Loads of predictable outrage about Mugabe going to Rome to pontificate at a UN Food Summit while his people are starving. Why the f**k do people bother. We know Mugabe will carry on until he drops off the perch, naturally or otherwise. While we concede his right to starve and kick hell out of people, and that of the Burmese generals to let people die in the Irrawaddy Delta, and the “international community” does indeed concede these rights, we may as well save our breath to cool our coffee. The point about Mugabe coming to Europe is that his security arrangements cannot be anywhere near as tight as they are in Harare. There must be millions of potential sniper nests in Rome. And with all these outrage-inspiring five course meals – dozens of waiters etc. must have had a chance to slip something in his lobster thermidor. It’s the old Roman way, after all. Where’s the Empress Livia Augusta when we need her? The disgrace is not that Mugabe went to Rome, but that he got back safely. At least Peter Tatchell had a go at him in Brussels a few years ago, and got a kicking for his pains. It wouldn’t have involved much more planning to take the man out for good.
We on the Left ought to be moving round to the idea of assassination to push the world in the right direction. The mainstream media wouldn’t print anything of this sort, so go the blogosphere! Marx queered the pitch rather by rejecting individual assassinations, but he thought that economic forces would do the job for us, and – sorry Karl – they haven’t and they won’t. And the argument that if our side start splatting baddies the baddies will start splatting “us” shouldn’t worry us lefties much. Assassination is one of the only ways I can think of of making a real impact on the ruling class, and of more or less confining that impact to the ruling class.
Saturday, 7 June 2008
A new scam
One has become accustomed to generous-spirited West Africans offering one amounts of money in the tens of millions in return for a little help laundering it, and one knows what to do with their e-mails. Yesterday I received a more subtle version of the same thing. This came allegedly from an impeccable source, with whom almost no computer user has not had legitimate dealings – viz. Microsoft Himself. They tell me that, in a recent promotion involving internet users, my numbers (I was not, of course, aware that I had any) had come up, and that I was due a payment of £150,000 which I only had to claim.
To do this I have to write to a man with a Hong Kong e-mail address but a UK phone number, under the reassuring moniker of Barry Coleman-Williams, giving him my name, address, phone number, nationality and gender, but nothing further (at least at the moment). The subtlety of this scam lies not just in the seeming straight dealing of Barry and his friends; it lies also in the sum held out. We all know, at least in the economic regions I inhabit, that sums like ten or twenty million simply don’t exist; but a hundred and fifty K is the sort of sum one could just do with. So well done chaps, nice try, but I don’t think so.
(P.S. I googled friend Barry, and discovered that a chap called Ameer Saeed Al-Ghani received the same e-mail, and that Ameer seems to have drawn the same lottery numbers as I have.)
To do this I have to write to a man with a Hong Kong e-mail address but a UK phone number, under the reassuring moniker of Barry Coleman-Williams, giving him my name, address, phone number, nationality and gender, but nothing further (at least at the moment). The subtlety of this scam lies not just in the seeming straight dealing of Barry and his friends; it lies also in the sum held out. We all know, at least in the economic regions I inhabit, that sums like ten or twenty million simply don’t exist; but a hundred and fifty K is the sort of sum one could just do with. So well done chaps, nice try, but I don’t think so.
(P.S. I googled friend Barry, and discovered that a chap called Ameer Saeed Al-Ghani received the same e-mail, and that Ameer seems to have drawn the same lottery numbers as I have.)
Monday, 2 June 2008
Bloody Moslems again
Well, actually not Moslems, but the West Midlands Police, insofar as the two groups can be meaningfully distinguished. Firstly the Channel 4 documentary, where they had to admit there wasn’t any real reason to hassle the programme for distorting what imams had been recorded as saying in the Green Lane Mosque and elsewhere. Yes, they did praise Osama bin Laden, yes, they did call for the murder of gay men, yes, they did describe the 98% of the population who are not Moslems as “filthy” and “unclean”. But in a sense it's fairly easy to follow the thought processes of the police. If these truths were to be admitted, it’s fairly clear that the police would be under pressure to close these mosques and arrest a few people. And they thought – possibly rightly – that this would lead to serious, and possibly violent, confrontation. So best, perhaps, to turn their fire on the programme-makers who had uncovered these inconvenient truths.
And then, more recently, a couple of American evangelists being told that they shouldn’t go evangelising in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham as it was a Moslem area and evangelising there counted as a “hate crime”. By a Police Community Support Officer, no less. And if the Americans came back, they were warned that they might be beaten up, with the strong implication that they should not expect any assistance from the police in that case.
Well, obviously this Keystone Kop had no authority to say anything of the sort, still less to submit the Americans to a harangue on US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he did. But he had clearly worked out which way the wind was blowing in our second city.
Firstly, where Moslems predominate in an area, they want complete control, and we would be well advised to grant this. As a result, anyone trying to exercise natural British freedoms is being unreasonable and provocative, as Moslems prefer to be unchallenged in their own areas.
Well, I suppose we can still choose whether we are prepared to accept this situation or not. I’m happy to go down to Alum Rock any time. Not that there isn't enough of this sort of work to be done right here in Lancaster.
And then, more recently, a couple of American evangelists being told that they shouldn’t go evangelising in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham as it was a Moslem area and evangelising there counted as a “hate crime”. By a Police Community Support Officer, no less. And if the Americans came back, they were warned that they might be beaten up, with the strong implication that they should not expect any assistance from the police in that case.
Well, obviously this Keystone Kop had no authority to say anything of the sort, still less to submit the Americans to a harangue on US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he did. But he had clearly worked out which way the wind was blowing in our second city.
Firstly, where Moslems predominate in an area, they want complete control, and we would be well advised to grant this. As a result, anyone trying to exercise natural British freedoms is being unreasonable and provocative, as Moslems prefer to be unchallenged in their own areas.
Well, I suppose we can still choose whether we are prepared to accept this situation or not. I’m happy to go down to Alum Rock any time. Not that there isn't enough of this sort of work to be done right here in Lancaster.
Sunday, 1 June 2008
Once more unto the breachchchyechhhhyuurrgggggghhhhh....
Resuming after an extended break, sadly not spent having a wonderful time but in the depths of personal horror; bipolar depressive disorder can leave you up the shit end for months at a time. Still, nil desperandum....
Was in the relative paradise of East Asia some of the time. China and Thailand.
China
It’s building up nicely for the drug- and nationalism-fest in August. Moronic security-goons everywhere telling you you can’t go here and you can’t go there. I went for a walk in a residential area where I had conducted a romance of sorts some fifteen years ago, and was told by some uniformed turd that I couldn’t go down that street. Why not? I asked in perfectly good Chinese. The guy looked at me as if I were a Martian and summoned a female assistant standing a few yards away who put up her hand and told me “No Road!”. I said it was jolly interesting that no-one would tell me why there was no entrance to this area, and that my Embassy would be most intrigued to hear about it.
The kerfuffle over the Olympic Torch Relay showed me one thing that I shouldn’t have forgotten about – how supremely important it is to the Chinese to put on a show. I can remember thinking when the Chinese first got the slot that it was utter madness putting on the Olympics in August in Beijing – for the simple reason that it rains all the time in August in Beijing, and I lived there long enough to know. However, the Chinese think they can fix the weather. By a process known as “seeding the clouds” they can send aircraft up to cause the clouds to tip out all their rain so it doesn’t fall on the desired occasion. They did this in 1999 on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic and it worked (though who knows whether it might not have been fine anyway?). But, I thought, doing it for one day is one thing; do they really think they can do it for three weeks?
No, I discovered. They don't give a shit for what the weather will be like during the actual Olympics; what they really care about is the opening ceremony (8th August). As it happens my ex-girlfriend, whom I met out there, is the senior choreographer for this performance. For anyone outside the Chinese cultural circle (and probably for a lot of people within it, who just daren’t say so) these shows go on for about five hours and are quite staggeringly boring. For the Chinese, they are the centre of the whole thing. A good five months before the Olympics start, my ex and her fellow-choreographers have been confined in a hotel outside Beijing working 18-hour days and 7-day weeks till August. She got a day off at a traditional festival in April to see her 7-year old son but was called back in the late afternoon. I was bloody lucky to get three hours to have dinner with her. There are 10,000 people involved in this opening ceremony and about 8,000 in the closing job. You can see why they get worked up about who goes to attend the thing. But we can expect beautiful summer weather for the ceremonies and filthy pissing rain for the actual athletics.
Thailand
Thailand, of course, is full of whores. Whatever people tell you about why they go there, the real reason s that it is full of whores. I had some vague plans, and so did the (English) mate I went out there to meet, to do a bit more travelling round the country. It didn’t come off, as it never does, because it’s too bloody hot to move, but also because I realised that the main reason I wanted to see more of the disease-infested and God-forsaken interior of Thailand was so that I could tell people back home that I hadn’t just hung around Bangkok and Pattaya, so that they didn’t think “Ah, just another sex tourist”.
Especially as I wasn’t being a sex tourist. I am pushing fifty, and it takes more than it used to to light my fire these days. In fact I found the whole business a bit depressing this time. I still like hanging around in the sleazy parts of town, because you meet more fun people there, but I wasn’t buying. Over the years I have come to understand the background to the unpleasantly exploitative aspects of Thailand’s main industry (goes for most of the rest of South East Asia too).
It’s clear that there’s no point in blaming the girls for being promiscuous and money-grubbing. Nor, despite the universal witness of Western political correctness, it is right to blame the punters. Some of us don’t like to have to promise all our time and all our money for the rest of our lives in order to get our legs over; and nor do I believe men who want to pay for sex should do it in their own countries, as each country perverts the business by means of illogical laws, and most prostitution in Western countries is far too deeply mixed up with the drugs trade, which a lot of us would rather avoid. No, the problem in Thailand is the local men, far too many of whom want to swan around on motorbikes and swig Sang Som whiskey without doing a stroke of work. Half the young women in Thailand have been raped and abused by fathers and brothers who then effectively pimp them out. Then they find worthless boyfriends who want money without doing anything for it, and are stuck financing these shitheads for the best years of their lives. That’s why Thailand (and the Philippines, and as far as I know Cambodia and Vietnam) are heaving with whores. It’s not out fault.
Was in the relative paradise of East Asia some of the time. China and Thailand.
China
It’s building up nicely for the drug- and nationalism-fest in August. Moronic security-goons everywhere telling you you can’t go here and you can’t go there. I went for a walk in a residential area where I had conducted a romance of sorts some fifteen years ago, and was told by some uniformed turd that I couldn’t go down that street. Why not? I asked in perfectly good Chinese. The guy looked at me as if I were a Martian and summoned a female assistant standing a few yards away who put up her hand and told me “No Road!”. I said it was jolly interesting that no-one would tell me why there was no entrance to this area, and that my Embassy would be most intrigued to hear about it.
The kerfuffle over the Olympic Torch Relay showed me one thing that I shouldn’t have forgotten about – how supremely important it is to the Chinese to put on a show. I can remember thinking when the Chinese first got the slot that it was utter madness putting on the Olympics in August in Beijing – for the simple reason that it rains all the time in August in Beijing, and I lived there long enough to know. However, the Chinese think they can fix the weather. By a process known as “seeding the clouds” they can send aircraft up to cause the clouds to tip out all their rain so it doesn’t fall on the desired occasion. They did this in 1999 on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic and it worked (though who knows whether it might not have been fine anyway?). But, I thought, doing it for one day is one thing; do they really think they can do it for three weeks?
No, I discovered. They don't give a shit for what the weather will be like during the actual Olympics; what they really care about is the opening ceremony (8th August). As it happens my ex-girlfriend, whom I met out there, is the senior choreographer for this performance. For anyone outside the Chinese cultural circle (and probably for a lot of people within it, who just daren’t say so) these shows go on for about five hours and are quite staggeringly boring. For the Chinese, they are the centre of the whole thing. A good five months before the Olympics start, my ex and her fellow-choreographers have been confined in a hotel outside Beijing working 18-hour days and 7-day weeks till August. She got a day off at a traditional festival in April to see her 7-year old son but was called back in the late afternoon. I was bloody lucky to get three hours to have dinner with her. There are 10,000 people involved in this opening ceremony and about 8,000 in the closing job. You can see why they get worked up about who goes to attend the thing. But we can expect beautiful summer weather for the ceremonies and filthy pissing rain for the actual athletics.
Thailand
Thailand, of course, is full of whores. Whatever people tell you about why they go there, the real reason s that it is full of whores. I had some vague plans, and so did the (English) mate I went out there to meet, to do a bit more travelling round the country. It didn’t come off, as it never does, because it’s too bloody hot to move, but also because I realised that the main reason I wanted to see more of the disease-infested and God-forsaken interior of Thailand was so that I could tell people back home that I hadn’t just hung around Bangkok and Pattaya, so that they didn’t think “Ah, just another sex tourist”.
Especially as I wasn’t being a sex tourist. I am pushing fifty, and it takes more than it used to to light my fire these days. In fact I found the whole business a bit depressing this time. I still like hanging around in the sleazy parts of town, because you meet more fun people there, but I wasn’t buying. Over the years I have come to understand the background to the unpleasantly exploitative aspects of Thailand’s main industry (goes for most of the rest of South East Asia too).
It’s clear that there’s no point in blaming the girls for being promiscuous and money-grubbing. Nor, despite the universal witness of Western political correctness, it is right to blame the punters. Some of us don’t like to have to promise all our time and all our money for the rest of our lives in order to get our legs over; and nor do I believe men who want to pay for sex should do it in their own countries, as each country perverts the business by means of illogical laws, and most prostitution in Western countries is far too deeply mixed up with the drugs trade, which a lot of us would rather avoid. No, the problem in Thailand is the local men, far too many of whom want to swan around on motorbikes and swig Sang Som whiskey without doing a stroke of work. Half the young women in Thailand have been raped and abused by fathers and brothers who then effectively pimp them out. Then they find worthless boyfriends who want money without doing anything for it, and are stuck financing these shitheads for the best years of their lives. That’s why Thailand (and the Philippines, and as far as I know Cambodia and Vietnam) are heaving with whores. It’s not out fault.
Monday, 17 March 2008
Bit of a hiatus
Haven't posted for a couple of weeks. Began with having nothing in particular to say, and then progressed via general idleness.
Principal events - making the out-of-court settlement stick with my ex-wife, giving raise to huge relief and jubilation. Going to London to see Enormous Oaf 1, the aspiring actor, star in a show - and bloody good he was too. Looking likely to get Enormous Oaf 2 to study up here in the North-West in September. All this involving a fun trip to the Great Wen, which is still horrible, but it's always nice to be reminded of the thousand ways in which it is.
Staying with friends in Sudbury, in the general direction of Harrow. My friend warned me that the Piccadilly Line was buggered for the weekend, and so was the District Line, and so I'd have to get the Bakerloo and a bus from Wembley Central. OK, an extra quid on my Oyster Card, but what the hell, life's too short. On the Sunday, however, an extra ingredient was added to the mix; the Bakerloo was closed as well, due to "a person on the line". First thought: people who are selfish enough to top themselves by diving onto a Tube line should be warned that their bodies will be desecrated by having their quarters hung up at the market cross as in medieval times; second thought: how long does it take to get a sodding corpse off the line? If they really wanted they could have normal service resumed within the hour, which would be an even better deterrent to suicidal glory-hunters. But it seems that the delights of fucking London transport up reign absolutely supreme.
Meanwhile Enormous Oaf 2, meeting me in the centre to see his brother's play, dutifully bought a train ticket to find that his train wasn't running. Great.
What seriously worries me is how Londoners put up with all this. Well, given that Londoners habitually do 10 or more hours of unpaid overtime a week to please their bosses, I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. Why are we so fucking servile?
Part of the same question is, as I've asked before, why do we put up with bankers? It's clear that there's been another disaster, caused by people who have too much money to be properly regulated and still expect to be bailed out by government; are they going to come under proper control, or are we going to have to go and lynch them?
Principal events - making the out-of-court settlement stick with my ex-wife, giving raise to huge relief and jubilation. Going to London to see Enormous Oaf 1, the aspiring actor, star in a show - and bloody good he was too. Looking likely to get Enormous Oaf 2 to study up here in the North-West in September. All this involving a fun trip to the Great Wen, which is still horrible, but it's always nice to be reminded of the thousand ways in which it is.
Staying with friends in Sudbury, in the general direction of Harrow. My friend warned me that the Piccadilly Line was buggered for the weekend, and so was the District Line, and so I'd have to get the Bakerloo and a bus from Wembley Central. OK, an extra quid on my Oyster Card, but what the hell, life's too short. On the Sunday, however, an extra ingredient was added to the mix; the Bakerloo was closed as well, due to "a person on the line". First thought: people who are selfish enough to top themselves by diving onto a Tube line should be warned that their bodies will be desecrated by having their quarters hung up at the market cross as in medieval times; second thought: how long does it take to get a sodding corpse off the line? If they really wanted they could have normal service resumed within the hour, which would be an even better deterrent to suicidal glory-hunters. But it seems that the delights of fucking London transport up reign absolutely supreme.
Meanwhile Enormous Oaf 2, meeting me in the centre to see his brother's play, dutifully bought a train ticket to find that his train wasn't running. Great.
What seriously worries me is how Londoners put up with all this. Well, given that Londoners habitually do 10 or more hours of unpaid overtime a week to please their bosses, I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. Why are we so fucking servile?
Part of the same question is, as I've asked before, why do we put up with bankers? It's clear that there's been another disaster, caused by people who have too much money to be properly regulated and still expect to be bailed out by government; are they going to come under proper control, or are we going to have to go and lynch them?
Sunday, 2 March 2008
Why I am not a Catholic....
Largely because of their obsession with temporal as opposed to spiritual power, complete unscrupulousness in maintaining their power and influence, as best shown by giving complete support to General Franco in 1936 with his policy of murdering everyone to the left of David Cameron, in order to secure complete control of education. Not to mention the other policies; whereas Christ on the Cross said that He could have summoned twelve legions of angels to protect Him, but didn’t, Franco brought in twelve legions of Moroccan rapists to ensure the Church’s side won. Also because of their half-baked doctrine of marriage, which serves no useful purpose except to give Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh a peg to hang plots on.
More recently, see the crap-hole a Brit in the Philippines has got himself into by fathering a child on a Filipina who was not yet free of her abusive husband: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=517821&in_page_id=1879
The Church is falling over itself to protect the rights of the so-called husband. As Laurence Sterne wrote of a typical Catholic, “His priests have got the keeping of his conscience”, whereas the priests have a rule-book where their conscience ought to be.
More recently, see the crap-hole a Brit in the Philippines has got himself into by fathering a child on a Filipina who was not yet free of her abusive husband: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=517821&in_page_id=1879
The Church is falling over itself to protect the rights of the so-called husband. As Laurence Sterne wrote of a typical Catholic, “His priests have got the keeping of his conscience”, whereas the priests have a rule-book where their conscience ought to be.
Saturday, 1 March 2008
Good old Iceland
On the whole I think it's a good idea that Northern Rock has been nationalised. Firstly because there obviously wasn't a private buyer who wouldn't have demanded so much unchallengeable money up front as to make the whole thing unmanageable. Secondly because something needs to happen to break the taboo about nationalisation - which was the main reason the establishment, including (or especially) NuLab, was so much against it. Sorry, chaps, the idea may be here to stay now.
Thirdly, because we might be needing a nationalised bank. The existing cartel of cut-throats are currently saying that they must be allowed to charge people what they like for the occasional overdraft (illegal though the current charges are), otherwise they may have to charge everybody for having an account at all. Now this isn't on. We don't "choose" to have a bank account, we effing well have to, because employers won't pay our wages in any other way. A few years ago, when working in the public service, I enquired, not entirely seriously, whether I could have my monthly salary in cash in a brown envelope. Not that I was really on for paying my leccy and phone bills personally in cash, but still. If the bastard banks are going to charge us by the month for running our accounts, there needs to be a simple alternative, no doubt with a limited service and possibly without overdrafts, which will do what 90% of us want for free. Why can't Northern Rock be that?
George Trefgarne, writing in this week's Spectator, disagrees with me. The government bail-out of Northern Rock, he says, has created "moral hazard", which means encouraging other banks to behave just as irresponsibly in the knowledge that the government can't really let them swing in the wind. "The bosses of every high-street bank comparable to Northern Rock now know that however bad their decisions, however risky their speculations, they will be bailed out by the government. If things go wrong they can simply resign, having amassed millions in bonuses and share options over the years, as Adam Applegarth, the ex-Northern Rock chief executive, did before Christmas."
Trefgarne, though a Tory, is dead right. The cunt's got clean away with it. And we all know that the main reason for the run on the bank was that everyone assumed, no doubt rightly, that if things went tits up then Applegarth and his cronies would have grabbed all the remaining money and told the depositors "sorry, nothing left for you!"
It is here that my thoughts drift off to the ancient Icelandic legal system, whereby people who behaved like that were sentenced by a popular assembly to outlawry, i.e. anybody who had suffered at their hands could go and knock them off without legal penalty.
In the same cultural context, I am reminded of an episode in the Icelandic saga of Njàl, where the house of Njàl and his delinquent sons is surrounded by hundreds of enemies and burnt down over their heads. I think that there is a connection here to Adam Applegarth. I hope I find out his address one day.
Thirdly, because we might be needing a nationalised bank. The existing cartel of cut-throats are currently saying that they must be allowed to charge people what they like for the occasional overdraft (illegal though the current charges are), otherwise they may have to charge everybody for having an account at all. Now this isn't on. We don't "choose" to have a bank account, we effing well have to, because employers won't pay our wages in any other way. A few years ago, when working in the public service, I enquired, not entirely seriously, whether I could have my monthly salary in cash in a brown envelope. Not that I was really on for paying my leccy and phone bills personally in cash, but still. If the bastard banks are going to charge us by the month for running our accounts, there needs to be a simple alternative, no doubt with a limited service and possibly without overdrafts, which will do what 90% of us want for free. Why can't Northern Rock be that?
George Trefgarne, writing in this week's Spectator, disagrees with me. The government bail-out of Northern Rock, he says, has created "moral hazard", which means encouraging other banks to behave just as irresponsibly in the knowledge that the government can't really let them swing in the wind. "The bosses of every high-street bank comparable to Northern Rock now know that however bad their decisions, however risky their speculations, they will be bailed out by the government. If things go wrong they can simply resign, having amassed millions in bonuses and share options over the years, as Adam Applegarth, the ex-Northern Rock chief executive, did before Christmas."
Trefgarne, though a Tory, is dead right. The cunt's got clean away with it. And we all know that the main reason for the run on the bank was that everyone assumed, no doubt rightly, that if things went tits up then Applegarth and his cronies would have grabbed all the remaining money and told the depositors "sorry, nothing left for you!"
It is here that my thoughts drift off to the ancient Icelandic legal system, whereby people who behaved like that were sentenced by a popular assembly to outlawry, i.e. anybody who had suffered at their hands could go and knock them off without legal penalty.
In the same cultural context, I am reminded of an episode in the Icelandic saga of Njàl, where the house of Njàl and his delinquent sons is surrounded by hundreds of enemies and burnt down over their heads. I think that there is a connection here to Adam Applegarth. I hope I find out his address one day.
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