Glob-a-log

It would be quite funny if it wasn’t so very scary, and quite sad: to realise that obiviously no-one in the White House or the Pentagon really has a fucking clue:

WASHINGTON — When the Pentagon announced in March that Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood would become the senior American officer based in Pakistan, it reflected the military’s aim to put a crisis-tested veteran in a critical job at a pivotal time in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas. But nearly two months later, the military has quietly canceled the assignment of General Hood, a 33-year Army veteran who was excoriated in the Pakistani news media for one of his previous jobs: commander of the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

It’s not nuclear science, people; we know the very recent history. The fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan ran into serious trouble because Bush decided not to pursue Bin Laden and the others but to invade Iraq instead. He did leave some of the army in Afghanistan and relied on the highly unreliable European NATO partners to take over some of the fighting, which most of these partners refused to do. That was a serious miscalculation on the part of the White House: to think that the countries who were lukewarm at the very best about the whole Iraq adventure would take over the fighting in Afghanistan was somewhat naive. Still, one might have expected these so-called partners to do a little bit more. As it is, they didn’t and still don’t but in terms of miscalculations this was a relatively mild one for the Bush administration.

There were two more, much bigger mistakes that the White House made though. The first of these was to rely on the Karzai government in Afghanistan to get at least some of his house in order. That was a seriously foolish expectation though, since Karzai had to rely on various warlords even to stay in office, let alone exercise any real power outside of the capitol - and none of these warlords had even the slightest interest in following the Bush agenda.

The second and even bigger mistake was what the Bush administration did in Pakistan. Having removed most of the US army, unable to rely on the NATO allies or Afghani forces, the White House made one last desperate gamble: to trust Pakistan’s army leader and dictator-in-chief Musharraf and to gamble that he a) would be able to stay in power and b) would be willing to actively pursue the Taliban and make sure that its forces couldn’t use Pakistan as a safe haven.

In doing so the White House chose to ignore the fact that the army had always condoned and even cooperated with Pakistan’s most hardline mullahs. Also, the army had long standing deals with Pakistan’s mountain tribes, who were the friends and allies of the Taliban. In order to stay in power Musharraf was happy enough to take the millions of dollars the US gave him - and he was also happy to parade in front of the cameras as the trustworthy and moderate ally of the USA. Musharraf was gambling that the support of the US would help him to stay in power, enabling him to do as he pleased with the opposition, with the tacit approval of the Americans. He was also hoping that if he did just the minimum that was required to keep the Americans happy, they would keep supporting him.

Musharraf’s gamble proved to be as foolhardy as any that the Bush government made. Even the token help he offered the Americans in the War against Terror proved too much for the various other power blocks in Pakistan. When he sent some of the Pakistani army into the mountains the local tribes saw this as an insult and they waged war on and humiliated these poorly equipped army troops. The mad mullahs and their Islamic schools were also deeply offended by anything that even resembled help to the infidel Bush and from silent partners of the military regime, they turned into Musharraf’s most dangerous enemies. So, in order to stay in power Musharraf became more and more dictatorial, alienating most of Pakistan’s society, from its reasonably moderate majority to its most rabidly violent minority. In the end, Musharraf lost his gamble, lost the presidency and even lost his army position.

The White House, of course, now was without any real ally in Pakistan. The fundamentalists hated the Bush administration more than ever, the moderates despised the White House for allowing Musharraf to oppress the moderate opposition and to fire most of the High Court judges. What’s worse, even during the years that Musharraf had been in power he had not done anything that was of any real help to the US in its fight against the Taliban. Supporting Musharraf had been another financial, political and military blunder. So, now the US no longer had any friends in Pakistan. Which was seriously bad news, for this meant the Taliban could now move with even greater ease between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Worse, in a way, was that all of this had left Pakistan seriously unstable and for a while it seemed that an Iran type Islamic revolution could be a possibility. Not a good scenario at all, especially since Pakistan had nuclear weapons.

In other words, the Bush administration needed to mend fences in a desperate hurry. The new Pakistan coalition government both either hated or deeply mistrusted the White House. It was willing to talk but not willing to do the Americans’ bidding. In other words, what the USA needed to do more than anything else was to tread very carefully, to be on its diplomatic best behaviour.

So, of course, what did the appalling White House & Pentagon idiots do? Yes, they gave the post of most senior officer in Pakistan to the guy who had been the boss of the Guantánamo Bay prison: one of the most hated symbols of all that is wrong with American foreign policy in the eyes of the whole of the Muslim world. Nice going! As I started saying, it would be very funny if it wasn’t so scary and sad - and no, they obviously don’t have a fucking clue, which does not bode well for any of the rest of the world.

I’ve almost given up writing columns about political correct clowns and health & safety nuts. There are so many of these stories in the newspapers and it becomes more than a bit depressing to keep repeating the same things over and over again. Sure, some of these stories are wildly amusing but the people responsible for all the insanity are not - and they wouldn’t even get the joke, however patiently you tried to explain things to them.

So, I decided that’s it’s better to ignore these stories - or when I read them, merely to shake my head and to move on, cursing under my breath but not wasting my breath bemoaning these things at column length. However, the following story is too good to simply throw back into the murky pond from which it rose. It is such a perfect illustration of what is wrong with these people - and how it is also criminally and morally wrong for us to let these loons long enough out of the asylum to do irreparable damage to the structure of our societies.

People often tell me that these people mean well. That you need to have health and safety rules - and that it’s better to be PC than to call people by demeaning names and so on. Still, while I deplore bad manners and, with Jake Elwood, hate all types of ‘Illinois Nazis’ and also think that bosses should be forced by law to create a reasonably safe working environment, all of that does not mean that we should go totally overboard. Banning Christmas trees & carols, or piggy banks because they might offend non-Christians, or forbidding the fire brigade to put up Christmas/festive lights, because that’s not in their job description and they might injure themselves in the process… Well, you’ve heard all the stories: there’s so much of that shit going on and it is, as I said, truly depressing.

So yes, I admit that even the maddest of the PC and Health & Safety lot might not be in it for the thrill of feeling righteous and powerful but that all of them might mean terribly well indeed. I don’t think that is the case for a second but let’s say that all of these idiots are indeed trying to be helpful. Well, even then I still have to insist that they are not. Being helpful, I mean. They are, I’m afraid, annoying little pests who make all of our lives more and more miserable and unworkable.

Anyway, as I said, the following story makes for a perfect parable - for this is the madhouse cum prison world that these people are building, stone by bloody stone, law by stupid law:

From next year, anglers in Switzerland will have to demonstrate their expertise by taking a course on humane methods of catching fish, under new legislation outlined by the Swiss Federal Parliament. The new legislation states that fish caught should be killed immediately following their capture, with a sharp blow to the head from a blunt instrument. Under the new regulations, the use of livebait and barbed hooks is also prohibited except in certain situations. The laws come into effect in 2009 and state that “it is not permitted to go fishing with the ‘intention’ to release the fish.”

So, that’s alright then. To spare the fish the unbearable trauma of getting caught and then thrown back into the water again, we will kill it swiftly and humanely instead. A truly breathtakingly brilliant idea and I’m sure that all the fish will be extremely pleased with these new and indeed very animal-friendly laws.

Send in the clowns indeed. Give me strength…

Okay, I admit to being majorly pissed off. England’s RC Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has been at it again, claiming special status for his church and complaining about Godless governments, aggressive atheists etcetera, etcetera.

First this, though. It’s not the freshest of news but the words of the cardinal reminded me of a much happier and a much more welcome development in the mostly dusty chambers of the law:

Mediums and spiritualists fear changes to laws regulating the industry could leave them open to malicious civil action by sceptics. The union representing spiritual workers is to lobby the government over changes to the industry’s regulation. The Fraudulent Mediums Act is due to be repealed next month and replaced by new EU consumer protection regulations. The British Humanist Association said the change offered vulnerable people greater protection against fraud.

Under the 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act, prosecutors have to prove the medium or healer had intended to be fraudulent in order to secure a conviction. But under the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, which comes into force in the UK on 26 May, it will be the medium’s responsibility to prove they did not mislead or coerce vulnerable consumers. The Spiritual Workers’ Association says making mediums subject to the consumer-protection regulations does not recognise spiritualism is a religion. Its founder Carole McEntee-Taylor, told BBC News: “The problem is that it’s turning spiritualism the religion into a consumer product, which it is not.”

This, of course, would be a slightly more valid argument if spiritualists didn’t ask their believers to pay for their services in the hard coin of Caesar. While it is true that other religions, like Christianity, ask the believers to give alms and can be quite creative when it comes to collecting money for the church, they don’t really bill for their services. Neither do they claim to carry messages from the dearly departed to grieving relatives like a wireless instant messager service, nor do they offer to find lost property and/or people or heal corporeal and/or spiritual wounds, as long as the believer can pay for these things.

In other words, it’s all well and good to claim that you’re a religion but if you then promise to deliver services for money, along the lines of a commercial business, then it’s only reasonable that people - and the law - can demand a certain legal satisfaction. Selling stuff in the name of some spiritual principle is still selling stuff and should be governed by a more material principle than a mere spiritless shrug if the results are not as advertised.

This, of course, is the problem with these people: they wish to operate in the real world and demand what they see as a proper worldly status and its just rewards, while wearing the clothes of holiness and hiding behind some invisible and unverifiable Principle. In other words, they want power and privileges without accountability - and they demand both our reverence and respect in the process.

Which brings me back to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor - a man I truly cannot stand. Here he is, allowing his words yet again to appear in the online Guardian; and yet again, he’s feeling very aggrieved and sorry for himself and his Church:

British public life cannot be a “God-free zone”, the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales warned last night. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said he was unhappy about attempts to “eliminate the Christian voice” from the public forum. He suggested, however, that Christians were partly to blame for the prevalence of modern atheism, which was a product of a “distorted kind of Christianity.”

“What did we do to generate unbelief? We need to examine what we might have done to give people a misleading idea of God.”

He also called for a better dialogue between believers and non-believers based on mutual esteem, rather than a rejection of difference, in order to address the split between the Gospels and culture. Murphy-O’Connor has been outspoken in his attempt to secure the place of Christianity in society. Last month, in an interview with the Guardian, he argued that Christian leaders should hold a privileged position over the leaders of other faiths when it came to their input into public policy in Britain.

One last quote from yet another newspaper but concerning the same speech:

However the Archbishop also urged the faithful to treat those who do not believe in God with “deep esteem”, and said believers needed to recognise that the “hidden God” was active in the lives of non-believers as well as those who believe.

That, to be honest, more than anything else, truly made me seethe. Oh, how I loathe this man and this particular attitude.

Now, let me first state that I am not one of the Cardinal’s militant atheists. I really can’t stand people like Richard Dawkins or any other fundamentalist believers, be they of the militant Christian, Muslim or Atheist variety. So, I don’t care what people choose to believe, or what spirit or non-spirit they pray to in their hearts, their schools and their churches - as long as they accept that what they believe is their business and what others believe is theirs.

I’m very decidedly not talking about ‘tolerance’ here. Tolerance is one of the most patronising and demeaning principles humans have ever come up with. It’s saying, ‘Of course I know you’re an idiot for thinking/doing/believing such and so and so on, but since I’m an awfully good sport I’ll let you go on with your silly little business.’ Tolerance is the antithesis of mutual respect: It’s how certain very annoying grown-ups always treat their children, and that’s as charming but inherently inferior creatures whose whims and little fantasies & hobbies may be indulged up to a certain point.

So, when the Cardinal calls for a dialogue between Christians and non-believers, based on ‘mutual esteem’ and almost in the same breath demands that Christian leaders should hold a privileged position over the leaders of other faiths (let alone the godless heathen!) then I must regretfully tell the Cardinal to fuck off. I am an agnostic and as such I obviously and of necessity claim no superior spiritual knowledge, nor do I hold my own views in these matters as true or important. Since I don’t know whether there is a God and if so, which colour underwear He or She prefers, it would be a nonsense for me to tell anyone else what (or what not) to believe - but I will not tolerate to be spoken to in the ‘tolerant’ way that the Cardinal Murphy-O’Connors of this world think they have a God-given right to.

As to the Cardinal’s question what the church might have done to generate disbelief, well, I’ve taken enough of your time already - and it would be churlish and childish to go through the whole bloody history of the church again, from the Crusades and the pogroms and the witch burnings, to the modern day issues of child abuse, the stance on contraceptives, marriage, homosexuality and more of these things. All these arguments are based in some truth but we all know them and I don’t even think they are necessarily the biggest reason why people in the West at least aren’t that willing to follow the Church’s rule as they were in the past centuries.

I think there are many complicated reasons why people in the West have turned away from the Mother Church - and some have to do with what the Cardinal stated. I think I even agree with him that many people these days see the church as a kind of shop where they go to select only the handful of items that please them. In a me-me-me culture there’s less room for a communal approach to life’s issues and values.

There is another thing though - and that’s why I started with that article about the spiritualists. I think another reason, and maybe the major reason why people have become less enchanted with and less willing to obey the Church is that people in the West have come to see the Church as inherently hypocritical and unwilling to change. The Church claims to be the arbiter of truth; the Pope even claims infallibility - but time and again the Church has been forced to make its excuses to this historically ill-treated group or for this or that historical failure or crime. As I said earlier, I don’t think it’s these mistakes and crimes that have made people turn away from the church but its pride and arrogance and its insistence that it is and must be the only one that has all the answers. In other words, it refuses to be held accountable for its actions, even if at times it admits to having erred.

Like those spiritualists the church wants all the good stuff: respect, belief - and the power to do as it pleases, without ever being held accountable. Worse, while the spiritualists merely want to be left alone by the law, in order to practice their ‘belief’ and to profit from it as much as they want, the Church wants much more than the freedom to worship. They do not merely refuse to be held accountable for what they do within the Church, they also demand a place at the lawmaker’s table - and this, more than anything else, may be what’s made so many turn away from the Church.

Well, you can hardly call this news surprising, to be honest. Maybe I should just have given this column the title ‘There we go again…’:

PDT San Francisco — A federal grand jury indicted Bernie Ward, a former Catholic priest and ex-radio talk show host, in September on two counts of distributing child pornography and one count of receiving child porn using the Internet. Ward pleaded not guilty to the charges in December and had insisted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

Last month, Ward sought a ruling from the judge that would allow him to present a defence that he received and distributed “the charged contraband” for legitimate First Amendment purposes, namely to research and comment upon “social mores.” Ward claims the conversations he’s had with a woman who is an online dominatrix consisted only of role-playing as part of a book he was researching on hypocrisy.

So, no, priests - or ex-priests - being forced to confess they are really that into children is not exactly earth-shattering news. Depressing, yes; a ‘hold the presses’ moment, not quite anymore. That the man was also engaged in discussions with an online dominatrix adds a bit of very strange spice to the mix. That’s the kind of stuff we expect from English Conservative politicians more than from renegade priests - but maybe this just means that mister Bernie Ward attended an English public school when he was young.

The founder of the Jesuits famously claimed, ‘Give me a child until he is seven and he is mine.’ The old English public schools could make a similar claim, ‘Give us your children and when we’re done with them they’ll be buggered for life.’

It is kind of funny that our former priest & former d.j. now tries to hide behind the First Amendment. I’ve said it before but I’m more than happy to repeat it: While it’s said that patriotism is the last refuge any scoundrel seeks, in the USA the First Amendment is often a scoundrel’s first refuge.

One of the functions of America’s Supreme Court, of course, is to interpret all the Amendments. The Court is, if you will, to the Constitution what the Pope is supposed to be to Christ: the legitimate and only and infallible representative on earth. It is not and was never meant to be the easiest of jobs: to be the guardians of the Law. Still, even though I’m not a lawyer I can’t help but feel that our paedophile priest doesn’t have a prayer when it comes to hiding behind the First Amendment.

While it might not always be easy to know what the founders of the Constitution really had in mind, I’m pretty sure that when they wrote that First Amendment they weren’t exactly thinking of protecting the interests of some shabby priest who shared kiddie porn with an online dominatrix.

There are not many happy war-on-terror stories and this one is no exception to the rule:

The Pentagon confirmed yesterday that a Kuwaiti released from the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay three years ago carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq last month. Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi and two other Kuwaitis are reported by their families to have taken part in an attack on Iraqi security forces in Mosul. Although the families did not specify a date, seven people were killed in a suicide attack in Mosul on April 26.

Civil rights lawyers claim most of the detainees are innocent, while the US military claims they present a danger and would take up arms if released. The US military opposed his release, saying there was a risk that he presented a continuing danger, but he was freed after being transferred to Kuwait.

It is easy to see why the Pentagon would be quite happy to conform this news, because now the US government can say, ‘See, we were right after all: these people are dangerous terrorists.’ In this one case they may even be right. The man in question did, according to the US army, at one defect from the Kuwaiti army to fight with the Taliban in 2001. If that is indeed true the man had, one could say, form.

This, of course, does not mean that all or even any of the other prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are also wannabe terrorists who would form a danger to the US when they were released. There are various reports that many of those who were arrested and brought to Guantánamo Bay were turned in by other Afghani either for money or for private & family-related revenge (or a combination of both.) The whole operation was quite farcical, immoral and according to most international organisations illegal from the start.

It is not unreasonable to expect that some of these men, like the alleged Kuwaiti suicide bomber, were indeed fanatics who would rather die for some dubious cause than live for a more humane one but it’s impossible to say how many of the Guantánamo Bay prisoners belonged to that select, secretive and quite demented community. At the moment though, the Pentagon and the US government as a whole will be happy enough to claim that this one case validates their whole strategy in the War on Terror, from Guantánamo Bay, to rendition flight, to their interrogation ‘techniques’ etcetera, etcetera.

The sad truth is that we never knew how many of the Guantánamo Bay prisoners were ever guilty in the eyes of any legal and honest court and by now it’s probably too late to find out. The way these men have been treated over the years makes it unlikely that any of them could reasonably be expected to be fit to stand trial.

There is, of course, yet another desperately sad bit of irony in this endlessly protracted Guantánamo Bay black farce and that is the fact that it can’t be ruled out that quite a high percentage of the prisoners have, because of their treatment, by now become so bitter and twisted that they might indeed become suicide bombers the moment they are released. If you would like to create the perfect recruitment and trainings camp for terrorists, Guantánamo Bay would be a perfect blueprint.

The Good Book says, ‘Give to Caesar what Caesar is due,’ which, incidentally raises an interesting issue concerning the non-payment of taxes in the USA and elsewhere by church organisations but that’s a topic for another day - if I can be bothered, of course.

Let me digress a bit further, though. There’s an old joke told by one of our Dutch comedians which translates as follows:

It’s Sunday morning and one good citizen is less than delighted when he’s forced to get up to answer the door and finds a priest on his doorstep, who is there for one kind of collection or the other. The freshly risen citizen makes his displeasure known and the priest asks him rather snootily if the man has anything against God.

“No,” the good citizen says, “Just His ground personnel.”

Which, if we can believe Father Giuseppe Miliziano, an Italian parish priest, is more or less the
Roman Catholic Church’s attitude when it comes to Caesar, or the modern equivalent of Caesar’s rule. Meaning that the Church will grudgingly respect the power of the national government but that local representatives can, to quote Stephen King, ‘go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut’:

The Roman Catholic Church is opposing a nudist beach festival in Sicily billed as a “celebration of nudity” over fears of an invasion of naked sunbathers. The Church complained after the mayor of Cattolica Eraclea, the village nearest to the planned festival on Capo Bianco recently issued a decree allowing “free use of Capo Bianco by lovers of nude sunbathing”.

But Father Giuseppe Miliziano, the parish priest, said: “The beach belongs to the state, not to the local council. If the state decided to allow people to take their clothes off, there is not much I could do about it. But as far as I am aware no such authorisation has been issued.”

Ah yes, the Church and that whole nudity thing. It all goes back to Adam and Eve, the snake and the Garden etcetera. Having eaten that bloody apple and hearing God approaching, Adam and Eve covered themselves, having become self-conscious for the very first time. ‘The apple of self-consciousness’ doesn’t have the right Biblical ring, however, so let’s stick to the old ‘good and evil’ thing. Without these simplistic dichotomies the Church would not be able to exist, of course. Good and evil, Heaven and Hell, God and Lucifer, sheep and goats, black and white - ad infinitum and ad absurdum.

Anyway, so for the Church that first, original sin of eating the forbidden fruit, is indelibly linked to nudity - the frowning upon which in particular. So, I suppose Father Giuseppe Miliziano was being less than totally honest in saying that he would respect the national government’s wishes when it comes to nudity - and if he did mean it, he should be taken aside immediately by his own superiors for a few elemental ecclesiastical instructions.

Whatever one thinks about the validity of the Church’s tenements, within the world of the Church the good father would be absolutely wrong to bow to Caesar’s wishes when it comes to this whole nudity issue. As Jesus Himself explained, one should honour the law of the land when it concerns all worldly matters, like paying taxes - which the Church doesn’t, as I’ve stated before but never mind that now - but never when it comes to spiritual matters.

Father Giuseppe Miliziano should, in fact, be willing and eager to be thrown to the lions rather than make any concessions when it comes to matters of church dogma, like those earlier Christians were fed to these beasties by the predecessors of today’s version of Caesar. So, in an ideal world our good priest should, about now, be in the process of being processed into cat food - as, perhaps, should be all those other priests who go door to door collecting money on early Sunday mornings.

Poor Gordon Brown: it never rains but it pours. You get thoroughly trounced in local elections by the Etonian party - and then humiliated by an Etonian mayor of London.

And if that was not enough to stop anyone from waxing lyrically about all things British, some uppity museum managaer decides you might not even be interesting enough to attack with a life size voodoo doll:

Gordon Brown is well-advised to avoid meltdown in his next test of public opinion: it is at Madame Tussauds. The London tourist attraction has asked the public to vote on whether it should create a waxwork of the Prime Minister after Downing Street failed to respond to its request for him to attend a sitting.

“Reflecting the climate after the Government’s performance in the recent local elections, our guests have become decidedly split about whether we should feature Mr Brown at all,” said Edward Fuller, the museum’s general manager.

Yes, when the going gets tough, the tough can’t even get a bloody waxing done.

How the high and mighty have fallen indeed.

First, let me state that I am not a big fan of Burma’s military junta. It is a quite horrible regime, which treats most of the population worse than China treats the Tibetans - which is saying quite a lot.

Nevertheless, the following bit of Burma bashing left me quite speechless - for a short while, before I could decide between hysterical laughter and some choice obscenities:

WASHINGTON — First lady Laura Bush, a harsh critic of the military junta in Burma, slammed the regime Monday for failing to issue a timely warning to its citizens in the path of a deadly cyclone. She expressed concern that the government would spurn foreign emergency aid for the country, also known as Myanmar. Tropical Cyclone Nargis hit Burma early Saturday with winds of up to 120 mph, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless. It killed almost 4,000 people and left about 3,000 others missing.

Laura Bush…?

Wife of George Walker Bush…?

The George Bush of ‘Heck of a job, Brownie’ fame…?

The absolutely and totally useless little fuck up who mismanaged everything about the Katrina disaster…? If he could bother to stop praying to his personal Jesus long enough to even try to manage anything else than choking on a pretzel, that is.

Jesus smack smoking Christ! The bloody nerve of these people!

‘Travel broadens the mind’, they say - and it seems this is even true for those who merely come to watch the football:

FOOTBALL fans will be issued with leaflets on how to “use” hookers at next month’s Euro 2008 tournament. Prostitution is legal in Switzerland, which hosts the championship with Austria, and the Swiss Aids Federation will give out the leaflets in cities. They advise men to be polite, clean and not to drink alcohol to boost their “staying power”.

Ah yes, the oldest game in the world. It makes you wonder how our poor forefathers managed without these kinds of leaflets.

On a more serious note though, isn’t it time that the self-proclaimed civilised world put its collective head out of its pompous arse and just legalised prostitution altogether? Only yesterday I wrote a piece about the financial benefits of legalising drugs. The same goes for prostitution, obviously. Think of all the extra tax money if prostitution was legalised.

Not only that, of course. As with drugs, legalising prostitution would also mean getting rid of the ‘middle man’. Pimps, sex traders etcetera. If there were enough regulated brothels it would be much easier to deal with those who now prey on millions of women in the so-called civilised world.

I’m sure it wouldn’t solve all the problems in that oldest and possibly saddest of professions but it would surely help to bring the whole damn thing out of the Victorian closet and just deal with the fact that prostitution (like drugs) will never go away.

Ignoring facts never helps anything or anyone. Better deal with the world and human nature as they are and not as you would like them to be. As with all other things, dealing with things in a sensible manner always beats fantasy football solutions. In other words, more sensible laws and less ludicrous leaflets please.

Well, I’ve said it many times before: If all the countries of the world would simply legalise all drugs, it would end a lot of the world’s problems with crime and terrorism. By cutting out the ‘middle man’, which in this case is organised crime, you would rid the world of one of its most dangerous cancers.

Not only that, of course, for it would actually make a Hell of a lot of money too, in taxes, for governments around the world. Instead of losing more and more money and lives fighting this doomed War on Drugs, we could save millions of lives and make millions of easy tax dollars as well.

As the following story about my own home country shows:

Cannabis nets the Dutch treasury more than £300 million a year and has become one of the country’s top cash crops, new figures show. Turnover of the legal ‘coffee shop’ trade in the Netherlands is estimated to be at least £1.6 billion every year “Coffee shops”, where small amounts of cannabis have been legally bought and smoked since 1972, have become a major industry and a popular tourist attraction in cities such as Amsterdam.

Tax on the 265,000kg of soft drugs sold last year in the 730 cafés netted the government £315 million. The true figure may be much higher. “They do not want to know about it in The Hague, as it is all much too politically sensitive,” one anonymous tax inspector told an investigation for the Dutch KRO television channel broadcast last night. Turnover of the legal “coffee shop” trade is estimated to be at least £1.6 billion every year.