Glob-a-log

(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…)

(Yup, but you’re still not supposed to eat them…)

Now, here’s another weird one for you:

“Horse owners will have to sign a pledge not to eat their animals under new EU legislation, it has been reported. The rule, aimed at continental Europe, where two million horses are reportedly eaten every year, will still have to be signed in Britain.”

Nice, isn’t it, how the Brussels bureaucratic machine cares about horses?

Okay, maybe not quite:

“The Horse Identification Regulations, which will come into force at the beginning of next month, is partly to stop vets’ drugs from entering human diets. Anyone who refuses to sign up to the regulations could face prison or an unlimited fine.”

Enter the usual suspects, crying foul over this proposed bill.

No, not the odd ‘Brew up a buffet of horse’ whisperer, or the Guild of Black Beauty Butchers. It’s the British, of course:

“Kate Gillanders, of Kindross, Pertshire, told The Sun “We don’t see our horses as cattle. The thought of them being eaten is utterly repulsive. Brussels is poking its nose in where it should not be. The EU knows nothing about me and cares even less. This nonsense is somebody else’s obsession.”"

Quite.

Greater love has no woman for a horse than to protest against laws that protect them…

Anyway, I can’t say I’m in favour of this law myself - but then I’m not a vegetarian. Still, even if I were, what’s the sense of claiming it’s ‘utterly repulsive’ to eat a horse and perfectly okay to eat cows, pigs and chickens?

Now, I’m all for treating our food with due consideration. I don’t eat canned vegetables and I won’t buy meat that comes from animal concentration camps. That’s not because I think carrots or chickens necessarily got rights but I do think they deserve to be treated with some measure of respect.

However, I’m not sure it’s anything but the crassest form of sentimentality to judge some animals to be fit for consumption, while being repulsed by the idea of eating others…

… and that’s not even going into this whole horse riding industry, run by these horse lovers.

Now, me, if I had the choice of being a sheep, or a cow, who could live a peaceful life in a nice bit of meadow, before being eaten by whoever had kept me warm during those dreary English winters…

… or being a horse, who would have to jump over fences, carry stroppy kids around in ever more boring circles, be used as a sports utility in polo games and perform as a 1500 pounds sex toy for erotically confused teenage girls and not to be eaten at the end of such a foul existence…

… well, then I think I would rather star in a Cow & Chicken cartoon, even if it ended with a shot of some hungry bastard holding a fork and knife and slobber-stuttering, “That’s all, folks…!”

(Eat that, Seabiscuit… Or THIS…!)

(Missouri welcomes Nazi  drivers…?)

Now, this is quite funny.

Though it does show the perils of inviting the private sector to take over so much of what used to be the government’s job.

We already have fast food and soft drink titans sponsoring schools and using these places as juvenile feeding & training pens.

Get them young, as the Jesuits say, and hook them for (a short and very fat) life.

Funny though, if you think of it. When schools even mention the possibility of teaching kids about the perils of STDs or the problematic future teen mothers face, howls of protests ring from sea to shining sea but when Coca Cola and McDonald’s are allowed to push their poison on the young in a way most of our street dealers can only dream about, you don’t hear all that much about the corruption of our youth.

Anyway, I’m digressing. As I started with saying, the following news story is rather amusing:

“When a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement volunteered last year to clean a Missouri highway, and get official recognition for it in the form of an Adopt-a-Highway sign, state officials felt powerless to refuse. So they took a rather clever tack. Officials are renaming the stretch of highway near Springfield that the organization cleans after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled Nazi Germany and became a prominent Jewish theologian and civil rights advocate in the United States.

The renaming, which would take effect this summer, was approved by the legislature as part of a large transportation bill. The governor has not yet signed the bill but supports the concept of renaming the road, an aide said. The measure is not popular, though, with some members of the National Socialist Movement, who clean a half-mile stretch four times a year.”

You don’t say.

Me, I’d have thought any group of Nazis would love to stomp their boots on the face of a Jewish road. Though I suppose it would require a bit more effort to vandalise concrete than it was to smash all those windows, back in 1938.

So, I don’t suppose we will soon see a follow-up of the Kristallnacht, in the form of a Concrete Night.

(Such a beautiful song about such an ugly affair…)

(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…)

(”Characteristically thick…? Check…!”)

Now, before you get all excited, this is NOT what you think:

“For the first time ever, a fossil of a Neanderthal has been discovered in the Netherlands.”

No, it’s not him, I tell you.

First of all, we’re talking about a fossil here – and the man is simply not that old.

Or dead.

I know it’s a bit disappointing but believe it, it’s NOT him:

“The skull fragment, over 40,000 years old, with its characteristically thick Neanderthal eyebrow ridge, was found off the coast of Zeeland, dredged up from the bottom of the North Sea.”

Yes, I know, it would have been nice and, admittedly, ‘characteristically thick’ does tick the right box.

As I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t mind to hear that he’d been dredged up from the bottom of the sea.

However, there is that inconvenient bit about the dredgee being 40,000 years’ old. Now, I know that it feels like he’s been around for even longer than that but still, I’m afraid that dog won’t hunt.

So, please get rid of those flags and balloons – and cancel the order for champagne and caviar, or beer and crisps.

Geert Wilders hasn’t done an Elvis yet.

(Pretty damn awful, yes, but still not him…)

(The model of sexual tolerance: Little boys with fingers in dykes…)

You know, it used to be that, here in Holland, we could boast about our tulips, our windmills, our dyke fingering little boys and our much touted tolerance. Whether it was legalizing soft drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, abortion or the freedom to worship in the Church of the Recombined Sprout (or something), we would do it or be happy to introduce it the moment of asking.

For a few decades, it felt kind of nice to be that small, insignificant and decidedly geekish runt at any UN party who was widely known to be easy.

It’s kind of hard though to hang on to certain monopolies. Look at the realm of politics, for instance: It’s so much like the world of fashion. One moment you’re the only kid on the block to wear an Arafat scarf and the next, the whole world and its hawkish little Likud brother join in:

“JERUSALEM, June 14 — Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he is willing to support the creation of a Palestinian state, for the first time making a commitment that the United States, Europe and the Arab nations have pushed for since he took office.”

Okay, he immediately added a few conditions to this support, which, added up, translated into the Likud’s more traditional ‘When Hell freezes over’ message – but still: If even the likes of Bibi feel the need to express a certain type of tolerance towards ideas they find utterly distasteful, you know that your tolerance franchise might soon be facing any number of hostile takeovers.

It’s not just in the political power game though, that people have been gorging themselves on these tolerance stimulants. If it were, you could dismiss it as yet another Obama effect. No, it must be feared that the rot is much deeper.

(Oh, happy days indeed…)

Remember how socially conservative Spain used to be? For centuries, the Catholic church had the kind of stranglehold on Spanish society that led from the famed Spanish Inquisition to the Church blessed public stranglings of convicts in General Franco’s days. Those happy repressive times seem to be over, alas:

“As niche package tours go it is one of the most original and precisely targeted. As of this week, British lesbians are being invited to dig into their pockets, catch a flight to the Spanish costas and come back either pregnant, married or both. The offer comes from a fertility clinic and a gay and lesbian travel agency, which have launched joint package tours to what has now become one of the most socially tolerant countries in Europe.”

In other words, we now have Israeli hawks, crooning ‘Don’t cry for me, Palestina’, while the Spanish tourist board has turned the country’s various costas into one gigantic Lesbos style Smörgåsbord.

So, where does that leave Holland, when it come to its old tolerance patent?

That’s an easy one. It leaves us well and truly buggered and half-drowning in shit creek, with a paddle stuck up our collective little orange butt…

… and no, I’m not exaggerating. Look at what they’re up to in New Zealand these days, for God’s sake:

“In Dunedin, New Zealand, every year two Rugby teams of sevens go to battle fully starkers. The nude rugby international, which started as a celebration of New Zealand’s national nude day, was held yesterday as a warm-up to the forthcoming match between the All Blacks and France.”

Nice. So, Bibi’s opening up to Palestinians, Spain welcomes lesbians and New Zealand has turned into one huge freaking streaking show…

No wonder some people in Holland are starting to rethink this whole tolerance game. We are a nation of traders, after all, so we do know about markets – and if everyone is trying to flog the same kind of shit, it’s better to try and seek out pastures new.

Which is why it came to pass that a certain new political party in Holland decided to give up on tolerance and to take another road instead.

Enter Geert Wilders and his Post Tolerance Party, as reported on this lovely, if slightly bilious blog:

“Mr. Wilders appeared on Danish television yesterday. After being pressed by the interviewer, he acknowledged that millions of Muslims — those who support jihad and shariah, and oppose the democratic societies that they live in — will have to be deported from Europe.

He says, “There’s only one solution.””

Okay, it may not be exactly a new road…

Still, I’m sure it has more potential for profit than the boring old tolerance market.

(To paraphrase Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian’: What has tolerance ever done for us…?)

(What’s your thing: Nipple shots or Stalin groupies…?)

There’s a relatively broadly shared view that communism was a rather nice, secular Christian type of idea that simply didn’t work because it really didn’t understand human nature. Which sounds reasonable enough (though it doesn’t quite explain how you get from ‘well-intended but flawed’ to the Hell houses that Stalin and Mao built.)

Capitalism is communism’s cynical older yuppie brother. Yes, he’s sold out to the man but, then again, he’s got a trophy wife, a yacht and (since a few months anyway) an impressive amount of really bad debts. So, while capitalism may have the natural charm and generosity of spirit of a Dick Cheney sex tape, it does know a thing or two about human nature.

In other words, as long as you don’t let it totally run wild, it kind of works. (Or at least enough so that most people buy into the dream that they will, one day, also acquire that trophy wife, the yacht and a government bail-out.)

However, there’s another difference between communism and capitalism that seldom gets a mention – and that’s the respective comic value of these two systems.

Communism, I’m afraid, scores very badly on the political laugh-a-minute index. Which is not terribly surprising, since it always starts out with small groups of bearded men being very earnest about the redistribution of wealth and ends with mad dictators killing millions of citizens in gulags and interrogation cells. I think it’s safe to say that even the most rabid admirers of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao would admit that their heroes weren’t exactly Comedy Central material.

Capitalism, on the other hand, often is incredibly, almost excruciatingly funny – as the following news story from Japan shows:

“Along with choosing a dress and booking a honeymoon, there is one other item to add to the wedding checklist in Japan: hiring fake friends. Office Agents, a Tokyo-based company, rents out friends, work colleagues and even relatives to pad out the guest list. For £127, one of the company’s agents will attend the wedding as a guest, while a heart-tugging speech will cost an extra £64 and a song or dance will set clients back a mere £32.”

(With dope like that, who needs friends - or even a class struggle…?)

As we all know, one of the function of fairytales is to teach children some basic truths about life. That it can be tough and scary. That things are not always what they look like and that you need to be smart and resilient to survive.

Fairytales say more or less the same thing as that grizzled desk sergeant in the old cop show, Hill Street Blues: “Let’s be careful out there.”

I was reminded of the nature of fairytales when I read the following news article. It’s such perfect story book material.

It also serves as a very timely parable. Yesterday’s results of the European elections showed that those few people who bothered to turn up had decided to give the ruling parties a damn good kicking. What with the economic crisis, the lack of faith in ‘Brussels’ and the widely held view that Muslims and other undesirables are rapidly overrunning cozy Fortress Europe, it were the smaller, more wide-eyed, populist parties that profited most from the voters’ growing fears and chagrin.

Because those smaller parties are telling it how it is… Because they listen to the people… Because they understand where normal folks are coming from… Because they rage against the posh, bureaucratic machine…

Right.

People will always fall for snake oil merchants, of course. Nothing new there but it’s still very funny how these good citizens will march behind any banner that promises that ‘things will be different’ if you vote Brand X.

It’s quite insane but your average voter will willingly worship any damn frog that can change its colour for long enough for people to stop noticing it’s still a stupid, old frog but there you go: Democracy and human nature in synchronized action.

As yet another European election result and the following story show:

“A frog that constantly changes colour is being worshipped as a god in India. The creature was discovered in a flower bed and now draws hundreds of followers to the home where it is kept in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Now one of India’s top zoologists has decided he will study the unusual creature – provided it can be kept alive. Reji Kumar, 35, a lift worker, said he is doing its best but the frog has lost its appetite.”

Anyway, back to those fairytales and this inconvenient truth:

You can embrace and kiss most frogs as often and passionately as you want but most of them will stubbornly refuse to magically change into princes.

(They went all the way to the polls and all they brought back was this lousy Geert Wilders…)

(Bored with boarding…?)

Science can be tough. ‘Rigorous’ is the word our boys and girls in the white coats prefer – and not just because it’s a ‘dog eat dog’ world out there, when it comes to getting juicy grants and that personal holy grail of each and every scientist: ‘Tenure.‘

No, the whole business of science is hard. You have to test theories to destruction and then do it over and over again. Scientists are a bit like Rambo: You barely survive killing one group of pajama wearing folks and then you’re sent out to do the same to a bunch of guys in turbans, after which some Slavic furry hats await, after which…

It just never ends.

Even worse, it’s not always a few nose-fulls of goo in a test tube or a bunch of mice that get tested to destruction.

Truly, forget about that ‘dog eat dog’ nonsense. It can be  a ’shark eat scientist’ world too:

“Sharks can be trained like dolphins to feed from keepers, roll over and enjoy cuddles, according to new research. In experiments carried out in the US some varieties of shark allowed themselves to be picked from the water and cuddled. Keepers at the UK’s Sea Life Centres will now use the training techniques in the hope that they will end up with hundreds of trained sharks.”

It does make you wonder how these US researchers got the necessary volunteers to ‘carry out experiments.’ Perhaps the CIA did a bit more than simply waterboard those captured terrorist suspects?

People are always claiming torture doesn’t work but I guess giving someone the option to either come up with the postal codes of their leaders or go cuddle a shark could be quite effective.

It’s also nice to hear that, if this CIA theory is true, the American Intelligence Community still shares both information and various information gathering techniques with its British counterparts.

Mind you, if MI5 would indeed start to use these same techniques on the same type of ‘volunteers’ in the UK, at those so-called Sea Life Centres, that truly would be a case of ‘extraordinary rendition’ indeed.

(AC/DC didn’t know the half of it…)

(Gravity: Been coming to a place near you, out of nowhere, since Newton…)

Now, this truly is a tale for our time:

“Office worker Mr Coleman, 23, was ‘tweeting’ to his followers on his Blackberry while jogging to work when he cracked his head on a heavy low-hanging branch. The force of the impact sent the dazed runner crashing to the pavement and left him with a badly bruised black eye.

“One minute I was running along posting a tweet, the next I was lying on my back on the pavement in agony. The branch came out of nowhere and hit my face hard.””

Yes, that old ‘came out of nowhere’ defence.

Also beloved by car drivers who use their mobiles while driving (and the more old-fashioned creeps who enjoy a bit of drunk-driving) and subsequently hit a dog, child, granny or cuddly E.T. crossing the road – all of whom ALWAYS came out of nowhere.

The ‘came out of nowhere’ defence also has a twin brother, called the ‘noone could have foreseen this’ gambit.

That one has been used extensively, throughout history, both by the ‘Peace at any price’ brigade and by those who’ve never seen a a fight they didn’t want to pick or join, immediately. (Humanity isn’t very good at learning from past mistakes but it wouldn’t hurt for our professional doves and hawks to be forced, each day, to watch clips of Mr Chamberlain’s trip to Munich and Colin Powell’s WMD speech at the UN, respectively.)

More recently, both the ‘came out of nowhere’ and ‘noone could have foreseen this’ defence were used by both governments and financial institutions to ‘explain’ the latest global economical meltdown.

(It’s close to being a law of nature that, whenever both these defences are used, we deal with the kind of crisis that could, in fact, have been foreseen by any toddler with merely a working knowledge of piggy banking.)

Of course, all of us are human and thus kind of stupid, so it’s good that we can fall back on these commonly used tactics – and, as long as we don’t overdo it, we maybe should allow ourselves and our fellow dumb critters the use of them.

I’d suggest anyone up till the age of ten might use them, more or less, indiscriminately. Teens probably should be given a monthly allowance, until both their zits and hormones have had time to settle down a bit.

Between the age of twenty and thirty, we might just let people get away with these lame excuses once per season but after that, until death, senility or incontinence hits, there shouldn’t be a call for this type of defence more than once a year.

One caveat though: It doesn’t matter whether you talk about the collapse of a global market system or the disintegration of an overstuffed bin bag: If you’ve used one of these two defences for either of these occasions, you’re not allowed to use any of the two, during the rest of that calendar year.

Me, I’ve been saving up mine, for the last few years but I do intend to use one of them with a vengeance, whenever the time is ripe.

It involves a baker’s dozen of beehives, an outdoors swimming pool filled with honey, a half brick and a quite elaborate pulley system.

Now, I’m not picky and I only need one individual out of the following groups of persons to walk past my house:

1) Any TV quiz or reality TV show host or TV sports analist
2) Any politician
3) Any professional PC plodder
4) Any raving Godhead, be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Jew
5) Any Holocaust denier, Scientologist or Elvis-shot-Kennedy-and-blew-up-the-Twin-Towers type
6) Any of the makers of ‘Mama Mia!’, ‘Dances with Wolves’, ‘Spiderman 3′, ‘The Nutty Professor’, ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ and/or ‘Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves’
7) Any of the inventors of the karaoke machine, the Crazy Frog ring tone, elevator music and speaking toilets
8) Bono

So, whenever any of the above mentioned persons will find themselves struggling not to drown in my honey pool, while beset by a horde of angry bees who don’t like their hives getting pulley-ed from over them and while sporting an angry bruise where a carefully coincidentally launched half-brick hit them…

… well, then I will simply smile politely, with a slightly puzzled look on my face and state that whatever just happened precisely:

a) came out of nowhere and
b) could not have been foreseen by anyone…

(On the Hill, in Westminster, in any self-respecting pub and wherever people roam and gather…)