One, two, one two...

Test, test, and so on and so forth. Aye, this will do, this will do nicely.

Blargh

...Why does one get credit for, 'generating jobs and opportunities for other people' while society's creation of the demand and indeed provision of the revenues appears to be ignored? Thing that's annoying me today.

This is a post about how much I hate religion.

"Some of my best friends are religious!..."

In Tartarstan, in the Russian Federation, some lunatic sect has been keeping children locked under-ground for years on end, its leader claiming to be a new Muslim prophet. Other Muslim leaders have said, er, no, Muhammed is the last prophet, and if you say otherwise you're not Muslim, so this shit isn't our responsibility. Cool. And Christians can say, er, no, Muhammed isn't a prophet, we stop at Iesu or whatever he's called. Cool. And Jews can say... and so on and so forth... 

Religion is bad, you barbarians-all, just fucking stop it.

I can't get over how religious leaders/groups in the region can absolve themselves of all responsibility by addressing one point of dogma in their fantasy and declaring that this sect leader deviates from it. Oh, so it's not your problem, then? Cool. I suppose the secular state will just have to deal with it. Well, there's a first time for everything (and a fucking seventy billionth, apparently).

Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Shintoists, Zoroastrians, Neo-Pagans, and all the rest, whatever made-up nonsense, you're all being dicks, just fucking grow up, we're all (people who aren't lying to themselves or others... there must be literally dozens of us in the world!) pig fucking sick of your shit.

We all (including you, don't fucking deny it you arrogant pricks) know that you're lying, it's inarguable, and you are getting a lot of people killed, tortured, raped, and robbed, and you've been doing it for thousands of years. Even in my most bizarre dreams I can't invent anything more evil than religion.

If this shit doesn't stop soon, I'm going to lose it and start building a forest of wicker giants, and then we'll all get our culturally sensitive religion on, and the pope is definitely invited. (I'm probably not going to do that. Just saying that if we really go the whole hog on religious tolerance, I'm going to have to set you all on fire to please Vindos.)

To clarify the point of this post: everyone who lies is a liar, and pointing out that another liar's lies contradict your lies does not legitimise your lies, you liar.

Or, “For fuck's sake, how much evil must humanity endure before you all just stop it?”

Argh! This doesn't look exactly the same as once it did!

I just over-heard an advert on telly describing a 28-page Jamie Oliver guide to good BBQ recipes, and putting aside for a moment the fact that it's absolutely pissing down and has been since the dawn of time, I couldn't help wondering, who actually needs 28 pages to explain how to do a nice bit of corn on the cob?

”...Free, with the Daily Mail”

Oh, okay.

I'm sure they do have a lot to tell us about how eating firelighters causes cancer, but how, fortunately, eating firelighters can prevent cancer and protect us from this clear and present danger to our children.

”...take care not to repeatedly cover and uncover your BBQ, as illegal immigrants may be attracted by smoke signals.”

More importantly, though, somebody's left the gingernuts unwrapped and now they've gone all soft. Friday is ruined.

So, local council elections, tomorrow.

I can vote for the Tories, which would be a lot like going to the Lakes, catching an eel, freezing it solid, smashing myself in the balls with it forty or fifty times, eating half of it raw, then jamming the other half up my arse. Or I can vote for New Labour, who didn't even bother to campaign, have no chance of winning, and are also shit.

Plus, I won some ale at the pub quiz, tonight.

Odds on me bothering to vote? 

Oh, fuck! It's snowing! It's fucking snowing! There's a small quantity of actual crystalline water ice falling from the fucking sky!

So I'm back on a bi-monthly posting cycle, am I? Jolly good.

I had draughted half a grumble about a Panorama episode's twaddle on Britain allegedly drinking itself to death, but then I forgot where I left my blog, and indeed its password, and now I'm not sure whether it's worth complaining about a programme aired months ago.

I might do it anyway, because without it -and this preface- there likely wouldn't be much of an update here at all.

By, “draughted half a grumble” I mean that I'd smeared a few keywords over a Word document, leaving me with the impression that I'd watched Panorama, it'd been about booze, and it'd annoyed me. And by, “Word” I mean... whatever I'm using now that I've gone all Linuxy. Evidently I can't be bothered to look up to the top left of the screen to read, “LibreOffice Writer”.

From the aforementioned half-grumble/keywords I can discern that the programme featured, amongst other things:

*The assertion that people are getting liver disease younger and in larger numbers than was the case thirty years ago

*Well-known reptilian David Cameron going back on everything he said about booze before the election

All, of course, presented in between dramatic scenes of projectile falling and repetitive cursing, before a cheekily slipped in reference to the fact that:

*Alcohol consumption in the UK is actually in decline

Oh.

But we shouldn't let that deflect us from our sensational Crusade, for it gets middle-aged slurry-brains fired-up to see footage of young people in a state, so that they may say, “Ooh, I didn't see scenes like this in my day!”

Yes you fucking did, you just don't remember it because you were pissed!

In more important and up to date news, I've been a bit ill, and now I'm mostly better. Another mucus-coated, sleep-deprived victory.

Meanwhile, there's still little sign of the London Congolese protests in the mainstream (UK) media, so far as I've noticed. Lots about demonstrations and harsh police crack-downs in other people's countries, and the odd bit about their oil and their disputed elections, but rather less about (Sub-Saharan) Africans, even/especially the ones who're here, and their coltan and disputed elections... which is depressing though predictable.

This is the bit where I try to justify the laptop I'm using to post this blog by insisting that an individual dropping out of modern society is unlikely to help anybody else.

The (barely) reported focus of some protesters on coltan, and on shoppers rushing to buy their smart-phones and game stations, seems fair enough, to me, but I don't want to just live as if the 'information age' isn't in full swing around me any more than I want to go vegan or forswear all motorised transport. Instead, while I don't have or want a car, I happily (wait, happily? I don't do things happily, that was misleading, sorry) use public transport, and I eat eggs from chickens in the village, and I have a (decidedly not smart) mobile phone that just happens to be older than many primary school children (I intend to keep it until it no longer works).

My feeling is of course that, once again, it's the market principle and the growth economy ideal -and their advocates- to blame for the perpetuation of the Congo's assorted woes and by extension mass arrests in London. When the latest games console comes out the price of coltan spikes as millions rush to buy it ASAP, and the fighting to control tenuously grasped Central African deposits is fuelled. There's nothing inherently wrong with owning a phone, if you ask me (at least no more than there is contradiction in drinking coffee while expressing frustration at the socialisation of risk on private profiteering, Mensch), but there's plenty wrong with the Gadget Show. There's nothing inherently wrong with the internal combustion engine, but [censored for Top Gear fury]. And there's nothing wrong with scrambled eggs, but the Colonel can definitely improve the rest of the world by fucking off back to Kentucky.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I think you're a wanker, and I'm going to have a mince pie and maybe play a game on a computer that's as old as I am but still works fine and definitely doesn't need replacing every two years just to sustain a fundamentally unsustainable economic model while killing as many innocent brown people as possible and keeping the fuck up with the bastarding Joneses, who, quite frankly, can go and fuck themselves with the latest in fairy lights.

Er, I mean, play in the snow! Jesus Christ, snow!

Bosh.

Tories: human rights are bad, foreigners are bad, protest is bad, shelter for poor people is bad, employment is bad, benefits are bad, women are bad, homosexuality is bad, abortion is bad, sex is bad, peace is bad.

Lib Dems:

That's my review of the coalition so far.