Why mankind must be destroyed

Is there any sight that fills you with greater sadness and anger directed against your so-called "fellow" humans than this?

Sure, there are plenty of other things that might convince you that humanity is not fit to exist – but few things sum it all up more than a dog turd in a plastic bag discarded in a field.

To anyone who does this: if you're going to pick the turd up, put it in a bin or dispose of it at home. If you just dump it in a plastic bag somewhere, IT IS WORSE THAN JUST LEAVING IT.

Dog shit biodegrades after a week or so, and is gone, back into the circle of life, along with all the fox shit, hedgehog shit, bat shit and owl shit that's already in the field there for the little kiddies to pick up. Plastic bags don't degrade. They last forever. So the turd will be there forever too.

That's the best possible outcome. More likely, the bag will sooner or later get torn, so the turd will degrade, but more slowly than before. So it sits around in the field, attracting flies, spreading disease, getting stepped on etc etc for months. And then, there's still a plastic bag blowing around the field.

Who do you think is going to take away your little dog poo bag? I'm not. It's one thing to pick up your own dog's shit, but I draw the line at someone else's (photographing it, however, is a different matter...).

To anyone and everyone who has ever done this: You deserve to be sealed in a plastic bag, with a dog turd and left in a field.

A constructive use of time – learning German, pt 2

Michel Thomas and I have been getting along great. I think that I'd probably be his favourite pupil if (i) he were not dead, (ii) we'd ever met and (iii) I was being taught German by him along with the other muppets on his foundation course CDs. I'm way better at it than them.

I reckon he'd say "Right!" to me quite a lot. Which leads me to an early problem in writing about learning to speak German, as opposed to writing German. I can't find any satisfactory way of transposing how Michel says "Right!" due to his Franco-German accent. At best, it's kind of like:

Ggggcccchrrriiiiight!

His "r" is that sort of throat clearing sound that language learning books will (lazily) tell you time and again is like the "ch" in the Scottish "loch". Put aside the fact that they are referencing a different language in order to explain how it's said in English AND the fact that "how to learn Spanish" books use the same simile for pronouncing "j" – it's not ggggcccchrrriiiiight.

The closest I can get to it is the growl Tigger makes after he's finished singing his theme song in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons. Unfortunately I can't find a link which includes it, so you'll have to imagine it.

However, while searching for the above I got this AWESOME Swedish version of the song. And this version in Finnish is even better.

Anyway.

The Michel Thomas method is a very unusual way of learning.

I'm 4 CDs in to the course, and we're probably using no more than 200 different words – and yet building up long sentences like "I'm not going to give it to you today because I don't have it now." It's all about grammar and word order, with vocabulary almost being ignored.

Why don't they teach like that in schools? Why do they confuse kids with terms like "dative" instead of saying "to me is mir, me in any other sense is mich"? [Pardon me if it's not quite that simple]. Why did I bother learning the German for "pedestrianised area" (Fußgängerzone – I'll never forget it) at age 14 instead of a rather more useful word like "because" (weil) which I have no recollection of ever coming across before?

And why do we emphasise WRITING in foreign languages at the expense of SPEAKING and LISTENING? The way that Michel has it in his course seems ggggcccchrrriiiiight to me.

Postscript: Please excuse the irrelevant image. I am following the longstanding tradition of newspaper business editors and putting an exciting picture on a boring story.

Beware the crows

You can break down the UK into three kinds of environment, defined by the prevailing forms of bird life.

Number one, urban areas – pigeons overrun cities and town centres like a swarm of leprous medieval beggars.

Number two, songbirds definitive of nice suburban and rural areas, characteristic of places like "leafy Surrey" and villages full of holiday homes with names like Cricklewickle-on-the-Dinglywingly.

Number three – the crows. Denizens of places most simply defined as "bleak". Stick up a housing estate on some moorland, the crows don't go away. Because it's still bleak. They remain, eye witnesses of ancient human sacrifice and the horrifying rites of our ancestors. Today, they hunch sneering down at council estates and wind-battered farm houses, miserable dog walkers and the crap-strewn gardens of residential A-roads.

Crows don't just look creepy. They are creepy, as this article I read in a local paper about a "crow court" makes clear. A group of crows is called a "murder" for god's sake.

Wherever I go (outside areas 1 and 2 above) I can be sure that if I look around, I'll spot a crow, watching me. At least, it looks like it's watching me. Against the sky – even the fart-grey skies of the Yorkshire autumn – the silhouette of a crow is like a black hole, sucking the light from around itself to achieve an almost reflecting darkness.

And this is why I believe crows are not birds at all, but rather extra-dimensional entities. That's not a bird watching you from on top of that lamppost while you wait at a lonely bus-stop as the last of the sun's rays fade away. It's a window straight to hell, and something's peering out at you from in there. Read anything on here and you'll know what I mean.

Imperialism begins at home

If I had huge amounts of debt in personal loans, which I was struggling to repay, and yet every time I saw a charity collector I gave them whatever was in my pocket, you'd think I was an idiot. Not only an idiot – as a husband to Elvira of Castille and father to Roger Jr and Tancred – you'd think I was irresponsible.

So why is it that at a time when the UK has the biggest peace-time deficit in history, the decision to ring-fence international development budgets is not being treated with the scorn it deserves? People in this country are about to have their benefits cut (whether they contributed to them via National Insurance or not), services cut, lose their jobs etc etc – but it's a question of "morality" that the UK continues to hand money over, more often than not, to corrupt, incompetent and barely democratic regimes in the developing world.

Doesn't charity begin at home? For the religious moralists, isn't there something in the Bible about removing stuff from your own eye before worrying about other people's? For the liberal universalists, if the principle of equality demands the relief of absolute poverty wherever it occurs, (i) shouldn't we give vastly more and (ii) why are we so selective in who we give to?

In my humble opinion (which, while you are here is what you will be subjected to, like it or not), the idea that the government can make a "moral" decision to dole out taxpayers' money overseas while taking away services from people in this country, is just more evidence of the fundamental misconception of the role of the state that pervades our political class.

By which I mean, they think it's their money, not our money, that they're spending. They think the state has a status as something more just a means to the end of facilitating our living together in harmony and comfort.

Which brings me onto defence spending. And if you thought from the above that I'm a right-wing maniac, you may begin to realise that my general position does not quite fit onto the simple left-right spectrum.

The UK is currently engaged in one foreign war in central Asia, which has been going on for nine years. Until its recent glorious, spectacular withdrawal – reminiscent of Dunkirk in its heroism - it was involved in another one in the Middle East. British forces were in that one for seven years.

For what?

I think even the most rabid supporter of The War Against Terrorism (hereafter, TWAT) acknowledges that two wars with a combined duration (so far) of 16 years have not made the UK safer. So, the state has failed in its primary function there.

Is there any other justification for the UK being involved in these foreign wars or laying off teachersandnurses (not a typo, simply a portmanteau concept for the "good" public sector) for the sake of having a new aircraft carrier in six years' time?

You know what it is? Let me tell you. Imperialism. The UK just can't let go of it.

We are a medium-sized country and economy with a colossal debt. Why on earth do we need to spend billions on nuclear weapons everyone knows we'll never use?

Forget about the past and any justification there might have been for them during the Cold War – that has NOTHING to do with upgrading Trident today. Are Germany, Japan, Canada, Brazil etc etc any less safe, any more vulnerable to invasion or foreign subversion or any threat that exists in the real world today than the UK because they don't have nuclear weapons? Is Britain taken any more seriously anywhere because we do have nuclear weapons? I don't think so.

Having armed forces that can (on paper) be projected around the world, like giving away charity, is at the grubby level of Realpolitik about nothing more than securing influence. Getting favours by bullying, protection racketeering or bribery.

At the psychological level, both are about willy-waving. About being seen as the big man. The USA can do it because they are the big man. China can do it because they are the big man. Everyone else – including Russia – mistakenly believes that the 20^th century never happened.

Let's finally drop the 19^th century imperialist notion of the "nation state" as something with any justification or mission outside its borders. Look where that got us in the last 200 years. States exist to serve their own citizens and nothing else.

Postscript:

I readily acknowledge that there are counterarguments to the various things I've said here, and that my position simplifies things. Who knows, maybe something I said sounds a bit like something someone else who I wouldn't agree with once said. But if wars can be started because one man thinks "it's the right thing to do", I don't see why I should have to give all viewpoints an equal airing. This is my bloody blog.