UNNATURAL ATTRACTION

In Oscar Wilde’s story ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ the antihero makes a Faustian pact in which he keeps his beauty while a portrait of himself ages and also displays all the twisted marks that his debauched lifestyle makes on his soul. In the end Gray’s vanity and immorality conspire to destroy him. Wilde’s character had ultimately attempted to cheat nature and failed.

In a similar manner the antihero of Joris-Karl Huysmans “poisonous French novel”,  ‘A Rebours’ or ‘Against Nature” rebelled against the boring trappings and limited thrills offered by petit bourgeois society as personified by 19th century France and embarked on a journey of his own to create an artistic and ascetic capsule in which he can escape the vileness of the world that surrounds him. In the end though his decadent lifestyle threatens to overwhelm him and he is forced to return to the mainstream in order to survive. Again the natural order of things quietly triumphs.

Fast forward a century and the ascetic obsessions of these writers and the angst ridden guilt and poetic desperation of their heroes to rebel against the norm seem almost quaint. Indeed their adolescent yearnings for sexual relief among the painted and seemingly exotic prostitutes of bohemian Paris. or in the forbidden embraces of their own sex may seem tame by today's standards but at the time these stories shocked and scandalised. Indeed Oscar Wilde’s hints at homosexuality during his trial and the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ were testament to how underground talk, and knowledge of, sex was at the time. Wilde, had in fact, like his creation, gone against nature and as such he would pay.

Now the natural order has again been tampered with, though not, on this occasion by angst-ridden fops clutching glasses of absinthe in their trembling hands, but by the far more deadly forces of political correctness, or cultural Marxism as its becoming known as. Over the last decade an army of lawyers and civic busybodies has been intent on sweeping aside any vestige of that bourgeois world order so loathed by Wilde and Huysman’s creations. Now any budding rebel with a liking for the wild side can witness almost any sexual perversion or depravity in seconds on the internet or for real should he or she so desire. Most drug’s are easily available and human behaviour is now all but devoid of restraint and morality, anything goes in fact.

The denial of gratification or limitations on personal desire have, in just over a century, moved from seeing a renowned writer like Wilde imprisoned for ‘gross indecency’ with another man to seeing that same sex act enshrined and protected in law. Likewise lesbianism, transsexuals, same-sex marriages and a whole plethora of other sexual acts which were until recently deemed perverse, or existed only in the twilight world of pornography or were at best known but unmentioned are now discussed openly and even taught to school children. Six year olds can now seemingly describe the three F’s; fisting, felching and fucking better than they can perform the three R’s; reading, writing and arithmetic, such is the wonder of our modern education establishment.

The liberal lefts obsession with the propagation of human rights and sexual rights no matter at what cost to society has now removed the fun and thrill of illicit sex and moved it from the bedroom, where it belongs, into the realm of officialdom, lawyers and bureaucrats. Now what a gay man does to another man’s bottom or what someone else may think of such activity is proscribed by law, people can be arrested, not, as in Wilde’s time, for committing an act of indecency, but conversely for thinking or saying out loud comments or statements that maybe deemed derogatory of that once, ‘indecent’ act.

Gay rights, along with women’s rights, have in fact championed and set the tone and tempo for all other rights legislation since the UK legalized consensual sex between two men in 1967. Originally an act of genuinely liberalism to remove an unjust and unwarranted criminalization of a small number of homosexuals, ‘gay rights’ have since been used as a sledgehammer with which to bully and cajole the wider society firstly to accept and tolerate a minor sexual proclivity, then secondly to champion and promote it as a lifestyle choice and finally to offer it as an alternative to the male / female relationships so beloved of nature.

Now the sexual act is almost irrelevant as its ‘rights’ obsessed supporters have sought out other sexual causes and variants to add to their orgiastic lexicon of rights legislation. Reading almost like a Karma Sutra for the politically correct sexually minded almost no sexual act or minority group is excluded from the liberal lefts great rightsgasm except of course straight, bourgeois, for which read middleclass, society. For this despised group who taxes fund this liberal lasciviousness and who must grin and bare it for fear of prosecution when their children come home clutching copies of the latest copy of ‘Same Sex, Safe Sex’ or

a pop-up guide to fellatio, there are no rights only wrongs.

Human rights, sexual rights, race rights, religious rights, age rights, gender rights, disability rights, fat rights, slim rights, children’s rights, animal rights, criminal rights, asylum seeker rights, immigrant rights, ugly, low IQ, semi-human, thieving non-entity, welfare dependent all-my-life rights. In fact any rights accept those for the indigenous mainstream population are now enshrined in law like some new ten commandments, though these are written not in blood, or hewn from stone but scrawled in semen like the ejaculatory musings of the sexually obsessed. For the world that Dorian Gray or Jean Des Esseintes, the anti hero of Against Nature, sought out in the dark and forbidden recesses of their cities red light areas is now establishment policy, and protected by law.

Many would argue that this is a good thing, that the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for being homosexual or that societies previous Victorian attitude to sex and sexual freedom was both harmful and damaging to society. Further many would see sexual repression or self restraint as harmful and to many it was, but like many aspects of life it was also the natural balance between desire and denial that kept families and the wider society intact. Now in our new, rights-enshrined, fisting, same-sex, burka wearing, disabled, fat-friendly, ethnically aware, carbon-footprint reducing, multi-ethnic, religiously tolerant, tree-hugging liberal utopia we have championed human pleasure, decadence and gratification over family, stability and abstinence.

And now that the world that Jean Des Esseintes and Dorian Gray sought out is here in reality would Oscar Wilde relish the rights enshrined pleasures on offer to him or would he recoil in horror from the vileness of a culture that promotes anal sex to children and champions the rights of transsexuals and gender awareness over families and the laws of nature? Would he, in fact, do as he did before and get on the ferry to Dieppe in France and leave England for good?

I think he would. He might get intimate with a sailor on route, but that is his business, and his alone, it is not the right of the state, of lawyers or of a collective army of shrill, liberal left activists determined to enshrine every illicit sex act in law as a right. There is after all nothing more unappetising, unarousing or unerotic than someone demanding that you have sex when you don’t want to and yet that is what the state is doing. It is turning illicit fun sex into licit, civic duty sex, and who wants that? Not nature. And nature, long term, has a tendency of winning...

SPITTING IN THE FACE OF UTOPIA!

About twenty or so years ago when I was in Paris with my then girlfriend Nadine I remember seeing large groups of well dressed, in a kind of petit-bourgeoisie French kind of way, looking people emerging from a hall near Place Maubert in the 5th arrondissement where I was living at the time. There were hundreds of people and I remember that they all seemed very excited and animated, with lots of them talking loudly. There was also a lot of hand-waving going on accompanied by occasional cheering and spontaneous clapping. I imagined that they were just leaving some sort of religious meeting or service, but I was wrong. They were in fact, Nadine informed me, just leaving a Front National meeting which, this being Paris, had been addressed by Jean Marie Le Pen, the charismatic leader of France’s far right nationalist party.

Around the same time, Nadine told me that a lot of her associates from school now went to, or hung around, a university located near the Jardin de Luxembourg and that this was a well known college with strong fascist links. She also said that someone she knew, the ubiquitous friend of a friend, had recently been arrested for shooting dead a black man, simply because he was black. This was Paris circa 1985/86.

The French don’t conceal their racism in the way that the English do, rather if they don’t like someone because of the colour of their skin, they tend to make it obvious. This was the big difference that I noticed between English racism and French racism, ours was concealed and wrapped up in niceties’ and politeness whereas the French just spat in your face or, if they were being polite, they would just turn their back on you. This didn’t make it right, it was just the way it was.

 This was true too of our racial parties: France’s Front National has always been a very different political animal to the UK’s National Front or its latest incarnation the British National Party in that in its leader Jean-Marie Le Pen it had a charismatic, pugnacious, humorous and highly effective public speaker who was able to build and maintain electoral support at between 10 and 15 per cent. This level, whilst not sufficient to get the party elected to office, meant that the Front National had been able to carve out a credible place in French politics without too much hassle in the form of opposition. This all changed in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen stood in the presidential elections and got voted through to the second round of a three-part contest. This gave him a real chance of gaining the Presidency. Quelle l’horreur!

 At this point the French media and opposition parties of all political persuasions behaved in a similar way to that in which the UK’s media and politicians are responding to Nick Griffin and the British National Party following Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC’s Question Time. They have unified against a common enemy with the single aim of stopping them at all costs. In France, this meant that life long communists and die-hard socialists would vote for the despised Jacques Chirac, the right-leaning, incumbent president that Le Pen was threatening to succeed. The media and the political opposition threw normal democratic rules aside and attacked Le Pen on an unprecedented scale, ultimately achieving their objective with the generally loathed Jacques Chirac obtaining a colossal 82 per cent of the vote. At no time did the hysterical French Establishment address the issue of why so many people had voted for Le Pen, instead the media damned them as at best, stupid, white, ignorant racist scum and at worst, stupid, white, ignorant, racist, Nazi scum. The Establishment being made up of white, highly intelligent, non-racist people who know best, of course.

In the UK, we are now following a similar path though in our own inimitable way. From the Queen to Ken Livingstone, to politicians and the nation’s media, virtually anyone who could has condemned the BBC’s decision to allow Nick Griffin air time. Yet, unlike the French leader Le Pen, Griffin is neither charismatic nor a particularly good speaker but, despite this, within 48 hours of a particularly unimpressive appearance on Question Time, 22 per cent of the UK’s population have said that they would seriously consider voting for the BNP. Cue shocked political pundits! Cue gasps of amazement! Cue anti BNP media frenzy!

Why? Why the hysteria and why the big potential increase in support for the BNP? Why indeed? For the new Establishment any form of politics or opinion that dares to criticize their multiracial utopia is an anathema, likewise the reinvented heirs to Blair, the Conservatives, are now so desperate for power and to be seen as ‘nice’ and ‘inclusive’ that David Cameron would probably black-up, cut off a limb and go gay if he could and our mainstream media is now so spineless when it comes to issues of race that despite a few rare exceptions they have almost universally joined in the assault on the BNP. Again, as in France, the fact that 22 per cent of the population would consider voting for the BNP is ignored as these people are again dismissed as ‘stupid, white, ignorant, racist, Nazi scum’.

Yet our erstwhile leaders and opinion formers in their absolute arrogance, sneers and rights off voters who fear for their country and their way of life, forgetting that these same people were never consulted or even asked if they wanted a ‘multicultural society’ and might now be seeking someone to give their fears a voice. This multiracial ‘utopia’ was a ‘vision’, unasked for and in the main unwelcome, and is a ‘vision’ which now threatens the stability of Europe. Yet an unelected cabal in Brussels is continuing to impose its vision of a multiethnic, irreligious, centralised, neosocialist utopia on its 27 member nations regardless of its peoples wants and this is why a growing number of their electorate are prepared to vote for political parties once thought beyond the pale.

The last twenty or so years have seen an orchestrated attempt by Europe’s leaders to deliberately alter the indigenous make up of Europe’s member states and while the political will may have varied from state to state the end result in most cases has been the same; a radical increase in immigration resulting in a seismic shift in each State’s population with immigrants placing an increasing demand on social, welfare and housing resources and in some areas altering the entire way-of-life of communities.

Many would argue that this is a good thing. That immigrants bring with them cultural diversity, new ideas, that they bring energy and vitality to otherwise staid and moribund societies and that this in turn boosts the economy. And in many instances this may be true. But ludicrous, unplanned and unrestrained immigration is also dangerous and grossly irresponsible and threatens the welfare not just of the indigenous population but also of immigrants already settled in an area.

Europe is now at a tipping point where immigration is actually threatening real societal change, change that is to be expected as immigrants grow in number and strength. Next, obviously and inextricably the new populations will want a bigger say in the way their adopted homeland is run. Their religions, their standards and so on, already in many cases tolerated and incorporated, will become increasingly important and as the scales tip from the old and aging indigenous populations, toward the young, growing, new populations, so people will become scared and fearful as the world, manners, customs and religions they know begin to disappear to be replaced by manners, customs, dress and religions that are both alien and to them, often threatening.

Yet, even now when it is obvious to even the most fanatical supporters of a multiracial State, that the resources of Europe are finite and limited, discussion and criticism of their utopia is still forbidden with anyone who dares to raise a voice against it branded a racist, ignorant or, to use the current politically correct term of abuse, Nazi scum. Yet criticism and discussion is crucial before the silent and silenced indigenous peoples of Europe are forced to seek the extreme in order to be heard. If they do that, then there may be more for the Establishment to worry about than whether or not a few second-rate fascists appear on the television. For then the people of Europe will be, like the disaffected Parisian racists of twenty years ago, either ready to kill someone for the colour of their skin or, if not, at least ready to vote for someone who is. In which case, it’s time to forget the niceties and spit in the face of multiculturalism before its too late.

SCUM NATION

Open any UK newspaper, log on, tune in, or whatever, and week in, week out, all year long, you’ll see story after story of some man, some son, someone who has been beaten, kicked, stabbed or shot to death on Britain’s streets. The offender nearly always either a blank-faced sub-human white twat or blank-faced sub-human black twat, linked only by their single figure IQs and amoeba-like social skills. What we are seeing is the spawn of generation I-don’t give-a-fuck mating with the children of I-feel-guilty-about-the-death-and-destruction of-WWII-so-I’ll-punish-no-one-and-live-a-life-of-total-indulgence-baby-boomers producing vicious sub-human vermin fit only for extermination, yet kept alive and allowed to breed by a nation state obsessed with political correctness, inclusivity and see-no-evil, speak-no-evil legislation. A state that is, in fact, sacrificing the rule of law and order and its duties in maintaining a democracy worthy of the name, on the alter of creating a touchy-feely Nirvana. Scum Nation to you and me.

Trying to cite an individual case as an example of our current malaise is pointless, as barely a day goes past without some new horror and some new sallow-faced scum boy criminal being paraded before us in the newspapers. Recently, the media was full of the plight of a mother with a disabled daughter who was persecuted so much by a particular group of vermin youth that she killed her daughter and herself by setting themselves on fire. Think just how desperate you would have to be to do that? The police, of course, did nothing to help her over the preceding months, even advising on one occasion, when youths had again gathered to shout abuse and throw stones at her house, to ‘close the curtains’ and perhaps they’ll go away. It's telling that, once the brouhaha around this story broke and the youths' families in turn felt the wrath of the mob, the police rushed to defend them from attack rather than, perhaps, arming their officers with sash windows or venetian blinds.

Examples like the mother hounded to death by vicious underclass dross are in fact all to easy to find, from the father kicked to death for asking youths to stop vandalising his car or to keep the noise down a bit to 21 year old Goth girl Sophie Lancaster, who was kicked to death last year while walking through a park on her way home on a summers evening. The mother of those responsible also found the later court proceeding so hilarious and the grieving of the murdered girls parents and friends so funny that she had to be ordered to stop laughing in court. Perhaps if her son on conviction had been shot through the back of the head rather than sentenced to a few years in one of our HM prison hotels and she had been forcibly sterilised to stop her producing anymore vermin she might have shut up. As it is, I am sure that she and her thug litter are doing just fine.

And why is Mummy Underclass Scum doing fine? Because, since the day her mother, Granny Underclass Scum, gave birth to her in a previous litter, she has been sucked into our great ‘breed for greed’ culture whereby money, clothes and a house are provided immediately mummy scum gives birth and all she has to do to contribute is to open her legs. This means that her litter can be looked after immediately without her ever having to work or think about the responsibility that usually comes with having children. It also allows time for the newly arrived infant scum to be prepared for their own entry into our ‘breed and greed’ culture a few years later without mummy scum being too ‘stressed out’ by life.

Female adolescent scum are usually able to breed and produce a litter at about 12 or 13 years and, from that point, can often be in season and ready to breed again within weeks of giving birth. This increases their value and wealth within their chosen career path and will enable them, like Mummy Scum, to get a house and smooth their entry into our government’s womb wealth scheme. It also means that the scum family is now secure and provided for from cradle to grave without the hassle of providing for itself. This is mainly because daddy scum belongs to the ‘cum and run’ school of fatherhood whose perceived duties end as soon as his cock's out of whatever means-tested minge he’s just got lucky with.

Young underclass males are the scourge of New Britain, surly, feral, with no focus beyond their own stupidity and with a world view so myopicly narrow that they are reduced to stabbing and shooting each other over postcodes and iffy trainers. No doubt these geographic throwbacks would stab themselves if they ever got a ‘return to sender’ letter from a rival borough. These street name sados and wannabe criminals, whose entire life consists of mooching around shopping malls and council estates dressed like a twat monk in a short robe, are not fit for purpose. The purpose, in this instance, being human life.

Usually a species, even germs, create, mutate and continue to propagate because there is  a benefit to their species in expanding their number, or of continuing to exist. The rise of our new sub-human species; scum-boy and scum-girl, however has broken natures rules. Were we lab rats or some form of bacteria, no doubt we would turn on these deformities and wipe them out but, because we are a caring community, we do the opposite and nurture them, feed and clothe them and then when they are big and strong, they thank us by stabbing and robbing us. Such is the way of the world in 21st Century New Britain.

This is our future; one that breeds but can’t read, one that steals but can’t work and one that kills because it doesn’t want to live or is too stupid to do more than exist.

Our society created this mess yet resolutely refuses to deal with it, rather it throws money and resources at a species that was created and spawned by the very excesses of our welfare culture and one which, given its womb wealth and breeding for greed training, will only ever take more and more. The state needs to be cruel to be kind, very cruel in fact and start penalizing illegitimate birth rather than rewarding it and then perhaps the womb can be separated from wealth and a child no longer seen as some form of cash commodity. It may also force the fathers and mothers of the feral vermin currently prowling our streets to do something about their offspring before next generation scum rises up from the sewers as on current trends they may actually cross the vermin / human divide in which case it will be a waste of timing drawing the curtains as they’ll come up through the sewer pipes.

THY SHALT NOT OFFEND, EVER!

Twenty years ago I made a short film, Visions of Ecstasy, which was refused a certificate for release on the grounds that it was potentially blasphemous, effectively banning the film and stopping it from ever being shown. In the summing up I was deemed to have ‘outraged the divinity of Christ’ and it was feared that the public broadcasting or distribution of my film was a threat to public order and since then, for better or worse, ‘visions’ has sat on my shelf gathering dust. Preserving God’s divinity and saving the country’s streets from riots and baying mobs seeking divine retribution. As a result of this I have had, aside from a loathing of State censorship, an equally strong dislike of religion, particularly when followers of a religion seek to use the State to enforce their values. So it was with some surprise this week that I found myself not only siding with some Christians but actually getting angry on their behalf as the zealots of political correctness, appeasement and ‘cultural diversity’ sought to further the advancement of their new PC Jerusalem by censoring personal beliefs and the dress of Christians.

In the first of three separate incidents, a Christian couple, Ben and Vogelenzang, were charged with breaching Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which apparently covers causing harassment, alarm or distress, because they allegedly insulted a Muslim woman. The Muslim in question was staying at the Bounty House Hotel in Liverpool, which is run by the Vogelenzangs, when a conversation arose about her faith. During the chat one of the topics discussed was whether Jesus was a minor prophet as Islam teaches or whether he was the son of God as Christianity teaches.

It was further stated by the fun-loving intellectual Mr Vogelenzang, that Mohammed was a warlord, while the equally philosophical Mrs Vogelenzang stated that she thought the burka was a form of bondage for women. Apparently this line of conversation so outraged the woman that she felt compelled to rush to the nearest policeman who, instead of telling her to grow up and get a life, questioned the Christian couple and charged them with a ‘religiously-aggravated public order offense’. They are now awaiting trial.

Now, to my mind, having a chat or an argument about politics or religion or whatever is what makes the world go round, and a religiously-aggravated assault would have meant that the Christians had donned Mahamoud Ahmadi-Nejad face masks and fist-fucked Ms sanctimonious up the arse while reciting the ten commandments and telling her to convert, as opposed to having a quiet tete-á-tete about the pros and cons of shrink-to-fit burkas. Still, I’m sure that the police know best and rounding up Christian law-breakers is really going to make us all feel safe out on the streets.

The UK’s next ‘feed them to the lions’ moment came when Exeter NHS nurse, Shirley Chaplin (no relation to Charlie, though he probably scripted her case), refused to remove her crucifix neckless and now faces the sack. Chaplin is the second nurse this year to suffer this fate as NHS nurse Caroline Petrie was suspended in February for the same ‘offense’. Chaplin has apparently worn her crucifix for 38 years without hordes of non Christians running out of Exeter’s NHS hospitals in shock and horror that a ‘christian’ was openly walking the wards.

It would have been interesting had Exeter’s wannabe twat-boy suicide bomber, Muslim convert Nicky Reilly, not failed in his attempt to blow up a café to see whether the local NHS authorities would have rushed around getting Muslim nurses to remove their ‘approved’ headscarves in case they gave offense to non-muslim infidels who had just had their limbs blown off? I doubt it.

The UK’s third Christian pogrom has, surprise, surprise, come from the Government, where so much nonsense comes from these days, and is contained in the hysteria-driven new legislation called ‘lets protect little children from everything and wrap them in cotton wool until they are 18’, or the ‘Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA)’, as it's more popularly known.

Under this new legislation, anyone coming within two miles of children has to be vetted by the ISA to see if they are a crazed sexual predator, murderer or a Scout master whose idea of getting ‘hands-on’ experience is to turn the local camp into a nonce nirvana. Christians, who are well known for their happy-clappy-touchy-feely tendencies, are of course worried that the authorities have singled out the ‘touchy-feely’ part of the bible for special attention, and they have.

From summer 2010, everyone from School governors to dentists and nurses (though not crucifix-wearing ones as they will have all been sacked) must have their backgrounds checked by the ISA, as must authors who visit schools and parents who organise lifts to sports matches and so on. Christians fear that, because of their beliefs on homosexuality, marriage and of course shrink-to-fit burkas, they could be unfairly targeted by this legislation and have their careers ruined as a result, which, given current trends, is quite likely. So now the UK's Christians, the people that for years who were seen as the guiding moral force in the land, the people who used to pack our churches on a Sunday morning and whose quaintness was, like rain on bank holidays, robins and Rupert annuals, forever England, are now being persecuted by the forces of multiculturalism, mediocrity and modernity.

Normally, the trials of tribulations of a few Christians would, like the idle wind, pass me by, but such is the speed and unceasing advance of political correctness, appeasement and abasement by the authorities to all things Islamic that I felt genuinely aggrieved by their plight. In particular because petty officialdom mixed with an almost fawning desire to please and carry favour with all things Sharia (note the Home Office announcement to its employees not to eat food in front of their Muslim co-workers during Ramadan as it might make them feel hungry or Councils desire to rename Christmas as a ‘holiday’ and to remove Christmas trees) is destroying our pagan/Christian roots and the moral basis on which we live.

The religious base of this country is pagan and then Christian and, whether we like Christianity or loathe it, its key commandments form the moral code which holds us together. We know that it is wrong to kill, to steal and to fuck our friends' partners and get jealous when someone has more than us and these rules and a few others have for centuries made us what we are. As we have have become less religious so the laws have been weakened and amended, we no longer lock homosexual men up or burn witches, but generally the Christian moral code still holds sway, or rather it did.

With the demise of Christianity will fall our values, not all at once of course and not immediately, but they will fall. Every assault on Christianity is an assault on our wider freedoms, on women’s freedoms, on sexual freedom, on, ironically, religious freedom and the freedom of speech and into the gap will step another religion. A religion whose moral code allows for no dissent, no sexual freedom, no individual rights and which will enforce its laws totally. It is a religion that would, were it in control, certainly not allow a member of another religion to discuss and comment on its shortfalls and allow complaints against it to be made in law. In fact one of its first acts, should it become the leading religion in the UK, will almost certainly be to abolish Section 5 of the Public Order Act and its ubiquitous religiously-aggravated public order offense. We should abolish it first, reclaim the moral high ground, celebrate our culture and protect the Christians in our midst, for without them the country will move another step closer to the abyss.

Hallelujah

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

For some reason, and without any rhyme, I have become increasingly obsessed by end of the world science fiction films these last few weeks. Usually my thoughts, such as they are, flit between the Third Reich, an idyllic England that probably never existed but in my mind resembles Devon circa 1965 and large, milky-white breasts preferably attached to a sex-crazed woman whose own obsession is to sit naked on my face and wriggle, slowly.

As an obsession this future sci fi doom scenario began quietly and, by obsessional standards, surreptitiously with my re-reading some predominately 1950s and 1960s novels over the last few weeks including John Wyndham’s brilliant Day of the Triffids and the gorgeously haunting Chocky, Edmund Cooper’s All Fools Day and Kronk and a few forgotten gems like Steve Frazee’s Sky Block (Bodley Head, 1955) and George O. Smith’s Hellflower (Bodley Head, 1955). These apocalyptic tomes sowed the seeds of my own personal journey to a kind of McCarthyite nirvana where mankind or rather mankind as personified by pockets of very middle class ‘nice’ people fought off nasty, untrustworthy aliens and, after many setbacks, won.

And thus it came to pass that I watched on an almost daily basis films like ‘War of the Worlds’ including both the 1953 version and the 2005 versions, Independence Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Day After, Threads, The Omega Man, Day of the Triffids, No Blade of Grass, Village of the Damned, The Earth Dies Screaming, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Gattica, I Robot, Planet of the Apes and a film that terrorized me as an eight year old, Dr Who - Invasion Earth 2150 AD.

Why my usually earth-bound mind had filled with end-of-the-world visions perplexed me for a while, particularly as all references to this phenomenon usually cite the fifties fear of communism and the burgeoning Cold War as the cause. Which, given that all the West has to fear coming out of Russia right now is the nouveau riche and visually disturbing fashion, meant I was obviously barking at the wrong shoulder pads. But fifties sci fi films did capture a mood and a sense of a nation's fear. Fear of communists and of invasion purvey films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Mars more than anything else and, despite Senator Joe McCarthy's perhaps overzealous patriotism, the alien was the bad guy, and the bad guy was communist scum, admittedly portrayed as a little green man, but commie scum nevertheless.

It is interesting that in the original 1953 version of War of the Worlds, mankind, personified by action man actor Gene Barry, is prepared to fight the alien no matter what the cost and to exhaust every remedy in their desire to fight to the last. But in Spielberg's 2005 reworking of the War of the Worlds. mankind, personified by new man Tom Cruise, is portrayed as a fleeing, craven rabble where even the ‘hero’ is shown killing a man who had hidden him and his daughter from the aliens because the man who saves him is prepared to fight the invader and Cruise is worried that the noise of the man’s gun might alert other nearby aliens and consequently endanger him and his daughter. So Spielberg reduces the fighter to a crazed ‘survivalist’ that Cruise has to kill in order to survive. Crazed man bad, craven man good is the modern message which that means that 21st Century man doesn’t kill and fight the invader he hides and flees and lets the alien assimilate him and his culture. Ultimately of course, mankind fails and is only saved by our bacteria which, unsurprisingly given how generally revolting we all are, poisons and kills the aliens. But still Spielberg leads by example and the example is give in.

In our brave new world there is no modern McCarthy to alert the citizens to the threat of an alien, dangerous ideal. Nor is there a fear of another Cold War because Communism has been trounced by the Capitalist West and hurrah the wicked commie alien witch is dead. Or is she? Perhaps she’s just changed sex, grown a beard and started believing in an ideology that is as vicious and as threatening to our way of life as anything that Marx and Lenin concocted. In fact, if anything, the witches new cave dwelling cronies are more dangerous because, since the fifties, we have lost the will to fight the alien and those that can or do want to fight, are portrayed, like Spielberg's gibbering survivalist, as dangerous fools. It is no coincidence that George Bush’s attempts, tragic as they were, to fight Islam were damned as the futile gestures of a ‘stupid’ man. The new ‘wise’ men reason and emphasize with the alien and alien culture for they see only goodness in aliens and will ‘assimilate’ their culture into our culture and eventually our differences will blur and we will all live as one. Cue singing birds and smiling, multi ethnic crowd.

In the post WWII world, where the shadow cast by Nagasaki and Hiroshima was still fresh and communist expansion into China and Korea were just happening, McCarthy saw a threat to the US and the US way of life that was very real and his ‘scare-monger’ views permeated society creating witch-hunts against perceived communists. Reds-under-the-bed scare stories were everywhere and many card carrying communists, trade unionists, socialists and indeed totally innocentists were arrested and quizzed by the FBI and also, which is often forgotten, many real Moscow connected spies and radicals were outed and exposed. Despite the cost in liberal sensibilities and a few left wing casualties, the Cold War was won and communist ideology silenced.

The ‘red’ Russian alien too would eventually be defeated, and ironically by another ‘tough’ actor from the fifties, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was also portrayed as stupid and hateful by the liberal media and, in particular, Europe’s left-leaning intelligentsia who ruthlessly lampooned Reagan from the moment he took office. They were so clever and he was so stupid but then what could Europe expect from America? What indeed. Here, proclaimed the liberal alien loving intelligentsia, is a crazed, gibbering, communist-baiting half-wit who will start a nuclear war, a man who won’t even talk to the Russian aliens. Well the alien-loving intelligentsia were wrong and the ‘stupid’ actor was right and communism collapsed and right now the intelligentsia are wrong again, only now there’s a ‘smart’ man in the Whitehouse with the hots for bearded alien witches and Spielberg is writing the script.

The 21st Century alien is not to be feared, its followers are not to be hated, and most of all it is not to be fought. In fact we created the alien with our bad policies and imperialist ways and now must make amends and even if the aliens do bad things now and then like fly planes into tall buildings or blow up tube trains we mustn’t get angry because most aliens aren’t like that and when they are its our fault anyway. We should in fact listen to the new Obama disciples, men like actor Sean Penn and director Oliver Stone, who has just made a love-you hugumentary about Venezuelan President, the thug Hugo Chavez, and who paraded with him arm in arm at the Venice film festival last week. Stone leads by example and gets into bed with the enemy. Not for Stone, the red-under-the-bed, the reds in his world are in his bed and fucking him up the arse!

No, the witch is not dead, she’s alive, has a beard, a poe-face, a hatred of women and a circumcised clitoris-severing cock and is preparing to lead her people out of the caves and into the promised land or, to be more specific, Europe. We now live in a world where the fifties' science fiction cold war analogies have become realities, only no one is listening. We need a big bad wolf like McCarthy to stir the people up and champion our imperialist, capitalist, wonderful and flawed world before it is too late and yes, we probably need a ‘stupid’ commie hating leader too. One who speaks from the heart rather than one who speaks well to the heart and who isn’t afraid to look a crafty alien in the eye from time to time and, if necessary, blow his head off. But most of all we need to tell Oliver Stone he’s crap.

Mad, Bad and Culled: Come Back Eugenics, All is Forgiven

Apparently the UK now has some 84,150 people locked up in its prisons, give or take the odd dying train-robber and Libyan terrorist, with more being added every day. This, given the fact that you have to be on your twentieth offense or whatever before one of our courts would even consider locking you up, means that there are probably one to two million criminally minded types or their dependents hanging around, feeding off welfare, stealing what they can, breeding or generally behaving like some parasitic munchkin any one time.

This vast criminally-minded sway of the population is the Underclass, the great cradle to grave, totally welfare dependent, semi-literate, thieving subhuman dross that has sunk its rotten teeth into the soft belly of Brown’s Britain and is, in conjunction with the Government, bleeding it dry.

For years successive UK governments have cosseted the weak, the needy and the medically unfit along with the undeserving, the could work but won’t, those that can take whatever the State has to offer and more, and turn welfare dependency into an art form. They are encouraged to do so at every turn by a system that rewards sloth and indolence as much as it penalizes success. 21st Century Britain is rotting from the inside and yet our leaders go on prescribing more of the same, like some quack doctor that goes on pumping mercury into a patient even when it is obvious that his medicine is killing him.

Our ‘we’re all victims now’ culture, coupled with the States self-flagellating obsession with human rights and being seen to be politically correct, has now become so insidious and all pervasive that many of us utter and enact PC pieties with the same gusto that a religious zealot once used in trying to do, and being seen to do, God’s work. Both kinds of zealotry are insufferable and both carry the same degree of saintly sanctimoniousness but whereas, at least for most of the last hundred years, Christianity operated separately from the state and strived to instill a basic set of moral values in the population, the modern politically driven PC mandarin is driven not by morality but by the spurious concept that all humans have rights and that, contrary to modern notions of evolution, that we are also all equal.

We are also all vulnerable and must therefore also be protected from all possible harm which has led to the formation and writing of new legislation under the ‘catch-all’ header of ‘Health and Safety’, the politically correct world’s Sermon on the Mount, the Holy Grail of the blame someone else, Help me I’m a victim give me compensation, Ism-ist culture that is destroying Western life faster than the plague wiped out our ancestors.

Now a criminal has rights, his skin colour cannot be mentioned as that is racist, his photograph cannot be displayed as that breaches his human rights, his religion has to be respected along with his sexuality, food intake, living space, hair style, and so on infinitum. The Victim has less rights. In the UK, defending your home against burglars can make you more of a criminal that the burglar. Hurting or hitting a criminal is a minefield of politically driven nonsense that rarely favours the victim and all the while the crime rate climbs, though now of course criminals can add the ‘credit crunch’ to their lexicon of woes, grievances and excuses for their criminality. This is the ‘you made me a criminal so my crime is your fault’ concept. We are in fact the cause of crime, not the criminals.

I though would like to see a state that removed all rights from criminals other that the right to exist and only then if they had committed a crime that didn’t warrant the death penalty. Murderers and other criminal dross should be killed. To my mind, the day that a criminal commits a crime is the day that their ‘human rights’ cease. California’s “three strikes and you’re out’ legislation whereby any criminal convicted of more than three offenses was put away for life seemed pretty fair. If you haven’t learned that crime is pretty stupid after getting caught and convicted twice then maybe jail is the best place for you to be after all.

In the US and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a far more dramatic, draconian and, many would say, unacceptable policy with regards not just to criminals, but to their offspring, families, the disabled, the infirm, and those on the margins of society, this policy's name was Eugenics and in the US a policy of sterilizing criminals to stop them breeding and creating more criminals caused consternation and fear in prisons throughout the country. Eventually the war and concerns at the Germans' capacity for death (even in the early 1930s the Nazis were killing tens of thousands of the so-called feeble-minded and sterilizing thousands more under the guise of eugenics) ensured that US lawyers would be able to protect prisoners' rights to their bodies.

Consigned to the lunatic fridges of the science world after WWII’s eugenics nightmare showed that the Nazis' enthusiasm for bumping off anyone with so much as a cleft palette had led to the killing of some six million Jews, homosexuals, communists, Slavs and a large number of Gypsies, meant that the idea of the State killing off its perceived undesirables was going to have to take a back seat for a while. But, ideas like Eugenics, which is basically the study or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive traits), have a habit of coming back. As they say in the bible (Genesis 40-41) ‘you can’t keep a good man down’ (though actually you can if you shoot him).

Modern science, with its ability to ‘enhance’ babies in the womb, clone, alter cells, preventing certain hereditary diseases from occurring, understanding DNA and so on, show that we are getting extremely close to creating a ‘perfect’ human or at least science's idea of a perfect human. Indeed, James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, who is also an outspoken proponent of using genetic engineering to "redesign" future children and "improve" the human species. said that: "If you really are stupid, I would call that a disease.... So I'd like to get rid of that.... Those parents who enhance their children, then their children are going to be the ones who dominate the world.... People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

Yet, while the world talks of the perfect human, our society appears obsessed with encouraging the rise of the imperfect human. We dumb down, we despise elites, we mock intelligence and celebrate stupidity, we ignore differences of race and ability for fear of nebulous ‘rights’ and we nurture a parasitic criminal underclass allowing it to breed and fester while undermining and damning the rest of society. The underclass is like a great sway of vermin that lives, like rats, only a few feet from us at any one time. The underclass does no work, contributes nothing, is uneducated, steals, is violent, takes up property and landspace, and constantly whines for more. It is ungrateful, vile, and dangerous, yet we pay it millions upon millions of pounds every year. We provide the feckless young underclass girls, pregnant almost as soon as they can be, with homes and money, rewarding their careless promiscuity, young underclass males can procreate at will as the state will pay for their offspring. All responsibility for their actions is absolved and paid for by the State. This is anti-eugenics, the rise of stupidman.

The 21st Century Brave New World is not populated by the beautiful and the ultra intelligent rather we are evolving the super-stupid. The new stupidtelligentsia is probably the first species on earth that is regressing and disproving Darwin’s theory of evolution at the same time. Each generation born in the underclass has less brain power, is more brutal, less able to speak and more criminally minded that the last and each generation is more likely to destroy the hand that feeds it, us.

Eugenics may have had a bad start and a bad history but it offers a solution for the future, a solution that we will inevitably begin to be used as it becomes available. For, as sure as part of our population rejoices in its own squallor and simian qualities, so another will be striving for higher goals, to produce the perfect human and drive the human race forwards. It will be interesting to see how the champions of the underclass and of political correctness and Health and Safety deal with the rise of the über babe... Born of human to be better than what went before, or born of subhuman to be less than... No doubt the only winners, as in all things, will be the lawyers, a species that neither evolves or regresses but, like God, just is.

THE AGE OF THE ELOI

The soft, fluffy, cotton wool mindset that seems to have reduced most of the world's left/right political animals to a sort of sludge-brained Eloi have somehow convinced themselves and, seemingly, most of the population, that the secret of a happy life is now to log-on, dumb-down, spend-large, think-small (if at all) and care lots. Empathy is the new apathy. I feel, you feel, we all feel but ideally I feel more than you. Now, if a butterfly sheds a tear in Japan, there’s hysterical grief in New York.

From President Obama’s recent beer swilling love-in with a policeman and a crabby black professor whose brilliant IQ he demonstrated by breaking into his own house (the professor then cleverly got himself arrested by getting all mouthy with the policeman who had come to check out a reported burglary), to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s lamentable attempt at bonhomie on breakfast TV, our leaders strive to be our mates.

A few weeks ago, when Gordon Brown tried to get all pally with the nation over concerns that hirsute singer Susan Boyle was going loopy and spent his airtime discussing Boyle, while at that very moment Moslem psychos were dicing their British hostages (reader’s may recall that Boyle’s sudden fame and wealth coupled with her inability to shave her face had made her go insane). No doubt the link between sudden fame and madness might go some way to explaining Brown’s own transition from smug and inept, but little known Chancellor of the Exchequer, to smug, power-crazed, I-can-walk-on-water-and-heal-the-world loony, Prime Minister. Our leaders are now desperate to connect with the people and more importantly to be seen connecting with the people. To show us that they ‘feel’ and ‘share’ our concerns: that our issues, no matter how trivial, are now their issues. That these tears of concerns are crocodile tears and not butterfly tears is now irrelevant, if they feel then we feel and vice versa.

Obama maybe in charge of the most powerful nation on earth, but years of touchy-feely rhetoric from the liberal left/right intelligentsia, coupled with his predecessors' failings and perceived gungho US-style Jingoism, have created the USA’s first Presidential enoch. Obama may be black, but his balls are distinctly pink and, judging from the amount of make-up he’s wearing, possibly shrinking as well. So when Iran’s religious thugs stamped all over their people’s valiant attempt at protest it was no surprise that the US uttered barely a word in protest. It should also be no surprise that Iran is now storming ahead developing their nuclear bomb or that North Korea can can lob nuclear test missiles around with impunity . After all, what’s Obama’s new all inclusive US of A going to do to stop them? Have a group hug probably or, maybe, if Obama gets really angry, he’ll stamp his feet and buy a new dress - cos he’s worth it and anyway that’ll show ‘em.

Our leaders though are only reflecting the deeper ‘nicey’ malaise that is sweeping the West. Now that political correctness, health and safety mania, sexual, religious and racial offend-thee-not legislation and a total obsession with making sure that no one is hurt or emotionally upset by life we are collectively dumbing down and regressing so fast that soon we’ll all be on a par with the Taliban. Lest we forget the Taliban are a species that, in 2000 years, has barely evolved beyond the stone-age; not, for them two brain cells when one will do.

It is telling too that the UK’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband and the Obama administration now want to arrange for talks and hugging with the Taliban. No doubt in this touchy-feely world we can overlook the fact that the Taliban blows up and murders school children in an effort to stop young girls being educated, that men can be killed for shaving and that being caught with satanic objects like a radio will get you thrown into a Taliban slammer. The liberal left/right coalition also conveniently ignores and turns a blind eye to the fact that the Taliban’s treatment of women is on a par with our treatment of battery hens only worse, given that we thankfully don’t stone chickens to death or burn them alive. Oh and lest we forget to the Taliban homosexuality is an abomination, so no same-sex beard love-ins in Afghanistan unless Susan Boyle decides to drop in for a sing-along and a bit of back door action.

We now have a world at the pinnacle of our achievement so far and we can either progress or, in a fit of mass hysteria, embrace a utopia that never was, can be, nor will ever be despite Obama’s pink testicles and Gordon Brown’s Saviour complex. What we have instead is a slowly evolving do nothing, want everything, emotional feel for everyone, upset no one, we are all equal, no gain cos we don’t want the pain, con trick. We are rapidly morphing from a can be, can do people, into a should we, can we, what if population of dullards not fit for anything except emotional turpitude and emphasizing with celebrities.

In the 1960s film version of H G Wells novel the Time Machine, the hero, played by actor Rod Taylor, stumbles across a seemingly idilic scene where young, good looking people sit around a river bank eating and drinking, seemingly without a care in the world. Suddenly a young woman falls into the river and starts drowning. She screams but the people ignore her cries and carry on eating and drinking, oblivious to her plight. These are the Eloi, a people who want everything but do nothing.

Then today a news story broke of a man who drowned in 18 inches of water after his car plunged down a steep bank into a stream. The rescue services and police arrived quickly along with a ‘health and safety’ officer who deemed the bank and water too dangerous for the men present to attempt to rescue the man and consequently a unit with 'water experience' were summoned from 50 mies away. While they waited for the second unit to arrive the men present sat around drinking tea while the man cried for help and died.

In the Time Machine the hero, in despair at what mankind had become, cried out to the Eloi:

"What have you done? Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating so that you can let it crumble to dust. A million years of sensitive men dying for their dreams, for what?!!! So you can swim, and dance, and play”.

Had the film been made now Rod Taylor would of course have hugged them...

SPASTICS ELASTIC

The reissuing of the book Art of the Nasty which Salvation originally published in 1998, which has now been revised and updated and published anew by FAB Press, has, along with the passing uncut of Lars von Triers' new film The Antichrist and the reclassifying of an episode of Friends from PG to a 12 for the use of the expression ‘laundry spaz’, meant that film censorship is again in the news. Has the BBFC gone too far? Is the BBFC too soft on sex and violence? Is the reclassifying of Friends politically correct lunacy?

Who knows and who cares?

What matters ultimately is the quality of the work on screen and our response to it. Adults will respond to something that they don’t like or which offends their tastes by switching off, not buying something or through disinterest. They do not need a censor telling them that this year's PC bugbears are offensive ‘words’, but showing a close-up of a woman hacking off her clitoris or a man ejaculating blood, as is the case in The Antichrist, is now OK.

Jennifer Aniston’s Friends character, Rachel, used the expression ‘laundry spaz’ to describe her ineptness in using a washing machine. According to the BBFC’s head of policy, Peter Johnson, ‘spaz’ is “short for spastic or ‘mong’ (originally a reference to people with Down’s syndrome), which is quite common in American works and we (the BBFC) have found that UK audiences are quite offended... research told us that for the public this is now as important as drugs or horror or sex”. Boo hoo.

What Mr Johnson and co at the BBFC mean is that they now seek offense, that they see racial and disability discrimination, sexism, agism, homophobia and religious hatred seeping out of the cinema screen relentlessly. Now censorship is morphing, moving away from the old taboos of the sexually explicit and the gratuitously violent and into a new, quasi Orwellian world of thought control and new speak where disapproved words and ideas outside of the new norms are excised and erased forever.

This move is the censors Shangrila where they can be part of the brave new world where hatred and wickedness are excised not just from film but ultimately from our minds. Spaz may have been one small word for Rachel but it was a whole dictionary for the BBFC. Already, filmmakers and scriptwriters are pouring over their Thesauruses in search of nicer, more cryptic ways, of calling a dwarf a ‘dwarf’ or of insulting a black or gay man without using the ‘n’ or ‘f’ words. If they can’t find the appropriate ‘nicer’ euphemism then rest assured that the BBFC will have a whole selection of tasty morsels in their new ‘it's a wonderful world’ lexicon of life. When opened, it plays ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’, unless you’re a spaz of course in which case you can just dribble along to the chorus. Offensive? Well yes. Should I or anyone else be stopped from saying things like this? No.

The episode of Friends that caused all the fuss was an early episode that consequently fell foul of the BBFC’s new offend-thee-not word holocaust, which is currently culling non pc words from our vocabulary faster that you say spastics elastic to someone with a speech impediment. Such is the odious advancement of the notion that we are all equal and of equal worth (except white, working class males and Christians who are of course scum), and being of equal worth should not be offended or discriminated against in any way least we get upset or emotionally damaged. Hence highlighting the noxious and improper use of the word ‘spaz’ in Friends which might not only ‘offend’ us but legitimate spazes as well, that is someone born with spastic diplegia, or hypertonia, which is better known as cerebral palsy, or just plain ‘spastic’ but which has now be reclassified by the generic term ‘disabled’. Likewise the ‘Spastics Society’ was rechristened ‘Scope’ in 1994 which of course means nothing and offends no one and therefore conforms to the new pc mantras of inclusivity, touchyfeely, niceness where no one gets hurt. No matter that you have an incurable neurological disorder that will probably kill you by age thirty, just so long as no one refers to you as a spaz it’ll all be alright and life is so much better for the rest of us now that your offensive sounding ‘spastic’ disability has morphed into ‘scope’, which of course rhymes with ‘hope’, which is wonderful and sounds so much nicer.

Likewise, the BBFC will no doubt be removing words like nigger, poof, faggot, cripple, spic, yid and so on from films where their use is deemed inappropriate or likely to cause offense. Yet, why is it so offensive? ‘Sticks and stones may break our bones but words will never hurt us’ children use to chant in response to being called a fat pig, or indeed a spaz. Yet in our new utopian society where you can get three months community service for mugging someone yet years for offending another race or religion, words not only hurt they are deemed so dangerous that they cannot be heard or spoken. Silence in Brown’s Britain is indeed golden.

What is it that modern society now fears so much that we have to censor words, and has in a sense made words more alarming to the BBFC than the sight of a woman mutilating her vagina? Is it that words hurt? Or that words make us do things, that they inspire us to hate as well as to love or like? That they can make us despise someone or something that pictures cannot, or is it that these now ‘forbidden’ words are part of something intangible that the new politically correct quasi religion of mainstream soft left/right political thought cannot tolerate? That some thoughts and the words that represent them are now deemed so dangerous that they have become the new taboos? I think so.

Hatred of a religion or race is a taboo. Hatred of a particular sexuality is a taboo. So is questioning women’s rights or the rights of the disabled or rights for other groups. All are now protected and enshrined in law. Discrimination is in many cases a crime as is the telling of racist or sexist or religious jokes to various degrees a crime. One may argue that this is a good thing. That allowing groups and individuals the freedom to express hate or to promote hatred against an ethnic or specific minority is bad and unnecessary in these enlightened times. Yet there is a balance to be struck between protecting society from those that potentially would destroy it or aspects of it and an individual's right to express his or her disgust, or hatred of that society.

By censoring words, the BBFC and the government that sanctions and endorses their decisions are denying those individuals, and the wider voice of dissension that doesn’t buy into this new nicetopia, a voice. And when people are denied a voice they get angry.

In the US, freedom of expression is enshrined in law as the First Amendment and protects the extremes from the mainstream. So pornographers and the Ku Klux Klan can sup with Pro Lifers and radical Islamists and no one gets hurts. American society manages to be what the UK aspires to be, but which in our new politically driven times is failing to be; a true Democracy. The BBFC and those that seek and take offense so readily should remember that the first recorded case of word censorship was of the philosopher Socrates whose writings were believed to be corrupting youth, his punishment was death...

I VOTE, THEREFORE I AM

The last few weeks have been historic for many reasons. In the UK, our main political parties have disgraced themselves so much that they may well have sown the seeds of their own destruction. Indeed, Labour and the rubbish that is Gordon Brown may well be dying before our eyes and it may yet be that Labour will collapse as an electoral force in much the same way that the Liberals did in 1921 when dissatisfaction, with their handling of the First World War, the suffragettes and Irish Home Rule, all combined to convince the electorate that the once great Liberal party was a weak and spent force. Indeed, in the general election of 1922 the Liberal vote totally collapsed allowing the Labour Party to become the main opposition to the Conservatives for the first time. The Liberal Party never recovered...

This would be exciting if the Conservative or Liberal parties offered an exciting alternative, unfortunately they don’t, in fact, many of the expenses-fiddling MPs belong to the Conservative Party anyway and, more importantly, neither the Tories or the Liberals have anything new to say. The reality is that our three once great political parties and those that join them and represent them at Westminster are tired, bereft of ideas, indolent and corrupt. Theirs is the politics of the sound bite and the vacuous, of the craven preaching to craving, whose political agenda is that of the prostitute who ‘will be whatever you want me to be’ and whose ‘passionate beliefs’ are rehearsed and acted out before us with all the conviction of a poor man’s Hamlet performed by the local amateur dramatic society.

Anyone who watched Gordon Brown’s ludicrous ramblings last week as he sought to galvanise Labour Party members would have seen right through Brown’s vainglorious displays of ‘passion’ as he listed his intention, at a time when the country is collapsing under the burden of State debt, of spending yet more money we don’t have eliminating child poverty, youth unemployment, third world hunger and, if I remember correctly, curing AIDS in Africa. Each tear-jerker policy accompanied by Brown’s now familiar punching of his fist into the palm of his other hand, while with his one good eye he stares wildly around like some myopic cyclops buoyed up on crack-cocaine and his own rhetoric. No wonder that the latest reports have him planning to slink out of office some time soon so avoiding the double whammy of a decimated Labour vote and an economy reduced to the level of basket case Zimbabwe. It's no surprise that Gordon Brown is suddenly so keen on giving money to Africa as the only countries likely to take in a buffoon like Brown once he decides to flee the UK as his financial chickens come home to roost will be the the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia or Zimbabwe, though I suspect that even Robert Mugabe may think twice before letting Brown get at his coffers.

So it was moving and wonderful to see the brave and truly passionate men and women of Iran braving that regime's religious zealots and Revolutionary Guards to march through Tehran’s streets demanding that their votes count. We forget in the UK when we take our democracy for granted that, in other countries, the right to vote is often a fragile right and that people, as in Iraq and Iran, brave life and limb literally just to put their precious ‘X’ next to their candidate of choice.

I remember the collapse of the Shah’s regime in 1979 and watched the Iranian Revolution unfold as an impotent West and in particular an impotent and useless US administration led by Jimmy Carter, floundered and vacillated as disaster followed disaster and the seeds of Islamic fundamentalism were sown. So it would be genuinely exciting if the people of Iran were able to topple and overthrow what is currently one of the most destabilizing and dangerous states in the world. It is also worth remembering that the pre-revolutionary Iran was one of the most pro West Muslim countries in the Arab world and one of the most modern and forward looking despite the Shah’s excesses and abuses of power and its people deserve a lot better than being led by a second rate Holocaust denier with a death wish who wants to lob nuclear bombs around.

It's a shame then that, while some of those most deserving of democracy fight and die for their right to choose their political leaders and style of government that, in the UK, we seem to have chosen the ‘am I bovvered?’ path to political oblivion. It's ironic too that we have democracy but are represented by politicians and political parties that are so ghastly that we can no longer be bothered to vote while those who can’t vote but want to are currently represented by some of the bravest people alive, themselves.

Perhaps when the UK’s political system collapses or when our increasingly invasive police state finally crosses the line and takes control because our politicians are so crap that they can no longer do their job then people may realise what we had. Though I doubt it, for now our democracy is about the freedom to watch Jade Goody die, or read Katie Price’s thoughts on sex or fly to our second home in Malaga or whatever. Where is my Vote? is the cry on the streets of Tehran ours may well be Vote - Why should I?

We may soon have the answer.

Democracy Betrayed, Betrayed by Democracy

England is often cited as the Mother of Democracy, a defender of freedom and a nation that values the beliefs and hopes of its citizens above all, and who will, if necessary, defend those beliefs to the death. Yet, since this nation and its people last fought for its survival in World War II, some 70 years ago, our Governments, politicians, and the Establishment that nurtures them have slowly eroded our freedoms, ignored the values of this nations people, mocked our culture and betrayed our beliefs. In so doing, they have created a society and country that is corrupt, decadent (in a bad way) and totally at odds with the nation our forebears fought and died for all those years ago.

These last few months have shown the people of this country, the ‘Mother of Democracy’ just how corrupt, weak, criminal, shameless and our utterly immoral our politicians and the Establishment have become. Not content with riding rough-shod over the values of centuries, of destroying this nations identity, of mocking its laws, its religions, its indigenous peoples and our morals they have looted and stolen at will. The credit crunch and the expenses scandal may well prove to be the defining moment, the events that finally tipped the scales between public indifference to the machinations of our self-serving politicians and financial institutions to real public anger at our current malaise.

What Labour has done, as to various degrees the majority of governments since 1945, is pursue the creation of a racially harmonious, sexually progressive and socially cohesive society where crime, poverty, racialism, disadvantage, class divides and equal opportunity prevailed. Indeed, with the best of intentions, the new European ideal was to be colour blind, racially mixed, classless, sexless and devoid of strife and, in order to achieve this, our leaders and betters have passed umpteen laws and sublimated our culture in pursuit of an unattainable Utopia that has absolutely ignored our past and will destroy our future.

So it is, for the last 65 years our politicians gradually, and with increasing fervor under New Labour, have sought to limit opposition and silence criticism of their new multi-cultural, multi-sexual, multi-everything Shangri La. Yet, by criminalizing our right to expression, successive governments have in turn denied us the benefits of the Democracy bequeathed to us by forefathers. Instead, we are being subjected to the iniquities and vagaries of a vile, weak and utterly useless system of beliefs that has no mandate, no validity and no longer even the veneer that it has the law on its side. For the utter contempt by which our politicians, and the Establishment which props them up, have lined their pockets and feathered their nests should be the last straw, for democracy has damned us and we in turn should damn the democracy that protects them.

What is the point of democracy if those empowered by its citizens steal from its coffers and pursue political objectives regardless of the wishes of its citizens? Maybe it's because our politicians hold us in contempt. Maybe its because our hopes and fears are too basic and simple for our grandiose politicians, with their notions of a vast multicultural disneyland, to bother with.

After all, most people believe in the death penalty for murder and child molestation, yet such attitudes are mocked by our leaders. People under the threat of prosecution may seem to embrace the fact that successive governments have filled this country to overflowing with the world's human flotsam and jetsam, and that the son of God was probably a sodomite who took it up the ass to save the mankind yet, I think not.

Rather it may be that the people of this country are sick of the rubbish done to them in their name. Sick of the vested interest groups lining their bank accounts with Euro grants paid for by our taxes. Sick of lying and thieving politicians who patronize them on the one hand and buy their second homes from them on the other and, most of all I suspect, sick of the mess that England has become.

Politicians may say sorry but words cost nothing and, in these circumstances, come very cheap indeed. In fact, Gordon Brown and his ilk are, in my opinion, for their fleecing and making destitute of our economy and in the mass immigration that they have overseen and encouraged, treasonable. They have engineered the virtual financial and racial destruction of our nation and it is yet possible that this country will collapse or at best emerge greatly altered. How altered depends on how angry the people of England are. In times passed, traitors' heads were stuck up on pikes on the top of the Tower of London, where their sightless dead eyes could gaze out over the City of London. It would be fitting if Brown and his cronies could share the same fate. So I hope that the people of this nation are very angry indeed...

DEFENDING THE TORTURERS, OFFENDING THE TORTURED

President Obama’s decision to name the names of those in the Bush administration who sanctioned the use of torture, including possibly Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and ex-President George W Bush, and authorise the release of hundreds of photos of Guantanamo Bay inmates in various stages of abuse, have generally been greeted with glee by the Obama camp and Obamamites worldwide. Bush was loathed, the war in Iraq generally hated and 2001’s Twin Towers attack is beginning to fade into history so the Democrats' decision to ram home their recent election victory by damning the already wounded and discredited Republian party probably seems like a good idea.

Who cares if the CIA is weakened in the process, or that US and, by extension, the West’s national security is compromised, or that the US government is now so driven by partisan interests that it will endanger its own operatives in pursuit of some Republican scalps? Of course torture is abhorrent, and yes of course the US Government in an ideal world shouldn’t be sanctioning its use. But this is not an ideal world and the US and the West is effectively at war with an ideologically-driven enemy whose long term aim is the total destruction of the West’s way of life, its religions, its beliefs, its democracies and who is prepared to use any means, including nuclear, biological and extreme terrorist acts to achieve them.

No doubt President Obama’s new happy-clappy style of global diplomacy plays well with his supporters, raised at they have been on media driven, West Wing style faux politics in which nicey replaces nasty and a few Kennedy style sound-bites will get Iran, the Taliban, North Korea and the world’s assorted US haters to put flowers in their hair and shout hallelujah. Maybe they will and the world will enter a new golden age of peace and prosperity where torturers and terrorists are just bogey men parents conjure up to frighten naughty children and disputes are settled over tea and biscuits and no one gets hurt anymore. Sounds possible.

Seventy years ago, the world was so fearful of war that appeasement, the condoning and tolerating of national aggression by the likes of Hitler’s Germany, Musslini’s Italy and a resurgent nationalist Japan and a revolutionary Russia, became the new peace corps buzz word; better, in fact, craven servility at any price than war. No doubt Obama’s recent declaration of love for Iran’s loony Presindent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his limp response to North Korea’s resumption of long-range missile tests are pointers to Obama’s new post-Bush, post-torture paradise but, personally, I think that they are seriously naïve miscalculations of very dangerous and cunning enemies.

In a world in which strength and power ultimately rule the Bush administration’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan may be viewed more kindly by history than they are now. Equally the US’s use of torture techniques to extract information, whilst unpleasant, may also be seen as the lesser of two evils; the greater evil being a successful terrorist attack on US or European soil. If, in the next four years of the Obama administration, there is a successful terrorist attack on US soil, and I believe that there is a strong chance of this, then Obama’s more conciliatory approach to world diplomacy will be partly to blame, if only for encouraging its enemies into thinking that the US is becoming a soft target again.

I personally doubt if torture has any valid use, but then I’m not a soldier, nor am I at the cutting edge of the fight against Al Quieda, but equally I am well aware that things happen in war and in the quasi-legal world of counter-terrorism which are not nice and which, were I a crusading human rights lawyer, might also breach several statutes. However, if it keeps me and the West safe and if that means looking the other way because someone has spat on the Koran or smacked a possible suicide bomber in the face then so be it. For all Bush’s faults it is important to remember that there has been no terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11, will Obama be able to say that after eight torture-free years in office?

It may be that if, in the future, Obama has to stand amidst the ruins of some much loved part of America, as Bush did after 9/11, and address the nation following a successful terrorist attack, that he and the Democrats may yet rue the day that they brought the world of human rights and political correctness into the shadowy world of counter-terrorism where it has no place and no role.

General Sherman over a hundred years ago pretty well summed it up:

‘You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out; I know I had no hand in making this war; and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace”

THE UK’S DEATH BY A THOUSAND LAWS

The Chinese have many skills, amongst them is a greatness for intricate and delicate work, often creating incredibly fine and minute sculptures and carvings. However, in the past the Chinese also utilized their skills in other ways, among them being killing a man by a 1000 cuts and pumping him full of opium so that as he was slowly cut and sliced to death, his mind sent him into raptures of ecstasy making victims exhibit ghastly smiles and euphoric grins even as their executioners cut off limbs and removed organs. Such was the executioners skill that they could literally prolong the agony until exactly the requisite 1000 cuts had been administered.

New Labour seems to have acquired similar skills, though rather than cuts they are killing us with new laws. Since 1997, when they were elected, Labour have passed over 1000 new pieces of legislation that can send a UK citizen to prison and, with each passing month, further laws are added. Yet there are no protests, just resignation or blithe acceptance, in most cases. A few weeks ago, legislation was sanctioned that makes homophobia a hate crime, now even telling a homosexually-themed joke will fall within the laws remit.

A few comedians protested but generally no one really cared, for many this was a good thing and, after all, hating people for their sexuality is wrong as is hating people for their religion, their disabilities, their race, their lack of achievement, their physical appearance or their age. In fact, hating anyone is ghastly and should be legislated against and, as it happens, just what we seem to want and what the Labour government seems happy to oblige us in providing.

Yet protest we should, because these laws and our feeble acceptance of them are building up governmental and state control in ways unthinkable a decade ago. Not only are they a major attack on our freedoms but they enable the State to conceive and foster a climate where State legislation on virtually every aspect of our lives is expected and condoned. So, when in December 2008, the Culture Secretary Andy Burnham (why do all politicians now shorten their names to the matey version: Tony, Dave, Andy, Steve – all ghastly), proposed a ratings system for ALL English language websites worldwide and was seeking agreement from the incoming Obama administration no one said or did anything. After all, isn’t it a good think if it bans all those nasty racist sites and controls pornography? Who cares if in March the UK Government announced plans under the prevention of terrorism legislation that any UK citizen, including fishermen and pilots, planning to leave the country, even if only for a few hours, get government approval first. The new law will also allow for the confiscating of passports for people owing council tax, TV license fees and all manner of misdemeanors, including maybe telling off-colour jokes about black, disabled, Muslim homosexuals. Of course no one cares.

Maybe they will care that the Government is to legislate, again under new terrorist laws, for the total monitoring and policing of ALL UK users of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter on the spurious grounds that potential and active terrorists may set up a Facebook page! Again no one cares. Perhaps the fact that the Government proudly admitted last year that they record and store every text message and email sent in the UK, but that they would only access an individual's personal data if he or she were suspected of terrorist connections or perhaps had told an offensive joke or wasn’t recycling their rubbish correctly. But again, no one seemed to mind.

Now the UK Government is pushing to access its citizens Google and other, search engine records on the grounds that someone who tapped in ‘bomb’ might be a ‘terrorist’ in the same way as someone who tapped in ‘schoolgirl’ might be a paedophile.

And does anyone care now? Of course not for we’re either too busy watching Jade Goody’s funeral, drinking or worrying about paying for all the easy credit that Gordon Brown pumped into our collective bank accounts over the last decade. In fact, I doubt anyone cares who's looking at our text messages or emails just as long as they’re not ours. And that’s the problem we’re now so selfish and have become so dependent on the state that we really don’t care about anything until it smacks us in the face, by which time it's too late. Luckily the Labour Party’s opium has run out.

The Labour Party’s opium was money, and the drug lord and administrator of the opium was Gordon Brown who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer for the last ten years, controlled the UK’s money supply. Now that money has run out and slowly the people of this crowded island are beginning to feel the pain as the opium wears off.

Brown is now desperate; desperate to spread the guilt for his actions by blaming all of our financial misfortunes on ‘international’ events, and desperate to borrow as much money (opium) as he can so that he can sedate the populous again before they fully wake up. Not for nothing did Marx cite religion as an opiate for the masses.

The UK is bankrupt, inflation is looming (forget deflation) and unemployment will pass three million within twelve months, and nothing said or agreed at the sham G20 summit will change anything. So what is left but to subdue, distract and control the population before that population gets roused enough to hang the Browns of this world from the nearest lamp post.

However, looking at our feeble attempts at protest last week as several hundred public school boys and girls, mingled with thousands of journalists, the deputy editor or Vogue was there, models, a splattering of Class War anarchists left over from the poll tax days and a motley collection of Greenpeace types intent of saving the planet, I think Brown is pretty safe.

Whilst our protesters only managed to break three windows in an undefended branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland and spray paint a few walls, the protesters against Nato who took to the streets of France’s Strasbourg a few days later showed us how these things should be done. Barely reported in the UK, ‘black bloc’ anarchist groups from France and Germany caused so much mayhem in the City that Michelle Obama had to cancel her ‘walkabouts’. The riot police, France’s paramilitary and pretty scary CRS, lost control and had to abandon large sways of Strasbourg to the protesters, who in turn blocked roads to the airport, burned down whole streets and a branch of the Hotel Ibis chain, which for any one who has stayed in one, is no bad thing.

Had Brown and his G20 cronies encountered similar events in London, with clouds of smoke blocking out Brown’s smug grin, then for the first time in years the UK population might have shown it cares enough to do something instead of just seeking more credit or agreeing placidly to yet another Labour law that can send us to prison.

Personally, instead of allowing Brown to slowly wean us off his financial opium, I think that its time to go cold turkey and break something a bit more serious than a few windows. Maybe we should do something really dangerous and tell a few jokes…

Save the World from Gordon Brown - Shoot Him!

6th March 2009


Now that I am in my dotage and fast approaching the age when I will probably forget my name, dribble, have hairy ear lobes and, if I am lucky enough to get my hands on some curvaceous beauty, need to take about twenty pills before I can do anything about it, it is rare that I get myself worked up enough to feel like attacking someone or something; Gordon Brown's speech on the 4th March to the US Congress caused both.

There have been umpteen analogies with the 1920s and 1930s since the world started sliding into recession about a year ago and with them have come dire warnings about a rise in fascism, violence, collapses of governments, hyper Weimar Republic style inflation, civil disorder with armageddon and the four horsemen of the apocalypse waiting in the wings. If I was then to look for a modern day Neville Chamberlain in all this I would look no further than the UK's ghastly Prime Minister Gordon Brown. For his appalling tenure as Chancellor for the last ten years saddled the UK with terrifyingly high levels of debt during a time of plenty, and whose ludicrous ego and desire to be seen as a Churchill-like figure unifying and saving the world is truly horrendous. His "peace in our time" moment can only be a matter of time now.

Brown's desperate bid to fend off economic disaster by reducing interest rates to virtually zero, bailing out the banks, authorising the Bank of England to print £175 billion and promising to spend billions more on our public services is nothing short of imbecilic and shows that Brown will sacrifice the UKs future for short term gain. Brown, like the newly elected Barrack Obama, who he was so desperate to impress this week, sees increased state spending as the means of ending this current crisis. They see pouring millions into everything from road building, the health service and welfare as a way of reviving the economy. But the public sector sucks in money and spews out waste, in effect it produces nothing and costs a fortune, yet this is where all hope is vested at the moment, that, and getting the banks to lend us money again. To, in effect, re-inflate the very credit bubble that caused this current crisis in the first place and at the same time empower a state sector that sucks the life blood out of the private sector, the sector that creates wealth.

A kind of bizarre example of this is the newly announced campaign by some UK councils to be given the power to take over empty shops in order to prevent UK city centres becoming ghost towns during the current recession. The irony here is that it is these same councils, whose relentless pursuit of money through ever increasing business rates, that have forced many of these shops to close in the first place. The campaign waxed lyrical about how these empty shops could be turned into 'community' art centres, playgroups, youth centres and as places where people could go for advise on housing, community, race and gender issues. All marvellous no doubt and all needing grants and subsidies to be paid for either by the few people left in work or by some of Gordon Brown's newly printed millions.

So in Brown's all inclusive, gender friendly and ethnocentric utopia we will be able to spend our enforced leisure time wondering from one community 'art gallery' to the next. The value of this 'art' will be the highest ever, given that a business was driven into bankruptcy in order for the gallery to exist and, secondly, huge subsidies will have been needed in order to staff them. The art will also be dire for in Brown's new egalitarian society, political correctness will deem all 'art' good, unless it offends of course and therefore, if some fat black lesbian decides to smear herself in oils and roll across a canvas it will be 'good' because she is female, black and a lesbian. Likewise if a disabled person in a wheelchair decides to get creative and try out finger painting then the local council will no doubt find an empty shop to requisition and turn it into an 'art' gallery in order to hang the work. We are in fact spending money on crap; crap art, crap ideas, crap people, crap economics and creating a crap society.

In the 1920s and 1930s, many people did turn to political extremes as a solution and maybe they will again, but whatever they do it'll be preferable to the crap ideology and faux statesmanship of Gordon Brown and his ilk whose ideas will, I believe, create the chaos that will in turn create the political extremism so many fear. For me, I hope that if an extreme political force does take over, that its modeled on Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, whose first act on seizing power was to round up the civil servants and bureaucrats, march them out to the countryside and kill them. Only then will we be saved from Gordon Brown's people's art and state subsidised craptopia.

Snow, Darwin and the Survival of the Weakest

The last two weeks have been tiring for me, as Redemption enters its 16th year so the constant battle to survive and grow a business has to vie with my own creative desires and sometimes one doesn't necessarily equate with the other. So for the last week or so my thoughts and mood has meandered from a sort of foggy optimism to a form of semi melancholy to frustration at the sometimes ridiculousness of life. All of which had left me weary, a bit out of sorts with the world and, unusually for me, a bit down...and then it snowed!

I had just finished watching the film, The Station Master, which is excellent by the way in a kind of soft Hal Hartley style, and was getting ready to take Eddie, the very posh long coat Chihauhau of my girlfriends, out for his last walk of the day, when I glanced out the window to be confronted by a sea of whiteness and falling snow. Now only a city dweller can appreciate the truly magical calm that snow brings in its wake, for there was silence, absolute silence. No people, no cars, no sirens, nothing but the muffled non-noise that heavy snow makes as it falls. The empty streets also meant that Eddie was able to race around the snow like a gorgeous mad chihauhau, which is in fact exactly what he is.

There is something about the way that newly fallen snow, especially when no one else has walked on it, that is just beautiful and can, almost magically, transformed even the most mundane or ugliest of places into something wonderful or otherworldly and which instantly lifts your spirits and so it was for me. Or was until the following morning when I was confronted by a world that was seemingly made totally spastic by snow!

Never can there have been anything more ridiculous than the parade of poe-faced council health and safety 'executives' and other public officials who forbid buses, trains, tubes, planes, schools and it seems any human activity that might bring people into contract with 'extreme' weather, and by 'extreme' we are taking about two to eight inches of snow. Not two feet, or blizzards, just two to eight inches of snow in February, which is surprisingly a winter month... Normally though the diktats of England's legions of bureaucratic oiks pass me by but a sense of disbelief enveloped me when London's Camden Council closed its parks in case people slipped on the paths. Over the following days the UK then descended into a sort of snow hysteria where fear of the white stuff was fueled by an equally rabid media intend on presenting a few days of wintry weather as a sort of battle of the elements where people 'struggled' and 'heroes' walked miles to get to work while, inept council officials dithered on the sidelines. The overriding message though is that people have to be protected not only from the weather but from themselves, we can in fact no longer be expected to survive without the State stepping in, and worse, most of us expect it to step in and complain when it doesn't.

Even a few years ago the thought that almost the entire country's schools would be closed just in case a child fell over in the playground or got cold walking to school would have been unthinkable. Nor would a fifth of the working population have just stayed at home because it was too 'dangerous' outside and certainly in London the entire transport would not have just stopped. Yet stay at home people did and will continue to so no doubt as the 'extreme' weather continues its assault and the British people continue to demonstrate just why, had Charles Darwin, written his evolutionary study, Origin of the Species, now rather than in the 19th century that his survival of the fittest theory would have been retitled survival of the weakest.

For weakness and meekness are the new aspirations that we must aim for. Our leaders rejoice in mediocrity and loath elitism, failure is embraced and competition scorned, all races are equal, all sexes and sexuality's important, disabilities are championed and illness and weakness cosseted. No species is superior and all religions of value, no ones beliefs or faiths can be offended and everyone is 'someone' so the adverts tell us. We are all people, we are all wonderful regardless of our colour, race, religion, physicality, sexuality or intelligence. In fact Birmingham City Council has recently decided that the correct use of apostrophes in their street signs was too difficult for some of their ethnically diverse citizens and so have decided that rather than persevering and trying to teach people how to use them that they will simply abolish them. They will in effect, give up and dumb down lest some of us feel left out.

Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection demonstrated that through a process of evolution species evolved and by a process of the survival of the fittest the strongest and most adaptable animals and plants survived and developed as a species. In our new politically correct utopia, of course, such thinking is an anathema as it is the weak and infirm that must not only survive but whose needs must be championed above those of the able bodied and strong. Now we have a process of natural regression where our species is to stop evolving and instead, in the interest of diversity and equality, mutate eventually into some spongy, hermaphrodite with withered limbs and flesh the colour of puke with, no doubt, a varied belief system and an irrational fear of snow.

9th February 2009

This creature, the love-child of Karl Marx, the chattering classes and John Lennon, will probably begin to emerge during the summer when the hated 'extreme' weather has passed. For a few months it will be deemed safe for this new generation, 'the weakest links', to play outside while the rest of us look on and marvel at our new future.

Our obsession with equality, diversity and inclusivity means that we are constantly rewarding failure. Failure is now equal to success, the disabled akin to the abled, the stupid are on a par with the intelligent and the sexual deviant protected and championed by the state. Now our evolution and sense of achievement must be tempered lest the weakest be offended, better born deformed and stupid than born still able to progress and evolve or, heaven forbid, survive without state help in the snow. The same snow in fact that has highlighted our new enfeebled-ness and may, if it continues, actually make some of us think and act for ourselves again. At the same time 'extreme' cold in the wild often kills off a lot of weaker animals and its possible that the councils 'oik' population maybe reduced as well and that can only be a good thing.