Writing a work of fiction

Yes I am tired of writing a series of serious opinions on the issues of the day and the facts out there, so it is definitely time to write a piece of fiction.

My ideas:

1. I write the book anonymously so nobody can possibly trace me or prove who I am, or can work out who could possibly have written this.
2. I claim to be a member of the team of US Navy seals who took out Osama Bin Laden but change the facts of history into fictional ones so that it makes my backers look good (even if one of them ran away to Paris for two years to get away from his only chance of fighting in a war, and none of his sons ever intend to) and the current incumbent looks bad.
3. I also change the ending so that Muslims round the world get really angry and start threatening us, and it makes the current incumbent look responsible. 
4. I have it published as close to the election as possible so that our side benefits and nobody has time to realise that it is a work of fiction. 
5. And old Rupert Murdoch is bound to offer me a ton of money for the serial rights down the road ....

So what do you mean "somebody has already done this?".

Drug Cheats?

Lance Armstrong has been a sporting phenomenon. Recovering from testicular cancer to win the Tour de France seven times is quite extraordinary.

That he has been accused of doping (including some testimony by former teammates) goes with the territory. That he has denied it consistently is in his favour and the fact that he has never failed a test, despite his high profile, also speaks in his favour.

That he is now refusing to face charges by the USADA while maintaining his innocence sounds typical of him. It is sad that it has come to this, and proof of any guilt seems likely to be based upon hearsay.

Officially he will in all probability be stripped of all his titles - which would be a sad end to an inspiring story, though whether his guilt will have been actually proven is another matter.

Perhaps one curiosity that will result from this is that three of his titles would pass, officially at least, to Germany's Jan Ullrich. Another interesting character who has also been accused on numerous occasions of doping, and has also followed Armstrong's line that he did not dope. As he was the chief lieutenant on Team Telekom to Bjarne Riis, the 1996 winner, who has admitted to using steroids, and other members of that team have suggested that taking steroids was virtually team policy, and yet Ullrich managed to avoid taking them for all the years that he was involved with them, while nearly everyone else was doing so .... 

That said, except for the Fuentes affair (which he claims to be a one-off!) at the end of his career in 2006, he too never failed a drug test or got caught .... All his victories in various events from 2005 on have been erased, the rest (including the one TdF win in 1997 and several current second places) remain wharrever the suspicions involved.  

And this suspicion has never gone away.

Strip Ullrich of his 1997 Tour de France title, it would then pass to Richard Virenque of France who was involved in more than one doping scandal! And of course denied everything until he got caught! At which point the story became he did not realise what was happening!

This sadly becomes a never-ending story.

And the situation surrounding Lance Armstrong, given what he meant to so many cancer survivors, is all the sadder. You would hope that somehow his continued claims of innocence could somehow be proved beyond doubt. As it is we will never really know.

Not feeding the ducks

Further to my piece upon feeding ducks upon the river (Do not feed the animals and other nonsense) dated August 5th, I received a very interesting comment from an interested party (unfortunately listed as anonymous so I cannot thank them directly for the comment - rather than publish the comment I chose to do some research and expand it in this piece).

Anyway there are significant issues which mean that we should avoid feeding bread to ducks of which I personally was not previously aware (yes, even at my age I can learn new things), but are listed in the following article - which is American in origin but has international ramifications:

http://www.duckrescuenetwork.org/duck_care.html

Please note and observe. Anyone who reads this blog will understand that I am a bird lover, so I hope that the criticism made on the previous article will have a positive impact upon any of my readership in this respect. Protecting bird life remains a priority and we can all help.

It is true, it is written in a book

This piece of logic (?) came from a posting that I found on the Internet last night. From a Muslim. The book apparently is called the Koran and contains loads of scientific facts - like the water cycle, like the world is in the shape of a globe. Therefore as Mahomet was a bright guy capable of understanding these bits of scientific logic, everything that he had to say is true.

Sorry to disappoint you, my friend (and please don't start fretting and start threatening to blow me out of this existence), but it is not that easy.

Nobody (not even me!) gets it right 100% of the time. The fact that these facts were correct and they were written in a book does not prove that God exists because that is written in the same book. It would not be the first example of someone capable of reaching some correct scientific conclusion who was delusional where other matters were concerned. As here.

Move on.

It may surprise some of my readers to know that I had a classical education. As a working-class child living in a then industrial town in the North of England, it may seem arguable as to what use it might have been, but it is nonetheless the case. So at the age of 11 you start learning Latin. At 14 you get on to reading Plato (real fun stuff to try out with one of your uncles while he was lugging heavy weights round the dockside). And then you get on to an in-depth study of Greek and Roman mythology.

At the age of 17 (for my own amusement), I read, in translation, the two great works of the Greek writer, Homer - the Iliad (covering the events of the Trojan War) and the Odyssey (following the adventures of Odysseus on his way from that war). Get a good translation, recommended reading! 

Anyway since that time:

1. I have learned that archaeologists have uncovered many of the remains of the city of Troy.
2. I have learned that archaeologists have also indicated that findings thereabouts prove that a battle or protracted war took place.    
3. I have learned that Homer was actually trying to produce a historical account and not just a series of stories for entertainment.

Important in both the Iliad and the Odyssey is the role played by the the various members of the Greek Pantheon, Zeus, Athena usw. Hephaestus, god of the underworld provided the great warrior, Achilles, with his armour,  Athena was the patron of Odysseus usw.

Put this together. The Trojan War occurred, Homer wrote two books about this, as it was mentioned in the books it must be true that the Greek Pantheon exists. Absolutely the same logic as my Muslim friend above would have me believe about Mahomet!

Ah, but you cannot really believe what was written in the Iliad and the Odyssey? By the same token you cannot then claim that you can truly believe what is written in the Koran - either! Because something is written in a book DOES NOT MAKE IT TRUE! Why is any book preferable to any other. One might suit your opinions and beliefs, but it does not serve as empirical truth!

In other words if you want to prove the existence of God, you better come up with something more substantial than one single work from one single source. There is no reason to believe that will be anyway preferable to other alternatives available out there! 

Linguistic oddities and political leftovers

History has left some oddities around Europe that sometimes require some understanding of what went on in past centuries and why.

Head off to Germany's northernmost state, Schleswig-Holstein, some time for an example.

As anyone who follows German politics will know, virtually anyone who has an election anywhere in the country has a coalition government. There is proportional representation, and as parties rarely get 50% of the vote, power has to be shared.

So back to Schleswig-Holstein. In the state elections in 2012 came the usual vote with no clear winner and the need to form a coalition. This time the German Social Democrat Party (SDP) wanted to form a ruling coalition with the German Green Party (die Grünen), but still did not have a clear majority. So they also enlisted the support of the SSW - the Südschleswigsche Wählerverband.

This is the party representing the Danish speaking minority in the state. A Danish speaking minority? The state borders Denmark, and back in the 1860s when Bismarck and the King of Prussia were looking to build a united Germany, a short war was fought to acquire Schleswig-Holstein. A side product of this was the acquisition of a Danish speaking minority who now have Danish-speaking schools, councils, businesses, you name it.

German speaking leftovers also can be found in some odd parts of Europe (see my piece elsewhere about what became of the Sudeten Germans). One of the often forgotten countries when you talk of German speakers is Italy, that is apart from during the skiing season when an Italian with a very German sounding name wins an event. They invariably come from the South Tyrol, which was taken from Austria at the end of the First World War and awarded to Italy. I cannot say if I have ever heard of a movement to return it - relationships between the two countries are very good, so where maybe is the need?

Talking of Austria though, when the late Jörg Haider was governor of the Austrian state of  Kärtnen (Carinthia) he was notably hostile to the Slovenian minority being able to use their own language in schools and the public arena, or have place names in two separate languages, and even since his death in 2008 the issues have not shown much sign of progress.

Linguistic issues still do spring up from time to time where borders and linguistic minorities do not coincide. Even given the progress in bringing populations together for the common economic good, the leftovers of battles fought and wars won over a century ago do still occasionally raise their heads in ways that are potentially quite ugly. Maybe Schleswig-Holstein can show a way forward that is both positive and progressive.                  

Likeability or competence?

It was one of those bits of election coverage from around the world that you read occasionally.

Candidate one was an effective, extremely knowledgeable, highly competent person when it came to getting things done, but was also intellectual, aloof - in fact charisma-challenged.

Candidate two was the guy next door. Extremely popular in the neighbourhood, liked by nearly everyone (even those who did not agree with him on anything), not organised, no idea how even to arrange a children's birthday party, no real idea on how to change anything or fix any of the problems that people were having, and at best inconsistent - likeable but almost clueless.

At the last count candidate two had a sizable lead in the opinion polls!

That I have more than a bit of difficulty understanding. If you want your life improving, if you want problems resolving, you pick the person who will get results. How likeable they are should not be a factor!

Eventually charisma does not pay the bills! 

The War with Iran in 2013 and how Europe should react

Update (December 1st, 2021 - I thought about deleting this article. As we now know, Romney and Ryan did not win the 2012 Presidential Election and none of the things about which I warned occurred. Nonetheless I have left the article in the blog as the thinking behind it has some relevance. What might have happened is significant - and it could serve as a warning for the future. Iran's regime is by no means one to be admired, but another major Middle East war is definitely not needed either!).

I keep telling my American friends and contacts who are principally open-minded liberals (and generally good people - no anti-Americanism here!) about the disaster that is about to happen. Namely that Romney will win the US Presidency in November, and the Republicans will win both houses in Congress.

I get back from them the usual strange optimism that people were not born yesterday and it cannot happen. Sadly even American liberals suffer from the prime disease widespread in the US - over-optimism.

I finally noted an American liberal outlet yesterday that was prepared to agree with this assessment. Reality is finally striking home.

Even if the facts are that the Romney budget will increase, not decrease, the deficit; that unemployment will rise (sharply) not fall; that homelessness and poverty will increase massively while the rich get richer; that there will be more jobs (in China!); and that the chances are that more deregulation will lead eventually to a crash like that of 2008 only on an even bigger scale  - none of this will gain much attention amidst all the negative advertising and the masking of (OK blatant lies about) the issues.

If European governments can force their financial institutions to stay out of the mass gambling on Wall Street that will ensue (including the inevitable massive losses), some of the worst may be avoided but not much. The global economy is pieced together in such a way that the spin-offs cannot be avoided entirely. Things (mainly due to the on-going impact and side effects of the 2008 crash) are bad enough here. A repeat of that?  It doesn't bear thinking about.

And anyway are the non-nationalised European banks be going to be kept out of this mass gambling and losing heavily again - even remembering that the coffers are empty from last time, so there will be no-one to bail them out this time?

The one other aspect of the Romney agenda. Check out every survey on Bush's wars and how many Americans want to continue with them. A vast majority wanted out of the shambles in Iraq. A sizable majority want out of the still justifiable war in Afghanistan.

Romney has made quite clear that he (incorrectly) believes that Iran will have WMD (see Iraq), and they will not be allowed to have them. Translated: military action will be taken against Iran - who in 30-odd years of a regime that is by any stretch of the imagination internally disgustingly brutal, has still never launched an attack directly outside of its borders! Whether this means simply using air power, or a full-scale war .... Either way within the terms of international law, when the other party has not actually started anything it is not acceptable, even if the US (particularly when the Republican Party is in power) is not prone to take the slightest notice of such things.

Europe's response should be simple. We want absolute proof that there is a need for this action (better than you managed with Iraq!!!!), and not hearsay and not Israeli propaganda. Then if you can provide it (which you cannot!), we will provide logistical support only! No troops, no planes, just refuelling stops, use of air space usw.

The history of Europe is stamped with unnecessary wars over the centuries. Necessary action, as to bring the conflict in the Balkans to an end or end the illegal invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, can be justified, and that is about it. In other words action needs to be quick, sharp, purposeful and effective. War does not always liberate, in fact usually it creates for the civilian population concerned an even worse situation than what already exists including turning large numbers of them into refugees.

And whatever else, as much as I think that the intelligentsia in Teheran would love to see a more liberal regime, the chances are that the majority of Iranians are very much like their American counterparts - religiously conservative and prepared to select a government that reflects their beliefs/prejudices/superstitions. If we believe in democracy we are forced to accept that (nonsense as it may be), like it or not!     

Loner or individualist

Consider the word "loner". What do you envisage?

A person out on his own. A misfit. Someone who has few friends if any. Suspicious. Furtive. Not to be trusted. And, where the media are concerned, almost invariably male. General view: negative.

Now consider the word "individualist". What do you envisage now?

A person out on his own. Someone who does not conform, but in a positive sense. He will likely have friends but does not always do what they expect. Entrepreneurial, will take risks, bold, challenging. More likely to be male, but not always. General view: positive.

And when does a loner become an individualist?  Or vice versa.

We live in a world where people who choose to be alone in one way or another are not easily understood. In a business sense though it is much more likely to be seen as a positive quality than in a social sense.

Though quite why baffles me.

It must be some 12 to 15 years ago now, when I was still spending quite a bit of time in the UK, when I saw a stat that some 13% of working adults (one out of every eight) in the UK actually chose to live alone. It is not seen as being an easy option, though quite why ....

Apart from the times when I was in a relationship (that eventually failed) with one girlfriend or another before I finally, late in life, got married, this was the way I lived. One of my closest friends, a likable intelligent, sociable animal if I ever met one also lives like this.

The worst period of my life just about was during my student days when I was sharing accommodation with three people none of whom I really liked. Typical all-male accommodation at the time, untidy, disordered. I would not consider it to have been like the proverbial pig-sty, after all pigs instinctively live a certain way - humans should have the brainpower to do better.    

The standard argument over the years that human contact being what it is you are better off living with someone that you dislike that being on your own.

Sorry, disagree entirely. On your own, you have control. You are not subject to (at best) the whims or (at worst) the bullying of other people. Occasionally you get lonely, occasionally you get depressed.

But that sense of loneliness and depression can be a sight worse when subject to being stressed by the presence of an undesirable person (at least from your perspective) who is not going to go away any time soon.

I personally think that "loners" get a bad rap. I have travelled to a lot of places on my own, and had the chance to make a lot of occasional new friends through having nothing to slow or tie me down. You are master of your own fate and your own schedule. I think that my wife is a wonderful lady, but we do not travel well together - the expectations are totally different.   

There are also times when at home my train of thought is clearer when there is nobody around to disturb me (and the times that I feel like getting up and turning the television off when she is here, fume, fume! But you have to make allowances!). Furtive, suspicious? Hardly. Who knows, if I could make a greater success of my life in a business context (and pigs will fly before that happens!), I could well turn into an individualist! 

Research and development, or they will only do it for the money

Once in a while I pick up comments from American conservative commentators that greed is essential as without it there would be no incentive to invent anything, or undertake scientific research usw.

People are not actually interested in the discoveries or inventions, it is only the money they are to gain that drives them to do it.

I would personally dismiss this for the nonsense that it is. It is IMHO a complete misunderstanding of the intellectual process.

Move on.

Consider the case of Doctor Paul Ehrlich.

"Who?", you might be asking. Actually if you had lived in Germany in the 1940s, you would not even have been able to acknowledge his existence, being to science what Heinrich Heine was to poetry. Rather like under the Nazis in the 1940s, Heine was no longer the author of the poem the "Lorelei" (it was apparently an anonymous work), so Doctor Paul Ehrlich was not a pioneer in research into chemotherapy, nor the person who formulated "Salvarsan" - the first known treatment produced for treating syphilis.

Translated for those who did not get the gist of the last sentence - Ehrlich, like Heine, was Jewish, so his medical work in the field of chemotherapy and the discovery of the cure for syphilis were written off by the Nazis. Wrongly, of course!  

The cause of syphilis had actually been discovered by Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hofmann in 1905, and the first antibody test produced by August Paul von Wassermann, working with Julius Citron and Albert Neisser at the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin in 1906.

While working in private practice previously in Berlin, Ehrlich had himself done research at the Koch Institute (NB - free of charge, out of his interest in the science and concern to find solutions. One can hardly imagine that the profit motive was the driving force if he was prepared to undertake extra work without reward!).

While at the Koch Institute, Ehrlich had establish his own research institute (Das Institut für experimentelle Therapie), which moved to Frankfurt in 1899, and it was while working an offshoot of his Institute, the Georg-Speyer-Haus in Frankfurt, that he made his breakthrough discovery in 1909.

One can hardly imagine him jumping in the air screaming "I'm rich, I'm rich", when the breakthrough discovery was made. Rather you could foresee the satisfaction of finding a cure for what was a known social scourge. 

As a sexually transmitted disease, syphilis was something anyway that was not to be discussed in polite society. One recalls the reaction to Ibsen's play "Ghosts" in Norway a few years earlier. And despite the many notable personalities of the time across the world who had caught it, it was seen as much as a character flaw as a disease. To catch it was the sign of a person lacking a high sense of morality and one who indulged in unwarranted promiscuous behaviour.

So making the cure known involved overcoming many barriers, as did getting the product to where it was required. There was also the "moral" argument to overcome that having a cure for syphilis would lead to an increase in promiscuous behaviour! As it was, the toxic nature of the remedy often had unpleasant and occasionally lethal side effects, so whether this argument was totally valid is open to question.

Ehrlich though was to gain a Nobel Prize for his work, and in later years, in the aftermath of the Second World War, his reputation was re-established in Germany.

Today the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut can be found in Langen, in the southern suburbs of Frankfurt. It is administered by the German Ministry of Health and its main objective (and I quote from the website) is "the approval of clinical trials and the marketing authorisation of particular groups of medicinal products". Maybe a wider range of activities than those pursued by Ehrlich himself, but one of which he would have no doubt approved.

The only question left is whether he died rich, and money was a serious motive after all. A good question to which I have found no satisfactory answer. From my reading I gain the impression that he was a true man of science for whom research and finding resolution to medical problems were the most important criteria, and if he did gain financially as a result it was a by-product, not the principle aim, of the results of his endeavours.       

Reincarnation - or if the Buddhists have got it right

My wife theoretically believes in reincarnation.

The ultimate aim is to be so good a person eventually you reach Nirvana ("The ineffable ultimate in which one has attained disinterested wisdom and compassion" according to http://www.thefreedictionary.com/nirvana , nothing to do with a British band of the late 60s or an American band of the 90s).

Before that you have to go through various stages to prove your worthiness.

Don't quote me, but you cannot, I believe, regress too far, even if there are people out here who deserve to have their next (very short, sharp) life as a mosquito. The entire political class across the Western world definitely needs a downgrade though to go and relearn what they have obviously not brought to this life! That is of course assuming (very doubtfully) that the thinking works in practice.

There are tests available on the Internet to see what you might expect to be next time round, though I am informed that no self-respecting Buddhist would accept the results.

When I was in the rehab clinic in Bad Nauheim following my heart attack and operations, I went on the Internet there and tried out a test I found (might have been useful to know, my long-term survival prospects were not that brilliant at the time).

Answer - in the next life I am going to be a horse. All well and good, I might end up winning the Derby and retire to stud for the rest of my life (sounds like fun), or as a dray horse where at least I could get used to the smell of beer.

 Then again I might end up as a work horse on a farm, get gelded early (knowing my luck ....), and when I get too old, instead of being put out to pasture, I would get sent to the knacker's yard to be chopped up for cat food ..... 

Health Services and Insurance - particularly but not exclusively in Germany

I must admit to once having a certain naïvety when it came to the cost of health insurance.

In 2008, about 4 to 5 months before I had my heart attack, I was facing a situation where I was living principally in Germany, and working in France and needed medical cover for myself in both countries with additional coverage for my wife in Germany.

Health service coverage in both countries is excellent normally. Given that my earnings were not overly substantial, going through the German national health service made sense from nearly all points of view, given that they also allowed international incident coverage.

Which was all well and good, except for the fact that the employer in France would not allow for coverage from Germany! For some obscure reason (don't look for logic in this), you could be covered from Spain.

Problem not resolved, I went to look at private medical insurance offers to cover both France and Germany on the Internet. I found one figure of €340. This is where the naivety stepped in. For some obscure reason I assumed that this was an annual cost. Rereading it, it became obvious that it was per month.

Throw your hands up in the air, mutter the phrase "I am never ill" (ironical given what happened 5 months later!), and go back and look at alternatives.

Eventually I came up with an alternatively that allowed two lots of coverage, using this strange Spanish alternative in France, and temporarily at least, the German coverage for both of us in Germany.

In Germany there is no opting out, you are obliged to be covered for all medical costs. Some 80% of people here are in the state system, the rest are privately insured. Costs for the insurance rise rapidly as you get older, and women's insurance at child-bearing age appears to be more than for men. The company that my wife works for is expected to pay her for the first six weeks that she is ill, after that the state system kicks in. They pay a percentage, not the full amount of any earnings.

One illusion that needs shattering here. It is not free! If you are employed at least. A percentage of your salary is deducted every month and paid to the health insurance scheme. Should you wish to visit a doctor, there is a charge every quarter (starting in January, April, July and October) of 10 Euro to be paid. Then if you require drugs for your complaint, they cost as well - so last month my wife had to pay a further 8 Euro 40 for something to help cure pains in her shoulder for example. In the UK, payment for prescriptions is also required in most cases, I believe.

The treatment here is good, reliable and would be expensive if you needed to pay for it yourself. I also think that it is more thorough than in the UK for example. When my father had had his heart attacks in England, they decided when he was ready to go home.

When I had mine, after the nightmare of 26 days in hospital (including 3 operations), they sent me off to a rehabilitation clinic for a month. The impact of that incidentally is well worthy of praise, you definitely have a more rounded recovery process.

Total cost of all this I accidentally discovered was some €17,940 which I could never have found out of my own pocket but is substantially less than I have spent in state insurance premiums over my lifetime (during which I have made a point of staying away from having medical treatment except when absolutely essential. And even then, reread my previous item where I went to work for 2 days after having the heart attack, and would not have gone to the hospital or had the treatment if my wife had not insisted - somehow you get through, and the income from work is necessary!).   

One curiosity is that the German national health system has been in place in one form or another since Bismarck at the end of the 19th century! And you don't get much more conservative than Bismarck. The apparently conservative logic of the time goes:

1. If you are to have a successful military you need fit, strong, healthy young men to fight for you. So keeping your population healthy makes sense from that perspective, and when most of the private soldiers in the front line come from the poorer sections of society, keeping that sector healthy becomes significant. (Not sure incidentally if they were aware at the time that infant mortality among boys was higher than among girls). 
2. A successful industrial nation needs a healthy workforce to do all the jobs that make the country prosperous. It benefits companies and makes them profitable not to have people skiving off sick.

Which are thoughts to ponder.

Why is it important?

My father's ashes have probably been rotating in their urn occasionally in recent years since I moved full time to Germany.

I grow up in England in the 1950s and 1960s hearing from my father's generation the phrase "I hate Germans". Asked why came back the standard answer "They started two world wars". I would question the first, the second is undeniable, but hating the leaders who started that second war is different from hating an entire people. Differentiation is a very important criterion.

My father was a quiet, very private, very sensitive man. And modest, and a great believer in work ethic - work was its own reward in many respects. Property, wealth? Come on! When I was 13 we owned absolutely nothing - no house, no car - we weren't the likes of Romney and Ryan coming from inherited wealth and despising, or at least offering simplistic unworkable solutions to, those people who were without.

He and my uncle, who besides being his brother-in-law was also his closest friend, both were involved in the Second World War. My father was a ground-crew mechanic in the Royal Air Force in Scotland. The role of a ground-crew mechanic was to help fit out a plane ready to go into combat, repair any problems when the plane returned from action, and generally ensure that everything with the war machine ran smoothly.

So when a plane came back from a sortie they had to deal with it so that it was ready to go out again when needed, and given the volume of activity in 1944, imagine what that involved. Were there  casualties on the plane when it came back from a raid? There must have been. If there were, my father must have seen the casualties of war close up. Do I know for certain? No. He never spoke about such things apart from one comment that he made when I was already 20 years old about how awful war was and that it should be avoided at all costs.

My uncle meanwhile was in a ground unit in the British Army. Unlike virtually every other member of my family, this meant that he had actually set foot outside the UK. He was a great raconteur in his own quiet way and would recount some of the amusing cultural differences that he had found in his time in Belgium. Action, war, guns blazing, death you name it - that again never came up in discussion.

I grew up in the era when Adenauer had brought Germany back into fold of democratic nations. Over the years I came to admire the political lions of that era, not just Adenauer, but also Erhard, Schumacher, Brandt. Sadly the days have gone when such personalities arose. Kohl, Schröder, Merkel, not one has known how to create full employment or raise the standard of living of the people as a whole.

Move on.

When I comment on Fascism rearing its ugly head again, and pan the likes of Michael Fischer, who seem to glorify all the nonsense involved, there are good reasons. The history of the Fascist era and the 1,000 year Reich is not just a series of stories taken from books and old newsreels. If I did not experience the events and the war that it produced first-hand, I know and have met people who did experience it.

In hospital in 2008 I met an 85-year-old German guy who had served on the Eastern Front. Not one kind word for Hitler from him (he had supported the resistance, tacitly at least) - and the stories he could tell. Tough old guy. His wife described him a "stubborn old cuss", but to survive the Eastern Front during the war and 3 heart attacks, he had to be stubborn - and more besides!  In a few short days I learned a great deal from him. Personal experience is often more interesting, if potentially more coloured and biased, than what you can read or see.

 But then he had the advantage over the Michael Fischers of this world, or the various Fascist and neo-Fascist parties round Europe and their supporters. He had seen the sheer awfulness that that thinking and intolerance produced. The brutality that arises from ignorance, the whipped-up nationalism and the instilled need to hate in a stereotypical fashion - if not measured and brought under control.

There are many understandable reasons for the insecurity and unhappiness (and justifiable anger) across the continent at the moment. The easy solution though of running to national borders, national ethnicity, national economic solutions, the "national interest", national sovereignty usw DOES NOT WORK!

For the simple reason the factors that control economies are international. The breakdown of capitalism in 2008 was international, the ramifications are international. Suddenly you can close your doors and everything will work? Don't kid yourselves. International speculators will see to that.

And what are the chances of buying products exclusively made in your own country?  You don't want to wear goods made in China? Prepare yourself to walk naked down the street when your current wardrobe wears out!

Which does not mean that we do not need to change how things work (limiting the ability of speculators to control our lives is IMHO absolutely essential, and breaking the stranglehold that the Chinese have on production is also essential - see other pieces that I have written on this blog). Simply looking to nationalist solutions, and the brutalised version of the caste system that they often entail will though take us nowhere positive.

The lessons of history indicate clearly that extreme political or economic or religious agendas create more problems than they resolve. The 45 million people who died in Europe in the Second World War are testimony to that (and check out the barbarism under which some of those people died - what do you say to anyone who wants to see a repeat of that?).

And ask the people of Eastern Germany if they want the barbed wire fences and the Stasi back, for all the difficulties that they have experienced in the past 23 years.

And ask the people who live in a spirit of religious tolerance how Sharia Law or its potential Christian or Judaic equivalents could possibly improve their lives.

I am an old man, I have a clearer image what Fascism entailed than those who foolishly embrace it now. It was a horrendous creed based upon our lowest, most ignorant instincts. We do not need it back in any way shape or form! And it is important to recognise that, and take every action possible to ensure that the return of such or similar creeds and practices never again happens.

For those of you who think that Fascism is not on the way back in Europe

You have to be able to speak German to read this:

http://de.nachrichten.yahoo.com/ungarischer-rechtsextremer-entdeckt-j%C3%BCdische-wurzeln-230802215.html

That someone with Jewish roots should be thrown out of his party because of them - thought that this thinking disappeared in 1945? Think again! This party is also into the persecution of the Roma people of Hungary - in a big way.

Interestingly though they describe themselves as merely "conservative and patriotic"! Now where have I heard that phrase before????

Also fascinating is the number of advocates of this thinking direct from the political cess-pit who have spent time in jail (the same can be said about the ethnic European converts to extreme versions of Islam! Another form of Fascism).

The lessons of the 1930s should be clear and obvious though. Fascism grew out of a vacuum when orthodox political and economic thinking failed and unemployment and poverty became rife. That vacuum needs to be closed again, and quickly, before we get a repeat of the events of the 1930s. It is no time for complacency and no time for shrugging our shoulders and saying nothing can be done!

You never talk about sex much, do you?

I was told this the other day.

Not sure that it wasn't meant to be a criticism, but in a way I find it rather a compliment.

Maybe I could bump up the number of page views by writing some really sordid stuff? Mmmmm.

Anyway two points to bear in mind.

1.  I am an old man. If you are still obsessed with sex at my age, you are in a very bad way psychologically. I am in desperate straits financially and the psychological impact of that should not be underestimated, but that is a totally different story! 
2.  For people who are younger, I am  reminded of what a girlfriend in Holland told me some 20 years ago - namely why spend your time talking about it when you should be doing it?

Anyway a few random related issues.

I noted the other day that despite the economic crisis, apparently the number of unmarried teen girls getting pregnant in Europe is going down. Which sounds like good news.

Way back when in the early days of my teaching career (about 1974 or 1975?), I encountered a girl, a very bright personable young woman, who was on the verge of going to university, albeit a year later than most of her friends. The year later was due to the fact that when she was 14, she had got pregnant and had had to take the year out of school.

"Always the quiet ones", one of my colleagues informed me, probably incorrectly. Her parents had taken responsibility for the child, her daughter had become her sister to all intents and purposes, and at the age of 15 she had resumed some kind of normalcy while her parents took the strain. At the age of 19, incidentally, she was still in a steady relationship with the boy who had fathered her child.

In many respects this was a fortunate example - teenage sexual escapades and the resulting pregnancies are often a lot sadder. I have, though, for years been in the progressive mould where kids and sex are concerned  in that I think that they should have all the information there is, nothing hidden, on the subject to ensure that they know the consequences involved. And boys (IMHO boys tend to be more irresponsible than girls in this area) should be informed that they will be held responsible if the worst happens (which would involve financial responsibility long-term for the maintenance of their child!).

A total digression brings me back to the subject about talking about sex. And 1975 also occurs as a dubious second link.  As a writer I should have thought of a more clever way of doing this, but .....

Anyway, one thing that I never did understand were/are these telephone services that you can ring to hear someone "talking dirty". This was in 1975 quite rare (if it existed at all) in England - which apparently is not the story now. That summer though occurred my famous see-all-of-North-America-in-21-days-on-a-very-limited-budget trip (didn't see Montreal, Las Vegas, the Pacific North-West, the Canadian Prairies or Florida, so the title is approximate!).

While in New York City I picked up a free magazine full of interesting thing to do in the city. One page was full of telephone numbers you could ring to have a "dirty" conversation. Loads of provocative pictures of semi-clad young women with provocative names and brief descriptions of the things they had in mind.

Quite what these conversations might entail ("I am touching this", "I am unzipping that", "I am getting really excited" usw) .... Yes, well. You cannot see the person, you cannot touch them and all they are doing is talking. What is the point?

Then you look at the price of the calls. Standing in the middle of 5th Avenue fumbling for change so you can keep this overpriced load of nonsense going and looking a complete idiot in the process???? You could use the money instead to go and see the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and do the guided tour of one of the major TV studios (I think that it was CBS, but don't quote me). Sure enough that is what I did.

Get out to LA, sex appeared in a totally different form. I was wandering down Sunset Boulevard when a startlingly attractive young blonde approached me. My days of loneliness were soon to be gone, all the trappings of a frustrated love life were soon to be behind me, the girl of my dreams had finally appeared?

Well not exactly!

Or rather only for exactly 20 minutes if I had $50 to lay out. Not quite "Sunset Boulevard" as I had hoped or expected, sadly. I was staying in a hotel room in downtown LA that cost $4 a night (cheap even in 1975, and with ingrained dirt on the bath enamel to give it a real downtrodden feel) and I would have $50 to waste like that?

Pity really, she was such a nice looking girl, even if the language she used when I turned down her offer was not so lady-like! I wonder where she is now. 50-odd years old if she is still alive and you cannot live doing that forever.

This was just one of several strange events on that trip. Almost as strange was the flustered young woman who got on the Greyhound at some stop in Nebraska, hurriedly stuck down a bag full of clothes and other items on the seat next to me, made some comment about being back in a minute, and dashed off the bus again. 15 minutes later, one bag still sitting on the seat, the bus about to leave, and no signs of the flustered young woman. I mentioned it to the driver, who had difficulty picking out my accent and drove off anyway.

Next stop - one hour or so later, somewhere else in Nebraska, I headed off to find the lost property place. Told the guy about the woman, gave him the bag, was told that I was a real gentleman (huh? Anyone else would surely have done the same, right?). Might have been the girl of my dreams, might have been night after night ravenously doing what the girls on those telephone services above always talk about .... And then again!

Anyway so much for nostalgia (better known as "Nauseoustalgia" in past years in Mad magazine).  I have run out of material already.

"Well, you never talk about sex much, do you?".

Not really, but then there isn't really much interesting to say about it, is there? 
  

Religious propaganda in action

One of my latest ventures onto YouTube was to watch a video called "6 Solid Reasons Not to be an Atheist".

Not particularly interesting, logical or convincing, and containing nothing by way of solid reason or related mental processes.

You get this young American guy bouncing around uttering a load of opinionated views to which he is entitled, but do not differ much from what you can hear in a million other places.

What is interesting though is that the person who has placed the video on YouTube (a young person's medium theoretically, though I would question that) is not the person on the video.

The video is one in a series of very similar Christianity pushing theories (OK "propaganda" if you wanna be nasty!) aimed at relatively naïve young people who have become atheists (which underestimates most of the young people who are atheists IMHO). The person, who issued all these videos, is according to his/her YouTube profile 54 years old.

Why it isn't explained why some younger, unidentified individual is the person pushing the argument and is not the person issuing the video is a good question.

Maybe at 54 you do not think that you can look appealing to younger people. Well if they are not convinced by your looks or your presentation, why should they believe your arguments or your proxy?

It becomes though more of a sales or promotion or propaganda exercise than anything else. It does not come across as being 100% honest (which all religions like to think that they are!).

I would like to have communicated with the individual concerned for this exercise and challenge him ("her" actually might also be a possibility here) on the content, thinking and presentation of their material - and also upon the fact that they underestimate young people who have the capacity to reason. Unfortunately the individual concerned has a last Activity Date on YouTube of April 2009, so like a cuckoo they have left their damage behind and moved on.

Which may be a sad but typical comment upon the individual concerned and the entire exercise involved!

So how much money do you need anyway?

It may be my memory powers but the past has a habit of reappearing in current situations.

I was reminded this weekend of one of my better sayings from 1986 or 1987.

I was still living in Manchester, working as a Systems Analyst, earning the stunning sum of just over 11,000 pounds a year, and spending most of my evenings hanging round one of three pubs in Didsbury or the city centre  with one of my younger colleagues.

He was a staunch Thatcherite. Given that he was living in a tacky, overpriced, one-room bedsit at the time his political standpoint took some understanding, but he had overdosed on the Daily Mail, spent far too much time believing stories about the Cockney wide-boys who were getting extremely rich extremely quickly in the City of London (this was before Nick Leeson got found out a few years later and we were to find out how these characters got away with so much!), and doses of instant reality from myself were helpful in his personal development.   

Such as:
"If I start earning 10,000 a year more tomorrow, I am definitely not rich, but if I am forced to earn 10,000 a year less tomorrow, I definitely am poor!".

At the time an extra 10,000 pounds a year would have turned my life round. I would have gone from indebtedness to a degree of relative comfort very quickly. So much I did not need, my lifestyle was not extravagant, my needs not excessive. I did not need or want to have millions, or to live in luxury - wharrever.

I can also think that I was by no means alone in thinking in those terms.

Curiously though, the people who think like that have been squeezed, the jobs in that range have decreased in number, and there has been an increased polarisation between those with excess and everyone who is trying to stay out of poverty. In 25 years things across the Western world have not improved. The one thing that has changed though is that it has become harder for people to stay in work as they get older, with the ageism that is rife just about everywhere!

This weekend I was again back to the same theme. Namely how do I generate 2,000 Euro a month more - net. That is petty cash to the Murdochs and Romneys of this world, but all the difference to my personal life style. I would go from indebtedness to a degree of relative comfort very quickly (sound familiar????).

Something using the talents that you possess, that is secure, that will not kill all the time that you now have spare (the translation work is using up long periods of my days for the peanuts it brings in, as it is!). And avoiding the scams that make up 99.999% of ways to make money on the Internet!

Quite how? Good question, but unless we reverse the trends that have been imposed upon us for the best part of the past 30 years, no answer is likely to be forthcoming for any of us. The trend appears to be down not upwards and nobody seems capable or interested in offering anything practical that works - merely the same glib old clichés that have taken us nowhere for longer than I care to remember!

God taking revenge and other nonsense

I wonder how many of my readers have heard of Ahar? Or Varzaqan? Or Haris? Not the Harris with two "r"s in the Hebrides.

I pride myself upon my knowledge of international political geography, and yet until this evening these names were unknown to me.

They are towns in Iran - North-West Iran to be precise. This afternoon local time three earthquakes struck the area. At least 87 people at the last count were dead in those three locations alone. Apparently four villages in the region have been flattened - completely - while 60 have been badly damaged, so that figure of 87 will eventually be only a proportion of the fatalities involved.

A tragedy by any standards for the people who live there. For many of us the humanitarian requirements will be a priority. Anyone who saw the news coverage from, say, Italy or Chile, Haiti or New Zealand following earthquakes in recent years can understand the sheer awfulness of the event, and the impact upon the survivors who have lost loved ones, and have nowhere to go where they feel safe.

At least that is how I hope people will respond.

This being Iran, though, and given the public image in the world of their ruling political regime  .... And do not expect more help than normal from the Arab world (they are Persians, not Arabs), nor from much of the rest of the Muslim world either (they are primarily Shia, not Sunni).

And then of course there will be those in the Israeli lobby who will not see this as a natural disaster which could happen anywhere (see above) but rather as God taking revenge upon the Iranians for daring to challenge his chosen people. Thankfully we do not have many idiots left in Europe who think like this, but there are a startling number of people elsewhere who do. Sadly and stupidly (well, for starters there is no God to take revenge upon anyone, and there is no such thing as a "chosen people" either!).

Anyway, when this disaster in Iran has finally been cleared up, in a couple of years time the Iranian people can brace themselves for a disaster that is man-made rather than natural, as they will have the war to end all wars on their hands when the future President Romney and the equally awful future Vice-President Ryan decide to invade to find more non-existent WMDs .... That figure of 87 fatalities will seem small in comparison.

Postscript - anyone who wants my impression of the wretched regime in Teheran can read the rest of this blog and find articles where I am extremely critical of them, and why, and why I still oppose any war against them!

Update (December 1st, 2021 - I never was a good pundit, and so, of course, I was mistaken about Romney and Ryan winning the US election in 2012 - thankfully!).

The Great American Songbook, or boy meets girl?

I have been informed by people over the years that I am remarkably heterosexual in my opinions (well I am heterosexual, so what else would you expect?).

Which does not make me intolerant of people in the Gay community. You do not have to be Gay to be prepared to allow the same rights as heterosexuals to the people who are Gay (critics of President Obama's views on the subject please note). Live and let live, and don't interfere in other people's choices.

Move on.

This was not always the story. In the 1920s and 1930s - how much of this sort of behaviour was allowed to appear above the parapet? In Berlin before the rise of the NSDAP in the 30s, and in Paris between the wars (see Brassaï's book "The Secret Paris of the 30s" for some info on that), it was tolerated, but in most other places it was seen as decadent and unacceptable - and in passing realise that the image of Berlin in the Roaring '20s that many of us now have was not admired by people in much of the rest of Germany.

For no apparent reason (the way my mind works, I suppose) I started thinking the other day about the songs that comprise "The Great American Songbook". Many of them were written for shows where boy met girl or vice versa.

Then check out the lyrics of those songs and ask yourself how many of them are specifically male or female songs, and are absolutely essentially heterosexual - d.h. they could not have been written for a man to man or woman to woman relationship.

My favourite rhyme (indicative of the ultimate consummate skill in writing lyrics) comes from the song "My Funny Valentine":

           Your looks are laughable
           Unphotographable .....

That lyric comes from Lorenz Hart. Read anything you want about him you get lines about him "having problems with his sexuality"- a nice 1930s translation of the fact that he was Gay! Check out the rest of the lyrics to "My Funny Valentine", you will not find any distinct references to the object of desire being of the opposite sex.

Yes in the musical context in which it first appeared it would have been presented as such, but the inspiration for it ....

Not that he was the only example. Cole Porter was apparently either bisexual or Gay, depending upon the accounts that you read.  

Of course at the time "discretion" was the order of the day. You did not have to make it too obvious usw.

You can pick up some odd stories about the music of the period and its writers.  Not a song included in the "The Great American Songbook", but interesting nonetheless - in the 1950s Nat King Cole recorded a song called "Darling, je vous aime beaucoup". Written in 1935 by a lady called Anna Sosenko. From one account at least that I have read about this, it was written for her girlfriend - by implication the film star, Hildegard, who first introduced the song (I will not vouch for absolute accuracy on that story incidentally, but it is intriguing that if it were only rumour, that the rumour was never squashed).

It may be that we notice things more now, and times are less innocent than they were. The old song "I'm just wild about Harry", obviously a "female" song if you listen to the lyrics, was recorded by Al Jolson during his comeback in the 1940s. Four times married, something of a lady's man from what I can gather, and otherwise a staunch conservative singing a line like "the heavenly blisses of his kisses fill me with ecstasy" - hmmmm, OK, did it cross his mind at all, one wonders?

Imagine someone of his stature and political views doing that now.You would never hear the last of it!

It is now a more open world (or much of it is) and more tolerant. And I would politely, from my straight heterosexual perspective, suggest that things are better like that as well!

Halfway between genius and madness

I have to admit that while mobile (North American = cell) 'phones have often the habit of annoying me, in one respect they have been an absolute blessing.

I am one of those weird people who thinks aloud. Talking to yourself is never to be recommended - historically people who do so are regarded as more than a little bit crazy. I have done this since I was a small child, and my parents used to be very concerned.

Not least because I could hardly ever be drawn into conversation with anyone else!

As a very bright child I needed intelligent conversation, and with a very bright person - so who better than myself? At least I wouldn't get angry if the person to whom I was talking disagreed with me! I would put down this need to talk to myself partly down to loneliness and partly down to genius!

Times change, you get older. These days if I notice that I am thinking aloud, I stop myself. Sometimes the conversations with myself go on though - still the need exists to have a conversation with another intelligent individual, I am still, even as an old man, remarkably shy, and so .... The strange thing is that I do not always agree with myself. With age and experience I can see alternatives that never previously existed and will play them off against each other.

Having an intellectual argument with yourself! Now that is an interesting thought.

Of course if I do start to articulate out on the street these days, nobody bothers to stare me down and think that the Black Maria (or German equivalent) should be along for me any second. More than likely they think that I am using a mobile/cell 'phone to talk to someone!

Yes, they definitely have something positive to be said for them, even if they annoy me like crazy when other people are using them for very loud conversations in public places! Suddenly my insanity or genius, whichever, can easily be disguised as normal behaviour!

The purpose of life

I was again provoked by some more Internet nonsense last night - no, nothing that wanted to "prove" that one belief system or another could not be wrong. As they all contradict each other on this, they are never to be taken too seriously, and the proof is always anything but ....

No, this time it was the other old chestnut which reads "Atheists, why live?" - d.h. if you have no life after this, this one obviously has no purpose usw. Put this nonsense to one side for a moment, and go off on a tangent.

I saw a couple of days ago a wonderful clip of a hawk in action. In a few moments of exhilarating, if possibly frightening action, you could watch it descend from the sky at amazing speed and with amazing accuracy take out its prey (a pigeon, which was killed instantly) in full flight.

The result of this action we followed to the hawk's nest, where it used its capture to feed its young (who will one day have to learn to use similar skills).

Look outside at the moment and see sparrows picking up seeds from a neighbour's garden, or a blackbird picking up a tasty worm from the same place - nothing like the effort involved!

The hawk has to live, it needs food. Why is it a carnivore? Why this spectacular performance to capture its food? Surely there must be an easier way to feed itself? The purpose of its spectacular diving technique though is practical, it is not to provide aesthetic pleasure to ornithologists. And in this life, note, not as an action to merit reward or punishment in the life to follow!

Nature provides us with some examples that are remarkable (see the hawk in full flight, watch the behaviour of the male emperor penguin in the depths of the Antarctic winter usw), and many others that are extraordinarily mundane (watch the average cow in a field for example).

They live this one life (Buddhists, and any other individuals committed to the theory of reincarnation, will not agree with me here, but anyway), make the best of what it offers them, and when their time is up, they die. If you are a pigeon (see above), a vole in the direct sight of a hungry owl, or a steer in a slaughterhouse, that death may be short, sharp and very painful. If you had a purpose to your life, it was for the benefit of some other creature!

For humans though, at least according to a lot of the mythology past and present out there, this theory is not supposed to work.

This life, however short ( maybe only a few seconds) or long (120 years is possible - but hopefully I will not live that long!), is merely preparation for something else that follows. You are here to be judged for your actions and if you are good you end up on a cloud playing a harp, while if you are bad you end up in Tartarus pushing a stone permanently up a hill only to watch it fall down when it reaches the top (or find yourself in Eternity's answer to Abu Ghraib being permanently tortured!).

If this nonsense were true, wouldn't it sound like a waste of anything up to 120 years?

But why differentiate the human being from the hawk? We may have spectacular talents, why not use them for the good of those around us now?  The purpose of this life surely (if there is one) is to make the best of what we have and perform our lives accordingly and not worry about what follows, which I am 100% convinced will not exist anyway - death will be the end, period! I wonder how many hawks make it to this mythical Heaven anyway!

Guns

For European readers this may come as a shock, but it is perfectly possible to live in the United States and

1. Not own a gun.
2. Feel no need to own a gun.
3. Have no fear of other people who do own guns.

During the several months that I spent working there (OK, this is nearly a quarter of a century ago), the subject never crossed my mind. I never ran into a single incident where a gun was involved. You could just as easily have been in Germany or the UK.

That is though as close as the comparison gets.

The mind-set is totally different here from there. If they wanted to take guns away from all gun-owners, legal or illegal, law-abiding citizen or criminal, in the US it would be a massive exercise. Unlike here for example, where ownership of guns is rare and discouraged.

After the Winnenden shooting two or three years ago, I recall entering a comment on an English-language website here indicating that I could not see why gun-club members had to take their guns home with them, surely they could stay under lock and key at the club.

You could guess the origins of the people from the responses that I got. The Europeans all nodded in agreement. One American expatriate though informed me that I should be afraid what would happen to me if some armed robber broke in usw.

No fear of the latter.

1. You do not get many armed robbers breaking into houses here - they also have difficulty getting hold of guns, and there are better targets than us if you want to rob someone (banks for example). I cannot recall hearing of a single domestic break-in by an armed robber in 11 years living in Germany, though armed bank robberies do occur occasionally.
2. The percentage chance is so small, I am not prepared to get paranoid about it.
3. Anyone wanting to steal much wouldn't find it worth his/her time anyway!
4. I would not know how to handle a gun, nor have I the slightest desire/intention to learn how to handle one!

Once in a while we get an incident, like in Winnenden, or in Erfurt in 2002, where some maniac has got hold of a gun and gone out and killed a load of people. Such incidents are tragic, and thankfully rare. That they are rare though is indicative of the fact that the rules here work for the most part. The laws could still be tightened up?  Maybe.

Either way I see no reason to get paranoid about it. I also see no need to lecture Americans about their gun laws, even given the dreadful event in Colorado the other week. It is eventually for the people there to decide the best course of action to follow. Different cultures breed different expectations and often require different solutions.

As people do not seem to learn

I will recommend going back to the piece that I wrote on 26/1/2011 - "The differences between Fascism and Communism - a history lesson"

rather than repeating myself.

Secondly those of you incapable of reasoning in terms other that "left-wing" and "right-wing", stick to soccer where the terms are meaningful. In a real world current affairs discussion they are meaningless slogans!

It is amazing how many proverbial rats have come out of the proverbial sewers since the Nadja Drygalla / Michael Fischer story broke. Supporters of Fascists and neo-Fascist groups may constitute a very small minority in most of the country (though in parts of the former East where reunification has been an obvious disaster, they attract a higher following), but they seem capable of making a lot of noise when it suits them.

Not that their arguments have one rational basis for discussion. Most of what they have to say can be compared unfavourably with manure. As for one thing that I read yesterday about Germany being threatened with the return of Communism ....

If one thing is not going to happen in Germany it is the rise of a meaningful, effective Communist organisation that will eventually take power. There is no sense of 1932 any more when the KPD could get 17.9% of the vote in the elections, and consequently a lot of conservative voters supported Hitler to block their rise to power.

Parties like the NPD would love that to happen again. As Communism is almost dead in the water nearly everywhere (the Chinese have abandoned it for starters), though, the arguments from the Fascists, based upon fear rather than fact, should be dismissed for what they are.

One difference between Communism and Fascism not mentioned previously on this blog is the fact that there will be no return to Communism, but Fascism could well be another matter. A movement that can attract over 20% of the vote in Austria, nearly 20% in France, and is responsible for all sorts of unpleasant manifestations in various Eastern European countries needs watching. And (excuse the bad grammar) guarding against!

Appealing to people's ignorance and meanest instincts in difficult times is easy and an obvious vote winner. The lessons of history need to be observed and attempts to fix the symptoms of the problem (increasing unemployment and poverty) are urgently required if we are not to repeat the errors of the 1930s!

In bed with a Fascist

If everything that I have read about Michael Fischer in the past two hours is correct (and I reserve the right to be corrected if the information from "Die Zeit" usw is inaccurate), he is a thoroughly nasty bit of work.

He has been a member of the Rostock National Socialists (as in Nazi, so "Fascist" is a perfectly good word to use in this context), stood for election as a direct candidate for the Neo-Fascist NPD in Rostock in 2011, is aggressively hostile to both Turks and Jews, his views on homosexuality come straight of the NSDAP playbook, and he has been known, verbally at least, to advocate for the ending of democracy in Germany by violent means if necessary. And he has a habit of turning up at demonstrations making the sort of threatening noises that people of his belief-set are expected to make.

That was yesterday, however, not today, if the comments of his girlfriend are to be believed, though others who know of him in Rostock apparently seem less than convinced.

The girlfriend is a lady called Nadja Drygalla. Until this week she was an obscure sportswoman from Rostock - a member of the German rowing team.

As readers will know I have not been following the Olympics. The chance of me watching rowing ever is about as high as me ever painting a masterpiece. So I came to this story a bit late.

Suddenly you have an obscure 23-year-old woman thrust into the public spotlight. The German team was already out of the event in which she was competing, so she could easily have gone home without any noise. As it was though, the fact that Fischer was her boyfriend led to her having a discussion with the German chef d'équipe and apparently it being considered in everyone's best interests that she did go home.

Back home, she has gone from being obscure rower and Olympian of no great standing to a national discussion point. Interviews today indicate that she does not share her boyfriend's beliefs and had already indicated to him that things had to change. Consequently he had cut his links to the extremist groups involved.

All well and good - we shall see usw!

I am prone though to utter the old wry Mandy Rice-Davies comment: "Well he would, wouldn't he"!

And you're also prone to ask why it took so long. This relationship has been running since 2009. She was at one point a trainee policewoman, who felt obliged to quit as the top brass in the local police force did not like her boyfriend's connections. Now comes this embarrassment at the Olympics. And then apparently she was looking at signing up with the German Army and that is now on hold.

And while she has commented that she contemplated ending the relationship, how far did she ever get with this? Given that she does not share his opinions which have twice ended her career ambitions, and have now given her international publicity that she could well do without ....

So what's the attraction? He is actually very charming (don't believe the character assassination stuff in the press today?)? He is exciting? He is great in bed? She is frightened what might happen if she did try to end the relationship? It leaves a lot of open questions.

I know for myself and from my own experiences that you will make sacrifices to be with somebody from whom you can get something special in a relationship. The one thing though that I would never have contemplated is going to bed with a woman who was a committed Fascist, under any circumstances! That she would stay with a guy with his outrageous beliefs for so long frankly baffles me.

Do not feed the animals and other nonsense

If you ever visit Thailand there is an an interesting ritual to be tried - namely feeding the fish.

It is usually carried out on the grounds of Buddhist monasteries, but not always. You pay a small sum for a bag of fish food (large enough to throw, not the sort of stuff that drifts through your fingers into your home aquarium). You then stand on a bridge, or at the end of a jetty, or simply on a ledge, observe where you think that the fish are, and start throwing the food in their direction.

There are large shoals of them, they come at you from all directions, and they are competitive!

Spread around your aim, and if you want some real fun, aim the food into what looks like an empty space. You will soon realise how empty it is  - not!

The Buddhists see this as good karma, apparently. It is also pleasing, given that most of us look upon fish as food and little else. And for once, to put in a good word for religion (cough, splutter), Christianity, Judaism and Islam all emphasise the importance of relationships between humans and other creatures. Noah did not just take humans on the ark, for instance (though where he found his kangaroos and kiwis and iguanas and bald eagles is a good question .....).

In 2008 when I came out of hospital after my heart bypass operation, my wife decided that some similar form of karmic experience was needed here. As there is nowhere round here to buy large bags of fish food, nor a place where they congregate (in fact fish being offered food round here usually find that there is a hook, a line, and a rod fastened to it!), we decided to buy a loaf of bread from the local supermarket and go down to the Main to feed the ducks.

I did this for several days. Fun to watch the competitive nature of the ducks in action. Until one day one of the local residents came and told me that it was illegal!

It takes some believing that feeding bread to ducks on a river is illegal (don't the local politicians have something better to do with their time?), but apparently there is a local by-law which stops you doing this. I did not quite pick up what the resident was telling me (Hessisch does not always sound like German), but I think that he said something about rats - surely cannot be correct, I must have misheard. Rats, and throwing bread to feed ducks in the river? Where is the connection?

Not sure how these local by-laws apply. Today I may well have done summat illegal again (unaware of the fact while doing so). There is a park in the area close to where all the major banks are situated in the city centre. I went down today armed with a couple of 2-day-old croissants that we no longer needed, sat on a bench and started feeding these to a couple of ravens and one solitary pigeon, who were the only birds around to be seen.

No problems so far with the authorities, but if I am missing from this blog for the next few days, I may be serving a short sentence for illegal conduct. Fines? Nothing to pay them with, so I might get to find out what Lindsay Lohan almost started to suffer!

Global Warming - for and against

I have not previously commented on this subject because frankly I think that the evidence is still being collated and the jury is still out.

But on the argument whether it is happening or not:

1. If you think that it is, please produce all the scientific evidence that proves the point and let us study it.

2. If you think that it is not, please produce all the scientific evidence that proves that it is not, and let us study it.

BUT DO NOT WASTE MY TIME WITH SUPERSTITIOUS JUNK THAT IT CANNOT HAPPEN BECAUSE IT SAYS SO IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS! THAT IS NO VALID ARGUMENT AND NOT WORTH 2 SECONDS WORTH OF ANYONE'S TIME!

We are really being swamped by Muslim immigrants?

A few weeks ago I had the Internet equivalent of a shouting match (in German) on YouTube with a fellow immigrant. A UK national and a Serb both getting irate at the same time, not to be recommended.

His claims, which I tried, logically, to refute were that you cannot have a successful multicultural society as long as there were Muslims here (there was no word "fundamentalist" in that sentence, hence the difference of opinion), and that Germany was being swamped with Muslim immigrants.

My contention - which is the product of 11 years worth of observation - that a lot of the so-called "Muslim" immigrants have adapted, drink beer, eat pork, and only attend mosques during Ramadan (like those Christians who go to church at Christmas and Easter and that is about it), he would not even consider. My view is unchanged despite his arguments.

Many immigrants of all backgrounds assimilate - like I have, for example (quite what the British are supposed to do to become fully Germanised, I have not quite worked out. Atheists fit in very well here, I always was the rational, logical, organised type, and I will happily drink Warsteiner, Paulaner, Bitburger usw!).

A few weeks ago, as she occasionally does, my wife had a gathering of the diaspora. To attend you have to be Thai (more immigrants!), Buddhist and female (which rules me out on all three counts). On such occasions I feel obliged to clear off out of the way. One favourite activity is to go to the Karstadt department store, sit down in the elegant coffee-bar there and drink coffee. Occasionally you get two of the staff there chuntering away in Italian (more immigrants!).

On my way back from doing so, I decided to put the theory of my Serbian friend (well "friend" might not be an accurate description, but it is at least not unfriendly!) to the test. Walking down Zeil, Frankfurt's principal shopping street, I set about counting how many Muslims I could spot. This is not that easy - men for example cannot easily be designated according to their faith, so you are limited to counting women wearing the archetypal clothing plus accompanying husbands and children.

As a very good systems analyst (NB!!!!) I will tell you that this form of data collection is prone to inaccuracy, as the criteria are not precise enough, but for the sake of argument it will do.

The stats anyway were interesting. Total count of people on Zeil in that sample - 2,119. Total number of obvious Muslims - 7.

Swamped by Muslim immigrants? Not if that sample is anything to go by.

In case that sample was based upon a poor selection process, I tried it again on Wednesday during the latest gathering of the diaspora. Gorgeous  sunny summer's day, 28 degrees Celsius (82 Fahrenheit). After the cup of coffee at Karstadt, I headed down to the banks of the Main, walked a bit, and then sat down and soaked up the sun, and watched the crowd go past.

For female fashion fans, you will be interested to know that shorts are very much in fashion this year, at least during the heat of summer. No fundamentalist female Muslim (or one married to a male fundamentalist believer) would be seen wearing anything such, that said.

Count from Wednesday early evening (the gathering of the diaspora went on a bit longer NB) - 3,277 people seen on the banks of the Main, number of obvious Muslims - 4!

Definitely being swamped are we? Certainly not in Frankfurt, even if I cannot speak for the rest of Germany!

Absolutely delighted or just very pleased?

I did a translation for a very high-powered company this week.

They seemed to happy enough apart from one bit where I used the phrase "very pleased" when they thought "absolutely delighted" was more appropriate.

Prone as I am to North of England understatement, I see from where they are coming, and if they knew me at all, they would understand why I used the terminology that I did.

I am rarely "absolutely delighted" about anything.

Situations where I would be absolutely delighted? Try the following:

1. Being offered a job in line with my experience and my expectations, and my potential (and, yes, people of my age still have potential!).

2. Being offered a salary which will ensure that I can live adequately without ever getting into debt for the rest of my existence.

3. All the money that I am owed being paid so that I have no further problems like the ones that I currently have (another attempt to get €1,300 that I am due fell on deaf ears yesterday afternoon - that money is crucial for a couple of reasons).

4. An end to poverty worldwide, an end to debt, unemployment, underemployment and overpopulation worldwide.

Chance of getting any of the above 4? Quite .... then the chances of me being "absolutely delighted" about anything are extremely remote.

Being "very pleased"? That might be a different matter, but the bar is a bit lower and the expectations not so high. The list is too long to quote, but if you go back and read the whole of this blog, the subject matter is not difficult to locate.

Trading issues with the Chinese

There are issues with trade with China that for some reason keep getting brushed under the carpet and it is about time that they were addressed.

1. China is allowed for reasons that baffle most of us out there to keep a fixed currency rate. The rate is set at a particularly low level making Chinese goods ridiculously cheap. Every other country that you can name has to float their currency at a "market rate", which means that the rates fluctuate. I have seen one estimate which has stated that if the Chinese currency floated the way that all other currencies do, it would rise some 300% (!) in value.

As things stand, this fixed currency rate causes a massive glitch where trading is concerned. Nobody else can compete on a level playing field, and consequently large numbers of jobs are killed in manufacturing in particular elsewhere in the world.

Either the Chinese should be obliged to float their currency the same as everyone else, or the rest of the world should calculate the actual value of the yuan (the Chinese currency) according to standard market criteria and apply a tariff where necessary to ensure that the price was fairly fixed.

2. There are standards of air cleanliness and pollution by which companies across much of the world are forced to abide. China has the bulk of the world's most polluted cities, indicating that these rules are not applied there (which again means that they create unfair competition by avoiding paying the sums necessary to ensure that anti-pollution measures are in place, which most everyone else is obliged to have). The WTO (or similar) should inspect ALL Chinese facilities to ensure that the same standards apply there as everywhere else.

3. Workers' rights are not observed in China as they are in much of the rest of the world (the country is Communist in name only - actually it is a brutal extremist capitalist dictatorship). The ILO should be allowed to access all Chinese workplaces and should ensure that working conditions are the same in China as applies across the rest of the world.

It has been noticeable for some time anyway that some countries (Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand come immediately to mind, there were definitely others) were far more successful economically when they were dictatorships than when they became democracies (although the country being successful does not necessarily equal the fact that the people as a whole benefited! Usually most of the advantages stayed firmly in the hands of the rich and the powerful). One wonders what would to happen to China if their chronic dictatorship gave way to democracy.