The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Monday, April 30, 2018

Proposititional Futurabilitation, Workabilitous Progressitivity

In spite of Dunkirk and all that's happened since, the perfidious Euro-wog in charge of Nazi punishment beatings continues to hold up negotiations on the Irish Question by insisting that Britain negotiate. With its customary British combination of pluck and gumption, Her Majesty's Government has repeatedly announced that the whole issue of the Irish border can be solved with technology; which one would think should be more than enough to settle the matter and pass to more significant things. Not a bit of it, however: the perfidious Euro-wog and the Irish prime minister continue to behave as if the relationship between Britain and Ireland were, in some strange fashion, complicated. Fortunately, within hours of the perfidious Euro-wog's pernicious pronouncements, the blithering prima donna David Davis announced that some proposals "on the future" were being copied and pasted from somewhere or other. It remains to be seen whether the future according to Team Davis is in quite the same place as it is for the grown-ups.

Sunday, April 29, 2018

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 7 viii-xi; Luke 11 x-xiii

Jesus proclaims that everyone who asks receives, and compares God to the sort of parent who does not necessarily give a stone when asked for bread, a serpent when asked for a fish or (according to Luke) a scorpion when asked for an egg.

Each of the three examples which Jesus gives contains a parable about humanity's relationship with God. The contrast of stones with bread echoes the devil's challenge to Jesus during His period of temptation in the wilderness; thus, when you pray to God for bread, the stone which you actually receive from Him serves to remind you that you do not live by bread alone. In the contrast of serpent and fish we see the two contenders for humanity's soul, with the wise and truthful counsellor of Genesis set against the image of the fishers of men: those who use tempting morsels of supposed spiritual nourishment to lure their victims onto murderous hooks, or who cast their nets to draw random individuals into a suffocating and unlivable realm.

The contrast of egg and scorpion is the most cynically truthful of the three and, presumably for that reason, does not appear in the Sermon on the Mount. In the ancient world the egg, with its seemingly miraculous hatching of living creatures from the inanimate shell, was a potent symbol of divinely-ordained fecundity; hence its later association with Easter and the Resurrection. But life is also pain and suffering, thanks to God's punishment of Adam and Eve for listening to the truthful serpent instead of to His arbitrary orders; thus by giving His children an egg, the Father metaphorically gives them a scorpion also.

Even by Jesus' standards, on the purely literal level His words demonstrate remarkable callousness and complacency. By the Saviour's reckoning, nobody who asks God for their daily bread can ever go hungry, and nobody who asks God to protect them from temptation can ever be tempted. It follows that if you say the Lord's prayer and still suffer the pangs of hunger or temptation, then your faith is insufficient and the fault is entirely your own; therefore, implies the Saviour, those who have the impudence to be hungry and fallible can simply starve and be damned. Such is the gospel of the new covenant; such are the good things which the Father gives those who ask Him.

Saturday, April 28, 2018

Two Optimists

While Britain's substitute for an Environment Secretary, the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, has been busy throwing dead cats in defence of the race-baiting incompetent at the Home Office, a notorious pessimist on the other side of the Atlantic has decided to take a more constructive view. Speaking at the unveiling of a national memorial to the enterprising activities of some proto-Rudds in Montgomery, Alabama, the former vice-president Al Gore noted that the effects of climate change in the USA will cause most suffering among the poor, the elderly, and African Americans. Should the same results be replicated in the Recrudescent Vassal Imperium, as well as in those insignificant parts of the world which exist purely for the accommodation of lesser breeds, then of course no honest, sensible, intelligent jabbering homunculus could ask for anything better.

Friday, April 27, 2018

No Blacks, No Irish, No Docs

Despite that minor public-relations setback on the Windrush front, Britain's Ministry for Wog Control continues its glorious crusade to ensure that the immigration system works in the national interest, or at least in the average Rothermere Daily Stürmer reader's conception thereof. After a winter during which the National Health Service was stretched to the breaking-point, thanks in large part to staff shortages inflicted by the Minister for Absent-Minded Real Estate Investment, the Home Office has been merrily denying visas to foreign doctors at the rate of a hundred a month. It matters not to the Ministry for Wog Control that the swarming medicinal hordes have been through a legal recruitment process and legally offered vacant posts which presumably have some vague relevance to the prevention and treatment of illness; if thirty-odd years of the neoliberal gospel has taught us anything, it is that the national interest is an altogether higher and better thing than the mere well-being of the British public.

Thursday, April 26, 2018

Criminal Tolerance

For some reason or other, doubtless connected with the obscure and inconsiderate workings of the law-breaker mind, the merchandise in the malefactor warehousing system appears intent on causing damage, both to itself and to its hard-working handlers. The Minister for Profitable Incarceration was moved to blather about urgent action: "Assaults on our hard-working staff will never be tolerated," he said, although neither he nor his predecessors have shown much intolerance for them up to now. The tolerability of assaults on inmates, of course, depends on whether the offender is a grandson of Windrush faking a mental health problem, or merely a hard-working Conservative donor who fell victim to an accounting error. Indeed, the Ministry for Profitable Incarceration claimed that the sharp rise in the statistics may have been partly due to a change in the auditing methods; so the solution to the whole problem may lie in a simple bit of figure-fiddling. It remains to be seen whether the scumbag-press-propitiating solution of cuts to luxuries like rehabilitation and prison officer pay and training will once more prove simpler still.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Green Crap? Whistle For It

During his stint as mayoral mural micturator for taxpayers' money, the then London Haystack was famously casual about the effects of pollution, maintaining consistently illegal standards of air quality and incurring various fines at the talons of the Brusso-Strasbourgian banana-straightening conspiracy. Promotion to Imperial Haystack has done nothing to compromise his statesmanlike vision: in the two years of his incumbency the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns has lost nearly a quarter of the full-time staff dedicated to dealing with climate change. Clearly the Imperial Haystack intends Britain to be a world leader in the field, if only in the sense that Liam Fox is a world leader in the field of international trade. Indeed, the Imperial Haystack has made the degree of his concern over climate change readily apparent in his official speeches, where he has mentioned the subject nearly as many times as it was mentioned by Churchill, Sax Rohmer and the Emperor Nero put together.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Class Bullies Lack Application

The long and famously happy relationship between Her Majesty's Government and the technology of the electrical computator has attained new depths of squealing, creaking, clunking ecstasy. A mobile phone app whereby resident Euro-wogs can discover whether the Recrudescent Imperium is prepared to tolerate their presence a moment longer will not work on the brand of mobile phone which is used by more than half of the adult population. As with the fact that the dead-eyed warden's hostile environment would harm British citizens, the incompatibility was known in advance; and as with the hostile environment, the Government didn't care and anyway the entire regrettable business is, as usual, somebody else's fault. The race-baiting Clegg-pledger at the Ministry has claimed that the app will be as easy to use as an online shopping account, and also that it has been "extensively tested;" doubtless her next attack of veracity will confirm that the whole idea was cooked up by Momentum and the Labour Party in 1998. In the wake of the Windrush persecutions, the Euro-wogs have had the temerity to threaten close scrutiny of developments, though fortunately such fiendish encroachments on our democracy are likely to be thwarted by the Government's use of secondary legislation to ensure that everything can be changed on ministerial whim.

Monday, April 23, 2018

Our Kind of Reformer

That charming young man, Prince Mohammed bin Salman of the head-chopping House of Saud, has sent his servants to wog-bomb a wedding in Yemen. According to health officials and other malcontents, at least twenty people were killed and some thirty children wounded in this third demonstration in three days of shared British values. Nevertheless, the Britishness of the weaponry and expertise used remains as yet unclear; which means that any meaningful estimate as to how many of the detrimentations were collateral and how many were actively meritorious may have to wait a little longer than (to pick a random example) the interval between an alleged chemical attack and the subsequent righteous chastisement of the lesser breeds.

Sunday, April 22, 2018

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 12 xliii-xlv

Jesus recounts the fate of a demon which is cast out, and wanders through waterless places seeking rest and finding none. Eventually the demon decides to return to the place from whence it came. Finding that place clean and tidy, the demon invites its friends along, and the person who was originally exorcised ends up worse off than before.

Spoken in the context of the Pharisees' request for a sign, this anecdote is another swipe at those who keep the law yet lack the credulity and fanaticism required in the kingdom of heaven. It is remarkable for the casual contempt which Jesus displays towards those He claims to have healed: He implies that He has been cleasing the possessed in the full knowledge that His cure will achieve nothing more than leaving them vulnerable to even worse possessions.

Given that Jesus proclaims His ability to cast out devils as a proof of His divine authority (Luke 13 xxxi-xxxii), His coyly cynical admission that His exorcisms are pure snake-oil throws an intriguing light on the rest of His ministry. The possibility that Satan may be divided against himself is hardly made more plausible by the Saviour's image of demons turning every exorcised person into a housing co-operative; and if Jesus by the finger of God merely makes the demons' accommodation more comfortable, what profiteth it anyone if they allow themselves to be cleansed?

Concerning the final state of Mary Magdalene, who apparently suffered the worse-than-useless process no less than seven times over (Luke 8 ii), we can only speculate. All four gospels agree that this poor demon-ravaged creature was either the first, or one of the first, to see the empty tomb of Jesus; and the implication that by the end of the Saviour's ministry she was playing hostess to a horde of devils gives us an interesting perspective on her position as a witness. Depending how many demons were in residence at the time, it is certainly possible that Joanna, Salome and the rest, being no doubt neatly-swept rooms in their own right, were each ripe for occupation by one or more of Mary Magdalene's tenants. From the women, the demons could then quite easily have spread into some or all of the other disciples, bringing upon them all kinds of mischievous delusions and hallucinations, and thus providing a more than usually plausible origin for their testimony regarding the Resurrection.

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Heatwave Huzzah

Fuck the blossoms on the trees,
Fuck the petrol-leaden breeze,
Fuck the itchy swollen eyes,
Fuck the dust and fuck the flies,
Fuck the buds upon the bough,
Fuck the basting biped sow,
Fuck her porker, fuck their shoats,
Fuck their squeals and fuck their bloats,
Fuck the sunshine, fuck the spring,
And all the world, and everything.

Porlock Smobley

Friday, April 20, 2018

Culinary Buzz

Spaniards are being offered insect-based foodstuffs, including spicy chilli buffalo worms and Jimini's crunchy crickets for the Disney fans. Whether entomophagy will catch on in Europe remains to be seen, but it would certainly be unfortunate if Britain's approaching independence from the ghastly Euro-wogs were to vitiate the nation's chances of finally finding a use for Michael Gove. No-one has yet proposed that our own swarming cockroaches might make some modest restitution by having their children served up as refugee roasts; but given that many ministers of the Crown probably spent their childhoods pulling the wings off flies, such healthy developments can only be a matter of time.

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Fiendish New Tricks from the Great Satan

North Korea is very cynically and selfishly attempting to abdicate its role as the most convincing existential threat to the United States since Nicaragua, according to the president of South Korea. Moon Jae-in claimed that the North would require in return only the twin enormities of an end to perceived hostile policies and a guarantee of security; which under any normal US president would constitute an unacceptable violation of the World Cop's jurisdictional sovereignty. The Trumpster, doubtless inspired by the brilliant negotiating stance of Team Tessie against the sovereignty-plundering Euro-wogs, has confined himself to an assertion of willingness to walk away if Kim Jong-un's head-tribble should start yapping and spraying at his own.

North Korea has previously indicated a willingness to give up its independent nuclear deterrent in return for US withdrawal from South Korea and denuclearisation of the peninsula and Japan. As is mentioned in Britain's leading liberal newspaper, North and South Korea have been technically at war since the 1950-53 conflict when, as is unmentioned in Britain's leading liberal newspaper, the United States butchered a fifth of the North's population in collaboration with its South Korean allies, many of whom had been collaborators with Imperial Japan during the recent unplesasantness.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

I Decide Who is a Jew

In the wake of the unflattering media exposure resulting from its Windrush persecutions, the Government has prudently re-classified two of the most prominent cases - a cancer patient who was denied treatment, and a special needs teacher who was denied employment - as honorary whites. As might be expected, there is already some doubt as to whether this latest promise about the NHS amounts to much more than any other pronouncement by the dead-eyed warden and her boot-boys. Even assuming the best, it remains an open question whether reprieve from deportation by a wave of Tin-Pot Tessie's hand, like some ghastly low-budget parody of royal clemency, will elicit the proper degree of gratitude from those still at risk of a dawn surprise from the Ministry of Wog Control.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Gasping for Empire

Despite the prevalence among foreign populations of wogs, piccaninnies and the more expendable type of British citizen, it seems that the lesser breeds are making a sterling effort to emulate the Recrudescent Imperium's cleansing achievements. Getting rid of excess proles by means of a poisonous atmosphere is not solely the prerogative of the noxious flatulations of the Home Office and its colorectal cohorts in the scumbag press: the mayoral régime of the London Haystack managed great strides in the same race to the bottom purely by taking its ease and allowing matters to take their Brussels-defying course. Now the rest of the world is catching up: according to a study by the Health Effects Institute, less than five per cent of the world's population has access to clean air, and deaths from pollution across the globe are estimated to have increased almost twenty per cent in the past thirty years, and this despite the fiendish machinations of the Heathen Chinee. The Health Effects Institute does point out that gradual suffocation tends to interfere with the labour efficiency of human resource units; but it is to be hoped that the increasing scarcity of unpolluted air will foster an atmosphere of healthy competition that will ensure the survivors are worthy of service to their freshly-globalised Britannic masters.

Monday, April 16, 2018

Of All the Surprising Things to Happen

Even the most profound intellect is not immune from error, and even the most honourably-intentioned and well-thought-out policy may occasionally result in unforeseen and perhaps undesirable consequences. It will be self-evident from the foregoing that the subject under discussion is the Ministry for Wog Control and its hostile environment for swarming hordes of the Windrush persuasion, which has blown up rather spectacularly in the faces of Tumbledown Tessie and the Minister for Barbadian Tax Arrangements. Four years ago the previous Home Secretary, whoever that may have been, removed the legal protection afforded such people, doubtless while her Liberal Democrat coalition partners were distracted by issues of greater moment; and yet some evil stroke of fate has decreed that people whom the Home Office deliberately deprived of protection now have no protection from attack by the Home Office. Fortunately, nobody has been deported for lack of documentation, although some people may have been deported by accident; nobody seems to know just how many, but one can hardly expect the Ministry for Wog Control to bother about things like that - not while a single cockroach remains in Britain, especially when it could be making itself more useful helping to ready the Commonwealth for its great new task of propping up the British economy after Brexit. Comfortingly enough, the race-baiting Clegg-pledger in charge of the Home Office has promised that the Home Office will sort it all out.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Bad Theology

Text for today: Luke 7 xxxvi-xlvii

While Jesus is dining with a Pharisee, a sinful woman appears with a jar of perfume and grovels at His feet, wetting them with her tears and drying them with her hair before pouring the perfume over them. When the Pharisee wonders if Jesus knows that a sinner is touching Him, Jesus tells a parable of two debtors whose debts were cancelled, the moral being that the relationship between God and humankind, far from having its basis in absolute and unconditional love, is an essentially commercial transaction in which whoever is forgiven most will love most. Jesus then observes that none of the services performed for Him by the sinful woman were performed by the law-abiding Pharisee, because the magnitude of a person's love for Jesus depends on the magnitude of the debt which He is empowered to forgive them.

The woman's behaviour is identical to that of Mary of Bethany in the other three gospels; although Jesus gives that incident a different meaning to this one, deeming Mary's action a preparation for His burial. Immediately after the incident in Luke's gospel, several women are mentioned who ministered to Jesus and his followers, including the wife of a royal servant (Luke 8 i-iii). Given His evident appeal to bored and wealthy females, it seems eminently possible that outbursts of lachrymose adoration were a repeated and perhaps a frequent occurrence during the Saviour's ministry. If not for the expense involved in purchasing the necessary ointment, such displays might even have been a daily fixture.

In this case, the moral Jesus draws is the same as for the parables of the lost sheep, the labourers in the vineyard and the prodigal son; namely that righteousness and keeping the law are of scant significance in the eyes of Jesus and His Father. Mere abstention from sin is next to no use at all: in propitiating arbitrary tyrants only repentence and grovelling will suffice. Hence there is good reason to believe the Saviour's assertion that those who have less to grovel about will be regarded less favourably in the eyes of heaven. It follows, comfortingly enough, that serious and persistent violations of God's law are not only forgivable but welcome, provided they are paid for with a sufficiently melodramatic self-abasement.

Saturday, April 14, 2018

A Dirty Old Woman in a Hurry

Nobody could accuse the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK of failing to learn the lessons of recent conflicts. The Reverend Blair spent an inordinate amount of time and effort fabricating evidence for the weapons of mass ethereality in Iraq; we all know how that turned out, so Tin-Pot Tessie and her very special chum the Trumpster have dispensed with any pretence of interest in mere facts. After the glorious crusade in Libya, the late Head Boy made a half-hearted bash at involving Parliament in his own efforts at creating more Syrian refugees for the Bullingdon Club to snigger about, but was voted down largely thanks to his own weapons-grade laziness and self-complacency. Given that there are very few Conservatives who would vote against a wog-bombing by one of their own governments in any circumstance, and that a sizeable chunk of the parliamentary Labour Party would happily tolerate Iraq-level casualties and poke Russia with a sharp stick just to put one over on the cross-party Nemesis that is Jeremy Corbyn, Tin-Pot Tessie almost certainly could have managed a Commons majority for the present adventure; which would at least have preserved the rubric of parliamentary sovereignty for her notoriously undemanding target audience. She was just too cowardly to try.

Friday, April 13, 2018

More Black Ingratitude

For those who doubt the glory of outright wog-bombing, there are humbler and subtler aspects to the moral miracle that is Britishness: railways, entrepreneurial gumption, Kipling and so forth. The present government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has clearly internalised the Recrudescent Imperium's more obtrusive virtues, notably a healthy scepticism about the authority of mere experts and a relentlessly pragmatic faith in the idea that a problem can always be solved provided one denies its existence loudly enough. In accordance with these staunch and stalwart principles, Kinshasa has refused to take part in a conference aimed at raising money for humanitarian assistance, on the grounds that the crisis in the DRC is being exaggerated by subversive humanitarians. The UN has designated parts of the country as suffering the highest level of emergency; and since the UN is not talking about Britain, the British government believes it. The conference is looking to raise £1.2 billion, and Her Majesty's Government is contributing £227 million, although it remains as yet unclear how much of this amount will go towards mere food, shelter and medicine, and how much will be spent on making genuine and sustainable progress in those truly humanitarian causes which either go bang or make a profit, or ideally both.

Thursday, April 12, 2018

May's Apocalypse

Chemical warfare, as the case of Saddam Hussein proved in the 1980s, is an unequivocal evil except when waged against the enemies of freedom. Nevertheless, it appears that the rush to punish President Assad for sharing Winston Churchill's opinion about the best means of controlling uncivilised tribes may be subject to a slight rah-rah interruptus; though it remains as yet unclear whether the delay is purely for form's sake or because there are still people in the White House who consider all-out war with Russia something less than a good risk. A couple of hundred Russian mercenaries (they were not, you will observe, anything so exalted as military contractors) were apparently killed fighting against some official Good Guys a couple of months ago, but a "deconfliction line" is being utilised for the purposes of disescalatory nonhottuppification. All this must be nerve-wracking for Tumbledown Tessie, who finally managed to hold a "war cabinet" meeting about actual wog-bombing rather than the usual internecine backbiting, or barking orders at the Euro-wogs and waiting for le shrug inéluctable, only to find the Trumpster's head-tribble mired in apparent self-doubt. Have our allies no sense of urgency? Do they not realise the scale of the looming humanitarian crisis for Conservative local councils all over Britain?

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Terminal Britishness

Once again, traditional British values are gratifyingly to the fore at the Ministry of Wog Control, whose minions showed almost every conceivable consideration to a melanin-advantaged deportee before she cast an embarrassing damper by dropping dead of a pulmonary embolism. As part of a swarming horde of two South African taxpayers, the migrant in question had been crowding Britons out of a job for more than ten years, and when she and her husband were indiscreet enough to try and renew their visas they were duly ordered out of the country and bundled onto a flight. Although the attending wog control personnel were not in the least fooled by the female cockroach's collapse at the airport, it was decided to postpone the deportation and kick the culprits into jail instead, presumably in order to spare the delicate sensibilities of any hired boot-boys on the plane who might be haunted by the name of Mubenga. A nurse pronounced the malingerer too ill to cope with the luxuries of detention; but the centre management knew better than to listen to mere experts, and the Ministry for Wog Control topped off the edifying saga by sending the deceased a text eighteen days after her death, warning of the dire consequences should she fail to present herself before the Britishness Police. A spokesbeing for the Ministry of Wog Control has offered its thoughts and condolences, which is certainly frightfully decent of it.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Doing Their Business on Britain's Doorstep

Pessimists, traitors and citizens of nowhere at that notoriously anti-business lobbying group, the Institute of Directors, have dared to imply that cutting ourselves off from our most profitable markets and giving the old Churchill V-sign to the biggest free trade area in the world might conceivably result in potential economic outcomes which may arguably, from certain unpatriotic and ill-tempered points of view, appear somewhat less than wholly positive. More than forty per cent of company bosses turn out to be lily-livered internationalists who wish nothing better than to continue living on Euro-wog subsidies rather than striking out and conquering new vistas of independent trade in the fields of Marmite, militaria and motivational flatulence. Three-quarters of companies are optimistic about their international business prospects; although it remains unclear whether any correlation exists between such optimism and the ability of particular companies to do their bit for Britain by flogging off their assets, dumping their workers onto the mercy of the Department for Workfare and Privation, and seeking asylum for their capital at a proper bank in Frankfurt. For anyone with an aversion to being tarred, feathered and braised in chlorine by angry shareholders, the decision whether to cut and run, or instead to trust in the negotiating power and brilliance of the former Minister for Werritty, must certainly be quite the little dilemma.

Monday, April 09, 2018

Vik: Tory in Europe

Rah rah for the wonderful news!
No Marmite nor cheese we'll refuse
This rising new star,
The plucky Magyar,
And his parliamentary pews!

With us on his side he'll go far!
Let's have a wogs-out seminar!
The wrong sort of Jews
Will quake in their shoes
At Britain's new chumlies, rah rah!

Sir Winston de Pfeffel Shakespeare

Sunday, April 08, 2018

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 5 xxvii-xxviii

Jesus proclaims that anyone who thinks adulterous thoughts has committed adultery in their heart. Since interior corruption counts for as much if not more than mere physical actions, it follows that adulterous thoughts are the same if not worse than actual adultery; which means, of course, that the thinkers of adulterous thoughts are worthy of being stoned to death by anyone thinking themselves to be without sin.

For the most part, the laws of Moses seek to control actions; their concerns range from keeping the social order stable, through the care and upkeep of priests and ritual propitiation of the divine tyrant, to compulsory genocide of the peoples of Canaan. There is also a warning against adultery at Proverbs 6 xxxii-xxxv, on the admirably pragmatic grounds that jealous husbands are dangerous. By contrast, Jesus extends the logic of the commandment at Exodus 20 xvii: He not only orders us to control our inmost thoughts and desires, He proclaims sinful desires equivalent to sinful actions. According to the Saviour's code, someone who has an evil thought and refrains from acting upon it is not an iota less sinful than someone who indulges physically in every vice under the sun. The substance of the Saviour's light yoke and easy burden is to intensify the inhuman commands of the dictator into the impossible demands of the inquisitor.

For His own part, Jesus recommended outer darkness with wailing and gnashing of teeth for anyone He considered unworthy; He called down worse than the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah on the heads of any men, women and children who did not hear His message; and He gleefully predicted the ultimate division of all human beings into a minority of saved sheep and a majority of combustible goats. Hence, assuming His words came from the heart, regardless of His actions Jesus was an even greater génocidaire than Joshua; and given His lack of interest in Lebensraum (Matthew 8 xix-xxii) had even less excuse.

Saturday, April 07, 2018

Won't Somebody Think of the Golf Handicaps?

Although the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK has shrugged off the whole issue of climate change by abolishing the relevant ministry and heading the Department of the Environment first with the gormless Andrea Leadsom and then with the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, the likelihood remains that somebody ought to do something about it. The governor of the Bank of England has warned that climate change can affect real people as well as mere Third Worlders, and has advised banks and insurance companies to start calculating the size of the tab which the taxpayers will have to pick up. He warned of a "climate Minsky moment", referring to the embarrassment of 2008, as a result of which banks were not penalised or made to change their ways significantly or compelled to assume greater responsibility for their activities; although the cost to the taxpayers may well have caused one or two sensitive souls to suffer fiscally significant moral qualms. Undoubtedly, were such a thing permitted to happen again it would be a most uncomfortable experience.

Friday, April 06, 2018

Taxpayers' Gift to Lung Snobs

As with many great British virtues, notably tolerance and fair play, it appears that thrift is best practised in appropriately targeted moderation. Although the Government cannot afford to feed its citizens, protect their rights to legal representation or provide bursaries to train public health personnel, there is always money to spare for dragging anti-pollution activists through the courts. Since last summer, the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove and his chums have spent half a million in taxpayers' money on defending their right to let forty thousand expendables die every year from the effects of pollution. Despite the jabbering homunculus having once written leaders for Rupert Murdoch, the enemies of the people nevertheless persist in their arrogant delusion that they know better; which only goes to show why the great British virtue of respect for the law is being practised with ever-increasing moderation by Her Majesty's Natural Party of Government.

Thursday, April 05, 2018

Lilliput Shrunken

Despite its leadership's pathological suspicion of foreign influences and the toxic mixture of sullen aggression and racist clowning that constitutes its foreign policy, the world's most ridiculous hermit kingdom is unlikely in the immediate future to launch a nuclear strike against North Korea. In the estimation of a report by the Commons select committee on defence, Kim Jong-un, "though undoubtedly ruthless, is nevertheless rational;" which rather scuppers the usual pre-liberatory "mad dog" angle, at least until the Trumpster's head-tribble or John Bolton or someone equally strong and stable proclaims otherwise. By way of compensation, the report suggests that a "45 Minutes from Doom" option may be available to the scumbag press within as little as eighteen months; although the notoriously fragile egos among the hermit kingdom's ruling class are likely to be somewhat dented by the idea that Kim Jong-un does not consider them a threat.

Wednesday, April 04, 2018

Fair Play, Honest Brokerage

Never let it be thought that Tristram Hunt, in giving up his pied-à-terre on the rightmost wing of the Labour Party, has become any the less a firebrand for the rights of the oppressed. In his present capacity as director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Hunt is magnanimously prepared to loan the Ethiopian natives some bits of their heritage which were stolen by Victoria's troops a hundred and fifty years ago. Ethiopia lodged a formal claim for restitution a decade ago, which was duly shrugged off by Hunt's New Labour colleagues; the British Museum holds thirteen tabots, which are so sacred that they cannot be displayed, but at the same time so British that they also cannot be returned. Hunt had a bit of a burble about the "philosophical case for cosmopolitanism in museum collections", although it remains as yet unclear how much of the Victoria and Albert Museum's native British stock he is prepared to contribute towards the philosophy of cosmopolitanism in Africa. He also suggested that we stop wasting development aid money on fripperies like food, water and medicine, and start handing more of it over for management by people like Tristram Hunt.

Tuesday, April 03, 2018

Bloody, Smelly Faeces

Lord Lansley of Turkey-Twizzler, National Health Service vandal emeritus, has discovered the hard way that cancer can afflict real people as well as plebs, shirkers and scroungers; and has very altruistically decided that now might be a good time to bring an end to austerity measures with regard to the screening of people in Lord Lansley's age group for the kind of cancer now afflicting Lord Lansley. Along with the late Head Boy, his compassionate lordship did announce a commitment to a screening process early in the coalition; but the purely secondary business of making good on the promise was hampered by the Government's famous ability with IT systems and the perennial fact that the Conservative Party does not believe that public health should be anything other than a playground for private profit. Lord Lansley's conversion to a more interventionist position is certainly encouraging, and I am sure we all wish him the speediest of recoveries, with a healthily spare food-bank diet and none of the little inconveniences which he and his chums saw fit to inflict upon less deserving sufferers.

Monday, April 02, 2018

Helping Them Out

Given the spectacular success of her predecessor's squalid little Powellite Pantechnicon stunt a few years ago, it seems only natural that the race-baiting Clegg-pledger at the Home Office should wish to attempt something equally visionary of her own. Accordingly, the Ministry for Wog Control has started sending letters to the swarming hordes before considering their claims, magnanimously offering to kick them out without first putting them through all the expensive bother of applying for denial of asylum. Doubtless the scheme will soon be extended to other departments charged with disposing of unnecessary and subhuman elements: those facing criminal trial, for instance, could be given the prison rule-book as a moral and economic improvement on the complexities of Legal Aid.

Sunday, April 01, 2018

Bad Theology

Text for today: The Seven Last Words

Luke 23 xxxiv
Jesus asks His Father to forgive those who crucify Him, on the grounds that they do not know what they are doing. Since Jesus Himself has the power to forgive sins, why does He call on His notoriously vengeful and murderous Father to forgive His executioners? Even at this late stage of His career, Jesus evidently lacked confidence in His personal ability to forgive non-Jews; and with good reason, since even with Jews His record of forgiveness is ambiguous. There is, for example, no indication that He ever forgave Judas Iscariot, and He certainly did not forgive anyone at all, even the populations of entire cities, for the irremediable sin of failing to hear Him preach. The Roman occupiers presumably did not hear Him either, but their ignorance provides a pretext for the Saviour's forgiveness rather than for His more usual recipe of outer darkness, wailing and gnashing of teeth, and eventual annihilation. That Jesus desires the Romans to be forgiven at all indicates that He foresaw the later importance of Rome in spreading His blood-cult throughout the world; thus His words are essentially a political expedient, an advance recognition, perhaps not entirely untinged with envy, of the far more influential ministry of Paul.

Luke 23 xxxix-xliii
One of the criminals crucified with Jesus asks for a miracle to save them and Himself; the other acknowledges the virtue of Roman justice while admitting the occasional mishap, and asks that Jesus remember him when He achieves His kingdom. Two other Gospels contradict this account, claiming that both criminals reviled Jesus (Matthew 27 xliv and Mark 15 xxxii); but as theologians we are fortunately not subject to the whims of majority rule. The criminal who proclaims that Jesus has done nothing wrong makes an avowal of faith, in ignorance or defiance of the Saviour's well-documented sins of pride, wrath and (thought and deed being equal in His philosophy; see Matthew 5 xxviii) torture and genocide. In return Jesus promises Paradise for the criminal, thus emphasising once again His central message that righteousness before the law counts for little or nothing next to repentance and unquestioning faith in Him.

John 19 xxvi-xxvii
Jesus bequeaths His mother to His favourite disciple. Given that Jesus rejected conventional family ties and, as the Son of a jealous god, was intensely jealous of the love of His disciples (Luke 14 xxvi), there can be no question of the disciple being charged with the mere worldly care of His mother in her old age. Far from such materialistic and mundane concerns, Jesus is testing the beloved disciple's devotion, which will presumably be measured by the disciple's hating the adoptive mother as if she were his own. Since the relationship has been imposed from above, this constitutes a somewhat easier test of faith than the one God imposed on Abraham (Genesis 22 i-ii) and thus, relatively speaking, a fulfilment of the Saviour's promise of a light yoke and an easy burden. Happily, there is no reason to believe that the disciple failed the test: the Gospel states that he took the mother into his home, but not that he refrained from hating her.

Matthew 27 xlvi, Mark 15 xxxiv
Jesus is quoted in Aramaic as crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Either He suffered a crisis of faith and belatedly realised the true nature of His Father's sense of humour, or else He was quoting the first line of the Twenty-Second Psalm in order to fulfil what He retrospectively deemed a prophecy. On the latter reading, Jesus presumably did not suffer a genuine crisis of faith, but merely went through the motions for the benefit of later scholars; which is certainly a comfort for the theologian.

John 19 xxviii-xxx
In His last extremity Jesus admits to the worldly appetite for water, rather than for fire and the holy spirit. This is one of the few signs of modesty He ever showed; and His next utterance, "It is accomplished", indicates that He may at last have achieved peace with Himself, having finally acknowledged His own flawed and physical being.

Luke 23 xlvi
Jesus commits His spirit into the hands of His Father: the pendant to His cry about being forsaken, and equally ambiguous. Either Jesus is speaking with His accustomed arrogance, taking for granted that the heavenly tyrant will recognise and receive Him at court; or else He is driven by pain and despair to the bleak conclusion that He has no better hope than this cruel, punitive and arbitrary parent.

Matthew 27 l
Jesus, having cried out again with a loud voice, gives up His spirit. It is a matter for debate whether this final cry is one of the utterances noted above, or simply an inarticulate yell. In view of the tentative flickers of insight, noted above, into His own and His Father's true nature, a further possibility is that Jesus shouted something even more theologically problematical than lama sabachthani, the substance of which has been spared us thanks to the mercy of the Evangelists and the generations of their transcribers and editors.