we see mass hysteria being whipped up by Muslims against recent remarks by the Pope without the tedium of considering what he actually did say. In order to demonstrate how non-violent Islam is, they killed a nun and burned Christian churches.

That I do not have a mandate from any god to speak as his earthly representative does not inhibit me from condemning all those who claim to have such a mandate while they do not themselves constantly, utterly and unequivocally condemn those looking to them for leadership for the bloodthirsty actions their own preaching foments.

A good 'ole boy.

I stumbled across an .AVI file today of an address to a virtually-empty USA Congress by one Congressman Ron Paul from Texas. It was refreshing to hear an American who not only had a feel for world events but who was prepared to develop a quite persuasive argument linking the current aggressive Bush Administration's policies to oil-producing countries wishing to be paid in Euros or gold instead of US Dollars.

A Google search on Ron Paul Texas brought up a multitude of references, regrettably none to the .AVI file.

Anyone wanting the tedium of downloading a 110-MB file to listen to his arguments, via BitTorrent, please say and I'll post the reference.

Poor Clare's Short of a party. I'd vote for her.

Tony warned them all not to tell the truth, or they would not be re-elected, but here is Clare deliberately showing them all up. So it's only a short while before she gets kicked out.

She has written in the Independent that she is to stand down as an MP after 23 years and accused Tony's personal creation, New Labour, of arrogance, a lack of principle and "incredible" incompetence.

In her article for yesterday, she said she was "profoundly ashamed" of the government, and that Tony Blair's "craven" support for the United States had made the world a more dangerous place.

Nothing new there, then, but she'll have to go, won't she? We can't have honest politicians publicly acknowledging their leaders to be charlatans.

Labour's 'less' is the real world's MORE

Having told the Trades Union Congress yesterday that there would be a drop in unemployment announced today, the right and honourable Tony Blair, MuPpet, must be a very surprised spinning machine today because when the official number of unemployed was actually announced, the number had reached a six-year high.

Having put his foot in his mouth, he is holding his tongue.