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Twenty-five years ago Sir Tim Berners-Lee (as he then wasn’t) invented the worldwide web, and surely its anniversary is custom-made for contemplation.

To be fair, this isn’t in short supply, as every columnist in His creation weighs the pros and cons. Yet most of the comments are one- or at best two-dimensional. The dimension they tend to lack is depth.

To say that the net has its pros and cons is to say nothing. Everything has its pros and cons, and certainly every technological invention in history.

The split atom can both heat our houses or incinerate them. An airplane can whisk people to the other end of the earth in hours – or kill them in seconds. A car can be driven onto the Channel Shuttle at Folkestone or into a crowd of grannies at a zebra crossing.

In that respect the internet is just like any other technological advance. Its pros are self-evident, and no one in his right mind will deny that the net is a marvellous tool, the kind only a bad workman would blame.

What does deserve a comment is the cons, as pointed out by hacks who are terribly confused about cause and effect. Let’s pick some perceived cons off the top.

Children acquire an easy access to pornography.

True. But then pornography has always been available – even in countries with no free press.

In one such country, an older pupil once showed an innocent 12-year-old boy a pack of photos depicting muscular black chaps copulating in various poses with overweight blondes. The boy was fascinated, yet never again sought out any dirty pictures. I had better things to do, like reading, listening to real music and hustling chess.

And had I displayed an unhealthy interest in such material, my sainted mother would have nipped it in the bud – no mercy, no equivocation, no delay.

So why don’t today’s mothers do the same thing? Just take junior’s computer away for a month, see how he likes it. Then give it back to him with the proviso that you’ll censor his viewing preferences and, if they’re objectionable, the next time he’ll have a computer will be when he’s old enough to pay for one.

The thing is that today’s parents can no longer control their tots. Children have absorbed the ambient ethos of rights, and they won’t have theirs taken away. Push comes to shove, they can do more to their parents than the parents can do to them.

For the ambient ethos has the power of the state behind it. Just like Plato’s and Marx’s models, the modern state has a vested interest in supplanting parents as the dominant influence on children’s personalities.

Denying children what others have, be it £150 trainers or high-speed broadband, is now treated as an infringement of the tots’ human rights, something that may lead to a lifelong psychological trauma.

These days no self-respecting child, actually no person of any age, can be without a trauma or two without looking like a pariah. So if a child locks himself in his room and surfs the net to his heart’s content (or other organs’ content), today’s parents are helpless.

And why would such a child watch hard porn rather then read a book (possibly even on Kindle)? Why would he play mindless computer games rather than chess? Why would he listen to oligophrenic pop rather than Bach?

Any comprehensive answer would have to be book-length, but such a book wouldn’t even have a short chapter about the internet. It would, however, have long chapters on the collapse of traditional civilisation and its replacement with our anthropocentric perversion.

A man (or, more to the point, a child) is now seen as merely a sum of his appetites and, if these aren’t instantly gratified, he’s denied his humanity. This is a much worse crime than, say, burglary, and quite on the par with child abuse.

Children and infantilised adults reduce human discourse to incoherent, vowel-less bytes of meaningless information.

This presupposes that, away from their computers, they’re able to communicate with an eloquence to do Diogenes proud. Well, they aren’t.

In fact, the net attracts the elite of our children, those who can express themselves, however badly, in writing. ‘OMG got 2CU’ falls short of the customary epistolary standards of the past, but at least the child knows his ABC. Many don’t.

The state again has a vested interest in educating children to become little savages, completely divorced from our civilisation. Only such people could fail to see through our spivs, thereby keeping them in power.

Our comprehensives are deliberately designed for this purpose, and they’re staffed with ‘educators’ trained and inspired to fail the pupils but not the state. One such, a Headmaster no less, writes in a letter to today’s Times, “For my wife and I the most important thing was…”

He and his ilk are the cause. The virtual world of the internet becomes so irresistible because the real world is run by equivalents of Headmasters ignorant of elementary grammar and paid by the state whose interests they serve so admirably.

The internet is used for ‘grooming’.

Well, properly brought up children won’t be easily groomed with the Internet. And badly brought up children have always been easily groomed without it (witness some of the on-going trials for offences committed 30 years ago.)

To say that the internet is to blame for a paedophile grooming a child is like saying that Burberry macs are responsible for an exhibitionist flashing a child in the street.

The wonderful, liberating ‘60s, still remembered with such touching nostalgia by aging cretins, managed to sexualise society without the benefit of electronic media. The tree was planted then; the internet just crates its fruit.

An so on. Poor workmen blame their tools for their botched-up jobs, poor thinkers blame the internet for our anomic, soulless, dehumanising modernity.

They’d do better to look in the mirror and ask themselves the perennial question: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eyes, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Happy birthday, ‘mote’, otherwise known as the internet. None of this is your fault. 

My friend Dave has kindly provided the real transcript of his speech to the Israeli parliament, stressing that it’s strictly for private use only.

I can understand his reluctance to let the text seep into the mainstream media, for the shoddy research on the part of Dave’s speech writers created a rather embarrassing situation.

Mercifully, the Knesset agreed to bury the speech as delivered and replace it with the one they helped Dave draft on the spot. It’s the second version that has been released orbi et urbi, but I thought you might be interested to read the original text. In the strictest confidence, of course.

“Gutn morgn, khaverim. Shalom!

“I’m so happy I’ve shlepped to Eretz Israel from my native shtetl London!

“Ber mir bist du shayn, boychick, as my Yiddishe great-great-great-great-great-grandmother used to tell me when she wasn’t writing the first great book of Jewish literature after the Old Testament, and that’s what I’m telling you now: you’re beautiful!

“To begin with, let me tell you that, even though I’m part Dane, and their PM Helle is a sheyne shikse in my native Yiddish, I disagree with the Danes who say that ‘animal rights come before religion’.

“Religion for me comes before animal rights, and I mean any religion to whose practitioners I happen to be speaking at the moment.

“Since it’s you I’m speaking to, khaverim, and since I’m part Jewish, a Yiddische bocher – the better part, actually – I think that if you feel like eating kosher and practising Shechita, who’s to say you can’t already? Certainly no one who needs the Jewish vote next year.

“Eating kosher is your right, and nobody sticks up for human rights as resolutely as I do, even if it’s the right of every faygala to marry another faygala.

“Allow me to take this opportunity to say that no doubt that nudnik momser Miliband is going to talk to you soon. Since he pretends to be a Yiddishe mensch, he’ll no doubt ask you for gelt to finance his ridiculous campaign.

“All he ever does is kvetch about lack of campaign funds, especially now that even the Unions have reduced their contributions. Even though I’m part Labour myself, don’t give him a single shekel! Bupkes! He’s at heart pro-Arab, that no-goodnik, and his father was a communist!

“O tempere o tsoriss, as another Jew, Cicero, once said, meaning that it’s oy gavalt when the likes of that putz pretend to be your friend!

“I’m telling you this on the emes: no one admires your chutzpah in facing up to the Arabs as much as I do – this, even though I’m part Arab myself. We’re all one happy family, mishpukhe in my native Yiddish, and okay, maybe they have the right to have their own state already.

“But you have that right too, you must keep your state, whatever is left of it after the diplomatic efforts of my friend, that’s pryyand to you, Barack and my own Foreign Office.

“As we say in my native Yiddish…

[At this point Craig Oliver, Dave’s Director of Communications, whispered something in his ear. Dave turned purple and screamed, having remembered to turn off the microphone first:]

What the **** do you mean, they don’t speak Yiddish?!? They’re Jews, aren’t they? Who the **** wrote this ******* speech?!? Don’t you ******* idiots do any research?!? So what the **** do they speak? Right, now you tell me. So get your finger out and give me a Hebrew phrase – now!!! Well, look it up, you moron! Any bloody phrase! Fine, this’ll do…

[Switches the microphone back on]

“As we say in my native Hebrew, ach-shav ani mevin. Now I understand all your needs and I’m with you wholeheartedly!”

Actually they hate private anything, including property. That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised that Labour are promising yet another raid on private pensions – this sort of thing is encoded into their DNA.

After all, if we strip socialism of its mendacious slogans (and all its slogans are mendacious), its essence is a commitment to transferring as much power as possible from the individual to the state.

This in effect means transferring power to the ruling elite, the kind that strives to exercise total, or rather totalitarian, control over people’s movements, property, speech – their bodies and their minds.

All modern governments are united in striving for this goal, which is why at base they are all socialist. Depending on how they plan to trick their way into office and stay there, they may say different things. But they’ll all do the same things, give or take.

There’s nothing else. All that talk about looking after the downtrodden, social cohesion, equality and what have you is just a tactic designed to soften people’s resistance, turning them into putty in the state’s hands.

That’s why whenever a socialist politician talks about reducing people’s dependence on the state, he’s lying through his teeth. The greater the number of people dependent on the state, and the greater their dependence, the greater the power of the state. QED.

The differences between communists and socialists in this respect are marginal and entirely tactical. Communists can rely on a greater range of control levers, including unrestricted violence. Tautologically named  democratic socialists have to use finer tools to do the job. But the job is the same.

The main tool in the socialists’ box is financial. After all, secure private property is a factor of independence. That’s why every pound in the people’s pockets is a burr under the socialists’ blanket. Removing this irritant is their life’s work.

Pensioners are especially irritating. First, they can no longer serve the state. Second, by requiring more medical help they compromise the so-called free healthcare, one of the main control levers in the state’s hands. And third, if the state really gets up their nose, they can just up and leave for sunnier climes.

Ideally, the state would prefer to cull all wrinklies, but this worthy goal can’t be achieved in one fell swoop: enough people still have enough residual scruples to be aghast. That’s why euthanasia has to be sneaked in through the back door, wearing the camouflage of kind regard for people’s dignity.

But it’s making headway nevertheless. Euthanasia is already legal in many Western states, and assisted suicide is being talked up as an act of almost Christian charity.

Still, it’ll be at least another generation before the state is able to fulfil the vision of that great socialist George Bernard Shaw. He inspired another great socialist, Adolf Hitler, by advocating the use of a ‘humane gas’ to dispatch wrinklies who can’t ‘justify their existence’.

Meanwhile, the state has to make sure that people have less property, and that whatever they have is less secure. The main target in our socialists’ crosshairs is people of independent means, however meagre.

Independent means come about by any of the three legal expedients: earning, inheriting or saving – and pensions are by far the most popular form of saving in Britain.

Clearly the socialist state has to compromise all three to fulfil its genetic desideratum. Extortionist income taxes go a long way towards punishing earning, inheritance taxes then kick in to make sure that whatever is left after the income taxes will be extorted again.

And still, after all the state in its munificence has done for them, those truculent ingrates sometimes manage to hold on to enough pennies to make themselves independent of the state in their run-up to heaven. That simply won’t do.

That’s why, when Tony Blair moved into 10 Downing Street and even before he invited every tattooed ‘musician’ to the housewarming party, he hit the pension funds for £5 billion. For starters. Hey, first things first – that’s what government is all about, isn’t it?

And that’s why the two Eds, Miliband and Balls [sic], are planning to hit our pensions again, ostensibly to finance their harebrained Compulsory Jobs Guarantee.

Able-bodied youngsters who’ve been on the dole for more than a year will be made to work for six months or lose their benefits. The programme therefore has two prongs, both hitting the same target.

First, the state will tighten its grip on a large group of young people already in its tender care. Second, the wrinklies will be made to part with some of their nest egg and hence some of their independence. How good is that?

You don’t think that after six months of a sinecure paid by, well, us the lifelong welfare recipients will be imbued with a work ethic, do you? Of course not.

Unscrupulous employers will take the state’s shilling (or rather euro, if Labour gets in), shove their largely illiterate trainees in the corner, then let them go after six months. By that time the state will have realised that just robbing pensioners won’t bankroll the scheme. It will then either abandon the programme or look for someone else to expropriate. But the pension funds will stay robbed.

I’d suggest a much better plan. No welfare should be available to any healthy youngster of working age. You’d be amazed how quickly they’ll learn to look after themselves – people tend to survive no matter what.

The sheer mendacity of Miliband and Balls [sic] is staggering. For they espouse the pernicious, inhuman ideology that’s solely responsible for creating the army of young freeloaders in the first place.

It’s that ideology that inspired the destruction of our education, that time-honoured way out of penury. It’s that ideology that created such blood-sucking Leviathans as the NHS and the whole welfare system. And now its practitioners claim that the very same ideology can set things right.

Really, these spivs won’t have a moment’s rest until they’ve done to the country what those good socialists Anthony Crosland and Roy Jenkins used to do to each other. And you know what’s even worse? We’ll let them.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having examined 1,141 species of birds, researchers at the Australian National University have disproved yet another Darwinian mantra.

They’ve discovered that, contrary to what Darwin and Darwinists have always maintained, it’s not just male birds who sing their beautiful songs, but also female ones. And neither of them sing to attract sexual mates.

Yet again, when faced with the sheer beauty of the world, Darwinists are found out. 

Left out of their cold-blooded ratiocinations is something that has to be obvious to any unbiased observer: the world is organised according not only to rational principles, but also to aesthetic ones.

In many instances aesthetics comes before practicality, or even cancels it out. Not only, as Dostoyevsky suggested, can beauty save the world – beauty is the world.

Look at the peacock’s tail for example. At first sight, this is a hindrance: after all, the oversized protuberance reduces the bird’s mobility, thus making it less able to flee from predators. Darwinists explain this and many other examples of seemingly useless aesthetic characteristics, especially in males, as a factor of sexual selection.

The more striking the male’s appearance, the more likely it would be to appeal to the aesthetic sense of a female and thereby pass its own genes on to the next generation. However, this raises a question that’s rather awkward for Darwinism: whence do animals acquire their aesthetic sense in the first place?

In the case of the peacock this comes packaged with characteristics that actively hamper the survival of the species. Clearly, metaphysical aesthetics overrides physical functionality – yet again metaphysics takes the lead.

This applies to birdsong as well, which, as we’ve found out, isn’t there to chat up the opposite sex. It does, however, betray the bird’s location to predators, again jeopardising physical survival for the sake of beauty.

Or look at the geometric perfection of physical bodies. Particularly telling here is the golden section, obtained by dividing a length into two unequal portions, of which the shorter one relates to the longer one as the latter relates to the overall length.

Any length can be divided into an infinite number of portions, but only one division will produce this geometrically perfect ratio.

Modern scientists discover the proportion of golden section in the morphological makeup of birds and man, plants and animals, in the structure of the eye (which so baffled Darwin that he admitted evolution couldn’t explain it – yet), in the location of heavenly bodies, in brain biorhythms and cardiograms.

Scientists are united in their conclusion: because this phenomenon goes across all levels of material organisation, it conveys a deep ontological meaning. But science is unable to explain it, and the best that honest researchers have done so far is admit their inability to account for the aesthetic aspect of the world.

After all, aesthetically perfect shapes add nothing to the organism’s survivability and may well endanger it.

Why, for example, do cereal plants need stalks with joints arranged according to the golden section? This does nothing to make the stalk stronger.

Why do the bodies of dragonflies relate to the length of their separate parts according to the principles of the golden section? This doesn’t enable them to fly any faster.

Why do our fingers relate to the length of their joints the same way? This doesn’t make gripping objects any easier.

Indeed, if Darwin was right, and organisms evolve in the direction of greater survivability, then why do they have so many seemingly useless, and often potentially dangerous, features that nonetheless adhere to rigid aesthetic principles?

The aesthetic arrangement of nature points at a metaphysical, rather than physical, purpose. And that’s exactly what’s revealed in birdsong.

The human ear can perceive no more than 10 modulations per second. Birdsong, however, often delivers 100-400 such modulations, making much of it imperceptible to us.

The only way to hear all of it is by recording the song on a specially designed tape recorder that can slow it down when playing it back. The listeners can then be exposed to an aural canvas compared to which the nightingale, our established vocal star, doesn’t appear all that virtuosic.

 In fact, many scientists regard the nightingale’s songs as rather primitive compared to, say, the musicality of the hermit thrush (Hylocichla guttata). Played at a slower speed, his singing shows characteristics amazing in the animal world.

He often repeats the passages of his music, each time in a slightly altered version. In fact, his singing has been compared to the ‘theme with variations’ of classical composers.

The bird follows two- or even four-beat bars, and even composes harmonic accompaniment to the main subjects, singing two voices at the same time.

Actually, some of the world’s leading experts in musical folklore were fooled by a clever researcher who played the slowed-down bird’s music to them, having first identified it as the chant of an African shaman.

The musicologists were perplexed. Understandably, none of them could identify the ethnic provenance of the music. But they all refused to believe that it came from an African shaman, insisting that it could only have originated in a higher musical culture.

The current debunking of Darwin, published in the journal Nature Communications, says, “Our findings… call for a re-evaluation of the pervasive view of birdsong as evolved through sexual selection.”

The authors, of course, stopped short of even hinting at the gross inadequacy of Darwin’s theory in general. Modern science at best accepts natural selection as only one – and far from the most significant – factor in ‘the origin of species’, and surely the authors of the study know this.

But they’ve got mortgages to pay and families to feed, something that would be in jeopardy for any Darwin denier. Modernity encourages free scientific enquiry – but only if the results agree with its founding principles.

Intellectual freedom? It’s strictly for the birds.

 

This comes from my ‘I Thought I Had Heard Everything’ department.

Col. Vladimir Putin has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize – bet you didn’t guess that. Admittedly he’s only one of 278 candidates, but I’m sure Peter Hitchens and other Western fans will agree he deserves not just to be short-listed but to win.

What better qualifications can one think of than bringing Europe to the brink of a major war? After all, every war is followed by peace, and no doubt, once the Ukraine has been sorted out, peace will ensue.

How long it’ll last is a different matter, especially since the Baltics are next, but we shouldn’t look that far ahead. What matters is now, and Col. Putin is trying to achieve peace after the minor hiccup of a war.

His selfless dedication to supplying weapons to Hezbollah and Hamaz are also ultimately directed at achieving peace in the Middle East, once Israel has been ‘driven into the sea’, to use his clients’ terminology.

If Col. Putin wins this ultimate geopolitical accolade – as Peter Hitchens doubtless thinks he should – he’ll add his august name to the long list of previous worthy winners. Such as:

Woodrow Wilson, for dragging America kicking and screaming into the First World War against the express wishes of Congress.

Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, for handing South Vietnam over to the communists. Tho had the decency to turn the prize down; Kissinger didn’t. That prompted Tom Lehrer’s remark that Henry accepting the Prize made political satire redundant.

Mikhail Gorbachev, for transferring power in Russia from the Party to the KGB and killing merely hundreds in the process, rather than the millions he could have killed. His staunch denial that anything untoward had happened at Chernobyl must have been a contributing factor as well.

Yasser Arafat, for murdering people with conventional weapons, rather than nuclear ones. Col. Putin of course did use such weapons to murder Alexander Litvinenko in London, but the yield was too low to count.

Al Gore, for producing a mendacious film about global warming that nonetheless served the useful purpose of making people feel guilty whenever they reach for an aerosol or car keys.

Barack Obama, presumably for having been a community organiser in Chicago. It couldn’t have been for anything he had done subsequently because, well, having just been elected President, he hadn’t done anything yet.

Actually, I’ve been a bit slipshod in listing Col. Putin’s indisputable qualifications for the Prize. It’s not only his heroic attempts to pacify the Ukraine that merit the highest accolades.

Earlier, in 2008, he provided the same service for the people of Georgia who forgot all the good things Russia in general and the KGB in particular had done for them. As a result of Col. Putin’s short and sharp war, Georgia finally acquired a government unlikely to go to war with Col. Putin – after all, it was he who appointed it. Peace ensued.

The same goes for Chechnia. Until Col. Putin sorted it out, that bellicose province had been at daggers drawn with Russia for 200 years. The good colonel had two Russian blocks of flats blown up, blamed the atrocity on the Chechens and started a war that – predictably and laudably – led to peace.

Putin installed a puppet government, gave it a free licence to run not only Chechnia but also the Moscow criminal underworld, and if that doesn’t qualify him as a peacemaker I don’t know what would.

And let’s not forget that Col. Putin has shown the world how to resolve hostage crises to everybody’s satisfaction (except perhaps the hostages’).

In 2002 some Muslim terrorists in Moscow took over a theatre full of culture seekers. In 2004 other Muslim terrorists grabbed a Beslan school full of pupils. In both instances, Col. Putin applied the technique pioneered at Béziers in 1209 and summed up in the command “Kill them all, God will claim his own”.

Both in Beslan and in Moscow, the terrorists and the hostages were wiped out together – in Moscow with a gas whose composition still baffles experts. This will no doubt discourage other hostage takers, promoting peace and reaffirming Col. Putin’s credentials as a Nobel seeker.

In one of those serendipities history throws up, the letter nominating Col. Putin for the prize was drafted by a chap named Beslan [sic!] Kobakhiya, who thereby has become my friend for life.

My new friend Beslan is vice-president of the organisation snappily called The International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation of Peoples of the World. According to the letter, “… [Col.] Putin makes efforts to maintain peace and tranquility not only on the territory of his own country but also actively promotes settlement of all conflicts arising on the planet,” and truer words have never been spoken.

In case you’re wondering, my friend Beslan’s group is on the list of those approved to proffer Nobel nominations, and quite right too. Moreover, its nomination has received a weighty support from the Russian singer and MP Iosif Kobzon, denied entry to the United States for his widely publicised links to organised crime.

Allow me to remind you that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.

This describes Col. Putin so accurately that, as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one potential winner. To join me and Peter Hitchens in expressing support, write to: Col. (ret.) V.V. Putin, c/o FSB (former KGB) Headquarters, No. 1/3 Lubianka Square, Moscow, Russia. 

Skegness Magistrates’ Court has handed a suspended sentence to a young man who admitted an act of sexual penetration with a Staffordshire bull terrier.

Some of my conservative friends are indignant at the leniency of the punishment, but I, being a resolute defender of progress and modernity, think it was unduly harsh.

For one thing, I too have warm feelings about bull terriers, even though so far I haven’t expressed such sentiments physically. Let’s face it, they aren’t the prettiest of dogs, which is why they need all the love they can get.

As to escalating such love to sex, who’s to say this is wrong?

Certainly not the Dutch scientist Midas Dekker, who in 2000 published the academic treatise Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, adding a whole new meaning to the concepts of heavy petting and indeed Midas touch.

Dr Dekker argued that people and animals can form loving erotic relationships, just like hetero- or homosexual humans. It is therefore wrong to assume that sex between a human and, say, a Staffordshire bull terrier violates the latter’s rights. On the contrary, it upholds them.

The right to warm and loving relationships has been sanctified by the 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights, and surely a bull terrier starved of canine companionship can’t exercise this right.

Since we’ve finally cottoned on that it’s not just humans but also animals who have rights, the owner would have been in default of his obligations had he declined to stick… well, I’ll spare you a graphic description of what he shouldn’t have declined to do.

The great philosopher Prof. Peter Singer, he of the tireless campaign to grant apes the same human rights that are denied to about 90 percent of the world’s humans, studied the issue of bestiality from the moral standpoint and reached the same – commendable! – conclusion.

“We are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes,” explained the good professor, doubtless on the basis of frank self-assessment. Therefore such sex “ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”

One wonders how poor Mrs Singer feels about this, assuming that her hubbie-wubbie practices what he preaches, as Dr Dekker apparently does. One suspects she may deny the family dog that extra helping of Pedigree Chum, you know how jealous human females can get.

According to these scholars, sex has no ethical dimension at all – it’s all about feeling, ‘lurve’, passion, pleasure, that sort of thing. By inference, no object of such romantic cravings can possibly bring them into disrepute, and they’re all worthy of being consummated or even sanctified by marriage.

Witness the kind of love that in the past dared not speak its name, but now not only screams it off the rooftops but actually threatens legal action against those who refuse to join the chorus.

Approaching the issue from the purely pragmatic angle, once sex has been scoured of its moral, social, religious and – well – human aspects, a dog may be seen as a better partner than a woman, a man or anything in between.

A canine lover is unlikely to encumber the relationship with soppy sentimentality and post-coital verbosity that used to make sex so complicated for human beings.

A dog isn’t going to demand flowers in the evening or respect in the morning.

It’s guaranteed not to say anything stupid – in fact, even better, not to say anything at all.

And if you decide to get rid of it, it won’t take you to the cleaners – and nor will it sell to the papers any disparaging stories about your character or sexual performance.

An ideal companion any way you look at it, in other words.

One only wishes that the Skegness chap had done the honourable thing and made an honest bitch out of his bull terrier… Sorry, I assumed that his canine lover is female; how silly of me.

Since the word ‘perversion’ has been expurgated from our lexicon, it doesn’t matter whether the bull terrier was male or female. The sex of either lover can no more act as an obstacle to matrimony than their species.

The famous Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld has shown the way by marrying his Siamese cat Choupette. I don’t know if the union was sanctified by the church, but I rather doubt it, considering Mr and Mrs Lagerfeld live in a residually Catholic country. The way our own dear Anglican church is going, before long guests will be tossing rice at poodles – or bull terriers, if you’d rather.

I have so much more to tell you on this subject, but I’ve got to run. I’m late for an appointment with the manager of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home who wants to discuss the possibility of repositioning his establishment as a dating service.

 

 

If you still have doubts that the world has gone mad, this will dispel them. The American firm Wilder Publication has seen fit to attach the following disclaimer to the title page of Kant’s three Critiques in one volume:

“This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.”

What a relief; I’m wiping my brow even as we speak. It’s good to see that someone cares about the spiritual wellbeing of our children so much.

Today’s children, and I bet you didn’t know this, are falling over themselves to get their hands on a copy of The Critique of Pure Reason – and as to Practical Reason, why, there’s a veritable stampede under way.

My impression was that they read nothing but text messages with the vowels left out for the sake of brevity. I’m happy to see I was wrong: apparently their young souls weaned on Twitter are reaching out, categorically if not imperatively, for moral philosophy refracted through the Kantian critical method.

In that they are far ahead of, say, Leo Tolstoy who – as a young man, not a child – ruefully admitted in his diary: “I read Kant and understood next to nothing…” That’s progress for you – today’s tots have no such problems.

True enough, once their spiritual thirst has been slaked, their impressionable minds can be corrupted by such Kantian aphorisms as “The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.” Especially those who work for Wilder Publications, the old Prussian would have added had that firm existed at the time – but we must refrain from such unfair remarks.

We must, however, be united in our desire to protect our young from Kant’s subversive tirades. Why, if he uttered them today, Kant would find himself in a prison cell faster than you can say ‘incitement to racial hatred’.

In the same spirit we must hail the removal of Huckleberry Finn from most school libraries in America. All American literature may have come out of that book, as Hemingway believed, but we know better.

After all, that objectionable scribble features a central character named Nigger Jim. In a country where a government official has to apologise publicly for using the word ‘niggardly’, there’s no room for such offensive stuff.

Of course, rather than removing Huck Finn from their libraries, US educators could have edited the text slightly. They could have re-Christened Jim as, say, “the socioeconomically disadvantaged Afro-American victim of racial oppression James.”

No doubt they considered this option and rejected it on the grounds of compromised readability. Getting rid of an American classic was much easier.

Personally, the idea of bringing great works of literature and philosophy up to date appeals to me. For example, Kant’s entreaty sapere aude (dare to be wise) could acquire a new lease on life if modified to read “sapere Audi” (dare to drive expensive cars in London traffic).

As to Kant’s views on matters amorous, they wouldn’t pass muster in any modern class on sex education, which makes them downright dangerous.

For Kant that whole area was purely an academic construct, for he remained a virgin until his old age, when his disciples insisted he should experience some hanky-panky. The old man was left unimpressed: “So many hectic movements and nothing more.”

It was no doubt from such truncated experience that Kant objected to what he spiffily called ‘objectification’, using another person merely for pleasure (the German word is even longer and therefore weightier).

Sex, he wrote, ought to be allowed only when serving a higher purpose, such as marriage. “Taken by itself,” he opined, “sexual love is a degradation of human nature”.

How wonderful that today’s children know better. They’ve been taught that the only purpose of sex is sex, because that’s what people like, and whatever people like is cool. The very same Hemingway did say “if it feels good, it’s moral,” proving that he wasn’t entirely reactionary.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly that our innocent creatures, trained as they are from their pre-pubescent years in the more inventive ballistic possibilities of eroticism, must be protected from such antediluvian nonsense.

It has to be said that Kant wasn’t all bad. Specifically, our children should be invited to share his idea that it wasn’t God who created man but more or less vice versa. “God is not a creature outside me, but only my thought,” he wrote – and Richard Dawkins couldn’t have put it better.

Also, Kant’s views on the French Revolution are consonant with those of modern educators. “This revolution finds in the heart of all observers the kind of sympathy that borders on enthusiasm.” Obviously Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France wasn’t on Kant’s reading list – and neither should it be on our children’s.

Protecting children from what was bad in Kant while encouraging them to absorb what’s good, mainly agnosticism, is the way to go. Of course withdrawal is also possible, followed by a soul-warming bonfire. The Critiques would keep the flame going nicely, with the president of Wilder Publications on hand to stoke the fire.

I hope he’ll emigrate to England at some point. We need bright chaps like him to give our ‘educators’ a helping PC hand in guiding children through the perilous undercurrents of Kant. Those few children who know how to read, that is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I admire such refreshing courage so much, I’d vote for Nick – provided I could lose whatever intellectual and moral sense God gave me.

Nigel Farage and his deputy, Nick declared, rarely vote in the European Parliament, and even when they’re there, they “don’t stand up for British interests”.

Of course Nick himself has missed four out of five votes in the Commons, as Mr Farage countered immediately.

Now I can only guess why Nigel is a bit laid-back when it comes to casting his vote within a body that has no moral, intellectual, historical and – I’d suggest – legal right to exist.

Why Nick misses voting in a body that has all those rights galore I know for sure. He likes to play tennis (badly) at my club, where he’s often seen on weekday afternoons.

But this is neither here nor there. What I find fascinating is that Nick obviously sees himself – and his comic-book party – as a tireless fighter for British interests.

Frankly, I don’t know what he’d be doing differently if his aim were to destroy this country as a sovereign nation. As you know, the LibDems under Nick’s industrious leadership are dedicated to the noble task of turning Britain into a province (or rather several separate provinces) of the EU.

To wit: time after time, in between hitting inept tennis shots, Nick expresses a longing for joining the euro, this at a time when even a reasonably informed child knows that such a move would destroy the British economy instantly and probably irrevocably. Nick obviously thinks such a development would be in British interests, yet some may beg to differ.

But then Nick does say odd things at times, which is painful to see in a fellow tennis player. For example, he says he’s proud of his Russian ancestry, hoping his audience would be unfamiliar with the nature of his Russian lineage.

In fact it derives from the family of Moura Budberg, née Zakrevsky, who immediately after the Bolshevik revolution acted as the honey in numerous traps set by the OGPU to blackmail foreign visitors and keep an eye on Soviet dignitaries.

Practising the world’s oldest profession within the ranks of the world’s most diabolical organisation, Clegg’s ancestor had affairs with the British envoy Bruce Lockhart, the writers Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells, and God knows who else.

I’m sure Nick knows all this and, if pressed, he’d agree that there isn’t much to be proud of. It’s just that his internationalist heart demands a claim to an international family background.

He isn’t proud of descending from the family of a secret-police whore. He’s proud of being an internationalist.

Nigel Farage is proud of other things. That’s why he treats the European Parliament with the contempt it deserves. “Our objective as MEPs is not to keep voting endlessly for more EU legislation and to take power away from Westminster,” he told the BBC.

Nigel Farage isn’t an MEP because he believes in European federalism. He’s an MEP because he wants to undermine the EU from inside. He’s Britain’s scout behind enemy lines, which is doubtless how he sees himself.

That explains why his voting record is only 50 percent. By contrast, Nick treats the British Parliament with the contempt it doesn’t deserve. That’s why his voting record in Westminster is a mere 22 percent. So whose scout is he, and how does he think the lines are drawn?

When the two go head to head in their televised debate, Nigel will wipe the floor with Nick. If he doesn’t, I’ll never buy him a pint.

 

 

 

 

My today’s article can be found on: revpetermullen.com

Another day, another interview with Israel National Radio, another penetrating question that goes right to the core of the matter: “How does Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine affect the world in general and America’s allies in particular?”

Since the interview kicked off at an ungodly hour of 5.30 am, my thinking was as sluggish as my voice was hoarse. Some afterthoughts are therefore in order, for the problem is vast.

Many nations count on America to defend them from bullies, yet America’s record in that area is at best mixed (which is not to say that ours is much better).

When President Wilson dragged the USA into the First World War, his aim was not just to defeat the Central European powers but – more important – to rid Europe of all traditional empires, including the British and the Russian with which America was ostensibly allied.

Wilson correctly surmised that their collapse would herald the advent of a new order spearheaded by America. That’s why he (and, to be fair, our own Lloyd George) welcomed both Russian revolutions of 1917, including the Bolshevik one.

Both countries offered only a token support to the White armies fighting to protect some semblance of civilisation in Russia. With the prescience we’ve learned to expect from our leaders, the dynamic duo reassured their electorates that, “Bolsheviks would not wish to maintain an army, as their creed is fundamentally anti-militarist.” Ergo, “There must be no attempt to conquer Bolshevik Russia by force of arms.”

This, even though the Whites, unlike the Bolsheviks, were prepared to honour Russia’s obligations and keep their troops fighting for the Allies. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, signed a separate peace with Germany, which was bound to cost the Allies numerous lives.

Not to worry. To the Wilsons and Lloyd Georges of this world, the war against Germany didn’t matter as much as the war for the world. For what Henry Luce described as ‘the American century’ to kick in, old empires had to go.

The British Empire managed to hang on by the skin of its teeth, but that unfortunate situation was corrected in the Second World War. Roosevelt clearly saw his mission in not just defeating the Axis powers, but also in ridding the world of the last bastion of traditional civilisation.

In that, Roosevelt’s desiderata overlapped with Stalin’s, but obviously not with Churchill’s. That’s why he objected to the terms on which America’s aid was offered during the Battle of Britain.

That victory was won at the expense of not only British lives but also Britain’s post-war economic prospects. Churchill knew this was coming: Britain, unlike Russia, had to pay for everything in cash, and IOUs (the last of which was paid off only in 2006) were accepted only grudgingly.

To keep up the payments, Britain had to sell all her overseas holdings and all her gold reserves. It was clear to Churchill that, even if the war were won, the Empire would be lost.

On 7 December, 1940, he wrote to Roosevelt, pleading that the brutally unsentimental terms on which American aid was being proffered would consign Britain to a position in which “after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.” Roosevelt acknowledged receipt and promptly collected Britain’s last £50 million in gold.

After the war the Americans continued this pattern of treating their friends in an unfriendly manner. In 1956 the CIA-controlled Radio Free Europe issued a call to arms for Hungarian patriots fed up with Soviet domination. They promptly rose up in full expectation of American help, which never came.

Soviet tanks rolled in and massacred Hungarian youngsters, while Americans were busy saving the fascist regime of Nasser in Egypt from the British-French-Israeli invasion force.

One would think that others would heed the lesson, but Cuban anticommunist émigrés didn’t. Aghast at watching their country raped by Castro’s thugs, they joined an armed force being trained, equipped and financed by the CIA.

On 16 April, 1961, Brigade 2506 landed at Playa Girón on Bahía de Cochinos (the Bay of Pigs). Their chances of getting rid of the communists were odds-on. After all, the air support promised by the Kennedy administration would offset Castro’s numerical superiority and his tanks.

Yet again, however, the US administration got cold feet. In an act of egregious betrayal the promised air support was withdrawn at the last moment, and the Cuban freedom fighters were butchered on the beach.

Moving right along, apart from issuing a few empty threats, Americans didn’t bat an eyelid when Soviet tanks turned the Prague Spring into a long winter. Nor did they do anything to defend their staunch ally, the Shah of Iran, in 1979 when he was being ousted by the chaps who’re now plotting to bring the world to the brink of a nuclear disaster. And so forth, ad infinitum.

This is the context in which Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine ought to be viewed. Obama, Cameron et al have responded with the traditional weapons at their disposal: meaningless phrases and empty threats.

Dave went so far as to promise a boycott of the Sochi Paralympics – I bet that’ll make Putin break into a cold sweat. Obama and Kerry threatened to reduce the G8 to its former G7. They didn’t express any willingness to make up any subsequent deficit in gas that would ensue if Putin chose to turn off the tap on his supply pipe.

The deficit would be huge. France gets 14% of her gas from Russia, Italy 27%, Germany 36%, Austria 49%, Greece 76%, while the three Baltic republics plus Finland rely on Russia for 100% of their gas supply. Not to bore you with too many numerals I’ve left all other EU members out, but the point is made, don’t you think?

The whole situation sends a message to America’s allies, such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and – above all – Israel: Be afraid. Be very afraid, especially if you aren’t prepared to go it alone when the going gets tough.

My interviewer Tamar Yonah doesn’t seem to be afraid. On the contrary, she seems to believe that now Obama has shown his true colours, Israel will no longer feel obliged to follow America’s diktats.

Since under Obama’s sage guidance those diktats range from appeasement to virtual surrender to suicide, such courage is good news – provided Israel is strong enough to handle single-handedly such threats as Iran’s nuclear programme.

I pray she is; I fear she isn’t. One way or the other, Israel knows that Obama’s America isn’t necessarily a friend to be trusted.