Criminal right to vote? You can say that again

English: European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Different entities they may be but there’s a depressingly similar theme whenever the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights flex their muscles these days. A nonsense is made of democracy.

The EU? Its most vociferous opponents are still to be given a vote on their country’s place at its table. Pure coincidence, I’m sure. Then there are the Irish, made to vote twice for an EU Treaty until they provided the correct result.

And now we have the ECHR, which believes that one man, one vote is worth fighting for, as long as the man in question is a burglar, bank robber or murderer.

It is, of course, the most blindingly obvious consequence that when someone’s criminal behaviour spits in the face of the country that gives him a home, his right to any say in its governance should be temporarily forfeit. There is something so rational in this proposition that only the most gushing of bleeding hearts could imagine that Civilisation would be better served were it to be turned on its head.

Cometh the hour, alas, cometh the nitwits, prompting the suspicion that we Brits are ignoring the elephant in the room, as long as we focus on Greece and the question of  if and when it might default on its debts.

A more pertinent question, surely, is whether we should be contemplating a default of our own. For when those entrusted with administering the European Convention on Human Rights seem so hell-bent on blurring the distinctions between Strasbourg and La-La Land, maybe it’s time we were taking our ball home until common sense re-enters the building.

Limerick, common sense and death by a thousand cuts

Just as you know it’s time to search for life jackets when rats start leaving the ship, we may have to concede defeat to the dark forces of political correctness, now that even the Irish are losing their sense of humour.

Is it just me? Am I really such a monumental brute for being briefly tickled by radio broadcaster George Hook’s wordplay in a recent address to a rugby club?

“During a speech, Hook told an audience of about 150 he had been asked by Limerick mayor Jim Long to join a campaign to change Limerick’s nickname from “Stab City” to “Fab City”.

“The following morning I opened up the paper and read two men were ‘fabbed’ in Limerick city last night,” Hook told the crowd.”

If it wasn’t so utterly depressing mind you, the fall-out would have been even funnier. Are we seriously expected to believe this…

“While some people laughed, others – including a delegation from Limerick rugby club Young Munster – said the comments were deeply offensive.”

Maybe rugby club social occasions have changed from my university days, when I watched in disbelief as my college First XV stood on bar stools, trousers and pants round their ankles and sang songs about menstruation. But I’m inclined to think not, to the point where I’d be keen to see verification as to whether the shrinking violets of Young Munster were indeed deeply offended, or whether someone with an agenda subsequently suggested to them that they might like to be.

Laura Ryan’s response, on the other hand, I’m reluctantly prepared to accept as genuine:

Laura Ryan, head of the Limerick Communications Office stated: “Mr Hook’s attempt at humour . . . was a bit crass and ill-advised. It crossed the line between a bit of banter and a cheap jibe and was just completely unnecessary.”

Now don’t be too hard on her: look who she works for. Bet she smiled about it in private.

Look, for those of you still consumed by indignation, a few points to mull over:

* People from troubled areas soon learn to joke about it and take a joke about it. It’s a defence mechanism as old as the hills. I know; I come from one.

* I’ll wager George Hook no more believes everyone in Limerick is a knife-wielding maniac because he jokes about it than I do because I laugh.

* Might it be that what really ruffled feathers here was a very pertinent dig at a very silly idea? ‘Fab City’?! That wouldn’t come from the same bright spark who thought ‘Cool Britannia’ was a winner, by any chance?

But why do I bother? It’s a lost cause. The Irish, it seems, have begun to succumb to the British disease of prissy, po-facedness. As Seán O’Casey might have put it, they’re out there looking for offence and scared as hell they won’t find any.

Game over.

Hockey hits also happen in the seats

The Stanley Cup is awarded to the NHL champion. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Don’t close the lid on that ‘special relationship’ coffin just yet. It seems there is still stuff that unites John Bull and Uncle Sam after all.

The publication of the kind of NHL standings that the league office would probably rather keep mum about, ranks all 30 NHL hockey arenas in the order of their beer prices.

At current conversion rates (all prices are apparently in $US) that makes top whack £6.16 a beer and bargain basement £3.87. Note that a UK pint is equal to around 19.2 US ounces.

From this not so much mouth-watering as eye-watering display of profiteering pricing strategies, it would appear that English Premier League football fans can take heart.

Their North American cousins are being every bit as royally screwed as they are.

Cheers!

Centralisation’s curse means craic appearing in Irish society

“Cork licensee Con Dennehy believes publicans and hackney drivers should work together to provide discount fares for elderly customers so they don’t live in rural isolation.”

Ha! I bet he does, was my immediate reaction to this report in the Irish Examiner. Nothing self-serving in that, I’m sure.

Reading the rest of the report, however, swiftly removed the smile from my face. Much as it may often look to enjoy a certain detachment from the destructive frenzy of modern living, Ireland, it seems, is feeling the social pinch in those very areas that grace so many tourist brochures.

‘Gardaí have noticed in the past few years that the age profiles of those committing suicide in some rural areas has increased…

…Mr Dennehy said that normal places of interaction for people, especially those living on their own, were disappearing rapidly in rural Ireland.

“It’s not just pubs which are closing, but post offices, creameries, garda stations etc. Even the postman is not now calling to some houses in rural areas and is instead putting letters in boxes down lanes,” [he ] said.

However neat it may look on the spreadsheets of those who decide such things, this is the flipside of the streamline and centralisation fetish that has long dominated the management of public and private sector concerns alike, certainly on my side of the Irish Sea. It sucks life out of areas that ultimately cannot live on nice views and birdsong alone. More and more, it also begs the question – if centralisation is so right, so imperative, how come we managed without it for so long?

Our ancestors weren’t all commercial dunderheads, I’m sure. How come there was a time when villages had their post offices and hospitals and small towns their railway stations and the British Isles not only survived on such arrangements but thrived on them?

Getting to the heart of it, is centralisation something commerce does to survive, or merely something it does to make big profits bigger?

I’m neither an historian nor an economist, so I would genuinely like to know. As might those among Ireland’s elderly for whom a place to die for seems in danger of becoming precisely that.

Libyan lies not the biggest stain on Labour

Image via Wikipedia

Even if the Daily Mail coverage appears somewhat after-the-event (see also here) there is still quite a story in revelations that the UK well and truly had the wind up over The World’s Most Wanted (left) stamping his little feet over Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s release.

For in the middle of this potential disgrace, those responsible have performed quite a remarkable trick – somehow managing to relegate the possibility of bare-faced lies and playing the electorate for fools to mere also-rans in a league table of conduct unbecoming.

For isn’t the very worst of this story the funk that prompted the Labour government to dissemble in the manner of which it stands accused? Some tin pot north African tyrant rattles his sword over the release of a convicted mass murderer and the United Kingdom goes belly-up like a puppy who only wants to please.

The same UK that fancies itself as so major a player in global affairs that it felt duty-bound of late to open another war front in Libya, even while telling its own people that there is no money available  for trifles such as educating their young and properly policing their streets.

Gadaffi barked, we are led to believe, and the land of Elizabeth I, Churchill and Richard the Lionheart came running.

If the War on Terrorism was a soccer match, this would surely be the cue for  a substitute nation to start warming up on the touchline, while a sneering fourth official held up  an electronic board displaying the letters ‘UK’.

It would appear that we are the very worst type of player. We merely talk a good game.

Location, location, location not this Imam’s strongpoint

Image by World Economic Forum via Flickr

You’d think Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf might have absorbed a lesson or two about picking his spot, given the furore sparked by the Islamic community centre (“it’s a mosque,” critics insist) that he plans to build in the vicinity of the World Trade Centre site.

It would seem not, however, after he chose a speech at Edinburgh University’s Prince Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in which to offer the following opinion:

 ”I don’t think we should allow, in our communities, space for those who wish to abridge the freedoms of another person on the basis of their religion, race, language or gender. I think we have to combat those tendencies.” 

These are fine words but they would sit a little more comfortably with me if I could be reassured that the Imam has publicly made similar comments of late in Algeria, Norway, Pakistan and Iran.

I don’t deny that Edinburgh can get a bit spicy on the sectarian front when Hibs and Hearts meet but of all the places aching for the benefit of  Imam Feisal’s wisdom, I would suggest that the Scottish capital currently comes some way down the list.

The scariest words a drinker will hear – “Brewed in the UK”

The essence of Luton

Welcome to Brahma; latest in a long line of serial offenders brought to you by the big-league brewing industry.

It is, the bottle informs me, Brazilian Beer since 1888 and brewed “to the authentic Brazilian recipe”.

Exotic as it sounds, it is also cursed by the most damning phrase any drinker will ever hear – “Brewed in the UK”. I knew its father, you know: “Brewed under licence”.

We’ve been here for 30 years now and as one who has tasted the real thing where the likes of Castlemaine, Molson and Budweiser are concerned and knows only too well how “Brewed in the UK” usually translates as “nothing like the original”, I call hogwash on that “authentic Brazilian recipe” claim.

From the very first sip, I detect no hint of Copacabana or samba. I detect what I always do in a bottle bearing the “Brewed in the UK” curse: bland, unremarkable beer that tastes just like all the other beers that result whenever big brewers decide that they can find the taste of Brazil, America or Canada by going no further than Burton on Trent or Luton.

Whatever the difference may be between this ludicrous fiction and those far eastern hawkers who flog fake Rolex, I’m struggling to spot it.

…………………………………………………..

Brazil’s Brahma beer goes global - in the company’s defence, it does at least come right out with it in this masterpiece of corporate-speak. I considered satirising the quotes from Devin Kelly, Inbev’s vice-president for global brands, but realised I couldn’t possibly improve on the original.

[Pic courtesy of timkas23]

PC’s acid test: they’re not paedophiles, they’re “minor-attracted people”

While I’m uneasy with World Net Daily’s indelicate bracketing of child abuse with homosexuality, that rather pales in the light of the rest of their report on the latest deliberations of B4U-ACT, an organisation that works with those sexually attracted to children in the state of Maryland.

WND reports that at a symposium held by B4U-ACT last week, speakers “promoted the idea that the American Psychiatric Association should remove pedophilia from the list of mental defects in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

Pride yourself on your open-mindedness? See how these soundbites grab ya…

• “Dr. John Sadler (University of Texas) argued that diagnostic criteria for mental disorders should not be based on concepts of vice since such concepts are subject to shifting social attitudes and doing so diverts mental-health professions from their role as healers.”
• Another speaker “argued in favor of acceptance of and compassion for people who are attracted to minors.”

An observer at the symposium, meanwhile, was horrified at other themes that it developed: the unfair demonisation of paedophiles, an objection to the word “wrong” being applied to them and the idea that children are not inherently unable to consent to sex with an adult.

I don’t know if this symposium had a title but ‘Moral Relativism Comes of Age’ wouldn’t have been far off the mark. So what did you do at work today, Daddy? Why, I attempted to sanitise child abuse, darling. Now don’t go spitting in Daddy’s face like that…

The irony is that those at whom the symposium was aimed are in this line of  work precisely because civilised people regard paedophilia as repugnant: no exceptions, no pleas in mitigation. If that sits uncomfortably with the refined intellects mouthing the inanities listed above then they need to find a desert island where they can set up the la-la-land they apparently crave.

By all means, care for your patients or ‘clients’ as you no doubt insist on calling them. Analyse them and attempt to understand them to the nth degree but be in no doubt that you do so not because their psychiatric intricacies look good on your c.v. but because you’re charged with that task by a Society who wants these people controlled, restrained and cured – that’s right, CURED, go on, say it out loud… – as far as is humanely possible.

And don’t you dare patronise ordinary people for their revulsion, tut-tutting that old shibboleth ‘demonisation’ as if it were some gigantic roadblock to your doing a decent day’s work. You work in the public sector, you dance to the public’s tune and that public happens to have zero tolerance when it comes to adults who view kids as sex toys. Do excuse our primitive ways.

You’re not paid to destigmatise, folks: you’re paid to find answers to one of Mankind’s greatest evils. Do your job and save the sordid idealism for your own time.

No guns or gore, yet Inside Job one of the all-time great horror movies

Image via Wikipedia

In a way, I’m delighted that Inside Job is now available free of charge, for all to see.

And in another way, I’m not.

Because I defy even the most benign among you to reach the end of this documentary feature film analysis of the crash of 2008 without wishing you had a gun.

On the face of it, 108 minutes of talking heads shouldn’t make for an Oscar winner. The drama, however, emanates not from the characters but from their damning words, as the causes and causers of Wall Street’s latest meltdown are nailed emphatically to the wall, in an expose of greed and hubris that will take you beyond anger.

That not one executive nor company  has yet been brought to justice for their part in this fiasco raises serious questions about just how much daylight exists between law enforcement and Government in America and leaves we plebs having to savour the film’s minor triumphs of retribution:

1. Mouse-like Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard’s  laughable attempt to go all John Wayne on the interviewer (“Give it your best shot!!!” – at 1:31:55) as he begins to perceive the corner into which he’s being painted. Some men can carry off the all-guns-blazing approach: this isn’t one of them.

2. John Campbell, Chairman of Harvard’s Economics Dept (1:30:05 and 1:32:30) doing the best hapless Brit routine since Bertie Wooster. If I thought this was the sum total of my 15 minutes of fame, I might never leave the house again.

And at the end of what I thought might be a film that merely confirmed what we already suspected, there is a certain sting-in-the-tail. If America’s business and economics academics are as hand-in-hand with these Wall Street geniuses as Inside Job suggests, what’s to say we won’t be back here again in 10 years’ time, when the next batch of college graduates hit the Street?

It’s a sign of just how relentlessly infuriating this film is that its only note of optimism comes if you’re a woman of a certain age, as French finance minister Christine Lagarde ably demonstrates that grey hair need be no bar whatsoever to arousing a certain je ne sais quoi in the opposite sex. If Combe Inc is the next American corporate casualty, it may be the first in a while for which bankers can’t be held responsible.

Glad to be gay; not fussed at being bust

Image via Wikipedia

It is the most jaw-dropping thing I read last week. Possibly last month.

From the excellent Outstanding Investments financial newsletter (subscription only):

“Let’s get past the military fact that it’s raining steel in Libya. Something else troubles me. The U.S. government doesn’t have a 2011 budget for its Department of Defense – and we’re six months into the fiscal year. This is, at root, courtesy of the last Congress, which failed to pass a defense budget in the waning days of 2010.

No defense budget? Last year, there was political capital for Congress to pass ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ legislation. But for some strange reason, Congress could not pass anything as mundane as a law to fund procurement and operations, let alone to pay the troops.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Congress has authorized no money to fight wars – at least not this one.“

Such ludicrous priorities kill off forever the idea that American liberals are much more down-to-earth than their British counterparts.

So a near-bankrupt Uncle Sam is bombing Libya on an open-ended spending spree but at least everyone involved is comfortable with his sexuality. I think I just heard the first cuckoos of spring.