Born on the fourth of July.

It's an old chestnut, but one man's terrorist IS another man's freedom fighter, and the history of the post-Ottoman middle east has enough label-confusion for a thousand lifetimes. The post independence US - with its genocides, manifest destiny and Monroe doctrine - is another case in point. Maybe it would be nice for all people of good will to use July 4 (or 14th or any of many other dates) to celebrate the idea of self determination and not the fiction of colonially imposed international frontiers or prehistoric devine claims.

Ignore the next bit if you are a person of faith. Skip to the end. I'm going to have a bit of a rant.

On the subject of claims: According to prehistoric celtic tradition the god Llew made a pact with the ancient Welsh that whilst the sacred head of Bran the blessed lay entombed in London, the whole island would belong to them and to them alone. Accordingly all the English and all other immigrants/invaders/settlers/refugees over the past two thousand years in the whole of the UK have to be summarily ejected from their homes by force of arms and confined on the Isle of Wight without access to resources or self determination. Only those with a living tradition of mistletoe worship and oak hugging shall be granted citizenship.
For it is written.

But... that's...utter, utter bollocks, I hear you cry! - Fairy tales and foolishness fit only for children and the slow-witted; A superstitious, fascistic throwback that flies in the face of everything we know to be true and everything we hope for. These tales are metaphors and comfort blankets and not to be taken literally, you say; Read some more stories, you say? - some different ones: - there's a million of 'em? Really?
You mean - being arrested in a first/fifth/eighteenth century mystical timewarp is not the ultimate in human possibility? Well f*ck me sideways. Next you'll be telling me we're all on a spinning rock in a vast ocean of nothingness with bugger all between us and extinction but a brain and an opposable thumb!

Thank the gods that no major international decisions are ever made on that sort of ludicrous basis! Imagine what sort of a mess we'd be in.

I myself base all my decisions on the sacred diatribes of the Cosmic Juggler as vouchsafed to Fat Kevin after a night of cider and horse tranquilisers in Liss Forest. It works for me.


Meanwhile, on planet earth - A World Bank report declaring that up to 75% of recent food price inflation is due to Biofuels is kept under wraps so as not to embarrass the American President - and BigOil is set to soak up 75% of the income from Iraqi oil fields, old and new, in a move nobody anywhere saw coming from a million miles away right from the very start. Links to follow