Thanks to Giles for pointing out to me the excellent collection of humorous and political comments that are collecting on the Amazon page for this Playmobil Security Check-Point. Here’s an example:
Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it’s a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times. Little children need to be aware that not all smiling faces and uniforms are friendly. I noticed that my child is now more interested in current events. Just the other day he asked me why we had to forfeit so much of our liberties and personal freedoms and I had to answer “well, it’s because the terrorists have already won”. Yes, they have won.
I wonder if Amazon will allow this commie protest to continue. It’s supposed to be a super-store not a community centre!
Ratan Tata, the head of Tata Motors who today launched the world’s cheapest car, is obviously quite a fan of the German motor industry: He described the new Tata Nano as a people’s car, an obvious reference to the Volkswagen, the car costs 100,000 rupees, similar to Hitler’s target for the VW which was 1000 Reich Marks, and the Tata site talks about the company’s blitzkrieg of new products at the New Delhi Auto Show. Still, they played a predictable Strauss track at the launch rather than Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries so maybe there’s nothing to worry about.
Have a listen to this puzzling clip of Nelson Mandela that I heard on the World Service last night.
He says: Together we have the power to change the course of destiny. Big ambitious blondes are needed to deal with the pandemic. But what truly matters are the Small Eggs of Kindness and caring that come from a place of real love and commercial.I’m all for big ambitious blondes, we could all use their help, but what are the Small Eggs of Kindness? Kinder eggs? They do come from the place of real love, Italy, and the brand is owned by Ferrero, undoubtedly a commercially successful company. The ‘rainbow’ mix of dark and white chocolate that the eggs are made from is a lovely metaphor for today’s South Africa and maybe what Nelson means is that the answer to the problems caused by the HIV pandemic in Africa may already be inside the ‘egg’, if we can just figure out how to put it together properly.By the way, did you know that Kinder Eggs are illegal in the USA? Yeah, they are, really.
According to the official Saudi Arabia information site:
To understand the history of the Kingdom and its political, economic and social development, it is necessary to realize that Islam, which permeates every aspect of a Muslim’s life, also permeates every aspect of the Saudi Arabian state.
and according to a story on the BBC News site today
An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped.
If I were a Muslim I would consider Saudi Arabia a very poor advertisement for my religion. Have a look at the official information site and click on the section entitled Saudi Art and Culture. It contains a poetry section containing two short poems, and a discussion of the Arabic language which is put to shame by the entry on the same subject in Wikipedia. The site also carries advertising; when I visited it had this advert inviting people to Meet Sexy Arab Girls at the top of the page. So, savage, uncultured and hideously hypocritical then. Nice.
The postmen are going on strike, and the news story about it didn’t really say why. On the postal union’s site there was a Message to the Public which I didn’t find persuasive. They talked about how they were faced with the prospect of arriving at work and being told to do a completely different job to the one they usually do and of having their hours of work changing from day to day. These are things that I and many other people have been used to for years. They also talked about how Royal Mail want to reduce their pension benefits and increase their retirement age. At the moment the Royal Mail pension scheme is so expensive to run that Royal Mail have to pay an extra 730 million pounds a year into it in addition to its member’s contributions. The CWU are in the enviable position of having the government underwrite their pension scheme if Royal Mail eventually go bust. Meanwhile final-salary pension schemes are closing in most companies in the UK.
So I don’t really feel very sympathetic towards the postal workers. In attempting to explain their grievances they have simply highlighted how out-of-touch with the real-world they are. Since their members’ pensions are protected if Royal Mail become insolvent maybe they’re calculating that it would be better to protect their cushy benefits and drive the company under than it would be to negotiate a less advantageous deal. It is of course the job of a union to protect its members’ interests, but sometimes that involves looking at the long rather than the short-term and even the CWU recognises that the current pension scheme is too expensive.
The amazing popularity of online shopping should have been a bonanza for the Royal Mail but instead they are in deeper trouble than ever. This may well be because the management is useless, or it may be because the organisation is bureaucratic and inflexible and many of the people who work there are unimaginative jobsworths, I have no way of knowing. In any case, this strike won’t help their situation. Like Millie Banerjee of Postwatch, I find it hugely disappointing to watch a great British institution tear itself apart. But on the other hand, maybe the demise of the Royal Mail will create a brilliant opportunity for a new, much better mail service. Here’s some things I’d like them to offer:
Destination tracking - Every time a parcel addressed to me is processed they should check to see if it is too big for the letter box or if it needs a signature. If that’s the case they could send me an email or text asking if they should deliver it the next day or on some other day when I am going to be at home.
People who are at home all the time could act as mini local post offices. Big parcels for anyone in their street would be left with them at the start of the day, outgoing parcels could be collected at the end of the day.
Tracking the delivery man. It would be so easy to put a GPS receiver on each delivery person and then track them so that I could see an ETA for them.
Smarter redelivery. I’m going out for the day but I still want my eBay parcel to be there when I get home so I go to their site and ask for all today’s mail to be delivered to my friend up the road.
Parcel aggregation. It’s daft for several delivery companies to all be calling at the same address. Why don’t they set up a clearing-house for data and then they could all deliver each other’s parcels.
Crikey, I could go on all day with this. Anyone fancy going into business?
The heavily trailed report to Congress by Gen David Petraeus about how well the ’surge’ is going was given a special 2.5 hour programme on the World Service. This is what happened when the General got up to speak.
The incompatibility between cartoonists and Islam is inevitable. Cartoonist are very frequently irreverent about everything and resistant to censorship. Some muslims are very touchy and, I’m afraid to say, authoritarian. There’s also the fact that many strands of Islam don’t allow representative art so the whole issue of cartoons is never going to be popular in the first place.
This weekend the Washington Post and numerous other American newspapers have refused to publish their regular cartoon strip Opus. Berkeley Breathed, the writer of the strip, announced on his site that the strips had been witheld from publication but he didn’t say why. The subject of the no doubt soon-to-be controversial strip is a young American woman on a spiritual odyssey who keeps trying out crazy religions. Last week she was trying to teach nude yoga to the Amish, this week she’s a “Radical Islamist”, complete with veil. It’s August, there’s not much news about, let’s see what happens.
You can see the possibly offending strip at the excellent Salon magazine.
People buy SUVs for the same reasons that some teenagers carry a knife: They feel insecure, their environment seems dangerous and they long for the admiration of their peers. Both behaviours are clearly anti-social but driving an SUV is more blatantly so because rather than being hidden in the owner’s pocket it is aggressively shoved in everyone’s face, a full-on “F**k you” to the rest of society.
When someone buys an SUV they are trying to buy an advantage on the road. They hope that if their vehicle collides with somebody else’s the added height will cause their bumper to smash through the windows of the smaller car, crushing the occupants and absorbing the impact. In fact, while it is true that you are more likely to be killed if you are hit by an SUV rather that a normal car, some SUVs have much higher that average driver death rates, according to a study by the IIHS in the US, so like knives they endanger the owner as well as everyone else.
Given all this it’s really not surprising to read research, conducted by car manufacturers and published in Keith Bradsher’s book Bumper Mentality, showing that:
SUV buyers tend to be “insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic, and less social than most Americans are.”
So what’s wrong with keying SUVs? It makes them less attractive to own, possibly makes people think twice before buying one and may be the only way to make the owner realise that the stares they get all day aren’t admiring glances. Even so, criminal damage is just as anti-social as buying an SUV, and if the owner bought the thing because they are afraid of their environment then keying their car may just make them behave even more badly. I personally think that a sticker campaign would be a good idea. Something like “I love you but I hate your ugly car”. Maybe I’ll design some. In the meantime, I’m really glad that Ken is intending to increase the London congestion charge for vehicles that produce loads of CO2. Social pressure doesn’t often work with anti-social people, financial pressure just might.
This political spat with Russia has got me thinking. At first I was so annoyed by their infuriating posturing that I was all for going to war straight away. But then I realised that although they are drunk and useless we could never win a war against them because they can also be cunning and dogged when the mood takes them. So we can’t win a war against Russia, and of course as we know Russia couldn’t win their war against the Taliban, so doesn’t that prove that we can’t win a war against the Taliban? It’s logic, pure and simple. So who can we beat? Well, we sort of beat Germany before and they beat Poland before that, so maybe we should try invading Poland instead of Afghanistan, or Slovakia, which is now even smaller than it was when it was Czechoslovakia. Now if only there was a reason, it doesn’t have to be a good one…
Wikipedia had an article about the Rhodes Blood Libel on its front page a few days ago. This was one of those cases where a Jewish community was falsely accused of ritually murdering a Christian child, leading to horrible repercussions. Reading the article I was wondering whether such a thing could happen today and what can be done to avoid it.
The false allegations gained ground because the suspects confessed under torture. Of course we all know nowadays that people will say anything if you torture them enough. The tortured person becomes a megaphone for the views of the torturer and his bosses, who are inevitable revolting, crazy people. So torturing people becomes more a way of perpetuating prejudices and lies than of gaining useful information. This is worth bearing in mind as some governments seek to legitimise torture or even actively legalise it.
There is also the question of why on earth anyone would believe such ridiculous accusations in the first place. I think it was partly because the Jewish community lived so separately from the mainstream community. The bizarre rituals of Judaism aren’t in fact any weirder that the rituals of any religion but people had no way of becoming familiar with them because they were always carried out behind closed doors. When things are done in secret, in a mysterious language, they do take on a sinister aspect.
That obviously got me to thinking about the way in which some Muslims are trying to cut themselves off from the society I live in, with separate Islamic schools and all-concealing clothing. I can see why the atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust that’s been generated by George Bush’s War On Terror would make people want to hide themselves away, but I think that reaction would be a big mistake. When people are suspecting your motives the answer is to patiently keep talking to them, not to run away.
Here’s a cool little script that estimates your gender based on the sites you’ve visited. How does it know where you’ve been? Now there’s the question.
If the main division in modern politics is between liberal and authoritarian then I am a liberal and if David Davis was standing against Labour in my constituency on the issue of 42-days I don’t see how I could vote Labour. That makes me very sad.
Thanks to Giles for pointing out to me the excellent collection of humorous and political comments that are collecting on the Amazon page for this Playmobil Security Check-Point. Here’s an example:
Ratan Tata, the head of Tata Motors who today launched the world’s cheapest car, is obviously quite a fan of the German motor industry: He described the new Tata Nano as 
The site also carries advertising; when I visited it had this advert inviting people to Meet Sexy Arab Girls at the top of the page. So, savage, uncultured and hideously hypocritical then. Nice.
The postmen are going on strike, and the 
So I don’t really feel very sympathetic towards the postal workers. In attempting to explain their grievances they have simply highlighted how out-of-touch with the real-world they are. Since their members’ pensions are protected if Royal Mail become insolvent maybe they’re calculating that it would be better to protect their cushy benefits and drive the company under than it would be to negotiate a less advantageous deal. It is of course the job of a union to protect its members’ interests, but sometimes that involves looking at the long rather than the short-term and even the CWU recognises that the current pension scheme is too expensive.
People buy SUVs for the same reasons that some teenagers carry a knife: They feel insecure, their environment seems dangerous and they long for the admiration of their peers. Both behaviours are clearly anti-social but driving an SUV is more blatantly so because rather than being hidden in the owner’s pocket it is aggressively shoved in everyone’s face, a full-on “F**k you” to the rest of society.
This political spat with Russia has got me thinking. At first I was so annoyed by their infuriating posturing that I was all for going to war straight away. But then I realised that although they are drunk and useless we could never win a war against them because they can also be cunning and dogged when the mood takes them. So we can’t win a war against Russia, and of course as we know Russia couldn’t win their war against the Taliban, so doesn’t that prove that we can’t win a war against the Taliban? It’s logic, pure and simple. So who can we beat? Well, we sort of beat Germany before and they beat Poland before that, so maybe we should try invading Poland instead of Afghanistan, or Slovakia, which is now even smaller than it was when it was Czechoslovakia. Now if only there was a reason, it doesn’t have to be a good one…
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