Right…it seems a good while ago since I posted the rant (scroll down) about us in rural Ireland..or anyone with a fuzzy RTE picture, not having the option of a Free to air digital service from RTE. The only option that was available was to pay Rupert Murdoch lots of pieces of silver for RTE on SKY on top of the annual licence fee. It seemed outrageous that we couldn’t get the Irish channels free on Freesat as the BBC and ITV are all on it.

Warning..rant!
My main objection to SKY is that I just will not pay Murdoch’s corporations anything..anywhere at any time. They are a major evil part of the world’s problems and the control of the media’s presentation of “facts” that make up the public’s diet of “news”, amounts to the control of populations and their opinions…and hence war..and death. He is the enemy of free and open media and people should know more about what they consume and who it serves. People’s opinions are only forged by the facts available to them and that’s how he works with the governments that he colludes with. SKY TV subscriptions are in my opinion Pieces of Silver covered in the blood of anyone sitting on oil or anything that gets in the way of US, and its puppy the UK, global ambitions. Never mind blood diamonds..this is blood digital…and digital opiates for the masses.
Rant over!

So, completely unrelated, I bought an aerial to improve the fuzzy poverty four channels (RTE1&2, TG4 and TV3). I’d just bought a new Samsung Full HD TV for the house and just couldn’t handle the RTE fuzziness. During the channel scan setup I noticed channels coming in on digital as well as analogue. What did we get? RTE1&2 and TG4 is crystal clear digital! I had to sit down and get a drink and make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. TV3 is still on analogue but at least it’s an improved fuzzyiness due to the new aerial. The quality of the picture is far superior to what you get with UK channels on satellite.

What happened? It seems to be a bit of good luck on our part to start with…starting with the TV. If you’ve bought a brand new Samsung make sure the country setting is Ireland..that is crucial for the mpeg4 reception and decoding. RTE are putting the digital channels out using a different encoding system to the UK. Theirs is mpeg2..and I wondered why RTE had decided to do things differently to our neighbours and now I see why. I should really have studied all the specs ages ago seeing as it’s a major part of my job here..encoding video. The mpeg4 encoding is vastly superior to the mpeg2…hence me being stunned. I was studying the LCD screen from about a couple of inches away to get a look at the pixelation. I would even go so far as to say that a lot of people could be fooled into thinking that live broadcast almost look like HD..it’s that good. Anyway, the new Samsung TVs have the mpeg4 DTT tuner built in so no need for another box. Check that before you buy though..the older models in stock don’t have it!

Then there was the aerial. I screwed it down to the top of a wall next to the house and used Google Earth to get a bearing from the house to Truskmore up the mountains ..our local aerial where all the TV comes from. It’s easy enough..use a placemark and draw a line path to where you want and note the bearing. Then get your Lidl camo combat compass out and line up the aerial…hey presto..RTE DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television).

So..there we go. I’m am almost choking on this massive slice of humble pie. However…the problem now is that we have all the daily cock-ups by presenters and programmers in glorious mpeg4 digital. lol. No more demands for pieces of silver to Rupert Murdoch to see our own National Broadcaster in digital…and it’s well overdue.

Thank you RTE…now bring on the HD before the next decade!

PS. On a footnote rant..this is the type of thing we’ve been up against. This guy doesn’t seem to think that ordinary TV licence payers have a right to free digital TV, and the Government is wasting €70 million…and it makes me mad. He seems to think that because his estimation of 80% of people subscribe to SKY..which is total rubbish..that the rest of people shouldn’t get the TV they pay for in their licence fee. He sounds like just another ignorant urbanite…probably from Dublin, that there’s no-one left without broadband and SKY. If the Govt were to follow that thinking then they should revoke the licence fee altogether and goodbye RTE. It’s a good job they don’t. Of course this guy has a vested interest..he’s flogging WiMax. I can’t see him putting Leitrim at the top of his sales list.
O’Kelly on Silicone Republic

I’ll start by saying that the comment below is my opinion and the opinion of others…in case they come after me we have to point that out..it’s only opinions and we are still legally entitled to those..just about. This is not a personal attack on Shane who is a really nice talented guy who works hard at what he does. It concerns Shafin Developments, the company he owns with his family. It’s all about the planning system and how it works..and who it works for.

It’s a long story but his some of his proceeds from the Westlife Empire have gone into destroying our local village, which also happens to be the historical seat of the O’Rourkes, of which as you can see and I’m one that carries a particular rare Gene going back over a thousand years (DNA tested..yep..scary). Dromahair was a major property and homeplace for the main branch of the O’Rourkes for more than 800 years. For the last 170 years or so Dromahair, being built by the Landlords the Lanes-Foxes, has also been known as the prettiest village in Ireland, sitting in the picturesque valley of the River Bonet.

I won’t get into the history of, and the details of, the planning permission process here, but in the first wave Shafin Developments have somehow managed to concrete over what was probably the medieval Dromahair of the O’Rourkes with nasty naff cheaply built 21st Century cabins. Not sensitively built in areas behind the village..nope..it’s in in your face as you enter the town, downgrading the first impression to that of a classic example of tasteless Celtic Tiger grab for profit. Nasty boxes made from ticky-tacky. This is not a rich pop star’s money doing something useful for the community…far from it. There’s many things they could do for the community if they volunteered the funding. Ironically I know he enjoys spending time in the community as a way of escaping the madding crowd surrounding the pop business.

The latest big shock is that now he has been granted planning permission to redevelop the site of The Breffni Centre, aka Patton’s pub and hall. We are going to get a Crèche, gym and supermarket. OK..the first two it might be argued are needed by some people, although a new crèche has already recently opened. The big problem is the supermarket. In the village we have three shops. Two are small supermarkets and both are run by local families who have been there for years..McGoldricks and Gilmors. I think that Gilmor’s has even been there since the village was built. Both stores have recently spent a fortune upgrading their premises goods and services..with Gilmors reputedly spending maybe over half a million euro on refurbishment. The village now has modern shops with great products and services. So..why the hell have they granted planning permission for Shafin to wipe out these two main stores as well as the corner shop which also has been recently re-developed?. That’s the million-euro question.

One other point has just reared it’s head, is about Gilmor’s shop.  It’s not only a supermarket, but also a hardware/animal feed/general store which provides the local lifeline to farmers in the immediate area. If Gilmor’s supermarket is taken down by Shafin’s new shop then I doubt if the other business of the general store/farming supplies can stand on its own and will go down as well. Whilst there may be a few people indifferent to the planning decision, it may hit home hard when the next time they need a bag of Beef nuts, or a sledge hammer, or €5 worth of oval nails, a pair of overalls and a wheelbarrow in a hurry they will have to drive the 25 mile round trip to Sligo or Manorhamilton. I can assure you that it will hit a good few people hard having that essential service withdrawn from village life.

I for one would like to see a copy of the economic argument put forward for this new shop…if it even exists. Somehow I doubt if it mentions that the two/three existing shops that have just invested very heavily will be forced out of business by this development. I’d be be obliged if anyone can send me a copy of that document. To make sense an argument for this new shop it has to be either highly misinformed at best or potentially fraudulent at worst.

We don’t know what the building is going to look like yet, but knowing what they’ve built in the past and the total disregard for tasteful sensitive architecture in Co.Leitrim generally, it will be a modernist monstrosity sitting in the middle of a classic period village…one of a kind. Development in architecturally sensitive towns and villages is supposed to enhance the local social and physical fabric…not destroy it. Why is it seen by most people that rich pop stars can get the planning authorities to do what they want, when local development for the community can’t get approval? For many people it all smells of something that Ireland is all too used to from the past.

The reality of this planning decision is that the traditional shops and their families are certainly going to be bankrupt because of a millionaire pop star’s family involvement in development. The only beneficiary of this misery is..Shafin Deveopments.

Of course, there are the other factors in the equation. When all development in Ireland has ground to a halt why does Shafin want to keep building where it’s not wanted or needed. It’s the opinion of most here that it’s something to do with tax affairs, and the only reason that would appear to make sense to a lot of people anyway.

There are many questions to be asked about the development by Shafin Developments in Dromahair, but it seems that no-one is prepared to ask them. I really don’t think that Shane is the right person to talk to about it. In fairness I remember him as a young kid and he is a nice guy actually and I’m sure this is all driven by his advisers and family. Shane lives in the world of constant touring, hotels, fan madness, record promotion and all the strangeness of the life of a popular performer. He knows that he’s a commodity on the shelf of the record companies shop and has a best before date. Then you need another job…

I’ll finish by saying that many people in the village are raging and very depressed over the latest planning decision on the Supermarket. We can’t trust planners and their decisions or developers. The Lanes-Foxes built the Dromahair you see not for themselves, but for their grandchildren and beyond and their communities…not for instant profit. That’s what determines what is right..and what should and should not be built. If the blame for Ireland’s woes has to go somewhere, it has to be with the planners. They are the ones who stood over building 350,000 unwanted houses in the country and the vampire banks just had a field day supplying the finance to the developers. Now we know the banks had to get it from somewhere.. which left the country broke. All pigs at the trough.

If it comes to either direct action or using international media being the only ways left..then maybe we’ll use them and see if I can rustle up a few more O’Rourkes to help us out. Traditionally our Clan were never shy of a fight..having caused the Norman Invasion of Ireland. That was over a woman though..according to legend. I’m sure that the great Chiefs of Dromahair would approve of this fight, seeing as some of the physical remnants of their existence were concreted over. The descendants of the old O’Rourkes come from all over the world to this place seeing it as a genetic pilgrimage and complain endlessly to me about it being ruined by modern tasteless short-sighted development. Heritage tourists used to provide an income stream into the village, now they’re being scared away.

OK..off back to sleep to find those Westlife albums..or Michael Moore to give us a hand with this one. The camera might be mightier than the sword, but many years using both I like to think I’m OK…just in case.

If you pay for a TV licence don’t you think that you have an entitlement to watch it in digital as part of that fee? Why should we pay twice for the programming? (I won’t get into here whether it’s worth the price or not. That’s another post.)

RTÉ have it all ways…licence fee, advertising and SKY…greedy. As TV licence payers we should demand that we can get digital reception of our national broadcaster without paying a monthly subscription to Rupert Murdoch’s Empire. Terrestrial reception of RTE is in some places impossible and in all places vastly inferior to Digital.

When they switch off the analogue terrestrial signal in 2012 they are going to introduce a FTA digital set-top box but there’s no way of knowing at this point whether you’ll get a signal through their expensive set-top boxes at all. If it doesn’t work then you’ll only have one option to watch RTE and TG4 etc at all…pay SKY another €20+ a month to watch all the content you have already paid for with your licence and by suffering adverts.

As licence payers we should demand that RTÉ is available free on the Astra28e satellite for all to receive with the appropriate equipment. All BBC, ITV Channel 4 channels in the UK and nearly all other EU national broadcasters are available free on satellite so why not RTÉ?

It’s about time we started a movement of civil disobedience and refuse to pay our TV licences on the basis that RTE are in contempt of Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Please pass on the petition link as a matter of national interest, information and need.
and support Brian Greene who’s doing a brilliant job of getting under their skin http://www.rte2fta.com/
and check out some of his posts such as this one:
http://www.briangreene.com/bhg/2006/rte-fta/

Here’s the wording of the Petition..

To: RTÉ & Irish Government

We call on the Irish Government, RTÉ & its Board & Audience Council to
make all RTÉ transmissions free to air.

With particular focus on digital services the licence payer is funding
the transmission of RTÉ signals that are encrypted and not equally
available to all citizens of Ireland.

Article 21 (2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states
“Everyone has the right to equal access to public service in his country”

We demand all public service broadcasts be Free To Air.

Sincerely,

The subject now deepens. It seems that possible the Open Source Linuxey kernelbabble speaking Geeks have sussed out how to remotely control balls of light to draw designs in crops. My big question is..if they can do that why can’t they design a Linux OS that would allow people to edit video professionally so we can dump all the Gatesy and Jobs systems and work away free from interference either on the OS front (MS) or being tied to crap hardware (Jobs). Maybe all their resources have been tied up developing the technology for making crop circles and left no time for useful projects. I can just see one of them eating his brown rice admiring his new African tyre sandals exporting the design image from The Gimp (awesome program by the way) into Blender for 3D work and then into the remote control module linked to the ball of light launcher. After getting bored with making crop circles featuring everything from Mayan calender designs to pictures of Indian faces, what does he do? Whoops..his redesign of the Firefox logo for his own version of the popular browser slips into the process while he’s out making his Basil and mint green tea. Some poor old farmer then has to work out what the hell has happened to his field and how much the papers will pay for pics.

There again..it could be a Microsoft or Apple conspiracy to get the Geeks blamed for this stuff. There’s plenty of people with the time and technology sitting in those organisations to do this stuff. However..I suspect that if it was them then the mystery would be over, as the balls of light whizzing around might have to hang on a bit every now and again to download updates before they could go back to work…and get spotted by people coming out of the pub.

I have to admit..I don’t know where I sit on the subject. When I lived in Sussex a crop circle appeared next to my house in a flax field. Seeing as it was June and I was up all night full of Caffeine (ha hum) and working, I could see out of the window and was even walking around the garden in the moonlight. I lived in a pretty isolated spot on farmland and what I can tell you is there’s no chance a bunch of stoned students made it..as I defo would have seen and heard them. If it’s down to balls of light then that was possible when I was in the loo or something. I did hear low humming noises but put that down to my tinnitus I was suffering from. That was in the ’80s and long before Firefox or any other intricate design..just a boring old circle.

There we go. What do you reckon?

And…there’s a reality that not too many Irish Nationalists seem to be making a song and dance about. That is..that the British economy now has more control over..and probably taking more money out of…the Irish economy than at any point in pre-Independence and colonial days. I wonder if Michael Collins and Dev would be down at Tesco buying cheap Chianti, olives, olive oil, Humous, vine leaves, pork pies and Newcastle Brown Ale. Then going onto PC World for a laptop to organise the revolution on…and buying bits for the old Roller in Halfords and so on and so on. One things for certain..if he’d gone into the store that says “The difference is we’re Irish” and found he had pay 25% more than he would in across the border he probably wouldn’t have signed the feckin Treaty. There again..he probably wouldn’t have started the war in the first place if knew the way that the politicians nowadays run the country and would been a Senior manager in Lidl or sommit.

PS, eventually managed to get a couple of snaps with security giving me hassle.
The first is normal…and the second is the local management’s professional attempt at rectifying it.

As we see the rockets being launched from Gaza at “Southern Israel” it can be hard to hear nowadays that these rockets are being fired by guys who are actually aiming them at their own land. If the Israeli Sate hadn’t confiscated their land and ousted them in their racist policies of ethnic cleansing, then this practice of shooting rockets anywhere else would just be known as amateur rocketry…just like clubs full of pimply schoolboys do all over the world.

I remember having a mate at school who was into rocketry. We went to a launch of one of his big rockets one evening and it went badly wrong and landed in the wrong farmers field. The farmer was not impressed at all as it set fire to his barley stubble and chased us in his Landrover all over the place and then phoned the police. Ironically the ownership of the field had been in dispute between my mate’s family and the now angry farmer.

Compare that with doing the same thing in Palestine. The odds on our rocket hitting a house nearby were much more than one landing in on a house in Southern Israel but we never had to suffer the farmer coming back with the Police in their helicopter gunships firing missiles and white phosphorous shells at us killing all our extended family, then bringing in bulldozers to flatten all our houses complete with the occupants.

On a more serious note, the fact that the Israeli public were behind this war sheds some rather horrible light on their mentality that says it’s OK to kill as many Palestinians as you like in exchange for firing a few amateur rockets. The reality is that during this latest conflict more Israelis died in road accidents than were killed by rockets from Gaza. You don’t see them attacking the main car manufacturer’s factories though eh? Not many Israelis will openly admit it but I know many of them share the opinions of a late politician who described the Palestinian as lice. I suppose it’s no accident of history that now the most racist country in the world is inflicting death and misery and another race. The image of Palestinian kids wearing the German concentration camp striped pyjamas throwing stones at Israeli troops to point out to the world that now the Palestinians Ghettos are getting the same treatment as the jewsih Ghettos during WW2 is particularly powerful but censored from western media generally.

There we go. 10 Israeli soldiers and three Israeli civilians died…and so the Israeli public found it not only justifiable but morally and politically OK to kill in excess of 1300 Palestinians of which 400 were children. The Arabs have for many years being saying Isarel has no right to exist on historical grounds. I find myself thinking that it should not be allowed to exist now on the grounds that it has committed mass murder and should be disbanded.

I always wonder how many US supporters of Israel would feel if some powerful Empire came along and backed the Native Americans to take back their land beacuse of an old troublesome book about them being the chosen race and how they had a historical claim to the land and proceeded to occupy, ethnically cleanse and then murder the resistance fighters of places like Carolina, Tennessee, northern Georgia, and Alabama.

OK..not a politically correct rant I give you, but if the truth hurts then there’s still time to repent…lol..like all that crap they preach in most religions. Being a student of military history and empires, then the only way to get a lasting ceasefire, justice and equality it to arm Hamas to the teeth with decent weapons. If it was a level playing field them the Israelis might think twice before indulging in Genocide.

I wonder where my mate from school is now. I would say he could get a good advisory role in Gaza and teach them how to make decent rockets. If I could have a dream come true it would be that when the UFOs make themselves known and visible..lol..that they will take on the power of the US, Israel and Britain and disarm them to create a peaceful world based on the products of work rather than robbery. The Faeries told me to write that bit.

Better open the bunker shelter for a while in case the drones come looking for me….nananananana

Recently I was talking to someone from a bank that I may or may not use and I’ll cut the story short. They told me that if you are self-employed your chance of credit is virtually nil and don’t even bother getting audited accounts from the accountant to apply as you won’t get it..even small amounts. Not only that but they will be calling in all current credit soon. They’ve brought in blanket rules by the look of it.

If you’re in the PAYE sector then you’ll be in trouble too for getting credit if the company you work for employs less than 25 people. You might be safe for credit if you work for a multinational…apart from the fact that you might lose your job and not be able to pay it back as they all head East.

Now..the other person I was talking to works in one of our National Banks in the very department that caused a of the problems. Apart from having many colleagues “working from home” It seems that as soon as the government guarantee scheme kicked in they got pay rises that were on hold issued as well as bonuses. They got their Xmas bonus and a nice fat €500 for Xmas festivities per head. This was all thanks to the fact that the Government left every man woman and child in the State liable for up to €135,000 a head..yep..every single one.

So..now we have bankrolled the banks, and they are treating us…the people they owe their existence to..like shite by refusing credit and inflicting extra bank charges wherever they think they can get away with them. I’ve noticed extra charges creeping in on my VISA statement already..like late payment fees, overlimit fees and so on. They were never there before. However, on the current account side their stupid new rules have cost them a few Euro. I used to just go out and use my Laser card and if I went into the red with it ..it was OK..no problem as you just got charged a referral fee and I would go an transfer the funds online to keep things in the black. Now they stop the payment on the card at the checkout..which can be embarrassing but it means they’ve lost the referral fees which last year amounted to nearly a hundred Euro in my case and saved me a few quid. They really know how to blow a hole in their foot for the sake of new policies. They’re just taking advantage of the likes of us who are too feckin busy earning a living to keep on top of things like moving funds from account to account. My sources also tell me that they have junket brainstorming weekends for policy makers in the banks to come up with new stealth bank charges..and why doesn’t that surprise me?

So…what’s the answer to all of this from the point of view of the poor old bank customer? It’s quite simple. We start a campaign where we persuade every self-employed, small or middle size business that has money on deposit to withdraw it and stash it elsewhere..like the Credit Union or even cash. If they are going to deny me credit then I’m going to deny them the same. Why should I have any money sitting idle in their bank when they won’t do the same for me when it’s needed. If we can get this idea out there we could bring them to their knees. I have had enough of hearing about small businesses being brought to their knees by lack of credit by not being able to fulfil the lucrative orders on their books.

So there we are. That’s my reply to the fact I was told that even if I got a multimillion Euro film job or just broadcast docs where I need to hire crew tomorrow, I wouldn’t get a single Euro in credit with which to carry out the work because of their stupid new rules for the self employed and small businesses. It’s not to do with individual status or credit rating either..I’m told and I shouldn’t take it personally..lol. They really are being stupid as once the multinationals have all gone to China or Bangladesh etc then we will be the only ones left on which to run an economy…and I can’t wait.

Do your bit for the downtrodden abused bank customer..get every cent out of the bank now and lets teach them a lesson. They are nothing but greedy self preserving pond life in my opinion. Certainly no better than common conmen, fraudsters, blackmailers and highwaymen. Obviously none of the original Banksters in the US who caused this mess have even been slapped on the wrist let alone incarcerated for the mess they’ve made of the world’s economies and more importantly…people’s lives. These people have proven themselves to be more dangerous than terrorists so I think they should be shipped out to Guantanamo Bay and water-boarded just for retribution and satisfying fun for new dole drawers.

OK..rant over…for now. Part 2 coming soon.