Glob-a-log

Here’s a strange story for you:

Police on Sunday were investigating vandals‘ spray-painting of dozens of city vehicles here, some with disparaging messages about the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Authorities think the vandalism to about 60 vehicles, estimated at $10,000 in damage, was done Saturday afternoon. The vehicles were parked across from City Hall and investigators said culprits tagged messages including “Obama smokes crack” and a racial epithet.

Don’t you love it when they say ‘racial epithet‘…? Leaving all of us to wonder: ‘Darn, now what could THAT word have been?!”

Anyway, though I applaud the political engagement of today’s vandals, I have to say that their campaigning methods leave something to be desired.

Not that there is anything wrong with negative campaigning – or to avoid euphemistic epithets: nothing wrong with lying. Politicians do it all the time. “Read my lips, no new taxes,” was a good one. As was: “I did not have sex with that woman.”

Mind you, that’s just the politicians themselves: the real dirty work is done by the ‘Swift boating’ people on both sides. So, vandalising some 60 vehicles to get over a political message is quite alright. Laudable even.

Still, one bit of advice: People don’t like it when others spray-paint their cars with slogans. So, chances are that when you spray the message ‘Eat at McDonalds’ on somebody’s car, that person will become an instant KFC convert.

In other words, if you want to campaign against mister ‘racial epithet’ and you have all those lovely spray-painting cans lying around, better make that message ‘Vote Obama!’, if you want those car owners to vote for McCain.

(Of course, if these spray-painting campaigners belong to the Obama camp, I take back all I’ve said above. Then they are, to quote the incumbent president, already doing a heck of a job – but in the spirit of Karl Rove, of course, and not of that clueless ‘Brownie’ guy.)

Norman Whitfield wrote this song, ‘War,’ asking what it was good for. ‘Absolutely nothing,’ was the answer.

Obviously, Halliburton and the arms industry at large will not agree with that sentiment – and neither will most politicians who are not doing as well at the polls as they think they should be doing.

Would George Bush have been reelected without the ‘benefits’ of 9/11 and the subsequent military campaigns? Most pundits agree he would not have been.

Talking of which: the Iraq war, to be precise, this story made it into many of the world’s papers today – and it is heart-breaking:

BAGHDAD: Iraqis love sports. Yet after five years of war, Iraq’s chances of fielding a competitive Olympic team are vanishingly small. Playing fields, pools and gyms are in disrepair. Athletes are targets for assassination. Only one, a weight lifter, qualified for the Beijing Olympics, the second Summer Games since the U.S. invasion in 2003. War and hardship, though, have not destroyed all of Iraq’s dreams for international competition. The country, which has been in three wars in two decades, has a robust Paralympic team.

Nice, isn’t it, how war is redeeming itself in this fashion? The country has been ripped in three very bloody parts, God knows how many people have been killed, or how many have been forced to flee their homes, their cities and their country. God knows how much the damage to the whole infrastructure is in petro-dollars…

… and yet, great news! Thanks to the war there are now, again, God knows how many candidates for the country’s Paralympic team.

Oh brave new world that has such headlines in it!

Any idea how much the average person in the West is in debt, thanks to mortgages, credit cards and ‘easy’ lending schemes? Well, I’ve got some figures here for the UK. Those of a nervous disposition better skip the next bit:

Total UK personal debt at the end of April 2008 stood at £1,436bn. The growth rate increased to 8.4% for the previous 12 months which equates to an increase of ~ £110bn. Total consumer credit lending to individuals in April 2008 was £230bn. This has increased 6.5% in the last 12 months. Total lending in April 2008 grew by £7.3bn. Secured lending grew by £6.4bn in the month. Consumer credit lending grew by £0.9bn.

Average household debt in the UK is ~ £9,223 (excluding mortgages). This figure increases to £21,450 if the average is based on the number of households who actually have some form of unsecured loan. Average household debt in the UK is ~ £57,683 (including mortgages). Average owed by every UK adult is ~ £30,260 (including mortgages).

Britain’s interest repayments have soared to £94.3bn in the last 12months. The average interest paid by each household on their total debt is approximately £3,790 each year which has increased £343 in the last 12 months.

Why all these dry and very depressing statistics? Well, one of Britain’s leading banks have thought up a way to make matters much, much worse…:

A leading bank is giving children as young as 11 debit cards without informing their parents, it has emerged. Lloyds TSB is sending the cards directly to children raising fears that they are being used to buy cigarettes, alcohol and pornography over the internet. Last night it was reported that one 15-year-old boy had used a card to buy Viagra on the net.

The cards are Visa-enabled and can be used any time a Visa sign is displayed. A spokesman for the bank said: “We wrote to customers under the age of 16, who previously had a cash machine card, to let them know they could have a debit card. We made it clear that they should let their parents know. Parents or guardians can ask for the cards to be blocked.”

Oh well, that’s alright then…

Of all the fucking cynical ploys! Make it clear to children that they should tell their parents that they have this cool, magical card that can get them much of what they want the moment they see it? Yes, that will happen – especially if you warn them at the same time that when informed the parents have the power to take away this card immediately. Again, even among all the other cynical schemes our banks come up with to lead us into temptation, this one is a beauty.

We’ve already seen it with mobile phones: how kids can build up quite impressive monthly debts, through calling and texting each other constantly. Most of the time, their parents pay off these monthly charges, so their children can go on treating ‘their’ phones as if building up debts never has any consequences whatsoever – and you can hardly blame them. Not when the parents keep paying the money and, on the whole, give their children all kinds of bad examples by buying God knows what on their credit cards and taking out loans for weekend trips, etcetera, etcetera.

As it stands, you can’t blame children for coming to the conclusion that it’s not at all necessary to work for the things you buy. We live in a spend first, pay later society – and then we blame the government of the day when we can no longer pay back all the loans we signed up for without a moment’s thought of the consequences.

That, as I said, is how matters stood till now. Now, enter Lloyds TSB and its cynical ploy to enslave its customers at an even younger age. You know, of course the tabloids obsess about what some kids will buy with those debit cards: porn, Viagra, sniffing glue and what have you. As always, they are missing the point. Who cares if a handful of kids will go on to buy things that will seriously harm them? You think those kids would not have found another way to do that if there were no debit cards. If you want to you don’t need to buy trouble: Believe me, you can get it for free, if you are seriously looking for it.

The real problem with this scheme is, of course, that it will peel away yet another protective layer from our already over-exposed communities. We know that the true powers that be don’t think of us as citizens but as consumers. They need us to buy their product and they need a captive public for that. It’s been a long time since they even bothered to dress things up for us – and now they are ready for that final step: to catch and enslave them when they are really young.

For verily, these days you don’t need iron chains to tell the difference between slaves and masters: You only need Mastercard.

Now, I don’t believe there is such a thing as acrophobia. What people call a ‘fear of height’ I would call a proper sense of proportions.

When dropped from even a relatively low building the human body tends to go ‘Splat!’ In fact, remember those forefathers of ours who left the relative safety of their trees? Well, they climbed down – very carefully. If the first few of them had dropped down, the rest of us would still live in those trees.

In other words, our brains are hard-wired to distrust great heights. People who go mountaineering, or para-gliding, or parachute & bungee-jumping are not brave: they are simply too stupid and too bored for their own good. Exactly the kind of character traits evolution is quite good at nipping – or splatting - in the bud, were it not for the regrettable fact that human engineering keeps these failed specimens alive, so they can pass on their dubious genes.

Of course, thrill-seeking is never the cause but always a symptom of the disease called decadence. People who live in war-torn countries, or eke out a living in places where diseases and famine spread like a peanut butter wildfire – people like that don’t seek for adventure, for an adrenaline rush; they are happy enough to make it to the end of the day, without having the last rites spoken over them or members of their family.

Anyway, fear of heights? Simply a good working knowledge of the laws of gravity, if you ask me – and it truly beats me why people would want to go on roller coasters or jump from planes for fun. Still, if you want to shut up your inner forefather who climbed carefully out of that tree and if you insist that you want to overcome that sensible respect for heights, the following article may be of great interest to you:

Billed by its organisers as a kind of mass-hypnosis, the experimental event at the world-class Edinburgh International Climbing Arena combined neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and hypnotherapy with an aerial assault course that would tax an acrobat, let alone an acrophobic: a zip ride launching into mid-air, followed by a scramble across nets and wooden structures dangling from the arena ceiling. Gary Flockhart, co-founder of Brain Train, the Scottish company that organised the event, explains that his combination of hypnotherapy, repeated mantras and guided visualisations was devised to unseat the deeply ingrained memories that lie at the root of most phobias.

What’s more, it seems to work:

Suzanne O’Brien believes her phobia originated in a childhood trip up Edinburgh’s Scott Monument at the age of eight. [Now] once mentally prepared and strapped into her harness, O’Brien was the first in her group to attack the assault course after taking a running jump off the edge of the launch platform. Out of 44 participants, an impressive 42 completed the course with her.

Though I still would like to remind people that many a ‘Let’s do it!’ was, is and always will be followed by a very final and resounding ‘Splat!’

I read the news today, oh boy…:

A ground-breaking treatment which cured cancer in mice is to be tested on humans by US researchers. It follows the discovery five years ago of a laboratory mouse that astonished scientists with an immune system which gave it complete protection from cancer. White blood cells taken from the animal and its offspring and transfused into other mice cured them of advanced cancers. Since then, similar anti-cancer activity by granulocyte white blood cells, has been identified in humans. Researchers now want to transfuse granulocytes from resistant individuals to cancer patients in the hope it will prove just as successful in humans as it has been in mice.

In a roundabout way, let’s now return to those, more extreme animal rights activists who are members or supporters of the various animal libration fronts:

Kermit the frog once sang, “It’s not easy being green.” He was right, of course. It’s much easier to see the world in black and white than admit to the existence of other shades and colours. People are attracted to the duality principle: black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. It’s also why certain types of religion that offer this easy fix have always been popular. When you’re talking duality, nothing much can trump the couple: God & Satan.

The best way to attract followers, whether you’re a political or religious shaman, is to offer your flock both a promised land and an (eternal) enemy. People are most easily led when they feel they are both fighting for and against something. This principle works for superpower states and world religions, as it does for the smallest terrorist group and religious sect. You get people to believe in your cause by offering them those comfort zones of duality.

Problem is, of course, that this type of black & white thinking can easily lead to all sorts of extremism. How many Crusades did Europe organise to recapture the Holy Land – and how many people died during the Christian infighting in Europe itself? How many innocent bystanders have already died, or lost their homes and their land, because of our latest War on Terror?

People are all too easily led to extreme behaviour, and most easily when there is that oldest of carrots: the lure of the fight between good and evil.

Take the animal rights movement. It used to be the case (at least in the West) that animals were seen as a commodity. Descartes (of ‘cogito ergo sum’ fame) ‘proved’ that animals had no soul and could not even feel pain – while a biographer of St Francis, the one who preached to the birds, lauded the saint’s sense of humour, when he described how the young Francis had laughed when he saw a pig, whose leg had been cut off by an axe, hobble around the market place, squealing till it died from blood loss, shock or what have you.

Our love of animals is a fairly recent thing. Of course, people have always used animals, and worshiped animals, and people have had private pets for a very long time but love of the animal kingdom as a whole, which leads to the love of each individual animal, is a moderately new phenomenon. As is the concept of animal rights, and organisations to prevent cruelty to animals.

Obviously, whenever people find a new cause, they always follow those same old patterns of duality: of black and white thinking. Hence, the new zealots of various animal liberation fronts – and the amazing human capacity to find the next Great Satan, even if, in this case, the Great Satan is humanity itself. Some animal rights people don’t think it’s enough to say the rights of animals should equal that of humans; they positively think that humans are inferior to all other animals.

To them, all forms of animal testing, for instance, are anathema – and they refuse to see any difference in testing for a new kind of make-up and a cancer research programme. Some of these people truly seem to believe that not to kill a hundred mice is better than to cure millions of people.

While I can follow their black and white argument that people have no moral right to use any other animal in order to sort out humanity’s problems, I also have to admit that when I read a story like the one above, I tend not to care too much about a few dead mice or the totalitarian niceties of black and white morality.

I’m sure all of you have heard the term ‘Macjob’. My trusted OED describes it as: “An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.”

The dictionary might have to change their definition a bit, though, now that newspapers have named the latest owner of a McDonalds restaurant:

The Queen owns a drive-through McDonald’s burger restaurant, the Royal accounts have revealed. Among Her Majesty’s most recent acquisitions was a retail park in Slough - which encompasses a drive-through McDonalds. Bath Road Retail Park was purchased this month by the Crown Estate, which administers the monarch’s property portfolio, for £92 million.

I’m not quite sure what her Majesty would want with a McDonald’s restaurant. Maybe her corgis enjoy the odd beef patty with French, Freedom or plain Royal fries. Or else she could make burgers out of those corgis that were surplus to requirement. ‘McCorgi’ does have a nice ring to it.

Anyway, the fact that her Bethness now owns a McSweatshop means that the Macjob might gain quite some status too. Flipping burgers might still be flipping boring but it must make a difference if you do it by Royal Decree.

It could also come with some serious perks & bonuses. The perfect patty-slinging person might be rewarded with tickets to Ascot or Wimbledon. Staff uniforms might sport the Royal Crown alongside those boring, golden arches. Those working at the salad bar may be allowed to wear fake Prince Charles ears.

There might even be some kind of special stimulus package – where loyal McDogsbodies may, after ten years of sycophantic service, be promoted to the royal household, where they can get the job of sweeping up the vomit of those princes who visit nightclubs (or hand them discreet Royal condoms when they get lucky) or clean out the stables when one of the princesses is done torturing the horses. Or hold up prince Philip’s spittoon (or false teeth) and be the first one to endure his jokes.

All these jobs, of course, will be as demeaning and low-paid as slinging burgers ever was but with this one defining difference: That these new jobs will truly be a Royal pain in the arse.

It is often said that people get the governments they deserve. While you may ask yourself what all those Zimbabwean citizens have done to deserve to be starved, mutilated and/or killed by the Mugabe regime, here in the West this saying makes sense.

When more people vote for Big Brother candidates than turn up to vote in most political elections, you can’t help but think that the ongoing Big Brown show is exactly what the British citizenry deserves.

On the other hand, it is decidedly unfair on the children that they are punished for the sins of their fickle fathers and muddled mums. Of course, those same Zimbabwean people (who are still alive, that is) would be happy to inform us that whatever life may be, fair it ain’t.

Anyway, the British government is at it again. Not merely satisfied enough with the recently gained power to lock up any grown-up they want for 42 days without having to state on what grounds, they now seem to want to use the full power of the state to go after those who show their hardened criminal colours at the ripe age of five:

Children as young as 5 will be identified as being at risk of becoming criminals or troublemakers under government plans to tackle offending and disorder on the streets. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, called for a huge expansion of state intervention in family life as a way of preventing young people from problem families drifting into antisocial behaviour and crime.

You would have thought that the government had more serious problems to deal with. Whatever they touch, in terms of policy strategies, seems to turn to shit. From the War on Terror to the National Curriculum, from national ID schemes to the Olympics. The government sows hot air and seems perpetually surprised that the only things it reaps are astronomically high bills (and lost local and by-elections.)

Still, do they ever stop and reflect on and try to repair the damage all their mad, hubristic schemes have wrought? Of course, they don’t. They just go from failure to failure, from one pathetic plan to the next contemptible con. Why be content with sinking Atlantis, if you can poison and nuke it as it drowns?

So, while I admire the tenacity of the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith: a woman who seems to have vowed never even to take the shortest of naps until she has made life a misery for all her subjects, I’d like to politely suggest to her that while juvenile delinquency might be a growing problem, your average 5-year old in England has more to fear from its government’s mismanagement of the NHS than society has to fear from these toddlers.

These following statements care of this Times article:

It is extremely dismaying that “the UK is much slower in diagnosing brain tumours” and that “delays were occurring because GPs were reluctant to refer children for brain scans or through lack of awareness of the early warning signs”

Or:

The UK also lags behind comparable countries in survival from other childhood cancers, and outcomes for common diseases such as diabetes are inferior for Britain’s children, too.

In other words, the government has no need to go after all those 5-year-old master criminals: the NHS is doing a heck of a job to rid us of this terrible threat as it stands.

“The human race is fundamentally insane. If you put two of us into a room together we’re soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another.”

That’s a quote by one of the characters in director Frank Darabont’s latest film, The Mist. I have to declare an interest here: I love the original story by Stephen King – and I distrust movie adaptations from stories, so I’m not sure I will even see the movie when it does come to a theatre near me.

I might though. Firstly, Darabont also made the Shawshank Remdemption and The Green Mile, both of which I really liked but maybe even more importantly, he already convinced me of his good intentions for this movie.

The ending of ‘The Mist’ is bleak, to put it mildly and the film script reflects this. So, when Darabont got a great offer from one of the big companies: $30 million dollars to play with if only he would change the ending, he refused and went with a company that offered half the money but left the story alone. First blood for Darabont, so to speak.

Anyway, I got all this info from a Guardian article, which you can find here. You should read it: it’s an excellent piece. The article also briefly discusses the political undertones that went with those old fifties B-movies, like The Thing (both the 51 and the 82 versions.) How all the radioactive monsters and the alien invasions were conscious or unconscious metaphors for the madness that was the Cold War.

The argument in the article being that each political period comes with its own metaphors – which you can easily spot when you look at remakes of old movies. So, the fifties version of The Thing has that Cold War sub-theme, while the remake is informed by the political climate of that later time.

I would certainly not disagree with that – nor with the article’s observation that King’s story and any subsequent true adaptation have that fifties’ B-movie feel, including a very rich soil, from which these metaphors can spring. It’s a great story (I think) partly because it doesn’t waste much time trying to explain stuff. There’s people trapped inside a supermarket; there’s a strange mist outside, in which monsters hide. That’s it, basically and then the author (and hopefully, the director as well) just lets those people get on with dealing with this situation.

When handled well, this sparcity of (background and back story) detail works admirably well. The best stories are those where we can – and must – fill in some of those blanks ourselves. Obviously, the details we then bring to these stories come from our personal ‘back stories’, the private ones and the communal/societal ones. Which, of course, also explains why those monster/alien stories worked so well as metaphors for the Cold War. The viewers lived that Cold War and they used that to fill in some of those blanks in the movies. Again, sometimes the director made these spaces consciously – sometimes it was a much more subliminal process. The effect was the same, of course.

Obviously, one should be careful not to overanalyse these things. One of the most discussed movies of that Cold War era is, of course, ‘The invasion of the body snatchers.’ I’m now definitely talking of the 1956, Don Siegel version and not the bloodless (and clueless) 1993 remake. For most movie commentators this one is the ultimate Cold War B-movie/metaphor – with some seeing the very scary and evil pod people as a metaphor for communist infiltrators, while others say they stand for the Joe McCarthy crowd and their witch hunts. Something for everybody, in other words.

However, when, much later, people asked Don Siegel to explain himself, he just shrugged and said, somewhat irritated, that it simply had been this very cool story about an alien invasion that he had taken a shine too. Of course, one could say that on a subconscious level he did want to make a political statement as well. That might be true: the beauty of such arguments is that there is no way in Hell that you can either prove or disprove it – but still, as even Freud once admitted, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

As for the movie version of The Mist: Well, I think I will give it a shot after all. As I said, it’s a great story and Darabont has already proven that he can work with Stephen King’s writings. Both the Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile started as Stephen King stories, of course.

In truth, I won’t care too deeply whether the monsters in this post 9/11 movie will turn out to be metaphors for the War on Terror: either as shades of Bin Laden or the Bush White House gang. Both would be possible, of course, but me, I just want an honest to God, Hell-raising story, with people who react like real people and monsters that are real monsters – but then, I’m easy. I’m a sucker for anyone who, like old Ishmael, says to me, “I’ve got a tale to tell – and you bloody well bloody listen!”

A long time ago, I was the minder and coach of a junior table tennis teams. Five boys in total, between the age of thirteen and fifteen. At our club all of our junior teams had one of us senior members to accompany them on their away matches – to keep them out of trouble, mostly. We would also coach them during competition and tournament matches and give them some extra training sessions when they requested this.

I can’t say I always enjoyed these chores but they were part of the structure of the club and it did make for a more cohesive entity. That was in Holland, by the way, while the following story comes from an English paper but in the West we’ve all become the same type of lobster, floating about in one big pot. In some places the water is slightly hotter than in others but we’re all going to end up thoroughly red in the face eventually.

Which is one way of saying that I couldn’t see me getting involved with junior sports teams anymore, these days:

A quarter of the adult population faces an “anti-paedophile” test in an escalation of child protection policies, according to a report. The launch of a new Government agency will see 11.3million people vetted for any criminal past before they are approved to have contact with children aged under 16. But the increase in child protection measures is so great it is “poisoning” relationships between the generations, according to respected sociologist Professor Frank Furedi.

I’m not a huge fan of sociologists, psychologists and all other types of -ologists, who think that using scientific tools (like statistics) somehow, magically, turns what they do into science as well. However, you don’t need to be a scientist, or a more modest statistician, or even a lowly sociologist to understand that if you treat everybody who ever comes into contact with children as guilty until proven innocent when it comes to paedophilia, you will, indeed, do serious damage to the structure of our societies.

The sad thing is that I would applaud the fact if the government took this atrocious crime seriously. For too many years the problem was hardly even acknowledged, let alone widely reported or acted upon. God knows how many children have had to live through it, without even the possibility of being heard by someone (in authority) whom they could trust.

The problem, as always seems to be the case with any government policy, is that when it comes, it does so in a rushed and panicky manner, without clear thought or any coherent strategy guiding it. Schemes are dreamed up that these career sycophants think that the tabloid reading public will approve of; wild-eyed plans that will make the government of the day look tough and, as one of those buzzwords has it, ‘pro-active.’

They always get it wrong, though – most of the time disastrously wrong – and they always make the existent situation worse, while adding a few new problems to the already poisoned mix.

Same here. The first thing that will happen when everybody is treated as a suspect is not that it will scare away actual paedophiles. Paedophiles have always beaten any system that ever was in place and they are highly motivated to try and keep beating it, since their ‘fix’ depends on access to children and they won’t be prepared to give that up.

No, what will happen first of all is that millions of well-meaning people will simply refuse to do any type of volunteer work with children anymore. Why put yourself in a position where you will be treated as a potential paedophile and go through the ordeal of ‘explaining yourself’ to some fucking civil service grunt with a questionaire and a two day training course of spot-the-paedo?

What makes this whole Wagnerian scheme even more preposterous is that it isn’t even close to being relevant. Treating the whole body of volunteers and paid staff who work with children as a possible army of child abusers is, statistically, the least useful thing you can do, when it comes to protecting children from paedophiles.

The world of statistics is a murky one and all kinds of interest groups, from our governments to paedophile activist groups try to bend, massage or simply fuck with the figures in order to ‘prove’ their point – but one thing all these statistics agree on is that far more children are abused by family members or friends of the family than by strangers.

So, to single out these strangers the way the government is planning to do is not only perverse and unfair, it also gives the dangerous (for totally wrong) impression that the government is tackling the problem in a decisive and sane manner – while the only thing the government is really doing is to aim and fire their cannons full of buckshot at a part of the population that is statistically less likely to ‘harbour’ paedophiles, instead of focusing on those parts of the population which actually commit most of these crimes.

Of course, most people like this fiction that the majority of these crimes are indeed committed by strangers. The truth is far more disturbing than that – and people don’t like to be disturbed. The government does know better, of course: they know the statistics but still choose to go after the stranger rather than say that what happens within the family is a much bigger problem. It’s politically a Hell of a lot safer to stigmatise a largely anonymous group of people than to point your shrapnel cannons at the families themselves. For that would truly create a tabloid storm and would cost any political party a huge amount of votes.

In other words, the current plans are not only ill-judged and counterproductive, they are also a cynical ploy: a way for the government to look suitably concerned about paedophilia while what they do is mostly smoke and mirrors – a let’s pretend we’re doing something policy that avoids dealing with the bigger issues, in order not to upset all those nice voters out there.

And if, in the end, this policy actually harms more children than that it helps, well, that’s just the way politics work.

(For more information about paedophilia, you can go to this website.)

It’s not something most of our governments want to hear but less regulations actually make us safer:

A German town has scrapped all traffic lights and road signs in a bid to make the streets safer. German town removes road signs to reduce accidents. The radical experiment appears to be working as there has not been a single reported accident in the four weeks since the signs were ripped up. Officials believe the move forces drivers to take extra care and show each other more consideration.

This idea of doing away with the myriad of signs, painted white lines and traffic lights was first promoted by a Dutch traffic expert. Most of his colleagues thought this was a ludicrously bad idea – until some local authorities tried it out and it proved to be an extremely effective way to make the roads and the people using them much safer.

Since then, these same experts have tried to ignore the whole thing, hoping that these successes won’t undermine their own authority and give people the idea that they and their expensive road sign industry are a perfect waste of space and time.

Indeed, stories about these highly successful traffic experiments are few and far between the more regular stories about traffic jams, and traffic accidents and all the expensive and rules-obsessed schemes by the experts who still insist on waving about their outdated signs as if they were that fairytale’s paid flunkies who loudly praised the emperor’s new clothes.

So, for now, those who have vested interests in the status quo are making more noise and getting more print than those who are actually making a difference when it comes to making our roads safer – but I’m sure that the truth will out, slowly but ever more conclusively.

Life is not a fairytale, of course, and it takes more than one small boy shouting that the emperor is naked to change the world but the moment will come when the emperor and his expert cronies will be exposed as naked frauds, who were so in love with their own status that they would rather ignore and even suppress the truth than help prevent more accidents and more deaths by admitting that their own approach was not just outdated but counterproductive and dead wrong.