Skip to main content

A level of Anxiety.

I'm not the first in blogland to point this out and I will not be the last. Imagine how the USA would have reacted in a mirror universe if

a)Russia had shipped nuclear bomb triggers and missile parts 'accidentally' to Tehran

on the same day as

b) a muslim had been found in the government district with a three-week old car bomb, three knives, a machete and a loaded shotgun, whilst dressed in a flak jacket and headed for the Supreme Court. At least all we wear here is wigs.

and

c)The US President-elect warned Russia not to draw Canada into a military alliance.

It's past midnight and I'm just playing a mind game, but in our universe all these things happened on the 26 March, just in reverse; it was America that sent the parts to Taiwan, it was Michael Gorbey who was found in DC and it was Medvedev who warned over NATO expanding into Ukraine.

And barely a peep from the media. The UK is not even on mauve alert, or whatever it is we are meant to be on. Vermillion probably.

So that's alright then.

Bad men could get back to dreaming up ways to steal oildrums so that they could hide muslims and communists in them as part of a plot to get Barack Obama elected by Mossad.

Or whatever version of that story that the neocons and the guardian and every other part of the political spectrum from blue to indigo is talking today.

I'd like to pretend that the entire West missed these stories because we were all concerned in some high minded damascene moment of revelation as we saw the meretricious financial architecture of the past thirty years slide into the rising ocean on our way back to church.

Actually, the Sun newspaper, fairly represntatively, was discussing whether UFOs had been seen on google earth near Wales, and whether there were medical doctors prepared to 'stretch' 'tiny Nicolas Sarkozy', President of France.

That's nothing new. The cubs' ball game was headline news just before Pearl Harbor; Nessie was on the front of the Daily Mail when Hitler came in at the end of January in 1933.

As an aside, if you are as mad as I am tonight, reader, why not have a look at this substantiated, well written piece about how Margaret Thatcher's government once discussed importing specially adapted dolphins with strap-on electronic gear to look for dinosaurs in Loch Ness.

Finally- a story about the intellectual life of the Thatcher administration that I can believe without snorting.

Here's an interesting Bob from Brockley piece to take your mind off things. The more of his blog I read the more interesting it is.

Night night.

Comments

bob said…
Thanks Martin!

b
12:01 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Congressional Healthcare Bill in America I spent a good deal of this morning and yesterday reading over the proposed American healthcare bill (or at least, a compound version; there appear to be five doing the rounds). I don't want to blog on the details of it immediately. It's also a bill, which may well stall in the Senate or be overtaken by events, and which could yet be critically amended. It is the product of Congress, not the administration per se, and the lawyers have not yet got at it. I had some instant worries about it though. In no particular order, I'll list them; Firstly, it can't allow individuals to choose their doctor and treatment in the long run; instead, it will practically formalise the role of doctors as salaried employees of large medical groups. Sarah Palin is onto something with the idea that this will then allow essentially ideological or non-medical outlooks on, say, euthanasia, abortion, transgender issues, or non-emergency treatments of c...
6 comments
Read more
William Orpen There are four major Christian traditions, which are of course Catholic, Orthodox, Armenian and Coptic. Some sects and cults also exist, like the Moonies or Anglicanism. Yet in some bizarre way this weekend, protestant contributions to something other than the seizure of churches have been making their way into my consciousness. I suppose that the first indication of this trend was a reflection in an old copy of Gibbon that he actually became cultured because of Calvinism. Packed off to Switzerland because he went Catholic at an otherwise boring Oxford, Gibbon fell in love with Suzanne Cuchod, and with Greek because of instruction from a Calvinist mentor. It's an odd thing--I keep coming across indications of Calvinists who could have fun, though they doubtless thought that they would pay for it later, and whose political intelligence was second to none. Althusius springs to mind, for instance. But then what am I thinking, I thought to myself? I've sat on balconi...
11 comments
Read more
Damon Buffini I'm not quite sure what to make of this story. Damon Buffini, a multi-millionaire in the City, and a very accomplished man, seems to have heard staff he regarded as lazy and ungrateful at the upper levels of management complaining about restaurants. He subsequently forced them all to eat two-day old Big Macs whilst reminding them of how lucky they are. It's nice to know that Saturn--in the form of a sort of globalisation guevara--could force his children to eat rather than devouring them, as in Goya's painting. How broken do people have to be not to walk out, though? I guess from his point of view, if they had any spine they'd be in business on their own. The whole thing is horribly fascinating.
Post a Comment
Read more