2012 Predictions

The American psychic, Sylvia Browne charges, apparently, $750 a reading.

Nice work if you can get it.

She has also been more wrong more often than virtually any other well-known psychic in the public gaze. See her comment to Shaun Hornbeck's parents that their son was dead, for example.

So maybe if I get a few things wrong, maybe people will offer me only €350 a reading? Sound good? Cheap? I only take Euro though, not US$ or Pounds (what would I do with worthless currencies like Pounds for starters?).

So. 10 predictions.

1. Romney is elected US President in 2012. The Republicans (after being responsible for the amazing policies which brought about the 2008 crash) sweep Congress. They promise the same as before which was of course extremely successful. Meanwhile the war with Iran will not take place in 2012 - and I am not allowed here to predict anything about 2013, so ....

2. The UK officially goes back into recession. Cameron informs the UK public that it is not his government which is to blame and it is obviously the EU that is at fault.

3. The UK also has to go to the IMF for a bailout. Cameron informs the UK public that it is not his government which is to blame and it is obviously the EU that is at fault.

4. The Pound falls to a new all-time record low against the plummetting Euro. Cameron informs the UK public that it is not his government which is to blame and it is obviously the EU that is at fault.

5. The BNP wins a string of by-elections across various parts of England, by promising to repatriate large numbers of people who were born in the UK, whose parents were born in the UK, and whose grandparents were born in the UK. Nick Griffin describes them as "undesirable aliens".

6. Scotland holds a referendum on independence from the UK which attracts a support level of 75%. Cameron informs his party and the rest of the UK that this is not a sign that the UK as a country is falling apart, and reassures everyone that his government is extremely popular everywhere as it always does the right thing for the country as a whole.

7. Germany manages to pay more money into the Greek exchequer than the entire population of Greece manages as a combined total. The new Greek Finance Minister assures Berlin that there are absolutely no signs of tax evasion in the country.

8. Israel, while testing one of the nuclear warheads that it purportedly does not have, manages to land it on a Palestinian refugee settlement in Gaza. A spokesman in Tel-Aviv describes the incident as "unfortunate", but points out that little serious damage was done, as there is little left in Gaza to which serious damage can be done.
Meanwhile the US government, on hearing this, berates Iran for being a dangerous nuclear threat, while the Republican Party (on the ball with world affairs as ever) sees this as one further reason for a fullscale attack on Teheran and lashes into Obama for not launching Enola Gay II immediately.

9. The English tabloid press, which knows more about football (soccer) than the rest of the world combined, predicts before the event that England are racing certainties to win Euro 2012, and confidently predict a 10-0 drubbing of Spain (obviously a 3rd rate team) in the final. In the event Spain win the tournament by beating Germany in the final again. England's main contribution is the usual erudite analysis of the team's performance (on the field - not what Wayne Rooney was doing in the hotel and elsewhere) in the tabloid press. The Murdoch tabloid press also have to send two journalists home for misconduct - apparently both knew who Xavi was and, worse still, they could almost pronounce his name correctly!

10. Unemployment percentages around the world begin to sink rapidly as governments find interesting new ways to disguise the non-working as something other than "unemployed". It is predicted that by 2020, that the number of non-unemployed non-working individuals in Europe will have risen to 97%.

Understanding the need for war

I was in Bangkok in 2003 when the war drums for the invasion of Iraq were loudest.

There was an article in the English-language Bangkok Post written by Maureen Dowd, a noticeably liberal writer for the New York Times.

She noted that there was no proof of the Iraqi nuclear weapon, while everyone knew that North Korea had one, and logically if you should invade anywhere, that anywhere should be North Korea not Iraq.

Today, as the drum beats for invading Iran beat ever louder from the US Republican Party (fortunately they are not in power where it matters), the news came that Kim Jong Il had died, and there was new leadership in Pyongyang.

Perhaps the new leader of North Korea (Kim's son, and since when by the textbook reading of Marxism has anything to do with Communism got to do with passing on a royal line - the Party should be up in arms at the thought. OK, I know, Communism does not work!) will bring his added testosterone to the situation and fire the button ....

Nobody though is talking about invading North Korea, despite the obvious dangers that the regime there poses. Why Iran and not North Korea?

Two possible answers:

1. Israel dictates US (or at least Republican Party) foreign policy. If South Korea or Japan had as much influence, maybe something might happen in North Korea!

2. North Korea has no oil ....

OK, persuade me that I am wrong!

And I am not advocating that there should be a war in North Korea either, though something needs to be done to help the North Korean people - textbook Marxism should not allow for malnutrition and starving children (OK, I know, Communism does not work!).

But it is nonetheless notable that the advocates of war are more concerned by a state that might possess a nuclear weapon in several years time as against a hostile one that already is known to have one!

All I want for Christmas

OK, you should have read the previous item first!

A shopping list:

1. A regular source of income that will pay all the bills, and leave something spare for the future. Working for a living, preferably employed by someone else, and definitely using the talents that I have, not the ones I would never have in the proverbial month of Sundays.

2. My sex drive back where it was when I was 25, and the chance to use it regularly (miracle cures needed and not just for myself).

3. Despite my atheism - a Biblical quote for you. Peace on earth, goodwill towards men (and women!). And an end to politicians and religious leaders, wherever they are, screaming for war for any reason. And downtoning the nationalism and increasingly sordid racism in Europe would help. I do not like Islam, but anyone who thinks that burning down mosques resolves anything ....

4. An effort for once and for all to ensure wild life habitats are properly maintained. With the thought that human beings are not the only animals living on this planet. And as we are the ones who supposedly have brains which allow us to think!

Mailed electronically to Santa and good luck to the hardworking reindeer, the one time of the year that a significant species gets some recognition!

'Tis the season to be jolly?

It is Christmas next week. Ho-hum, yawn, pass me the sleeping tablets and wake me up on the 27th .....

When people mention "Christmas", I am always reminded of the "Andy Williams Christmas Show" that the BBC used to import in the 1960s, and Andy singing the song "It's the most wonderful time of the year". All the references in that show to snow and reindeer usw, and then you remember that the show was recorded in Los Angeles where snow never falls!

Most wonderful time of the year? Not IMHO. The season to be jolly? Ditto.

As an atheist, the religious side of it is irrelevant to me, though rather like with Ramadan (another irrelevant celebration IMHO), I will happily let those who want to enjoy the event sensibly and in context, do so. The problem is just about everything else - the forced celebrations, the ridiculous excesses, and the way that much of the world is forcibly closed down for a protracted period.

In some places it is worse than others. In the UK for years now there have been no trains on December 25th and 26th. So you had better drive a car if you want to visit people who do not live locally - and you had better not drink and drive either! The Germans are, as ever (as might be expected!) more sensible about this - running a limited Bank Holiday schedule.

But the forced celebrations are really the annoying part. I recall one cynic remarking that Christmas is the time when people get together with others that they have not seen for a year and quickly realise why they did not want to see them for all that year!

In my eyes that piece of cynicism is totally and sadly accurate. The whole event also is overhyped, the expectations are far too great and the need to eat too much food, drink too much alcohol and all the other excesses that follow .... No thanks.

Since 1977 I have managed to avoid most Christmas gatherings, since 1991 I have avoided them entirely. My wife and I had a romantic candlelight dinner together a couple of years ago. Last year and this year she was and will be working (I also have an ambition, never to be fulfilled now, to be working in paid employment on December 25th!). That is as far as it goes or has gone.

There are some quite serious points here though. If you want to celebrate why does it have to be on any one day of the year? If you want to get together with your family and/or friends, why at this one particular time? And surely generosity is not, and should not be, limited to one small period of the year at the end of December!

As it is, it remains my view that far from being the most wonderful time of the year, it is actually the time when you see the very worst of people, behaving in a fashion that hardly does them credit. If you want to see the traditional "seven deadly sins" fully activated, there is no better time than this.

And excess also has its negative side. There is over the Christmas and New Year period in most countries across the Western world an upsurge in suicide attempts, whether successful or otherwise. People who are vulnerable are most subject to black and bleak moods during all the forced celebrations. For them it is anything but the season to be jolly.

And frankly I can understand why!

Please Repeat After Me 100 Times - HITLER IS DEAD

And has been for 65 years and has absolutely no influence upon current German government policy at all!

Last week, the week when David Cameron made himself, and by extension the whole of the UK, look completely arrogant and out of touch (with everyone except his fellow isolationists within the UK), I saw a couple of interesting pieces which were sadly typical.

Firstly there was an item on one forum where Germany and Iran were mentioned in some context or other. One British commenter (as against commentator) remarked that this was to be expected as Hitler and Ahmedinajad belonged together. Fine, except for the fact they were never alive at the same time, current Germany is a democracy not a Fascist dictatorship, few people want Hitler back and his influence here is nil. Ahmedinajad would, if he wanted to, have considerable difficulty talking to him (and I do not think that Shia Muslims are into spiritualism).

Typical of this though is the fact that even now many people in the UK cannot get Hitler out of their system, and falsely associate all things German with him. The fact that the Germans look upon him now as a thoroughly evil b*stard of the lowest type would never get into their thick skulls.

As for how many people in the UK could name the current German Chancellor and what she actually believes .... Not all that many is my opinion if this ridiculous fixation is anything to go by.

Consequently when I hear that 57% of people in the UK think that Cameron did the right thing, I take it with a pinch of salt.

How many of them actually understood the issues involved, how many understood the consequences of his actions, how many of them believe that the UK does not need any friends or allies? When many people still put Hitler and Germany automatically together even now, I would question the intelligence, logical basis and soundness of their thinking upon significant issues such as this. So this 57% is meaningless.

Which is not to say that the agreement last week was necessarily a "good thing" - though I would agree that keeping the Euro afloat was absolutely necessary. Cameron may have believed that it was bad for the City of London and therefore bad for the UK, I have seen enough contrary arguments this week which suggest that people across Europe are being sacrificed for the needs of the banking system and the fat cats who received all the handouts the last time. As the City of London is the ultimate home (in Europe at least) of the banking fat cats, you would wonder by this argument why Cameron vetoed it - and why the rest spinelessly did not!

Eventually there is also the argument - if an agreement had been reached which would have decimated industry across the North of England and thrown 1000s out of work as a result, that would have been "bad for the UK", or is it only a question of the City of London? Anyway it didn't need a decision by the EU to bring about the action described above (closing down industry in the North of England, throwing 1000s out of work etc) - THE TORIES DID THIS AS A MATTER OF GOVERNMENT POLICY IN THE 1980s!!!!

So what is, in other words, good for the UK, is more a question of arbitrary political definition than anything that can be objectively defined!

There have, despite the 57% support from the sheep (actually that is insulting to real sheep thinking about it), been some voices of sense (though not from the feeble government coalition partners, the Lib Dems, who as a pro-EU party should have forced a vote of confidence and possibly brought the government down), particularly from Alex Salmond and the SNP.

Of course the Scots can (and will if they have any sense) vote for independence in a referendum. The City of London is a long way from Scotland, and the Scots will take some persuading that it is the most important part of the UK.

Meanwhile Hitler's remains must be turning in their bunker. I can imagine of course that his ghost will be pleased to see that so many people in the UK remember him with seeming affection. And some of his committed deeply nationalistic thinking is well entrenched in growing political forces like the BNP and UKIP (and even at times rears its ugly head in the British Conservative Party).

Meanwhile though for everyone across Europe (including the UK), we had better prepare ourselves for several years of proverbial famine, where only the bankers seem to get more prosperous and fatter. Restoring economies, getting people back to work, creating prosperity for the masses, and combatting increasing poverty seem to ever more distant objectives.

Jealousy, Gays and Selective Thinking

To be subjective rather than objective (as will be most of this article), it has been an interesting few days for me on various websites, including of course the centre piece of my Internet universe - this blog.

Firstly I have been accused of jealousy (being jealous of Lindsay Lohan, American actress and recidivist criminal, to be precise)

Secondly I have been told that I must be Gay or at least a Gay sympathiser. It was also suggested that I am a Muslim sympathiser (check out the bulk of the items on this blog, you will soon be persuaded otherwise, and also remember that fundamentalist Muslims regard homosexuality as a cardinal sin, so logically (as ever) I cannot be a sympathiser both with Gays and Muslims simultaneously, right?).

Whether I should be jealous of someone who has to do Community Service (rather than jail time) in a morgue is very much open to doubt. I do not make a point of envying other people anyway, most of the time my concern is to see a rise in the economic circumstances of those who need it, want it, and are prepared to work to get it. I do not actually wish to deny the right of people to be wealthy. I will only criticise such when you have an economic system that works purely to make a few people wealthy while large numbers of people remain hamstrung in poverty with no way out (also known as the "McDonalds economy"!).

You can raise the standard of living of the people at the bottom end to a reasonable level, and see an end to unemployment while we are it, while allowing the wealthy to stay wealthy? Fine. But we are not going in that direction. Rather we are watching the impoverishment of people who were once in the middle (well lower middle actually) by sending worthwhile jobs as cheap labour elsewhere in the world, while creating more "burger flippers"! And try getting a job in IT after the age of 55!

And so to Gays. I have never once mentioned that subject upon my blog. I never discuss it on other fora either. I am an old man now, who always was heterosexual. I make a point though of not interfering with lifestyle choices for people who do not fit the same description. That is a personal choice for them to make.

This is not what I always thought. I used to be sceptical of why a man would want to have sex with another man, and I still do not really understand the desire, but I will not interfere in other people's choices (nor should any legal authority unless consent does not exist). It is not my issue. Everything said, finish, move on.

What we are seeing increasingly though in most areas of debate upon current affairs is something that I first saw raised in my first year at University. We were presented with an analysis of Voltaire's work "Candide" where the author deliberately simplified facts and excluded significant details to get a point over.

If you only present a proportion of the facts (or twist the facts so that they are not facts at all), you can always win your argument. The less detail that you have, the more erroneous your conclusions are liable to be, though. There is a basic flaw, as you learn when studying classic Aristotelian logic - namely arguing from a particular standpoint to reach a general conclusion.

There are loads of examples that can be used, politicians do this all the time - sadly. The point being though conclusions are only valid when you have taken all the facts into account, and reached a conclusion by tying them altogether. Some of the criticism aimed in my direction in the past few days is worthless because all the facts are not being considered before any conclusions are drawn.

We can disagree on principle. I am personally not opposed to constructive criticism, but there need to be some logical principles involved before such criticism can be regarded as "constructive". The simple spouting of abuse for its own sake achieves nothing, and the principle of selective screening of data (excluding arguments that are important links in the chain) is scarcely better than that.

Immigrants

It seems quite simple really - what to do with immigrants, that is.

They are all trouble-makers or idle scroungers, they want to blow us all up or steal from us or laze around and live off the tax we pay ....

You hear this occasionally. So it is right and we must kick them out, right?

OK - dreadful confession. I am an immigrant. I am a foreign national living on a permanent residence visa and without a passport from my adopted country.

Ah, but you are a white European, so it doesn't count ....

Which about sums it up really.

There is my wife though - she is Asian, from Thailand, "yellow" skin etc. Working of course ("stealing jobs" is what you normally hear when the nationalist extremists hear that - wanting it both ways is essential to the argument!).

The relationship with Thailand of course is somewhat different here - a lot of German men have married Thai wives so somehow that is OK. They are Buddhists (good, so they can bring their religion with them, unlike the Turks whose Islamic beliefs are not always trusted).

This thin dividing line though is important to an extent, but generally the relationship between most Germans outside the former East and the immigrant community is relatively settled and occasionally quite friendly. The former East, home of most of the country's extreme nationalist politicians, has special circumstances which are best discussed another day.

One significant feature about immigration in much of Europe, though, is the bias of the story and what the facts actually are.

Much of the immigration per se is old news. The era of mass immigration has not been the past 10 years. I saw one intriguing stat recently that more "ethnic Turks" went back to Turkey in 2009 than immigrated here. Most of the immigration to Germany at least in recent years, which is not over-substantial, has come from Eastern Europe - Russia principally.

I was once again watching Geert Wilders' short film "Fitna" on YouTube tonight (more on this another time). Picking one fact out from it - Mohammed Bouyeri, the radical Muslim fanatic who murdered Theo van Gogh, is presented as everything that is wrong with Islam etc. To bear in mind Bouyeri was born in 1981 - in Amsterdam! He was second generation, from a family that migrated to Europe in the 70s and 80s. In substantial numbers.

Despite radical propaganda to the contrary from extreme nationalist groups, I doubt whether anywhere in Europe now has waves of immigrants arriving. The people labelled as "immigrants" are often second and third generation. They may have adopted their parents' or grandparents' culture when it comes to religion, for example, but they are as much German or Dutch or Italian etc. as any previous nationality that their parents held.

It is not unusual to sit on a local train here and hear two young women bedecked in Muslim headscarves talking German, often with a pronounced Hessisch accent!

Not everyone has adapted. There are, for instance, 200 or so individuals on the German security authorities most wanted (potential?) terrorist list, a good number of whom were born here. To remember though, there are 3 million people of Turkish origin here, and then a number from various countries in North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia etc).

It is also not unusual, when Turkey are playing football internationals on television, for young men to sit in public places watching the game - and drinking beer! A very German habit, but hardly encouraged by the strict Islamists!

I am reasonably encouraged by developments. Political parties often make cheap capital out of the need for more integration courses and the like, but that is typical politics - they cannot solve the economy, so they need some form of distraction, so let's blame the foreigners for something!

Fortunately that is not too common an occurrence though. More encouraging was the outcry the other week over the extreme nationalist group who murdered a number of immigrants (see my previous article on this). Few people (outside the former East) want the Nazis back - there will be a full week on that subject in Hamburg next year. Now if the signs elsewhere in Europe were as positive ....

Piety

I have two types of memory of the school that I attended in England between the ages of 11 and 18 - bad and foul.

Once in a while though (due to my name and the school appearing together on some website or other), I am contacted by someone from there.

Last year I was invited to the Old Boys' dinner. I contemplated going, a chance for my wife to visit my aunt, and to meet some people who knew me nearly 50 years ago (perish the thought in several instances). The idea was abandoned when I was informed that she could not come, as it would be an all male affair. Looking back, one of the major problems with the school was just that - all boys, no girls!

The prospect of getting from Frankfurt to Humberside and back for a weekend is daunting enough. The fact that the person paying for the trip could not even attend the function that was the major reason for travelling? No, totally unacceptable. Vetoed. Next!

A year or so previously I was invited to attend an event where we would meet in the school hall and sing the school song for one last time. Apparently they were closing the building and tearing the place down. I will refrain from any cynical comment here, but let me simply say that I was not even tempted to attend. No misty eyes, just pragmatism!

The school song though is an interesting concept. Does anyone still have them, or need them? I recall one line from ours:

"But the pious man who this school began"?

This sounds like two mistakes being lauded in one short sentence! "Pious" here is meant apparently as a compliment.

OK - most Catholic nuns you would imagine to be kind, dedicated people (but check out Michael Moore's comments on the nuns who taught him!), and the Buddhist monks whom I have met since marrying my Buddhist wife are undoubtedly sincere people, and offer much that is laudable.

But the whole concept of piety requires unquestioning devotion to a religious belief. The teachings of that religion are never to be questioned, they cannot be seen as in any way mistaken, and the rules are to be followed to their ultimate limit.

If the tenets of the religion are wise, consistent and peaceful, then you can live with the consequences of the closed mind impact that it will have on the world as a whole. So at this point we acknowledge pious Buddhists with the respect that they deserve, ignore Hinduism as we know precious little about it, dismiss Jainism and the like for the same reason, and flash the number of proverbial fingers (one in Germany, two in the UK) at some of the others.

Islam in particular (though I have no interest either in defending Christianity or Judaism).

The young Nigerian man who got on to a plane going from Amsterdam to Detroit a couple of Christmas Days ago with explosives in his underwear, was described among other things as "pious".

A wonderful word for a terrorist bomber without the slightest concern for the rest of the people on that plane, some of whom must have been Muslims themselves!

For "pious" read "fanatical", "uncompromising" .... or just plain "stupid"!

We have brains to think. We have brains to analyse. We have brains that can be put to many worthwhile uses (not that intelligence seems to count for much in this world these days). Simply allowing the brain to be a sponge that absorbs a series of ancient myths and the questionable morality that accompanies them is a waste at best, and outright dangerous at worst.

There is in my mind nothing worse than unquestioning servitude to some holy book, the wisdom of whose texts is very much open to question when tested from any rational perspective.

"Pious" for me is no compliment, it is a word that I would gladly see eradicated from the English language, though given that much of the world's future may well be decided in the madrassahs of Pakistan, it is extremely unlikely to happen.

Eventually we should open up our minds and try and understand. It seems an increasingly difficult thing to ask for. But the real problems of the world that need to be resolved - poverty, unemployment, disease, overpopulation, debt, war-mongering to name but a few - are unlikely to be resolved by the "pious". In fact they are the last people that you could probably trust to resolve the issues!

Eventually we need working, practical solutions, not dedication to the hideous limitations imposed by some book of ancient myths!

Rainy Days and Mondays

I will sadden some of my readership by the following comment (Sunday, the day for confessions? Even for an atheist?).

I am not a total innocent when it comes to pornography. Since I was 15 I have had an interest in various forms of it (though notably not bondage, and being heterosexual, Gay movies have no appeal). A few years ago, I might admit it was something of a problem, these days it is an occasional interest still.

So putting that out of the way .....

People selling porn aim primarily at a market of young(ish) men between 15 (yes, I know the legal age is 18, but .....) and 35. There is a (not particularly dramatic) drop in sales to older men, even if the interest is still there.

Which brings me by a massive quantum leap of logic to Karen Carpenter. I doubt whether many men aged 35 and under have all that much knowledge as to whom Karen Carpenter was. On the day they got married they might have had the old record (maybe digitalised) "We've only just begun" played, and may not even realise that it was Karen Carpenter singing.

Her life was sadly short - she died of heart failure at the age of 33 in 1983 (yes, that long ago - so anybody who is now 35 years old would have been approximately 7 at the time! That point will become relevant later). She had battled with anorexia (ditto), had trouble with relationships that never worked out, and ...

She and her brother, Richard, made up a singing combination called "The Carpenters" - well-known to my generation, and producers of the sort of music that you liked to listen to when in a slushy and sentimental mood. I have downstairs in the cellar a "Best Of" album on vinyl that has not been played in years, and that is it. Ageing intellectual chronic depressives do not find much time to be slushy and sentimental.

The song for which they are now best known is the one quoted above "We've only just begun". This is a song of wistful hopefulness, and for sheer simplified optimism, it takes some beating. That said, two riders at this point. Firstly if you cannot be optimistic about life on the day that you get married, then will you ever be? It is the day when hope absolutely peaks. No troughs and valleys to come. Second point - a lot of people out there DO GET IT RIGHT! And congratulations to them!!!

My least favourite line in the song is, though "So much of life ahead". My own view is that there is no better age to be than in your early to mid-20s. Physically you will be at your peak, and intellectually your possibilities are as good as they ever will be. Originality fades as you get older, so plunder it while you can! Plan for the future, yes, but do not sacrifice what you have now to get there.

My preferred Carpenters song (for the melody rather than the lyrics) is "Rainy Days and Mondays". Curious in its way, as the lyrics are the reverse of my life. I am one of those maybe strange people who likes rain (as regular readers will know, I hate cold and snow!). Watch the trees and plants and grass react to rain. Nature in excelsis! And birds using pools of water for their own needs. I have no problems with rain, none whatsoever - even though when I lived in Lancashire, I had to get used to the frequency of it!

As for Mondays - I assume that the reference is to it being the day back at work after the pleasures of the weekend at home? Let me say this immediately. Tomorrow is Monday:

I WOULD LOVE TO BE GOING TO WORK IN AN OFFICE TOMORROW - I CAN THINK OF NOTHING THAT WOULD CHEER ME UP MORE THAN THAT PROSPECT - assuming, of course they were paying me enough to live within my means and they were using my talents. Cela va sans dire.

So what was all this irrelevant junk at the start of this article about pornography?

OK, back to the point. On my meandering round the Internet this week, I discovered that someone has this year come up with some lurid, very likely distasteful but hardly aggressively brazen photos of Karen Carpenter.

WHY?

Even if they exist, where is the interest? 28 years after she died? A woman who suffered from anorexia (hardly the sort of physique that would appeal to fans of that sort of thing). And for what audience - people in their 20s and 30s who hardly know the name, or the sadder version of old coots of my age, who really ought to have moved on to other things by now?

Is this tacky or IS THIS TACKY????

The cult of personality has become so important that this is even slightly interesting? And how important really?

This really saddens me, but it is so indicative of what we are supposed to think. Somehow though, I think that we should be far better than this. For all our flaws (and for mine - reread the beginning of this article)!

The Swedish rules on disciplining kids

I was on the local train coming home last week when I saw someone doing something which is apparently illegal.

There was this lady with two children (boys, approximately 7 and 10, but the ages are not necessarily accurate). Blonde, German (before people start berating the immigrant community), very middle-class from her accent, and obviously a concerned parent.

The two boys were pushing the proverbial envelope, the mother asked them to stop misbehaving, they didn't, she reached across and slapped them each hard across the wrist (once and twice respectively). The boys stopped misbehaving, looked rather cowed for a minute or so, then they resumed a sort of polite normalcy, getting drinks of water from bottles that she gave them, and behaving more like she expected.

Good parenting, I thought - personally. There was an incident, she resolved it, firmly and quickly and no harm done. And the message went out that there are rules to be observed, which IMHO you need in an ordered society.

All well and good. Except for the fact that by slapping the kids on the wrist she had broken the law. The Germans now have this silly rule (which the Swedes introduced the best part of a generation ago) that you are not allowed to hit children.

Under any circumstances!

So quite what she was supposed to have done? She had talked to the kids, they had not obeyed her. She had asked them to stop, they did not. So what then? When persuasion does not work?

I left teaching in England over 30 years ago for a reason (and this should shatter any reputation that I have among American readership that I am an incurable Liberal!). I believed at the time that discipline in schools was not strict enough, and the methods being used were simply ineffective. Corporal punishment was still at the time available for boys only (I opposed only the single sex nature of the punishment NB), but used far too sparingly.

Trying to talk bullies (of both sexes) out of bullying other kids? Yes, good luck for trying, but my experience with kids like that is that the only thing that they respected was being faced with greater force! It may be a sad comment but some of the unintelligent 14-year-olds with whom I had dealings liked to think that they were "tough" and that was it.

Period!

You can appeal to their better nature, you can make life more inconvenient for them and try and wear them down, but eventually the only thing that often stopped them was the knowledge that continuing down that road would be painful.

In every school yard there are several petty fascists who love running down those they consider inferior. You think that you can persuade them to behave better, appeal to their better nature etc - you name the cliché. The problem is if you do not persuade the petty fascists in the school yard that they are not going to get away with their misbehaviour, they could very well turn into serious Fascists as adults, who think that they own the world and that there are no rules out there that can stop them.

Sorry, but I think that what the lady on the train did last week was correct. Illegal or not!

Disagree? OK, I am a pragmatist and I will listen. Tell me instead something that is effective and will work. In the light of experience I will take a lot of persuading though.

I do not know how many people outside Germany

think that the story of the bunch of (neo-)Nazi thugs who murdered at least 11 immigrants (mainly serving in kebab houses! Note they were working people!) over the past few years is typical.

But I would simply comment that they were a brutal minority who were not representative of what Germany is and stands for now, and the number of people opposing them is many times greater than its supporters. That the security authorities took so long to find out is though a sad comment.

To get an amusing opposing take on the current Nazi hostilities, I would recommend the following YouTube clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaBUZA6GLK4&feature=relmfu

If youtube ever take it down, it may still be available on:

www.lautgegennazis.de/blog/

or almost certainly:

http://www.myspace.com/nosliw

Retrospective

It is 40 years and 5 months now since I walked out of university with my degree wrapped proverbially under my arm, and the sense that I had achieved almost everything that I would ever want to do with my life.

Apart from getting regular sex, which I wasn't getting then, and has only really ever been available on a periodical basis since (even in marriage it has been sporadic, but I will not ditch my wife because she has a low sex drive) - nothing else really seemed important.

To have achieved everything that you ever wanted by the time you are 22? That sounds ridiculous? Nonetheless, true. The last 40 years and 5 months have been more about survival than owt else.

And getting older is a pain with absolutely nothing going for it. When you physically fit, strong, healthy and your sex drive is in really great shape - what could be better? Losing all that is painful, and while your brain remains fully engaged and in gear, that actually only leads to frustration, particularly as the world seems to be in an even worse mess than it was in 1971, and much of humanity seems to walking down the wrong proverbial road, listening to the tune of the wrong proverbial piper!

Barbaric and pre-medieval

As the days pass and I get increasingly depressed and cynical about the way the world is going, it is rare to have anything to even slightly enthuse over.

I had though yesterday one brief cheering moment.

There was an item on yahoo.com about Israel doing the usual scare-mongering regarding the alleged Iranian nuclear missile. The article was not particularly fascinating but a lot of the hundreds of replies were. Apparently a lot of Americans think that if Israel has a problem, it is for the Israelis to sort it out, not for the United States in particular and the international community in general.

If it had been just one or two responses upon those lines, then I would have shrugged my shoulders and muttered a small word of encouragement. The volume though was what impressed me. Maybe there is hope for the future. Some anyway.

The criticism from those lacking any objectivity (and with little grasp of logic) will now of course use the shallow argument that if I oppose an invasion of Iran (by the West at least), I must be pro the Iranian regime.

Wrong on all counts! I do not know how many times that I have to tell people that because you oppose one thing, you are NOT obliged to take the second alternative. Both can be equally wrong. As here!

IMHO Iran represents just about everything that happens when you trust to the worst instincts of yourself. A theocratic culture based upon the fear drenched myths of generations ago, which should have been proverbially blown out of the water well before now. Power invested in the advocates of that extremist theological belief system and a legal system invested totally and brutally in it. And not to be challenged or questioned?

Sorry, no!

Regime change is desirable, but for that it would require the people as a whole to reject the barbarism and pre-medieval culture associated with it, and, outside the intelligentsia at least, I do not gain the impression that the desire is there.

The other day I picked up a video on the web. A woman and two men were having nooses fitted round their necks and were about to be hanged from a crane in public. Iran. 2007. I could have actually watched this to the bitter end, I chose not to - far too gruesome for my tastes.

Checking the story further, I discovered that the individuals were hardly worthy of a great deal of sympathy - the wife had conspired with the men to murder her husband. A common nasty enough event in the West. In the US, all might have faced the Death Penalty for the offence, in Europe they would have been jailed for a long time.

The only thing that really comes to mind here is that the event was held in a public square, and you could observe the large crowd there to jeer the criminals getting their "just desserts". Not unlike in England in the 18th century in fact!

The thought went through my mind as to with regard to this event, we have moved on that much. If the Death Penalty had been restored in the UK (as many want) and the English murderer, Ian Huntley, had been executed for killing the two young girls in Cambridgeshire a few years ago - and if they had decided to hold the event in a public square, how many people would have turned up to jeer?

Maybe I underestimate people, but I expect that a large number would have done. The appeal to our own worst instincts may still lead us down a road where the barbaric and pre-medieval instincts take hold. The major danger though is that we may allow some political regime that works on those instincts to take power - as sadly is the case in Iran.

The trouble with you atheists ....

It was one of those generalised comments, how evil we all are, how dare we not believe the Wrath of God (or Allah or Jehovah or wharrever) mythology. usw usw .....

The curious thing was the generalisation. A lot of people lay into all Muslims without even understanding the difference between Shia and Sunni, so this I sort of get. After all, the teachings of Mahomet are at times extremely bloodthirsty, and most of the rabid hoodlums (a small minority of Muslims incidentally) who misuse these mythical texts cannot understand that 1500 years have passed and things are different now.

I mean it may well have been the done thing in Arabia at the time for 52 year old men to take 9 year old girls to bed with them, and while that may be out of order today (actually IMHO it is totally out of order, but I digress), so maybe we have to make allowances for the evils of the time. And then again ....

But back to the generalisations about atheists. I have no problems with my views on the subject, and I am not aggressive in respect of people who prefer to stick to their mythical views of the world (though see also above). But occasionally it is fun to hear an erudite Richard Dawkins dissect opposing arguments, or Bill Maher point his telling sense of humour in the direction of believers, or hear the likes of Pat Condell absolutely shred religious beliefs.

But Pat Condell - now there is an interesting example of why generalisations about atheists simply do not work.

I have one thing in common with Pat Condell - we are both atheists. For the rest, we are like chalk and cheese. He supports the UKIP for one thing (the posh man's version of the guttersnipe neo-Fascist BNP), while I remain a totally committed pan-European (not the time for me to get into why the Euro for all its weaknesses is still eminently preferable to national currencies and the re-entrenchment into the myopic thinking and the banking ripoffs involved, and handing over individual countries to the whims of speculators. Well the UK has been run for the benefit of speculators and not for its people for longer than I can remember, so point proved!).

Another point about Pat Condell (along with Bill Maher for that matter) is that he is a strong supporter of Israel. All well and good hating fundamentalist Islam usw (see also above), but let us quickly revert to Israel. Israel was founded as a Jewish state - Judaism is a religion, and a pretty nasty one at that if you study the Old Testament closely enough. Fortunately the excesses of the teaching are mainly ignored these days, but the tenets for becoming an Israeli still have this religious undercurrent to it.

There were in 1938, 300,000 Jews in the area that is now their country. Which means that some 6 million plus have been added to their population by immigration, based on the fact that they follow or followed a religious creed that said that they had a divine right to live in that place and the others who lived there should clear off out.

Fine - several generations after Jehovah's original divine gift to "his chosen people", my ancestors were still based in Denmark (before some of them eventually set out in longboats and headed off for reasons best known to themselves to England - they must have had something wrong in their heads to even want to do that, but anyway). Maybe now is the time for me and a few others to reassert our right to land in Denmark that Odin and Thor offered us as their "chosen people" centuries ago.

It is exactly the same principle!

So when Pat Condell says that the Israelis have the right to the land and Palestinians have none, he is, curiously, reinforcing a religious principle.

Strange for an atheist to take sides on behalf of any religious thinking, even if the adamant supporters of Sunni Islam - namely Hamas - are hardly people whom you would want to support, even on a bad day (the same can be said of the Shia fanatics in Iran and Lebanon incidentally).

The atheist pragmatist that I am would not ask the Israelis to leave their land now (at least the land that they were awarded in 1948) - the status quo is always more important than any antiquated myth or silly idealistic solution that merely serves one side in a dispute. For my views on a solution, see previous pieces on here.

Anyway to reinforce my point, the fact that I am an atheist does not mean that I agree on everything with other atheists. As we have just seen, this not at all the case. So there is no point generalising about us. There may be trouble with us as individuals, but those are to be taken up individually (and any problem that you have with me, please take up politely with me - not with someone else), not in a fundamentalist rage that covers all eventualities.

Iraq War Mark 2 - or what to expect from a US Republican President in 2013

Author's note (December 5th, 2021). This may no longer seem relevant and I considered deleting it. But some of the content still applies to the reasons for any invasion even now and the logic about the potential problems on the ground if an invasion did ever take place is absolutely relevant. And as for the comment about Israel - not so noticeable when the Democrats are in power, maybe, but .... Meanwhile I remain as neutral as ever about the Middle East. A two secular (moderate) state solution is what is needed. Given the Israeli hawks on the one hand and The Hamas extremists' influence on a large number of the Palestinians on the other .... no, I won't side with either of them. 

From yesterday's debate of US Republican Presidential candidates:

Gingrich quickly agreed with Romney, saying that if all other steps failed, "you have to take whatever steps are necessary" to prevent the Islamic regime from gaining a nuclear weapon".

Apart from this rhetoric sounding exactly like what we heard from Bush and company before the now discredited invasion of Iraq, has anybody worked out what this involves? Try the following:

1. Another instance of the United States Conservative establishment wishing to start an unnecessary war to satisfy its own agenda.
2. Invading a country that is three times the size of Iraq, has three times the population, and is far less ethnically divided than Iraq (it is a fundamentalist Shia Islamic state with only small Sunni and Kurdish populations).
3. If David Petraeus's estimates upon a required invasion force required for any successful invasion are correct, this will need something in the region of 2 to 3 million troops. This will almost certainly mean that the US will have to reintroduce conscription.
4. There will not be much by way of allied support - even the UK will be lukewarm (though it depends how poodle-like the leadership in London is before they provide the support - expect it to happen, do not expect guts from a British government on issues like this).
5. Iran is a divided country, the government is not popular. There is nothing like a foreign invasion (which is exactly what this will be) to unite a people.
6. In Iraq there were 2 million refugees as a result of the invasion. Are there plans to deal with the 6 million Iranian refugees resulting from this? Or does that not matter?

Also to bear in mind:
If Iran does have a nuclear weapon (not guaranteed), which they can fire accurately (even less guaranteed), do they have the technology to launch it some 10,000 miles so it will land anywhere near the United States? Answer - absolutely not!

So what is the justification for this? The Israeli tail waving the American dog? Again????

The answer to that should be - if the Israelis have a problem, let them sort it out for themselves! If they wish to invade Iran, let them get on with it!

But it certainly should not be the business of anyone in the West to resume the playing of the ridiculous script that was first played out in 2003.

There are US Republican candidates like Ron Paul, and commentators like Pat Buchanan, who are intelligent enough to realise this. The rest are not, and in my book are dangerous people who are not intelligent enough to deserve to be elected!

Well if you want to know where the British neo-fascist fringe

entertains itself on the Internet, apart obviously from Facebook, try Yahoo Answers some time.

The thing to do is invent some statistics, present them as "facts", and given the lack of any critical answering device, nobody can challenge them.

There was one ludicrous comment on there today that "coloured" immigrants are breeding like flies, that thousands were getting into the country illegally usw usw.

The same garbage that has been emanating from these individuals for over 40 years now.

Yahoo Answers also has a facility where you can approve or disapprove of the comment. Six to nil in favour of this (inaccurate) blurb. Which indicates that this BNP clone has a lot of supporters out there, people who are convinced of this nonsense.

If you actually had a forum where you could place detailed facts before them .... But that would be asking for the moon, wouldn't it? After all never let the facts get in the way of a good story, or a piece of updated Goebbels-style propaganda.

You are prone to wonder from this how far we are from a British Anders Breivik emanating from the gutter, or a David Copeland imitator. I have to admit more than ever that I am happy to be living in a country where such morons invariably find themselves heavily outnumbered wherever and whenever they appear. Which seems to be more than you can, sadly, say for the UK.

Update 25/8/2025.

Those were the days when you could write this sort of thing.

As of now a neo-Fascist political party, which spends nearly all its time ranting on about illegal immigrants and asylum seekers and hardly ever discusses the economy - their approach would make Liz Truss's experiment a couple of years ago seem a mild disaster in comparison - for fairly obvious reasons.

Despite the fact that 68% of people in the UK in a recent opinion poll indicated that they want the return of the freedom of movement in the EU which they previously had, the EU is an ogre to be avoided at all costs apparently - and if you can win a landslide majority with 30% of the vote thanks to the first past the post system while the opposition remains divided ....

And given the likely prospect of a neo-Fascist President of France in 2027 .....  Not a time to be optimistic at all, is it? 

Can you blame the people of Greece for being angry?

I have a longstanding opinion that most people do not care whether they are working in the private sector or the public sector.

What they want is a job that pays the bills and maybe one that they also enjoy.

After that whether it is in a government office or the office of a commercial company, does it matter that much?

As long as they are earning, and as long as they can afford to live.

So when a crisis comes along and someone informs you that despite the fact that you have turned up every day, done the job to the best of your ability, but due to circumstances beyond your control you are being fired? What is your reaction?

This has happened to loads of people in both the private and public sector in recent years.

And now if you live in Greece, you are well nigh likely being told that if you work in a government office, your job is very likely not needed any more - even if you have carried it out with 100% commitment, competence and efficiency for years.

And do not expect to be alone, and do not expect to find anything else very easily either! And do not expect to be able to live off government benefits for very long either - they are being cut as well!

Of course there may be the odd training course out them as a plaster to cover the wound, but the wound is likely to be far larger than the plaster, and the plaster will probably offer little by way of comfort.

The fact remains that the majority of people of Greece have been sold down the river - by incompetent politicians, by crooked business people and by their own foolishness in believing that working hard and doing a great job would count for anything is this cynical world!

So what drives mature grown men to molest children?

Imagine you are suffering stress at work (those of you who are fortunate enough to be working).

Stress can be overpowering, it can upset your life balance, it can build up an extraordinary sense of despair inside you.

But could you seriously believe that it would drive a 45-year-old married man with his own children to kidnap, rape and kill a 10-year-old boy? Particularly if you have no history of being a child predator?

Such unbelievable and unacceptable logic though was apparently what drove a German murderer (called Olaf H - surname not issued in the German press as is the standard practice here) to abduct and kill a boy called Mirco in Nordrhein-Westfalen in September 2010 in what has possibly been the most infamous murder case here in the past few years.

Described invariably as a "monster" in the media, this guy had reached the age of 45 without ever appearing above the public parapet for anything, and then .... Why suddenly did this happen? On the surface the whole series of events has no apparent logic, nor is there any satisfactory explanation. Had this guy kept a secret life (or at least desire) hidden for years? And surely he would have been aware of the consequences of any such action.

Not dissimilar (except for the fact that the victims survived) are the cases of Wolfgang Priklopil in Vienna and Michael Devlin in Missouri in the USA, who were both 26 and 39 respectively when they kidnapped their victims (Natascha Kampusch and Shawn Hornbeck respectively). Both reasonably mature men with no reported history of being child predators (although after his suicide, Priklopil was mentioned by potential victims as someone who did try to abduct them).

Why would you get to that age and suddenly .... It makes no sense, on the surface at least. The desires are hidden and suddenly become uncontrollable and emerge in a macabre daylight? Better frankly that the desires stay hidden, and never emerge - but anyway!

In the case of the Californian girl, Jaycee Dugard, her abductor, Phillip Garrido, had a criminal record (and someone in California still bears the responsibility for allowing this individual to be released from jail after serving only 11 years of a 50-year sentence).

You might at least in his case understand the concept of "motive", even if his conduct was abhorrent in the extreme.

In my attempts to understand humanity though, this is one of the most difficult things to accept. Predators are usually serial recidivists who start really quite young (check out the notorious Russell Bishop in the UK for example). That suddenly some repressed fantasy would turn into a grotesque reality? Sad, depressing and almost inexplicable.

Postscript. For those of you who can read German, I would recommend Natascha Kampusch's Website (natascha-kampusch.at). Don't expect gaudy details of her captivity though - it involves her humanitarian work and her attempts to help women and children in need wherever in the world. Highly laudable and (to repeat the word) highly recommended!

The glories of war, or was this really worth it?

I was checking up on the battle of Passchendaele today. 1917, the First World War. Taken from Wikipedia (not always a good source of information, but this comment if anything understates the actual situation):

"After 16 weeks of bitter fighting in appalling conditions of rain, mud and slime, about one-sixth of the initial objective had been gained at a cost of nearly 400,000 British casualties (17,000 officers), leveling the entire town. Nearly 400,000 German soldiers gave their lives defending it".

800,000 casualties for what? Look at those numbers. For one moment think about the suffering ON BOTH SIDES? And for what?

War is so glorious (in appalling conditions of rain, mud and slime - see again), thousands died or were maimed, and for what end?

Erich Maria Remarque in his brilliant pacifist novel "Im Westen Nichts Neues" ("All Quiet on the Western Front" in English) debunks the glories of war and all the propaganda that accompanies it.

In my view the propaganda on both sides in the First World War was equally bad, the war was kept going because compromise was simply "not acceptable", and you couldn't let the other side seem to win. Both sides needed their proverbial heads banging together, and the whole thing stopping as early as 1915. Of course we cannot change history.

There are times when war is unfortunately necessary. Fascists of various description (Hitler, bin Laden, Milosevic and the like) have to be stopped. If they start something (as all of them did) they have to be resisted.

But let us not consider that war is in any way glorious. Much of it is dirty, disgusting and given to moments of inhumanity that would leave any of us totally and completely cold. And threatening to start something on the pre-emptive basis is as phoney a concept as there is out there. Often the basis is simply political anyway, and often is the result of phoney propaganda for which facts are evident by their absence (see Iraq now, and Iran in the next couple of years).

Some people can simply not get enough of you

Today, after 2 years and 5 months, I finally decided to close my MyLot account.

Several reasons exist for this decision, but the departure of a number of good electronic friends from the site, and their move to my email account instead, means that I have lost my enthusiasm for the site. And the number of old topics being constantly repeated, the limited jaded (invariably failed Conservative) political thinking and the lack of fresh ideas appearing - no, I do not really belong any more.

Meanwhile my mail queue gets filled with tons of uninteresting notifications, which I do not really need any more. Life will be quieter.

Of course I may miss the 7 or 8 Euro every third month (where is my laughing hysterically smiley?) ....

Problem is - I have three times pressed the link that is supposed to generate the email where I can find out what to do to quit the site. Nothing works. No email arrives. I cannot leave - they love me too much!

I wish I had an employer who was paying me €45,000 p/a who thought the same!

Ageism - an update

Every so often I get telephone calls from IT recruitment agents.

Most seem impressed with my CV and start talking about positions as one does.

The thoughts in my mind run approximately along the lines:

Am I interested? Yes.

Could I do it? Yes, probably extremely well.

Do you have all the necessary skills? Maybe not, but what I do not know, I will pick up. Fairly quickly knowing me.

Would I enjoy doing it? Probably (you have to allow for the fact that the occasional manager is incompetent and impossible to work for).

How much would I want to do it? Adequate (not massive) recompensation.

Do I have a chance of even being considered? NO!

Age is one factor, probably the most significant factor. Then there are all sorts of niceties that they introduce. But anyone who turns me down on the grounds that it would be an insult to offer the position to someone so experienced and obviously talented? Spare me - that might apply with McScheisse jobs, in IT I have no axe to grind about what I have to do.

About time, but should it have taken 28 years to bring these thugs to justice?

Read:

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/27/world/americas/argentina-dirty-war/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Referenda

I would recommend reading my piece from last month called "Really voting FOR something" before continuing with this.

If someone decided to put to the electorate an issue in a referendum where everyone was to receive a handout of say 20,000 Euro, would anyone vote against it? Even if some wise heads could see this for the bribe that it was and it could bankrupt the exchequer in no time?

Then if the government faced with a massive debt crisis which could close it down put in place a referendum where everyone would have to pay 12% of their income, immediately, to avoid the state's liquidation, how many people would vote for it, even though it was probably for the general good?

The whole problem with referenda is that they try to take complex issues and reduce them to a simple answer - yes or no. What then if "no" is the choice, despite the situation demanding some urgent action?

Wording the referendum is important, and then all sorts of political factors come into play. Is a government whose standing is at 25% going to win a referendum?

I recall being in Copenhagen, Denmark, on a business trip a few days after the Danish referendum on whether to join the Euro or not. I spent my time going out to the client site discussing the vote with the taxi driver who took me there - a Pakistani immigrant, who had no axe to grind. He informed me that 80 to 90% of the discussions before the vote had actually been about domestic politics and next to nothing to do with the Euro as a currency.

This I can believe. And yet, the Danes you would have imagined (according to stereotypes - always an unfortunate guide to the actual facts) are generally an educated, sophisticated people.

And there is also the undoubted truth - it is far easier to be opposed to something than to be for it. I can again for this example take you to the Occupy Wall Street / London / Germany usw movement(s) - to which I am generally sympathetic. That the banks have fouled up is self-evident (unless you are a member of the US Republican Party, but I digress). How you would put things right and avoid all the consequences of that foul-up - poverty, unemployment, underemployment usw - is another matter entirely.

It is, in other words, not just a simple "yes" or "no" situation. The "I do not like this, so get rid of it" approach simply does not work in the real world. A pragmatic solution has to follow. Bailing out the banks may seem to have been a bad idea, would letting them fail have been a good one?

Would we have no poverty and no unemployment if we had let them fail?

A referendum is far too simple a road to follow. The chances are that large numbers of people voting would not understand the issues and the consequences of their actions anyway. And there is also one of the sad truths of this world - minorities are often right!

In 1492 Columbus did not agree with the majority opinion that the world was flat. While we may jokingly remark that it might have been better if he had driven his fleet off the edge of the world, the fact remains that any referendum held at the time might have stopped him going. Which is an interesting point to bear in mind.

Small-minded parochialism and petty nationalism

And other similar beliefs preponderant among a large number of British MPs and their constituents.

111 MPs (and not just backwoods Tories - the Labour MP for the place where I used to live was one of these 111, though telling the difference between his opinions on anything else that differs from those of the Tories is extremely difficult) voted for a referendum on British membership of the EU the other day. If they wanted a referendum, it sounds like that that equals "we want out entirely".

And where would they take the UK then? The British economy is based upon the same principles of speculation and debt that landed the US in a mess. In many respects the UK is already the 52nd state (Israel is de facto the 51st). Or creating a large version of Switzerland floating out somewhere in the North Atlantic? Well wasn't that the idea of Thatcherism? Get rid of the industrial base and create one huge bank?

Which is why IMHO the country is in one diabolical mess.

One factor to realise with the reduced industrial base is that much of the incoming capital investment over the last few years has been brought about by the establishment of plants by international (notably Asian) companies who liked being in an English-speaking country and also wanted to be in the EU with all its trading possibilities. Take the UK out of the EU, would they stay? Ireland is staunchly pro-EU, they have an English-language culture, moving there would not be that difficult .... And how many unemployed would that create? Check the 1980s for details.

Still if we want a referendum on the EU, why stop there? Why not have a referendum on what the "Occupy London" (the British spin-off of "Occupy Wall Street") supporters want - if they can define something positive as to what they want to see, rather than just protesting about what the banks have done, as evil as that may be!

AND IT IS DEFINITELY TIME FOR A REFERENDUM UPON WHETHER PEOPLE WANT TO SPEND BILLIONS UPGRADING THE ANACHRONISM THAT IS THE INDEPENDENT BRITISH NUCLEAR WEAPON!!!!!

I anticipate that the 111 parochially minded individuals who want a referendum on British membership of the EU would agree!

They wouldn't? (Yes, I know perfectly well that they wouldn't!). Why not???? If government by referendum is the road to go (and the whole flawed thinking about holding referenda I will examine in a future post), then surely it would be logical to do so. But you do not simply hold one upon issues that suit you and your backwoods thinking, do you?

The good die (quite) young, the bad die wearing wigs?

The last few days have been challengingly different. An unrelated serious of unconnected detours through fact and unreality, between the seemingly turgid present and the suddenly recalled disppointments of a time that is really so long ago in my life.

I always try to avoid the "what might have been" moments of my life normally. As a pragmatist, what purpose does it serve?

Yesterday though came one of those moments. Like my most people getting older, I still seek out the music with which I grew up. Yesterday I had Melanie (Safka) on YouTube performing "Ruby Tuesday". Wonderful penetrating voice, hardly romantic.

It recalled though a girl called Karin in my final year at university in Swansea. I was a still immature, almost adolescent 22-year-old, she was a mature, "seen too much, done too much already" 21-year-old. Very attractive. No questions asked. She was flirting, I was very serious. Retrospectively it could never have worked, what would have happened if it had become a serious relationship?

And if I met her now at the age of 61 or 62? That is frightening, she could never get old.

A couple of my former university friends have died in recent years, I believe (I cannot prove the fact, but logic points in that direction). Both great guys, who went on to become excellent husbands and fathers. Neither of them saw 60. In this world when we have increasingly all the cures for everything?

And meanwhile somewhere in remotest Libya, the thoroughly awful former dictator Gadhafi was reaching an end that was almost inevitable and some 30 years too late. Apparently at the end, he was still wearing a wig! Arrogance takes some interesting forms, and he did not want his "people" ("subjects" is a better word? "Vassals" even better?) to see him greying and growing old!

Never thought that I would have any sympathy for a thug of that ilk, but I understand that totally! My hair is dyed though - wigs, hairpieces? Not my thing!!!!

One small step in the right direction

I am pleased that Gilad Shalit has been released by the militants in Gaza who have held him hostage for five years.

I cannot say that I am too convinced that releasing convicted prisoners in return for him is necessarily "a good thing". What is to stop someone else being kidnapped so that more prisoners can be exchanged for him/her at some point in the future? It sets a bad example.

My point about the Hamas - Israeli standoff remains what it was though. I am no fan of either the Israeli government nor of Hamas. Extreme attitudes produce extreme responses and extreme counter-responses, and progress to peace and common understanding will never be achieved that way.

Eventually though release of a hostage does indicate some ability to compromise - an important consideration in the development of a much-needed negotiation progress. We are still not even 1% of the way down the road to resolving the issues invoved, and the people of the area will continue to live a life on the knife-edge. Sadly for all concerned.

But any step down the road is better than no step at all, whatever misgivings you may have about some of the details involved.

Follow-up to my previous posting

Well the world is supposed (again) to have ended. This time yesterday.

I am apparently still here .....

Which means one of two things applies.

Either I managed to avoid the catastrophe that hit everyone else (apart from the few people walking past the house as I speak).

Or everything is now an optical illusion, and I really am not here any more.

What gets me, if the latter is the case, is why the afterlife looks exactly like the life I just left ....

The End! Brief and to the point

Apparently it will be the end of the world on Friday (according to one Harold Camping - he got it wrong in May, so to date his record on this is 0/1 - if his record goes to 0 and 2 he will be a good candidate to become a relief pitcher for the Red Sox).

Anyway thanks to all my handful of readers for your appreciative support through this past difficult year.

I would wish you a pleasant journey to eternity, but as I do not believe that there is an eternity to go to ....

Meanwhile I have a translation for a customer in Spain to finish. I can afford to get a few things wrong as nobody apparently will be around next week to check it!

The wonderful world of the inane Spam idiot

Every so often my Yahoo mail account finds its Spam box being rapidly filled with a load of gunge supposedly relating to male impotence drugs.

We are not talking one or two here - that is commonplace. We are talking about 20 or so an hour. Something of an epidemic in its way.

The point is though that it is junk. Absolute complete and obvious junk. If I wanted such items I would make a careful search of the Internet for reliable suppliers, I would certainly not answer a mail with all sorts of misspellings and in your face rhetoric.

So would be the story with most people, I would imagine.

So why do these idiots (polite word) send this stuff? It is of no interest to the vast majority of recipients, it is the cause of a degree of nuisance value, and that is about it. I have to check the Spam queue every so often (Yahoo has the occasional flaw which allows important, properly delivered mail to find its way accidentally into the Spam box).

For the rest though, this exercise in sending out mass junk strikes me as complete stupidity in action. It may give some puerile youth some momentary fun, but surely they can find something better to do with their time?

The Euro is about to implode?

I know this for a fact, I saw it staring me in the face on an Internet article this morning.

American or (very likely) British in origin I am not certain.

Explanations for this thinking? Rumour, conjecture, facts, explanations, details? NOWT!

It was simply stated as fact! Therefore it is bound to happen. Right? RIGHT????

Well, my anonymous friend, a short comment on this. Last week the Euro rose 3 cents against the US Dollar. So if the Euro is about to implode, what is going to happen to the Dollar? The Dollar cannot implode, can it? Sink, yes. Sink, sink, sink? Yes, yes, yes!

Stick your money in British Pounds instead? Latest rate for the Pound against the imploding Euro - 1.13. In 2009 the value was 1.43. Sounds like the Pound has already imploded!

Actually if you take a quick look at history you will discover that the Pound has sunk, sunk, sunk against whatever currency the (envy, envy GRRRR) Germans (envy, envy, GRRRR) have been using since 1971. The last time that I checked, the Pound had lost over 500% in value against the Mark or Euro over the past 40 years.

This does not stop the pundits in the UK from making their usual snide comments about the Euro (hee, hee it looks in a bad way). Curiously they seem incapable of noticing that despite all the Euro's problems, the Pound continues to struggle to retain parity against it! And this with a monetarist (hence encouraging ludicrously high unemployment and a disgustingly deflated economy) Conservative Party led government!

So, my anonymous friend, a little historical lesson for you. Whatever currency is backed by those responsible for the German economy, it will not only survive, it will eventually profit. Even the Swiss understand that (see the peg they introduced the other week to stop speculation).

The Euro is about to implode? Then I am about to marry a society heiress, move into a villa in the South of France and will be living on caviar and champagne for the rest of my existence. It won't happen? NO, IT WILL NOT HAPPEN!

Occupy Wall Street - Right or ....

As a non-American I have a lot of time for the aims and concerns of the Occupy Wall Street movement, even if some of the excesses some people are carrying out in its name are doing the movement no favours.

The fact is that most people in the middle are moving downwards not upwards. The ways out have also proven phoney (get an education, qualifications usw, all of which lead to being "over-qualified", particularly when all that is wanted in the "McDonalds economy" is burger flippers! And these days stuck with a huge amount of debt, as the idea of quality education being paid for any other way has been abandoned).

They are "going global" with this (there is going to be an "Occupy Frankfurt" on Hauptwache at 1200 today - the shopping crowd will love them!). Fine - we also need it, many of us in Europe have been reduced to poverty in recent years and need a way out. Working your way out (in the "McDonalds economy" that we are also stuck with) is not an option - they send most of the "good jobs" these days to India and China as cheap labour - and do not start believing that the state benefit system does any more than provide a basic lifestyle. Unless of course you have dozens of children!

The only problem that I have with this movement is "will it achieve anything?". Rather like Communism fails as all it does is remove the creation of wealth leaving everyone struggling against poverty, so this movement could easily be great on the analysis of the problem, but lack positive solutions which raise people up, and restore living standards to the necessary level. I would have to hear how they intend solving it.

But as for their critics .... There was a brilliant item yesterday on Yahoo where the guy listed the various opponents of the movement. Fox News USA (run by millionaires), Rupert Murdoch (enough said), leading Republican Eric Cantor (a millionaire), radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh (a millionaire) usw. In other words people who have a vested interest in the movement's failure. Rather than criticising the movement, they should be setting in motion an alternative action policy where people can raise themselves up, and if by work and education - proving that it can be made to work.

For the masses, not the spoiled brat few!

It is definitely too late for me, but then I am not concerned merely about my own lifestyle. A better world for me means a better world for others as well. Being selfish is not one of my more pronounced tendencies. If I were to die in the next month, as is possible, then I would still wish the movement success in its aims.

Seeing an end to mass unemployment and mass under-employment, and no further impoverishment of the gifted and the talented, is vital to future generations, not just the current one.

The Amercan financial establishment knocking us on the head once more?

Comment one - I have American friends and I am not getting at them.

Comment two - I am not anti-American (though not the equivalent of a jingoist for another country either).

Rather the problem. In recent weeks we have had rating agencies like Moodys, Fitch, and Standard and Poor's taking pot shots at the economies of various European countries. Spain yesterday for example.

Moodys, Fitch and Standard and Poor's are independent private organisations as far as I am aware. They are based in the USA (no question). The point though arises, why is a PRIVATE AMERICAN organisation deciding what is good and what is bad with the economy of a country outside the USA?

We have for better or worse a "Global Economy" - not an American International economy. We have, like it or not (and a lot of the time I do not like it! Which incidentally does not turn me into a Communist or an anarchist) international capitalism at work.

So if we are going to get decisions on the credit ratings and the like of various countries, should that really be decided by PRIVATE AMERICAN organisations? Surely there should be some official international body (independent of government (including that of the USA) interference) involved in making these decisions?

Of course if you make something like that international, then the American conservative fringe (well that also includes the Republican Party to an extent) will not play along and probably want to take its ball home with it and play on its own - see the less sophisticated views that you get from there sometimes on the UN and NATO (if a latter-day Napoleon Bonaparte came along, would the Americans be prepared to let their troops serve under him?).

Nonetheless, I do not see that Europe should be subject to what are primarily American concerns. The European model can work and can be made to work IMHO (although the Greeks are trying everything they know how to disprove that). It needs though what all organisations and governments and individuals require - a commitment to treat debt as an enemy and not a friend and to plan accordingly. Restore and emphasise policies on national savings programmes, as we used to have in the UK when I was a child growing up.

And international efforts to close down tax loop-holes would also be a major help in achieving this success. The Greeks would very much benefit from working to sort that out in particular as quickly as possible.

Heading for the great aviary in the sky?

For some reason best known to its followers, Christianity attaches souls to human beings only. Reptiles, insects etc. and a whole raft of other mammals do not have them. So when you get to Heaven, there will be no pigs or iguanas or mosquitoes to bother you - not even their souls.

Buddhism, a far less inconsistent religion than Christianity, does not travel down this road - it allows souls to exist for all living creatures, and given the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, you have to be very careful in this regard. My Buddhist wife will not let me swat flies in summer in the apartment. Who knows what I might be killing - anything from her reincarnated grandmother to a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan.

This afternoon, cursed with the depression that is our current financial disaster, I went for a walk down by the Main. If there is one last therapy available to me it is watching birds, and you get plenty down there. Some stray gulls who have followed the rivers (Main and Rhine) down from the faraway coast, ducks, and even crows of different types a-plenty (virtually the local symbol), even near a river, sparrows and wood pigeons, all of which perch on the trees next to the river.

This set me off thinking, again. What happens to birds when they die? In reality, not in religious myth for a moment.

I grew up in a seaside town, and I was used to seeing gulls in many varieties. In Holland when I lived there, I used to be fascinated by the number of grey herons "fishing" by the canals. While here we have the various members of the crow family.

It then struck me that I have never yet seen a dead gull, a dead heron, or a dead crow. Do they just fall out of they sky or off a tree and fall among the foliage and disappear among the leaves? My wife and I saw a badly injured young sparrow near the house the other week (broken wing or foot - no hospitals or surgeries for them of course, just a lingering death). A couple of hours later it was lying dead among the foliage - see above.

There are millions of birds on this planet, and many live a full life span. No pension funds for them though, so once they have lived out their time, they die as expected. But where do their corpses go? If you ever do see thousands of bird corpses it usually means that there has been a (human-inspired) disaster of some kind. Otherwise they seem to have the knack of simply disappearing.

And back to the "spiritual" context, one wonders what they do to move on according to Buddhist reincarnation theory. Some become moles, some become horses, some (sadly) even become human beings. Why? What decides this.

And of course the Christians may well have go it wrong. Young parent birds could easily be telling their chicks as they feed them not to be too greedy, or else they will not make it up to the great aviary in the sky when they die ....

Robert Burns - a tribute of sorts

I was standing on Frankfurt Griesheim station this morning, when I caught sight of a very attractive young woman. Reddish brown hair, smartly dressed and in a conversation with a blonde female friend who had a lot to say in very fluent German, even if she could not completely disguise her Eastern European origins.

The repressed ageing wolf in me was almost tempted to walk up to the young lady and comment in the best Scottish accent that I could muster:

"As fair art thou, my bonny lass".

Classic chat-up line? Not exactly. Even if she could speak excellent English, this is Germany, and she would have probably no clue what I was talking about ..... Waste of time given the age difference it would have been anyway, but I have to grow old disgracefully, don't I?

No? OK .... I did say "repressed wolf"!

So "as fair art thou, my bonny lass"? I am sure that I have also heard that incorrectly once as "as fair as thou, my ain true love".

Anyway it comes for those who do not know (cultural ignoramuses) from Robert Burns's poem "My love is like a red, red rose" - not the way that he spelt it incidentally.

I have been reading quite a bit of Burns's poetry recently. Wonderfully romantic stuff much of it is. Try his "Highland Mary" for starters. There is much in Burns's work that will awaken the romantic in all of us.

Not that his lifestyle quite reflected that. As a young man, at least, he was regarded as dissolute, a ladies man par excellence.

He was also what American conservatives call a "liberal" or more probably a ******* liberal! A man who appreciated and suffered along with the common man (realise that Burns could read and write in an era when those skills were limited to the select few).

That he had financial difficulties and eventually succumbed to heart disease (at the tender age of 37) puts him all the more in the "man after my own heart" category. I can empathise with him all the more in this knowledge.

Given my knack for ridiculous juxtaposition, I tried relocating him in time to the dreadful Thatcher years in the UK in the 1980s.

Here was a man who spoke English with a distinct regional accent (when Cockney and Home Counties English were seen as the only deviations from "Oxford English" that anyone was allowed to use, the rest were incorrectly indicative of ignorant lower class hoi paloi), who was concerned with the common man (rather than the banker and the speculator, the "alleged" heroes (!!!) of the Thatcher years), who did not live anywhere near London, nor probably wanted to (heathen!). And the tabloid press would have hammered him for his womanising!

Definitely someone I can come to admire more and more by the second, now I come to think about it!

Meanwhile where the young lady with the reddish-brown hair disappeared to this morning? I will never know. My still very lovable wife meanwhile is reverting from her usual very romantic anti-sexual self again and shouting as ever very unromantically into the 'phone, and I am musing upon Burns's not very romantic (but maybe highly enjoyable) follow-ups to his fascinating poetic chat lines.

"As fair art thou, my bonny lass ...."? Yes, I shall sadly spend most of the day wondering where that young lady went. Old repressed dissolute wolves have amazing difficulty coping with ageing and perpetual disappointments.

All I ever wanted from life

1. A job that I enjoyed doing, and could do well.

2. Enough money so that I could meet all the basic needs, always pay the bills on time, never get into debt, have some spare to travel with, and the ability to save something for the future (through safe investment, not through wild speculation).

3. Good quality regular sex (preferably with the woman of my dreams who would appreciate my presence).

4. A number of good, reliable, intelligent friends.

Houses, cars, massive wealth etc? What would I do with them? Children? Not that bothered, all things considered.

I cannot see what is wrong with the above list, but it has been impossible to achieve ....

The Amanda Knox case, and the usual media nonsense

First comment on the Amanda Knox case. My heart goes out to the family and friends of the victim, Meredith Kercher, who died a gruesome and unnecessary death.

On the verdict yesterday my views are as follows:

1. The Italian Appeal Court got it right. There was insufficient evidence to produce a guilty verdict, and in the light of that fact alone, the initial verdict was a mistake.
2. I happen to believe, based upon what I have read of the case, that neither Knox nor her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were involved in Meredith Kercher's sad death. Motive, among other things, seems to be totally lacking in this regard.

The problem with this case is the way that the tabloid media have once more got into an "us against them" mentality. Kercher was "good" therefore Knox was obviously "bad". Kercher was a nice girl who was brutally murdered, therefore Knox was fundamentally evil and unquestionably guilty.

Fine? Or rather not fine! This is nonsensical logic, an adversarial situation that makes no sense, and does not apply in any rational analysis of the case.

This taking sides has badly affected coverage of the case. People step back from the facts and trade insults, and based upon what? It makes no sense. And does not reflect the situation that existed before the case arose.

Maybe it is just me, but I had the sense also that Knox was being presumed guilty because she was American. It is, unusually for the British tabloid press who nearly always automatically assume that the Americans can do no wrong (see the Iraq War), strange to find this predominant anti-American tone. In fact I cannot remember the like since the Louise Woodward case back in 1998.

But when one of "theirs" does something unpleasant to one of "ours" (allegedly!), out come the proverbial knives ....

Continental Europeans get this all the time from the nauseous British tabloids, so I imagine that the Americans have to expect it some time.

But unfortunately it does not help us reach objective judgements in cases like this.

Meredith Kercher's death, I repeat, is a cause for immense sadness. Amanda Knox being locked up for four years for a murder that she very probably did not commit, though, was not the response that this dreadful business required. Approached rationally, we should look at the problem objectively, find the real culprit (probably Rudy Gueye, who is already serving 16 years for the offence) and unleash any proverbial venom upon him.

Meanwhile hopefully Amanda Knox can go back to Seattle and disappear into oblivion - if the often nauseous American media will let her ....

Do politicians ever learn anything?

I was never a great fan of Tony Blair.

On European issues he could sound reasonably intelligent, but on most everything else he seemed to be nothing more than a clone of the Tory Party leaders that he had replaced in 1997.

He was fond of debt-driven economies in both the public and private sector, and never seemed too concerned about fixing the issues affecting people at the bottom end of the financial scale - indeed his drive for full employment seemed to include a penchant for forcing people to accept low wage jobs which would never allow the individual to develop the possibility to live an independent life.

His worst mistake though without question was his decision to help Bush invade Iraq. You would have given him credit for understanding that the terrorists were in Afghanistan, not Iraq, and stepping up involvement there.

Mistaking a megolomaniac Arab nationalist dictator, running a secular state, for a Muslim fundamentalist sympathiser though was extraordinarily naive.

You would have thought that he would have learned from what happened in Iraq that there was a difference betwen Sunni and Shia Islam - one that has caused a rift in the Muslim world in the same way the Protestant/Catholic schism split the Christian world for generations.

You would also have expected that he would have had the intelligence to learn that Al-Qaeda is a strictly Sunni movement. Islamofascist? No question, but the Shia were another lower level of individuals to be separated into a separate box to be demeaned or even eradicated.

And you would have thought that he understood that Iran is the home of Shia Islam, not Sunni Islam. You would have expected him to realise that Iran has enormous problems itself with Al-Qaeda elements in the country, who would be no allies of Ahmedinajad and the Mullahs?

And you would also expected him to realise that wars do not always liberate people. Like a revolution often creates a counter-revolution, so war often simply embitters a people invaded, who then start a "counter-war".

Of course if you spend your whole time listening to what the belligerent anti-Arab (however moderate) Israeli government is saying, then most of these facts will pass over your head.

So Blair's recent statement about Iran being (I cannot recall the exact words) a viper's nest of terrorists, is provocative in the extreme and probably has "made in Tel-Aviv" written all over it.

It is though also in keeping with the thinking of the American Republican Party (whose ideology seems much closer to his than that of the Democrats, who you would have thought were his natural allies).

It is in many respects (if Iraq is anything to go by) a call to war - on the discredited Pre-emptive Strike Principle (upper-case for emphasis NB).

Let us clarify this. There may well be terrorists in Iran - the Basij are diabolical law enforcers and the epitome of brutality, and Iran does undoubtedly encourage acts of violence in other parts of the world. But the terrorists in Iran are not, and will never be, part of Al-Qaeda. You are as likely to see Ian Paisley become Pope as you are to see Iran ally itself with that version of Sunni extremism.

After the botch-up in Iraq, all the phoney claims that preceded the invasion, and the resulting chaos following the invasion, you would have thought that Blair would have learned.

Instead he just continues down the same ignominious path that he followed in 2003.

Provoke, invent, invade.

He seems unfortunately to have learned very little. Hopefully his Labour Party colleagues will realise the mistakes that he made. Maybe even the Tories will hold off involvement when their GOP allies win power in 2013 and think that it is good politics to have a foreign war to distract the population.

And while many of us would like to see an end of the Shia Islamofascist regime in Teheran, invasion by a foreign power hardly seems the way to bring it about.

Impressions of Eastern Europe after the Cold War - Part 2

I am limited by copyright at this point.

Really I would have liked to repeat the item that I wrote on Helium.com called "Eastern Germany 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall", which looks at one aspect of the post Cold War East, this time looking particularly at Eastern Germany and the impact of the fall of the Wall.

As Helium has the copyright for my article, however, I will merely place the link here (you have to copy it into your browser - believe me it is worth the effort!). It will also give the reader the chance to see my other Helium stuff (and that of a load of other, often excellent, writers):

http://www.helium.com/items/1963263-eastern-germany-20-years-after-fall-berlin-wall

I will happily dedicate the article in particular to two people with whom I worked in Munich in the mid-90s - Jörg (from Magdeburg) and Gundula (from Chemnitz). I hope that life is still being good to them.

Postscript (December 3rd, 2021): Since I wrote this item, Helium has gone out of business, so I am afraid the article no longer exists. I have my own personal copy of the article if anyone is interested.

Impressions of Eastern Europe after the Cold War - Part 1

It was one of those stories doing the rounds a few years ago.

Teenage girls in Russia were asked what career they wanted to follow when they left school. Top of the list when all the results were counted?

Prostitution. A guaranteed income, and more money than doing anything else.

OK forget the moral aspects involved, and argue with the logic. Being a prostitute sounds like a rotten life for most involved, if not downright dangerous, but the lure of the money involved was another thing entirely. Well, let's face it, financially it beats working at McDonalds by a long way, right?

I recall noting the other day that things do not seem to have changed much. Russia apparently has overtaken the United States as the major producer of pornography. Sex still sells apparently, and there are still plenty of young Russian women lining up take advantage of the (dubious) opportunities. Pornography also seems something that may be a bit safer than prostitution - there is not much chance of finding yourself alone in a lurid room with a dubious individual bent on sadistic violence.

There is though the warning here that came from the former French porn star (and if I am not mistaken, current anti-porn crusader), Raphaella Andersen, that she saw rehearsals for some of these Eastern European women who were asked to carry out some extremely painful acts to prove their sexuality and prove that they were suitable performers in such movies.

The spread of "sexual openness" was one of those areas that followed the end of the Cold War across Eastern Europe.

I remember being in Prague with two friends in 1995, and discovering that prostitution was widespread and that "live shows" (the sort of thing that was now on its last legs in Hamburg for example) were common-place. I recall emerging from a bar where they sold wonderful beer at a price that you could not have imagined in the West, and seeing a young attractive blonde who had more leg than skirt and was obviously plying her trade. One of my friends made a joke about her in his broad Glaswegian accent, but that was about as far as we would go.

In Budapest the following year, it appeared that when dusk started to fall, the vice industry would take over in a way that made Prague seem really quite tame. Curiosity drove me into a bar eventually - the price tab in Germany would put you off immediately, but Eastern Europe was still only learning how to rip people off in a big way, so what might seem a frightening price for a beer for a Hungarian was a pretty standard price in a Biergarten in Munich.

The girl that I met in that place epitomsed the sad state that had hit the people of that city. She was 24, married, had two kids, and was one of those attractive brunettes that you do not forget in a hurry. I bought her a relatively affordable drink, kept the subject away from the obvious, and tried to get her to talk about her life, as well as her broken English would allow (no slipping off into German, she spoke none).

It was her first night (probably as well - I hope that she didn't stay there for a second night). She loved her husband and her kids; no, she did not want to be unfaithful to him; yes, she understood what she had to do if the customer wanted usw ....

Why? Her husband had lost his job, unemployment had become rife across the country (over 20%, sounds like they had brought in Margaret Thatcher to advise on employment policy), the cost of living (after the end of Communist style price fixing) was rising inexorably, and what jobs were on offer made McDonalds-style wages seem almost generous! So what choice was there? And was I now ready to go to the hotel, as her drink was running out?

You're married, you love your kids and your husband and you want .... Sorry, no.

If she had learned to lie and told me that she was single? Still no, but with a bit less rancour on my part.

I do not know whether Eastern Europe has emerged more into the economic mainstream now, and whether the exploitative sex industry is still quite as omnipresent across the whole area (it obviously is still significant in Russia - see above), but is this what people in Easten Europe really wanted when the Wall and the Iron Curtain, and all the barbed wire fencing that went with it, came down?

This was a better life? Is it better now for the mass of the people (OK the Stasi and equivalents have gone, but ....), so that this is not needed?

More on the economic issues in part two of this discussion.