Glob-a-log

(Just say joey…?)

It’s not a state secret that the world’s governments are not exactly winning the War on Drugs. Spraying coca fields in Columbia, paying millions to corrupt dictators and ‘Just say no’ campaigns at home have not seen any serious reduction in the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs.

Banks may go broke, house prices may drop as fast as unemployment figures rise but the drugs cartels are not really in need of any government bail outs.

So, should we just give up and stop pretending that we ever had a chance of winning this grossly unequal fight?

Until today I would have suggested that that should indeed be the case. Better to tax the enemy than to continue this doomed and very costly war.

Thanks to an article in today’s Guardian, however, I’ve become a believer - a born again flag bearer for the War on Drugs, if you like.

The best part of the story is that fighting drugs can be fun. We won’t need to bribe militias and dictators anymore, won’t have to use dangerous chemicals to kill coca crops or pretend that’s it’s cooler to say no than to get high.

No, the only thing we need to finally win the War on Drugs is to breed more wallabies, teach them how to use a parachute and drop them above the world’s various poppy fields:

“Unlike their larger mainland cousins, the wallabies of Tasmania appear to be more trippy than Skippy. No lesser an authority than the island’s attorney general has discovered that hungry marsupials and thousands of acres of legal opium poppy fields do not mix.

“We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” Lara Giddings told a budget hearing on Wednesday. “Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”"

(Just what we need: More boring Canterbury Tales…)

I admit that it’s almost petty and certainly silly to get upset about a few thousand pounds of tax payers’ money being wasted, while billions  are being spent to bail out failed and corrupt companies and banks - or the many millions effectively stolen from same tax payers to hand out as bonuses to those incompetent greedheads that got us into this mess in the first place.

Silly, yes, perhaps, but I still find it hard not to curse out loud when reading stupid shite like this:

“One of Britain’s most historic cities, Canterbury, has been told it is sufficiently gay – after a complaint sparked a two-month investigation costing thousands of pounds. A government watchdog decided that Canterbury in Kent does enough to promote homosexual culture, rejecting a complaint by local activists. As part of the investigation, the council had to prove its inclusiveness by giving details of “touring plays and musicals, for example, which would be of interest to the LGBT community”. And it had to show that it had “put forward suggestions for small events that it might help fund, as well as proposals for other events such as exhibitions”. “

I can’t remember who it was who said that the love that did not dare to speak its name these days did not know how to shut the fuck up already but I tend to agree with that assessment.

I’m not saying all is cool in the world, when it comes to the casual acceptance of the obvious fact that there are more ways to love your neighbour than within a traditional heterosexual marriage. That day will probably have to wait till a future Pope, chief Rabbi or Mullah will introduce his or her gay partner to a world that will treat this bit of news with the same, rather bored consideration that it bestows on the daily weather forecast.

So, yes, there’s still discrimination against gays. We know that. It’s part of human nature to discriminate against groups and individuals. We are a tribal lot and tribes tend to define themselves partly by what they are not - and by what they won’t tolerate. In effect, this means that there has always been a tendency to discriminate against people, on the basis of religion, skin colour, sexuality, class, age, income, diet, hair colour, length, weight and what have you…

… and if we wouldn’t have any of those markers left, we would discriminate against people on the basis of their eye colour.

Anyway, back to this latest Canterbury tale. So, I would suggest that these stupid activists get a life, or, at the very least, a less self-obsessed life style. There are far more serious issues to consider than the way city councils do or don’t do enough to promote ‘homosexual culture’ - whatever the fuck that is, precisely. It reeks of the kind of ghettoish nonsense we should all try to get away from but that’s a topic for another day.

No, when various schools throughout England have stopped teaching about the Holocaust, in order not to offend Muslims, where the law mostly turns a blind eye to forced marriages and where the rise in attacks on gay men remain underreported for those same, politically correct reasons, we have much bigger issues than a city council’s readiness to spread flyers for the next ‘Romeo and Julius’ production.

In fact, demanding these lengthy investigations, to find out whether a city council X or Y does enough to promote homosexual culture, is just the kind of hysterical crap that will annoy the majority of right-thinking and mostly tolerant people and energise all those who push various anti-gay agendas. As I said, there are far more serious issues that do need our attention and this kind of nonsense can only distract from those.

In other words, these idiots only manage to harm the LGBT community they say they represent.

(Some things really are less helpful to the cause than others…)

(Plus ça change…)

Am I a big admirer of the veil, or the niqab, or the burka?

Well, I was raised in a family that believed feminism was not so much a cause as the only sane way to live – so, the answer is, “No, not really.”

I believe that the many women who claim that wearing the veil is, in a way, empowering and liberating for them are probably quite sincere.

I also happen to believe that they are in denial about the misogynistic roots of the culture that first designed these clothes – and, if I’m honest, I find these claims about the liberating qualities of this type of dress more than a bit distasteful, in a world where God knows how many women per year are still being stoned to death for proven crimes against some perverted moral code, or the victims of honour killings for merely being suspected of said crimes.

I mean, isn’t it ever so nice that these liberated Muslim women choose to adopt the type of dress millions of their sisters must wear, if they want to avoid mental & physical abuse, ostracism or even a most gruesome death?

So, here’s a simple  question for you: What would you call a bunch of liberated black women who would wear ‘empowering’ silver designer chains round their necks, while 90% of their sisters would still be forced to wear the original iron ones…?

In other words, was I pleased then, when I read the following news article?

“France could bar Muslim women from wearing full veils in public, a government minister said yesterday as parliament took action over concerns about an increase in women who are wearing the niqab and burka in big cities.”

Not, really, no, to be honest.

People do many silly things. Modern Muslimas wearing a ‘liberating’ or ‘empowering’ burka aren’t that much dafter than a certain type of Western woman who claims that a pole dancing course is all about discovering your inner power and, really, quite the feminist thing to do.

Would I be in favour of a total ban on pole dancing, because it’s as offensive to women as a burka is? Again, not really. Whatever I might think of both activities, as long as women aren’t forced to do either, I don’t think it’s the state’s business to interfere.

(plus c’est la même chose…)

(Some seeing-eye gods are sillier than others…)

I’ve always had a soft spot for Judaism. Sure, it’s slightly preposterous for any subgroup of humanity to claim to be the Chosen One but, unlike most other religions, they don’t try to convert other people. All they basically ask is to be left alone to worship the God of their choice, without feeling the need to tell others what they should do.

Obviously, like anyone who asks other people to leave well enough alone, the Jews have found out that this simply does not and will not, ever, happen. Which is another way of saying that, by now, even the most simplistically devout Jew must be aware of the fact that it doesn’t exactly pay to be God’s Chosen.

Anyway, now, I’m an agnost, so I find most stories about religious nuts (whether they are of the Ayatollah or Dawkins persuasion) quite silly.

Still, I normally don’t care all much that the vast majority of people feels the need to bow to one type of beard-in-the-sky or the other. It’s fashionable to call this state of mind ‘tolerant’ but, truly, I just can’t be bothered much to care about the spiritual comfort blankets of others.

I would only claim one simple rule of thumb. That is, the moment that the religion of person X starts to seriously inconvenience or harm others, then that person, religion and/or God can go fuck themselves. No form of tolerance should be wasted on anybody who thinks his or her belief systems are worth more than the welfare of other people.

It’s a rather elementary form of social hygiene, not to play your portable music thingummies in public, not to litter or to talk too loudly and too long on your mobile phones outside your home…

… and not to bother other people with your choice of supernatural support system.

It’s one thing to claim people should respect your need to have some kind of divine seeing-eye dog; it’s quite another to expect other people to tolerate said dog to piss all over their carpets, chase their cats and bite their ankles.

So, when Popes forbid people in AIDS-riddled communities to use condoms, or certain Muslims encourage throwing homosexuals from high buildings or groups of Hindus claim they will beat up or kill couples who kiss in public, then sanity and that fore-mentioned social hygiene demand that we resist these kinds of people, totally.

Now, I have to regretfully come back to what’s supposed to be God’s favourite set of tribes, the children of Israel. As I mentioned earlier, they mostly obey all the rules of social hygiene. Still, any social, political or belief system has its own fair share of lunatics. Judaism, sadly, is not exempt from this rule.

Enter Dena and Gordon Coleman, of Embassy Court in Bournemouth, England:

“A Jewish couple are suing neighbours over motion sensors that turn on the lights in their communal stairwell, which they claim make it impossible for them to leave their flat during the sabbath. Since the sensors were installed, the lights come on as soon as they set foot outside their front door — which they say makes them responsible for switching them on and therefore prohibits them from leaving the building. The couple are suing their neighbours, saying that their human rights are being breached, and are claiming up to £5,000 damages.”

I’m obviously not saying that suing your neighbours over a few offending light bulbs is quite the same as telling people to get AIDS and die, or kill & maim homosexuals and kissing couples but it IS part of that strange pathology that insists you can sick your divine seeing-eye dog on people who don’t respect your preferred type of invisible pet.

So, I’m afraid all civilized and rational people should treat this Jewish couple in the same way as any other raving Godhead and politely insist they desist and fuck off already.

(My dog has sharper teeth than yours, so there…)

(One Hell of a product launch…)

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Talk about the most painful news.

Talk about sex bombs…

Anyway, so, when a woman promises fireworks in bed, it is NOT enough to be merely polite and say, “Of course, dear.”

What you should do is smile, slowly back off and then run like Hell:

“WHEN faced with the news her boyfriend was going to leave her, a Russian woman took the extreme action. She blasted his penis off during his sleep. The woman, named as Kira V, had suggested a farewell dinner after hearing the news she was about to be dumped. During the meal she plied her lover with alcohol in order to ensure he wouldn’t wake up as she tied several firecrackers to his appendage.”

(Here’s  another woman you really shouldn’t mess with…)

(Resistance is futile: Have a nice day…)

It may not be safe to say this, in various parts of the world (and it would certainly be frowned upon in certain European circles) but I do like America. Granted, not its surface culture of fast food, fast living & fast spending but there is so much more to this vast and quite diverse continent than those who judge it on the merits of its (regrettable) TV shows and Hollywood movies will probably ever learn - but then, we know that prejudice is a condition that doesn’t welcome new information.

Anyway, on the whole, in America, people are certainly more friendly, welcoming and, definitely, more polite than in most of the other places I’ve visited and lived in.

The only gripe I share with a large amount of other Europeans who’ve spent time in the USA, is the way people in various types of shops, bars and restaurants wish you, upon leaving, a very nice day, with smiles as big and as fake as Elton John’s toupet.

It’s not the fault of these individual employees, of course: It’s their bosses with their ‘Smile or be fired’ policy who are to blame for this nonsense but it is, nevertheless, quite grating.

Having said that, the following news story is still vaguely depressing:

“Few places in Virginia are as draining to the soul and as numbing to the buttocks as the branch offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles. And yet, until recently, smiling was still permitted there. No more. DMV officials say the smile ban is for a good cause. The agency would like to develop a facial recognition system that could compare customers’ photographs over time to prevent fraud and identity theft. “The technology works best when the images are similar,” said DMV spokeswoman Pam Goheen. “To prepare for the possibility of future security enhancements, we’re asking customers to maintain a neutral expression.””

Quite.

‘Technology’ will only ever be happy if each and every individual person becomes part of an identical looking, thinking, consuming, voting and overall similarly behaving herd.

A sad looking herd, no less – since our new overlords, the machines, can’t cope with deviating expressions on the faces of individual pieces of cattle.

All this to prevent fraud, identity theft and, no doubt, terrorism.

Homeland Security already demands we remove our keys, our belts and bottled water, before we even go through ‘control’…

… and now, the powers that be have started to demand we drop our smiles as well.

Which is the kind of news, I imagine, Osama bin Laden will find highly amusing.

Not that you would notice, of course, with that beard of his.

(Until proven innocent…)

Gods but this really makes me very angry:

“In an age of advanced forensic science, the first step toward ending Kenneth Reed’s prolonged series of legal appeals should be simple and quick: a DNA test, for which he has offered to pay, on evidence from the 1991 rape of which he was convicted. Louisiana, where Mr. Reed is in prison, is one of 46 states that have passed laws to enable inmates like him to get such a test. But in many jurisdictions, prosecutors are using new arguments to get around the intent of those laws, particularly in cases with multiple defendants, when it is not clear how many DNA profiles will be found in a sample.

The laws were enacted after DNA evidence exonerated a first wave of prisoners in the early 1990s, when law enforcement authorities strongly resisted reopening old cases. Continued resistance by prosecutors is causing years of delay and, in some cases, eliminating the chance to try other suspects because the statute of limitations has passed by the time the test is granted. Mr. Reed has been seeking a DNA test for three years, saying it will prove his innocence. But prosecutors have refused, saying he was identified by witnesses, making his identification by DNA unnecessary.

A recent analysis of 225 DNA exonerations by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, found that prosecutors opposed DNA testing in almost one out of five cases. In many of the others, they initially opposed testing but ultimately agreed to it. In 98 of those 225 cases, the DNA test identified the real culprit.”

The New York Times article gives more examples of prosecutors trying to circumvent or, if you want, sabotage the law. Some of these examples are truly disgusting. Like the one where a prosecutor claims that, since the original jury was “convinced of defendant’s guilt without DNA,” such a test wasn’t needed now.

It was even stated, without blushing, that the fact that 175 convicts were already exonerated by DNA was “statistically insignificant.”

Which is one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever heard a law officer say.

Not so long ago, the prevailing thought was that it was better to let an X number of guilty go free than one innocent be imprisoned. That is no longer the case, it seems – but it is easy to see where and how things went so scandalously, so criminally wrong with the justice system.

I am no legal expert but it is not difficult to understand how a jury system, with both a defender and a prosecutor trying to convince this jury of the innocence or guilt of a defendant, can’t help but become a personally adversarial system, in which the egos of both defender and prosecutor become so inflated that the whole judicial process can become tainted beyond salvage.

In other words, for these two opposing parties winning becomes much more important than trying to determine whether the accused is actually guilty or not.

Prosecutors are by no means the only villains in this play. The law and the rules of law enforcement  have become so complicated, so bizarrely Byzantine, that there are defenders who specialize in finding loopholes and even the tiniest procedural mistakes to get any defendant off, even if they privately believe their clients to be guilty, be it of tax evasion or mass murder.

However, the state is more powerful than any individual defendant, so the prosecutor should be most careful when he or she uses the full powers of that state against any of its individual citizens. Playing ego games has, or should not have, any part in this.

It is also easy to see how the politicizing of the criminal justice system has helped to corrupt it. When judges and prosecutors have to campaign to get elected or appointed, building up a healthy résumé becomes overly important. Again, winning cases becomes more rewarding than seeking justice.

So, it should not surprise us that so many prosecutors are trying to sabotage the law that enables the convicted to have these DNA tests.

This obstruction has nothing to do with justice. It simply serves to help these prosecutors keep their positive score sheets. Like certain sports players, they don’t care all that much if they have to play the system, or outright cheat, to get these results.

To these ‘players’, their egos, public status and financial rewards are much more important than playing fair and being honourable. Winning has become all…

… and if that means locking up a thousand potentially innocent people rather than to blot their score sheet, lots of prosecutors are more than willing to have these people pay that price.

(Barry Bonds: Still not struck out for prosecution…)

(Come on, daddy, you can always make an expense claim…)

Now, here’s a truly Biblical story for you. Well, Biblical in the sense that I can throw in an old Bible quote. John 15:13, to be precise:

‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’

Or, in the following case:

‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man find a lay for his son’:

“A father tried to hire a prostitute to initiate his 14-year-old son in the “ways of sex” but ended up propositioning an undercover police officer, a court heard. The Polish man took the boy out in his car and allowed him to pick the prostitute, who was standing at the side of the road of a red-light district. But the teenager chose an undercover police officer and the 42-year-old father was arrested, the court was told. Judge Jonathan Teare said he was not sending the defendant to prison because of his excellent character.”

Yesss…

An excellent character, of course.

Setting your 14-year-old son up with a street hooker is, as we all know, indeed a sign of excellent parenting.

You know, sometimes I do worry a Hell of a lot more about the character of the average English judge than about the people being hauled in front of a jury of their peers.

Mind you, it must have taken some doing and some serious police time to find such a jury. I mean, how long must those poor undercover policewomen have worked the street before they found twelve men, good and true, who were looking for a hooker to deflower their 14-year-old sons?

If you follow the news a bit it’s obvious that it would be much easier to fill Wembley stadium with expenses fiddling politicians (or sexually perverted judges, obviously) than to round up twelve other curb crawlers of the same excellent character as our Polish superdad.

In Spain, they do things with a certain amount of flair that us Northern Europeans can only look at in awe, and envy.

In Holland, for instance, our cattle are kept in boring meadows, before they are whisked away surreptitiously, probably in the dead of night, to be redeployed as various bits of hygienically packaged, supermarket meat.

While in Spain, they let the bulls run wild in the streets, before they kill them, in operatic style, in huge stadiums, where thousands upon thousands of happy carnivores applaud the skill of their local butcher.

You know, even Spain’s scientists have more style than their Northern brothers and sisters. They may stare at the same kind of test tubes but they do so in the knowledge that they work for institutes with names like ‘The Superior Council of Scientific Investigations’.

Some of the stuff this Council does is pretty wild too, I have to say:

“Air in parts of Madrid and Barcelona is laced with at least five drugs, most prominently cocaine, a study has found. The Superior Council of Scientific Investigations, a Spanish government institute, said it had also found trace amounts of amphetamines, opiates, cannabinoids and lysergic acid, a relative of LSD, in two air-quality control stations, one in each city.”

Damn but that makes me jealous. For decades now, we in Holland have tried to corner the market on legalising drugs and we still are a nation of shop keepers and accountants: As boring as fuck, to be honest, be it stoned or stone sober.

What’s more, if you would get a few of our, not so superior scientists to investigate the Dutch air, I’m sure their findings would consist of a deadening mix of folding tulips, false modesty, farting sprouts, fake tolerance and the furtive fragrance of fading cheese…

… and here these damn Southerners only need to go out for a Spanish stroll to get high.

It is most unfair, really.

Mind you, this might explain what animal rights group call the cruel spectacle of bull fights. Maybe the Spanish people aren’t enjoying the ritual slaughter of innocent bulls.

With the air they’re breathing, it could well be that what they see is a colossal caterpillar, holding a very long and pointy spliff and waving this joint in the general direction of a gigantic, pink-coloured, tap-dancing bowl of snorting baby lettuce.

(How about shutting the fuck up for once…?)

God knows I’m not a monarchist. I’m Dutch, so I know what it is to have a royal family around. Our lot are mostly well-behaved but the whole system is, of course, quite ludicrous.

The only reason why I wouldn’t trade in our monarchy for a republic is that I would dread the idea of yet more bloody elections, added to the already overcrowded roster. Whatever you want to say about the various kings and queens old Europe has on offer, at least they don’t go in for photo ops at Euro Disney with their pop star spouses, in order to endear them to the voting public.

Anyway, as I said, while I’m not schlepping around guillotines, I’m not a great fan of the monarchy, so I even surprised myself a bit when I wanted to roar a heart-felt ‘God save the Queen’ upon reading the following bit of nonsense:

“An honour established by the Queen has been declared unlawful after Muslims and Hindus complained that its Christian name and cross insignia were offensive. The Privy Council in London has ruled that the Trinity decoration is unconstitutional because it discriminates against non-Christians. Five British law lords said that the creation of the honour breached the right to equality and the right to freedom of conscience and belief.”

I am too polite to tell these Muslims and Hindus where they can stick those kindly offered but obviously offending decorations.

Okay, I’m not.

I’m even willing to don a large glove and insert them myself.

You know what though? Ah, where to start…?

Okay, first of all, nobody is forcing anyone to accept any honorary bauble or mention the queen chooses to bestow on them. You can simply, preferably politely, refuse. The Queen won’t mind. Hell, she probably won’t give a good Goddamn either way.

Furthermore, Great Britain does have a state religion. Granted, the Church of England is the Bud Light of religions. Not very demonstrative – and not good for anything much, perhaps but it’s still the Faith of the Land and the Queen is its official head.

So, yes, when the Queen does hand out honours, it is, partly, in the role as leader of a Christian church. That has nothing to do with ‘breaching the right to equality and the right to freedom of conscience and belief’, whatever a few senile law lords say: It’s simply a (somewhat silly) part of the fabric of the state.

Blame Henry Vlll for leaving the Roman Catholic Church, because he wanted to fuck Ann Boleyn legally but don’t turn this into yet another pathetic politically correct crusade. God knows we’ve got enough of those going on already.

Talking of the Roman Catholic Church – and a Polish priest who’s on a crusade of his own, or, if you like, has put himself in a rather unusual missionary position…:

“A Polish priest has raised eyebrows with the publication of sex manual that advises couples to have a ’saucy and fantasy packed’ love life. In ‘Sex as you don’t know it: For married couples who love God, which has been described in Poland as a “Catholic Kama Sutra”, Father Ksawery Knotz goes against the traditional attitudes of the church towards sex. The Franciscan friar has few qualms about going into graphic detail about how married couples can spice up their sex lives.”

So, to those who are offended by and ruled unfavourably on the Trinity honour, I can merely offer the advise to read Father Ksawery Knotz’s new DIY handbook – or, in other words, go fuck themselves.

(Problems with the Cross? Just bend over and think of England…)