[#blairresigns]
United Nation Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) shows Palestinian and Syrian residents of Yarmuk Palestinian Refugee Camp crowding in a destroyed street as food is distributed.
Nuff said…
By the way, this photo, released by UNRWA, is really worth clicking on – Stunning.
Today is the day when a fabulously rich woman in a large hat – the sale of which could kick-start the economies of several African nations – plays ‘Gottle-a-Geer’ for a man who, whilst simultaneously drinking a pint of blood, will get her to relate how he will hurt the very poorest and most vulnerable in our society.
His lips will hardly move as the dummy regales us with his plans to extract 12 billion pounds or more from the most downtrodden and needy sectors of the economy – where it is spent daily in small, local businesses and shops – and place this money securely in the bank accounts of the rich where it will remain safe and undisturbed until inherited by their offspring.
People, including poor people and local businesses, will cheer and applaud.
The ventriloquist will further explain that in the coming Workers Paradise, workers will not need to fight for their jobs as the ability to do so will hinder the economy, cause unemployment, and halt the drive to full employment. The ability to do so, we will be informed, will therefore be removed.
People, including working people, will cheer and applaud.
The freedom to speak one’s mind – a freedom that has been seen to be used by bad people as well as ventriloquist’s dummies, and good people – who might use reason and rationalism to argue against bad peoples arguments – will be curtailed for the good of all.
People, now unable or unclear as to whether they can cheer, will merely applaud.
As the finale approaches, ‘Human Rights’, we will be told in a song as the ventriloquist’s Adams-apple bobs lyrically and in time to the dummies words, are to be re-named ‘Human Wrongs’.
Humans the length and breadth of the country – unsure now of right or wrong, left and right, or good and evil – will simply watch in awe as the dummy is put back into her suitcase until next time
Following this the Punch & Judy Show will resume.
That’s the way to do it.
Loosely related: 'Talking Out of Your Hat' - 'Nelson Mandela'
Loosely Related: ‘Good Morning, Ireland’ – ‘Talking Out of Your Hat’
Today is your big day. Today you get the chance to show the world you have shaken off the shackles imposed by that most corrupt of institutions, the Catholic Church. Today you get the chance to take your seat at the grown-ups table. Today you get the chance to lead the world by stating in three small letters that equality is a bigger word than inequality.
Today you get the chance to shout ‘Yes!’
It really is your Rosa Parks moment, isn’t it. How are you coping? Bit stressed? I’ll bet.
I’ve been watching the debate from this side of the water. It’s been impassioned and heated and those opposed to equality have at times resorted to equivocation at best and downright distraction at worse:
The church, in the shape of the Iona Institute and Mothers & Fathers Matter, have been busily tugging at the proverbial ‘What About The Poor Little Children‘ heart-strings by stating the obvious fact that you can’t replace the love of a mother (in the case of two gay fathers), or the love of a father (in the case of two gay mothers) without ever telling us just exactly how they know this?
In the absence of facts I’ve yet to see any of them pointing at Elton John’s kids saying, “See! See what a pack of bastards they turned out to be!” Or Rosie O’Donnell’s kids. Or Jodie Foster’s kids. Or any gay couples kids for that matter.
They fail of course to mention that this irreplaceable love is not so much replaced as lost completely in the heterosexual divorce courts on a daily basis. Or, for that matter, where research does exist, that it would seem to show that gay couples divorce each other less frequently than ‘normal’ couples.
Yes, when it comes to family values and obvious facts, it would appear that, along with dress sense, gay and lesbian couples can really teach us straight buggers a thing or two.
So much for the threat to the institution of marriage that allowing all citizens equal rights before the law will bring. Kinda’ strange to hear that giving others the same rights that you have will somehow dilute those very rights rather than strengthen them.
The more shameless of those opposing equality have also – quoting US statistics – insinuated that ‘fatherless’ children are more likely to end up in prison, or on drugs, though what this has to do with the argument at hand is quite frankly beyond me? Are these US statistics stating that the offspring of lesbian couples are more likely to commit crime or be addicted to drugs? Of course not. No more so than they state that offspring of lesbian couples will be green with purple hair. It is patent nonsense.
Then why mention this at all?
The answer is obvious. It is the scatter-gun approach to argument:
Smoke and Mirrors; Confusion; Obfuscation; Equivocation; An appeal to tradition; An appeal to the norm.
These are the tactics employed by a regime that has watched its power base being swept from under it by reason, rationalism, and the very public exposition of its own corrupt, malign, and immoral nature.
Interesting, then, to observe the obvious frustration at their inability to play the ‘kiddie fiddler’ card – the unspoken assumption that historically associates gay men with paedophilia. The unspoken assumption that I’ve seen reflected in the vox-pops of your older generation nightly on TV, the, “It’s not right” and, “Think of the poor children“, where the agents of the church can only nod in unspoken agreement, hands clasped in a tight-lipped communion of deceit.
When the lies and the fear-mongering are swept aside there is only one question that you have to ask yourself today: are you in favour of equality?
Well, are you? Do you think that anyone should be treated less equally than you? Do you think that other people should be allowed the same rights as you under the law? Do you think that we should all be allowed to sit at the same table… on the same seats… on the same bus? Or do you think like one ageing Irishman I recently spoke to who was “All for Equality…” but thought that this time it had, ”… gone too far”.
What part of equal do you think goes too far?
This is your Rosa Parks moment, Ireland. It’s time to make history.
Depending on the turnout it may yet go down to the wire. The polls all say it is the youth of Ireland that will carry the day – if they get out to vote – that this referendum is about a young and vibrant new Ireland facing up to the challenges of a modern world. That may be so – I hope it is, but perhaps it may also be worth sparing a thought to the many gay and lesbian Irish people among these older generations. There is no less a percentage among them than among these vibrant Irish youth.
Homosexuality is not a lifestyle choice.
They are there. They are many. They have been there forever. Hidden by dogma. Condemned to isolated, lonely, loveless lives – or forced into living one hell of a lie. The youth of Ireland are not just voting for themselves. This vote will be for those older people, too.
This is your Rosa Parks moment, Ireland. Grab hold of the seat in front of you. Don’t budge. Not one inch. It’s time to stop this bus.
Loosely related: ‘Talking Out of Your Hat’. – ‘Dear Tom Daley…’
I’ve long held to the conviction that if your belief – and by belief I mean belief in anything – involved the wearing of headgear of any sort then I could dismiss said belief fairly rapidly. For example: someone could make a claim as in ‘I believe in such and such’, and I would respond with: ‘Does it necessitate the wearing of a hat?’ An answer to the affirmative would allow me to instantly dismiss said claim and get on with the more important things in life such as removing scratch-card residue from beneath my fingernails.
The General Rule of HatThis has held me in good stead for a number of years. Oft times people would walk up to me in pubs and ask: ‘Can I interest you in the Theory of Evolution through Natural Selection?’, and I would say: ‘Do I have to wear a hat?’, and they would say, ‘Sorry?’, and I, satisfied with the successful application of The General Rule of Hat, would respond, ‘Oh, nothing… please, do continue.’
Of course you must understand that this is just a General Rule of Hat. It’s not absolute. There are exceptions:
For example, occasionally I find myself fairly deep into a debate, discussion or conversation before coming to the realisation that a hat is about to make an 
appearance. This usually happens at bus-stops and involves a large sheet of aluminium foil.
Fortunately society generally accepts that these people have a problem involving mental health and help is readily available.
Other times people are aware you employ a hat-filter and will deliberately hide the hat until a later time and then produce it in a ‘Tadaah!’ moment. Hat-wearers debating morality tend to adopt this tactic. One agrees on the immorality of, say for example, murder, rape, theft and slavery; you then bother to go into a long and detailed explanation of how one arrives at this moral position, when suddenly, ‘Tadaah!’ – a hat is produced and morality and immorality turn out to be at the discretionary whim of an invisible Magic Hat-Maker who lives in the Great Milliners in the Sky.
Voltaire perhaps should have said that in general good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things, but to make a good person do bad things, well, that takes a hat.
More disingenuous folk will try to foster the illusion that no hat is required in their belief at all – even though after a short while in their company it becomes apparent, or at least implicit, that their place of abode holds a large wardrobe simply bursting with hats. 
Proponents of Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity, and the various forms of the Cosmological argument, are particularly adept at trying to employ this ‘Look, No Hats!’ stratagem – almost to the point of self-delusion: ‘Hat? What Hat? I see no Hat?’
Hat-denial, it must be said, can be quite humorous to see – similar to watching someone play ‘whack-a-mole’, but with hats. Rational observers generally accept that these people have a problem involving mental hygiene. There is currently no help available for these people.
Still, those few exceptions aside, I hold great confidence in The General Rule of Hat. So much so that over time I’d expanded my thesis to include an inverse relationship between the size or grandeur of the hat worn and the amount of sense that would spew from the mouth positioned directly beneath it. The bigger the hat, the lesser the sense. Recently though, I’ve started to reassess this relativity aspect of The General Rule of Hat:
It began with the usual mid-spring reportage surrounding the activities of the Iranian religious police. As the sun starts to shine and temperatures soar, Iranian women, after being wrapped up all winter, begin to shed a few layers. This apparently gets the blood gushing through Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s old veins and, in order to avoid committing a very catholic sin, he grabs his hat and immediately starts talking out of it. This invariably results in a crackdown by the religious police involving such things as revealing or tight clothing; western hairstyles; hair colour; make-up and the like. It happens every year around this time and it’s about as newsworthy as David Cameron’s policies on ending child poverty.
I myself barely register it anymore – just another part of the background white-noise of religiosity.
Besides, it’s hardly surprising to hear gobbledygook spouting from representatives of any of the three Abrahamic faiths – or People of The Hat, as I collectively refer to them. Yahweh, 
who started off this damn hat thing, has been responsible for a veritable tea-party of mad-hatters pouring forth nonsense such as stoning disobedient children to death, having the cheeky ones killed by bears, and throwing gay men off tall buildings when a decent mountain can’t be found. It’s normal run-of-the-mill sort of stuff. Abhorrent of course, but hardly, after two thousand years, shocking. This year, though, my interest was briefly piqued by the revelation that Iranian men have now come under the gaze of the grand Ayatollah for the incredibly un-Islamic practise of eyebrow weaving.
Apparently Iranian men, just like blokes here in the west, are becoming more adept at personal grooming, hair care, intimate hygiene and washing behind the ears. Now, being a somewhat largely unreconstructed western male who barely moved beyond the wash, rinse, repeat instructions on the Head & Shoulders bottle, I had absolutely no idea what eyebrow weaving was?
Intrigued, I decided to research the story only to find that eyebrow weaving or threading, rather than some extreme sexual fetish, is a simple procedure for plucking and shaping the eyebrows – and eyebrows in Islam, would you believe, are taken very seriously indeed. So much so that to err in the eyebrow department can severely damage your health – and your afterlife. Get it wrong and you’ll burn in the proverbial fire. No, really, honestly. And the most shocking aspect of all of this? The one thing that had me gasping and short of breath? You guessed it: Hat size! Yes, hat size. Each and every Islamic ‘Scholar’ I consulted/listened to/viewed, wore a hat in accordance with The General Rule of Hat as one might expect – but what became quickly apparent was that their hat size never faltered from the miniscule. For the most part they wore a simple white skull-cap. Hardly Ayatollahesque at all, yet the nonsense that exploded so casually and yet so profusely from their mouths was worthy of the very grandest of hats.
I’d hate to bore you with the seemingly limitless extent to which certain People of the Hat can go on, and on, 
and on about body hair – so allow me to attempt a brief summation of the salient points:
Islamic men (it’s implicit they’re men) should grow the beard, trim the moustache, shave the pubes, and pluck the armpit hair (ouch!), whilst women of the faith (it’s explicit they’re women) may remove hair from the upper lip, thighs, calves and arms, but on no account should they ever, ever, ever pluck the eyebrows – never – I simply can’t stress this enough. Weaving, threading, plucking – whatever you want to call it, however you want to phrase it, this Allah/Yahweh character doesn’t like it, see’s this as a Major Sin – and will hurt you for doing it.
Yes, it would seem that this Allah/Yahweh geezer really does have a big downer on Islamic women who pluck their eyebrows. As to why? Well, your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps he was knocked-back by some lass with great eyebrows in a previous creation? Either way, we definitely know he doesn’t like it because a big mate of Mohammed – a bloke called ‘Abd-Allaah ibn Mas’ood’ – said he was out with Mo’ one night and they were chatting on about life, the universe, and everything, as one does, when Mo’ said he’d been chatting with Gabriel (that’s the Archangel Gabriel, yeah?) and Gabriel had said that he’d been chatting earlier still with Allah, and Allah had mentioned in passing that he didn’t like eyebrow plucking at all. Not one little bit. Can’t stand it. Hates it, in fact.
I can just imagine Abd-Allaah ibn Mas’ood’s jaw dropping at this momentous revelation:
“Really, Mo’? He actually said that?”
“Yeah, really went off on one, apparently. And that’s not all…”
“Hold on, Mo’… let me get a pen”.
He then wrote down what Mohammed had said that Gabriel had said that Allah had said:
“Allah has cursed the woman who does tattoos and the one who has them done, the woman who plucks eyebrows and the one who has it done, and the one who files her teeth for the purpose of beauty, altering the creation of Allah.” [al-Bukhaari, 5931; Muslim, 2125]
And now, all these years later, with Iranian metrosexual men queuing up to use the latest in eyebrow weaving technology, it really does throw a cat amongst the pigeons as to what Allah may actually like or dislike. Does this now apply to men as well as women when we can see that it’s obvious that Allah is pissed-off with a tattooed lass with sharp teeth and cute brows? And doesn’t it seem somewhat bizarre that removing eyebrow hair would alter the creation of Allah whilst a bloke shaving off his pubes would not? Can you see the trouble a seemingly harmless piece of gossip can cause? A moment on the lips, a lifetime in the Hadith. Who knew that Mohammed was such a jangler? The Ayatollah Al Khomeini really does have his work cut out for both him and his hat.
So, what to make of all this? Can we unpack it and make sense out of it at all? The simple answer is ‘No‘. My take on this is that it’s pointless looking for sense in nonsense. The really important thing to take away from all of this – apart from the lesson regarding the dangers of idle chat & tittle-tattle – is that, unfortunately, the size of the hat bears no relation to the quality of stupid beneath it.
This element of the theory has been shown to fail under the weight of the available evidence. It was a falsifiable aspect and has thus been shown to be false. I therefore unequivocally withdraw the relativity aspect of The General Rule of Hat.
Hold on… unless of course the small skullcap is merely symbolic of their inner-hat – which could be fucking immense?
You can throw your own hat into the ring below, if you so wish.
It’s International Earth Day today. Good to know the planet has its own special day when it can sit back, relax, and look back on its great achievements and past glories.
I celebrated the occasion by watching a pod of minke whales migrate north to cooler climes for the summer. Wonderful to see. Really quite spectacular. Beautiful creatures on a beautiful planet.
Yes, the Earth is just great, isn’t it. What’s your favourite bit? Do you have an Attenborough moment? The forging of the Himalayas through plate tectonics? Its incredible deserts? Its huge rain-forests? Its thunderous volcanoes? Dinosaurs, maybe? Or perhaps just the sheer and seemingly endless abundance of life it sustains – including our hedonistic and murderous selves?
These are certainly a few of my all-time faves – but the best bit of the Earth for myself, the real biggie, the daddy, the big kahuna, the killer app’ that the Earth has provided us with… is the Moon.
The Earth spat out the Moon after a collision with a Mars-sized-planet not long after its own formation. Can you imagine the energy, the power, the destruction? Yup, the creation of the Moon was always going to be the highlight for me – but then I’m a boy and tend to go with the big energy stuff.
More Bruce & Arnie than Kenneth & Larry, if you follow my continental drift.
I don’t suppose we have an International Moon Day? I’ll have to check. I hope so as it’s a very important piece of rock and one that us ordinary folk should know more about.
Of course, most of us are merely aware that it controls the tides – well, maybe not that moron Bill O’Reilly at Fox News… hold on, I’ll find you the link. I think the fun starts at around 1:35:
…but hey, retards aside, who knew that it stops us from wobbling out of control and making us all very very dizzy indeed?
Who knew – and this is magic – that it is observed by us as being exactly the same size as our nearest star and that it perfectly covers this star during a total solar eclipse which allows us all to squint and go “Ooh!” and “Aaah!” and “Shit it’s cloudy again!“. That really is amazing isn’t it, and well worth the price of a few kids blinded by not following the statutory regulations concerning solar eclipses. Just like those ‘dog-shit’ kids, they’ve no-one to blame but themselves. Don’t look directly at the sun, don’t rub dog-shit in your eyes – it’s not rocket science, kids.
But I digress. Back to the Moon:
Who knew that it slows the spin of the Earth due to both gravitational attraction and tidal friction, which makes our days – and nights – grow longer over time. We only get a good night’s sleep because of the Moon – back in the day, a good night’s sleep would only have yielded you two or three hours shut-eye. Your proverbial eight hours is all down to the Moon tugging away, day in day out, or 24/7 – as the Moon now allows us to say.
And who knew that it took quite a few heavy hits for us as we were growing up – hits that might have killed us all off had the Moon not been there to take it full in the mush. Hits that could have stopped us in our evolutionary tracks – or at least had us running around screaming “Shit, man, that really stings!“. It really is our big brother/cousin/best friend/thick kid of the schoolyard, and is now seriously being suggested as a major cause of abiogenesis itself.
Yup, the good news is we may well owe our very existence to the Moon. It may well turn out that we are only here because of that big lump of rock in the sky – the bad news is it won’t be there forever: What? Sorry? You didn’t get the memo? The Moon is going. Okay, it’s not going anytime soon. I’ve no wish to start any panic-buying. However, it is moving away from us at the rate that our fingernails grow – so we better enjoy it, and celebrate it, and utilise it, whilst we can.
Yes, it’s time to go back to the Moon.
Oh, and now we’ve finally discovered water on the Moon, when we get there we can break this water into its constituent parts, take the hydrogen, and make rocket fuel – no more of that ‘escape velocity’ nonsense. And that, kids, means we can go to Mars instead of killing one another. Now that is rocket science.
Brilliant, eh? An accretion disc 4.5 billion years ago pulls itself together due to its own gravity, gets hit by another great big rock which pukes out yet another big rock which, apart from helping us see at night, creates the conditions for us, 4.5 billion years later, to be able to slag each other off in badly spelled flame-wars on social media, or, alternatively, take the wife and four kids for a chance-of-a-lifetime holiday in the new Caliphate.
Of course in order to portray a balanced view I ought to mention that the Moon – and the Earth’n’all – were probably created a few thousand years ago in a poof of smoke by the sweet baby Jesus from inside a magic chocolate egg. Or maybe it was Allah, or Ogdoad, or Atum? One of those fuckers, anyway.
Now that we’ve taught the controversy you can click on the Google logo in your browser and – just before looking up the word ‘abiogenesis‘ – take a ten-second survey which will let you know (in that kind of ‘Chinese Calendar’ sort of a way) what ‘Earth Animal‘ you are associated with.
It transpires I’m a ‘Honey Badger‘. Bit chuffed with that – I like Honey Badgers.
Anyway, enough rambling, I only meant to say ‘Happy Earth Day’.
Happy Earth Day
Anvil Springstien.
Direct Link to Google’s ‘Earth Day’ Quiz:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=earth+day+quiz&oi=ddle&ct=earth-day-2015-5638584300208128&hl=en
Addendum: I was mindful that Google might well only have it’s ‘Earth Quiz’ up for the 24/48 hours or so that it took Earth Day to come and go. Well, I’ve just checked today (which is St Georges Day) and it’s still live. Let’s hope they keep it so.
meVolution 
