Tough Love and Fair Play

The International Red Cross, which has an unfortunate history of attempting to aid those whom Her Majesty's Government has declared unworthy of bothering about, is unlikely to redeem itself with its latest intervention. Although Her Majesty's Government has condescended to make grudging provision for selected Islamic State orphans, it has refused to restore the British citizenship arbitrarily stripped from people such as Shamima Begum, who was groomed as a child and might respond unprofitably to any attempt at rehabilitation. Meanwhile, not only has the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross proclaimed, against all natural justice and common sense, that British Untermenschen should be repatriated as if they were ordinary migrant swarms; he has even gone so far as to imply that the party of law and order should have some sort of regard for legal process.

Outside the Box

Fun-loving legislators in the Christian state of Ohio are attempting to pass a law requiring doctors to defy the will of God or else be charged with abortion murder. Among much else, the bill is designed to stop women escaping their motherly duties by undergoing an ectopic pregnancy, whereby God leaves the newly-ensouled one sitting on a fallopian tube instead of in the womb. The bill orders medical staff to scrape the little tykes off and deposit them in their proper place; mere experts claim that such a procedure does not exist, but that, of course, is also what they say about God. Besides the "abortion murder" offence, the new law will provide for a charge of "aggravated abortion murder", which will incorporate that other great favourite of the Christian state of Ohio, the death penalty. What aggravating factors will be specified, beyond the obvious ones of using bad language and operating without consent from a quorum of fathers and brothers and husbands, remains as yet unclear.

Not Just One of Those Argies

Brazil's very own Boris Johnson may one day be the first non-African to be indicted at the International Criminal Court, if some humourless people have their way. Jair Bolsonaro, the South American continent's most prominent proponent of the British model of statesmanship, has attracted the ire of lawyers and human rights campaigners with his ripping attitude to red tape and his Johnsonian jollities about the local piccaninnies, who are trampling over the moral rights of mining companies and Macdonald's alike. Jair Bolsonaro's noble emulation of British values extends to dismissing insubordinate statistics even when they are compiled by his own government; so it is to be hoped that his frère et semblable in the British hemisphere will succeed in his efforts to legitimise the Brazilian régime by bestowing appropriate trading privileges.

Collective Security

Since the ascendancy of the Trumpster means we can no longer rely upon our NATO allies, and since our inherent buccaneering pluck and gumption presumably means we shouldn't need to, a military think-tank has concluded that perhaps we ought to shrug off Princess Diana's legacy and go back to the good old cluster bomb. A report by the Royal United Services Institute has determined that, should the Recrudescent Imperium decide to go it alone against the might of the Russian Bear, the British artillery would be comprehensively out-phallused. Fortunately, Her Majesty's Government should find it reasonably easy to reconsider its obligations under the Convention on Cluster Munitions as a war in eastern Europe would cause casualties mainly among plumbers and other potential migrants.

We Need to Bring Society On Board

Despite decades of buccaneering leadership by representatives of Shell and British Petroleum, the European Parliament is still having trouble reaching agreement on how much to procrastinate over the climate emergency. The European People's Party, from which Britain's late Head Boy withdrew the greenest government ever because he found it too left-wing and preferred to associate with chancers and Holocaust revisionists, is doing its best to weaken a resolution over a form of words. Since the UN's environmental agency has said that emissions must fall by more than seven per cent annually to keep the situation merely extremely dangerous, governments are increasingly worried about how to avoid taking action and thereby endangering their members' retirement plans. Without the sunny outlook of a friendly environment and a comfortable climate, the golden handshakes may turn rare and rusty and the company directorships may start to wither away. Keeping the planet habitable is all very well as an ideal, but there are real-world practicalities to consider.

British Airs

Britain has consistently been a leader in the fight against climate change, which goes far towards explaining the latest findings on concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Levels of carbon dioxide nitrous oxide and methane all rose last year by more than the decade's average, according to mere experts at the World Meteorological Organisation. On the bright side, the immediate effects will be visited mostly upon the world's poorest and most vulnerable populations; but since the fiend Corbyn was deservedly derided for pointing this out in public, the Independent newspaper has wisely chosen to emphasise predictions of "mass displacement on an unprecedented scale." Britain's leadership might assume yet further dimensions of unrivalled unassailability, if only politicians had the courage to point out that climate change causes migrants.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: II Bicuspid xciii-cxli

In the seventeenth year of the war, however, the Father of Teeth was brought before the tribunal and ordered to declare himself in favour of one side or the other, since each was committed to the other's annihilation in the name of the Creator of the universe.

The tribunal consisted of a general from each of the opposing armies and a presiding judge from a neutral country which was selling weapons to both. The Father of Teeth was brought into the dock under guard and stood there grinding his thirteenth-best molars with a noise like distant cannon-fire.

"Will you choose a side?" demanded the presiding judge thunderously.
"Why should I?" said the Father of Teeth.
"Because all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," said one of the generals.
"Good people," the other general corrected him, for a major reason why he was committed to the other side's annihilation was the Creator's disapproval of non-inclusive language.
"But I am not good," said the Father of Teeth, "and there is room for debate as to whether I'm a person, so if I do nothing either good will triumph or it won't matter either way."
"Blasphemer!" thundered the judge. "Do you mean to imply that the Creator of the universe has so ordered things that individual moral choice makes no difference?"
"Not at all," said the Father of Teeth; "the Creator of the universe has so ordered things that one person's evil is another person's good, while a third person profits from both. Morally speaking, which is a different subject entirely, the moral choices of these three make all the difference in the world."

At this the tribunal was so shocked that both generals ordered the Father of Teeth to be taken out and shot, while the judge offered to supply the firing squad's equipment on highly competitive terms. The Father of Teeth offered blindfolds to all involved, on humanitarian grounds; and when the soldiers fired he caught the bullets neatly between his kevlar incisors and spat them back at the coup de grâce. Leaving the soldiers staring, for they had all imprudently refused the blindfold, the Father of Teeth returned to the tribunal chamber where, gradually filling the room and grinning with hideous civility, he asked the generals and the presiding judge if they would care to make a moral choice.

Patriotic Justice

Few things get Conservative Party gussets throbbing like a chance to apply the death penalty, but as long as the beastly Euro-wogs prevent Britain enacting its inalienable rights of Hangem and Flogham the Home Office is very sensibly attempting to outsource its little fetishes. A prospective agreement with the Trumpster administration, under the safeword-free conditions habitually favoured by British governments when dealing with the manifestly-destined, will permit the USA to imprison and execute British citizens without the UK being given corresponding privileges. It would be uncharitable in the extreme to assume that the whole thing has been scribbled on the back of an envelope in order to protect American hit-and-run drivers, or even to clear the way for indefinitely detaining a whistle-blower or two; especially as the Home Office has gone to the trouble of compelling the USA to provide "credible assurances" that British suspects will probably not be treated like American niggers. Also, the Americans will probably not be allowed to target people while they remain in the UK, so everything will probably be more or less fine for those who don't dirty their Britishness by behaving like citizens of nowhere.

Coming Soon

Our Noble Legacy

British values are again under attack in sunny Libya, where the Imperial Haystack recently proclaimed new opportunities for business once the corpses had been cleared away. Although the corpses to which he referred were the leavings of Islamic State terrorists rather than the wog-bombing moderates of the late Head Boy's coalition, the remark was considered somewhat tasteless even for Tumbledown Tessie's Minister of Wogs, Frogs and Huns. With typical foreign arrogance, the beastly Euro-wogs are now implying that the plague of migrancy which unexpectedly resulted from the liberation (since when do people run away from war?) is being dealt with according to the wrong business model. Since the model in question is British enough to involve the detention of human cockroaches in a hostile environment, it is only to be expected that the beastly Euro-wogs have severely redacted the report which calls for a re-think of present policy. The relaxed British attitude of Libyan officials towards the tiresome red tape of due process and financial accountability must have infuriated the Nazi commissars of Brusso-Strasbourg, even as Britain's leading liberal newspaper completely omits mention of our great nation's formative role in the new culture of buccaneering entrepreneurialism.

Lilies of the Field

Although the Saviour ordered His elect to love their Father in heaven with their whole heart, soul, strength and mind, it appears that a codicil was later added whereby certain people could desist from these obligations without shedding the uniform. This has resulted in an unfortunate case whereby a French woman who applied for a place at a retirement home and did not wish to abide by the dress code was forced to seek accommodation elsewhere, even though her mode of dress did not inconvenience the local priest. The nun's habit, which was against the rules of the state-run care home, is "not a sign of submission but of devotion" to a Father and Son who regard His (Their?) brides as property; and of course the Saviour famously exhorted His elect to consider raiment before all else.

A Brace of Britishnesses

I am sure we all sympathise deeply with Arron Banks, the founder of Leave.EU who has now split with the New Real Provisional Farage Falange and its strutting Caudillo in order to grow fun-free Britishness cannabis in Belize. Banks' Twitter account has been hacked and his private messages splurged across the internet for all to see, and even subjected to fake news, which must be jolly traumatic for him. Doubtless his new chums in the parliamentary wing of the Brexit Party will be able to help with any legal costs, with the aid of the ever-willing British taxpayer.

Elsewhere, one of the parliamentary Brexit Party's candidates has been sharing his insights on what ought to be done about undesirables. With admirable Johnsonian forthrightness, he advocated evicting "nuisance tenants" (there being, of course, no such thing as a nuisance owner-occupier, let alone a nuisance absentee landlord) and putting them in labour camps. The ex-Deputy Conservative education spokesbeing responded with superb hypocrisy, burbling about stoking and entrenching division and targeting vulnerable people, for all the world like a member of a party that opposed the hostile environment and voted against the bedroom tax.

Without the Law

Will the racism never cease? Not content with treating migrant hordes as if they were law-abiding taxpayers, the Stalinist extremazoids in charge of the Labour Party now threaten to treat Our Brave Boys™ as if they were Africans. With poppies from the Remembrance rah-rah still blooming in British buttonholes, the shadow attorney general has suggested that allegations of war crimes against British personnel should be scrutinised by the International Criminal Court, which has so far shown itself suitable only for prosecuting the lesser breeds. Her Majesty's Government, for its own part, has pledged to end "unfair trials" by dismissing any allegations with a light laugh, even though the BBC and the Sunday Murdoch have uncovered rotten apples and isolated incidents dating back even unto the earliest days of the Reverend Blair's democratisation by wog-bombing. In its anxiety to save money for the NHS, the Government is doubtless worried about the cost of finding and arresting war veterans, particularly when it has taken such trouble to put so many of them onto the streets.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Carnassials cclxiv-ccxci

Nevertheless, while biting a hole in the ground in which to conceal himself from his pursuers, the Father of Teeth uncovered what appeared to be a buried bundle of clothes. As he chewed further, rattling some metal posts a short distance away, the clothes unfolded themselves and became a small girl with white irises and long canines. With the latter she grinned at the Father of Teeth and then attempted to sink them into the boiled-leather folds of his neck.

Eventually she emitted a muffled "phoo," and sat back defeated on the edge of the hole. With affected nonchalance, she began using the spearhead nail of her little white forefinger to pick blackened splinters of the Father of Teeth's epidermis from between her gums.

"You're a tough one," she said.
"Nothing in there but pulp anyway," said the Father of Teeth. "You'd only have got indigestion."
"The way you've been eating into my native soil, you might have some trouble yourself," said the little girl.
"The trick is not to swallow too fast," said the Father of Teeth. He resumed his excavations, causing the metal posts to jangle against one another, while the little girl shook her head sadly.
"You must be very hungry," she said. "There's nothing here any more. There's a town, but the people went away. You can try the glucose forest if you like."
"The what?" asked the Father of Teeth.

So the little girl put her cold little porcelain hand inside the Father of Teeth's grisly gristly claw and led him to the metal posts. There were hundreds of them rooted in the dry ground, each sprouting a plastic bag at the top. The bags were far out of reach for either the little girl or the hunched and rickety Father of Teeth; but the little girl floated up and tossed one to him. It was full of a transparent fluid, which seeped drop by drop down a thin flexible pipe twisted loosely around the metal stem. "Sticky stuff," said the little girl with distaste.
"Where does it go?" asked the Father of Teeth, who had observed that the pipe appeared to drain straight into the ground.
"Who knows," the little girl shrugged. "The likes of me have no curiosity, only hunger." She grinned. "The Creator of the universe would have it so."
"What do you know about the Creator of the universe?"
"Only that He loves hungry children. That's why He made so many of us."
"He also made a great many teeth. Does that mean He loves the teeth for themselves, or does He merely enjoy the sound of chewing?" The Father of Teeth bared his best dark-mahogany chompers. "Or perhaps it's the caries He cares for. What do you think?"
"I think the pulp in your veins has addled your brains," said the little girl. "And I'm still hungry."

The Father of Teeth began chewing up the earth around the stem of the metal post, while the little girl floated up and perched in the cleft where the bag had rested. Soon the Father of Teeth uncovered the compost in which the metal post was rooted: a corpulent man with a healthy pink flush to his flabby features, sleeping peacefully in the earth and a soiled pinstripe suit. The pipe from the transparent bag fed into a vein in his wrist. As soon as she saw him, the little girl swooped down and sank her fangs into his complacently pulsing dewlap. "This is yummy," she told the Father of Teeth.
"There'll be one beneath each of the glucose trees," the Father of Teeth told her. "Use them well until you find better pickings."

Remembering her manners, the little girl wiped her red mouth. "Others are on the way," she said. "I saw them from up there."

So the Father of Teeth hurried on through the glucose forest, while the little girl waylaid his pursuers. Thanks to the corpulent man in the soiled pinstripe, her appetite was somewhat slaked, so only a few of them died. The rest took temporary shelter in the abandoned town, but found that they lacked the energy to pursue the Father of Teeth any further. They remained where they were, and soon grew into a useful community, if somewhat pallid and listless and frightened of little girls.

Minor Losses

Since anonymous sources are all the rage for reliability these days, it's presumably safe to believe the claim that the Minister for Wog Control intervened to prevent the repatriation of British children from Syria. Priti Patel's sense of fair play and Christian belief in punishing children for the sins of their parents was apparently shared by the compliant Sajid Javid and by the Minister for Wog-Bombing, both of whom felt that sixty-odd extra Britons in the country would pose a security risk. Both the children's evacuation and their care in the UK had been planned beforehand; which, considering the Government's usual way of doing things, may well be what ministers found so intimidating.

Insidiously Subtle

We are all aware, because we are told seven times a week by a free and cantankerous Press in various states of Stage 2 Leveson colic, that the Labour Party is anti-semitic; but it seems that the Conservatives are not altogether free from the racist scourge. A local deputy chair resigned after being present at an interview in which a Muslim man seeking selection as a council candidate was questioned obsessively about his faith, much as he would undoubtedly be questioned by the Conservative Party's racist voting base. The interviewers then discussed among themselves whether, given the racism of the Conservative Party's voting base, an Asian Muslim candidate would be able to gain sufficient votes to make his candidacy worth their while. Apparently there are still some to whom this kind of behaviour comes as a shock. Of course, the Conservatives are led by a racist, who was preceded by a racist, who was preceded by a racist, who was preceded by a racist, who was preceded by a racist; but few people have picked up on these subtleties other than the brilliant Baroness Warsi, who noticed the party's tendency to Muslim-baiting almost as soon as she no longer held the token female darkie share of the chairmanship. However, in defiance of the Conservatives' reputation as the Stupid Party, it is certainly worthy of note that at least one local Conservative party included until quite recently a council candidate who was slightly faster on the uptake than Baroness Warsi.

Pansy Plod

Despite a decade of healthy reforms and radical liberalisation of wog control, it appears that Britain's law enforcement industry is as steeped in metropolitan élitism as ever. Trendy snowflakes and Stalinist hippies in three-quarters of police forces maintain that their current powers are adequate when it comes to removing Gypsies and travellers, who are as near to being wogs as makes no difference. Eighty-four per cent did not support criminalising unauthorised encampments, and sixty-five per cent were extreme enough to claim that the whole problem would go away if there were more sites. This of course is the same dangerous logic that leads to belief in housing over homeless spikes and, in extreme cases, to the idea that immigrants can be taxpayers. The Minister for Cockroaches will no doubt be deeply disappointed that police forces across the country have conspired to soften the pea in her electoral dog-whistle. Should the former party of law and order be returned to government, there will presumably be a need for tough decisions, both on the extent to which privatisation is the answer and on who is sufficiently British to merit a share in the profits.

Sell That Thou Hast, and Give to the Millionaires

Quite apart from the electoral advantages, it's only natural that the Conservative Party should be reluctant to shed its natural racism when this kind of thing is the result. The party has so far overcome its common-sense attitudes as to form links with a black-majority evangelical church which claims to turn minor gangsters into watermelon-smiling piccaninnies. One of the church's pastors has fought a council by-election on behalf of the party and allowed herself to be photographed only slightly beyond the reach of the Imperial Haystack's busy little hands; and the church's accounts show that as of last year it was living beyond its means in the best City of London tradition. The deficit presumably explains why the church has allegedly been "encouraging" its customers to take out loans and, in the case of younger dupes, to hand over student loans for the glory of the Great Entrepreneur in the Sky. After numerous complaints, the church is finally having its dog-collar felt by the Metropolitan Police: a development welcomed by a spokesbeing who proclaimed that the church will "not condone any illegality of any leader or individual" except in the Conservative Party.

Shattering Targets From Behind

One of the most important reasons for leaving the EU is, of course, to free ourselves from the Brusso-Strasbourg Nazi-Soviet diktats which prevent the Conservative Party being as radical and ambitious as it would like in cleaning up the environment. This no doubt explains why an investigation by Greenpeace and the tree-hugging hippies of the Financial Times has found that the Imperial Haystack's promise to "do extraordinary things on the environment" is being fulfilled in much the same radical manner as when he presided over the poisoning of London. It appears that the Bullingdon Club's promise to deliver the greenest government ever has been at least as spectacular a success as the late Head Boy's pledges to detoxify the Conservative Party and stop it banging on about Europe. By way of compensation, a huge United Nations rah-and-blah is scheduled to be held next year, at which point Her Majesty's Government will be on schedule to fail its legal obligations over air quality, biodiversity, tree planting, recycling and river quality.

Vexatious Separatists

Among the many troubling facets of the Irish Question, aside from that perverse Euro-wog complicity of theirs, is the fact that many of the more educated natives have a rudimentary acquaintance with the English language. The role of Britain's plucky little adventurers in conferring this advantage is of course never mentioned; nonetheless, the government of the Free State does not scruple to read documents intended solely for a readership both British and deserving, and to treat the policies detailed therein as if they were somehow a legitimate concern of anyone outside the Conservative and Brexit Party. The erstwhile party of law and order has pledged to emasculate the Human Rights Act in line with the legal opinion of former Colonial Secretary Karen Bradley, whose achievements in office include finding out that voting patterns in Northern Ireland tend towards the sectarian. Bradley also proclaimed that killings carried out on the side of the goodies during the troubles did not have the same criminal status as those perpetrated by the baddies, which is about as grown-up as anyone could hope for; yet still the Free State continues to muddy the clear blue waters. No wonder the poor peasants are still simple enough to think they should be allowed to control at least one side of a border.

Waste Not, Want Not

And was our butchery so mean and thin
As not to satisfy your appetite?
Must you still put the patriotic bite
On those who gave their substance for your win -
Lives bitten short, our epitaph gulped in,
Swallowed to feed a politicians' rite:
Two minutes' toothless tribute to our plight
Before resuming that triumphal grin?

Did shrapnel chew our flesh and mud consume
Our bones - for this? Fed on our blood and breath,
Are all you brave of mouth who still presume
To laud our lives and huckster with our death
Not sated? Must we serve to feed, as well,
Fat maggots with fake red in their lapel?

Victor Britton

Crisis, What Crisis?

Damp northern proles and an occasional drowning do not constitute a national emergency, according to the Imperial Haystack's latest proclamation from the provinces. Floods are once again affecting the north of England, and the Imperial Haystack had a bit of a blather about doing something about it sometime, much as the late Head Boy and his climate-denying environment secretaries used to blather in floods of yore. Besides the climate, which will be fixed as soon as the Conservatives take us out of Brussels and into the arms of the Trumpster and Jair Bolsonaro, the Imperial Haystack also blamed the floods on "building," as it has long been known that the northern barbarians have too many affordable homes and not enough garden bridges. The Imperial Haystack ordered the humble folk to "face the reality that places like this are vulnerable to flooding" and that prevention measures would be so effective that "we're going to see more of it." Fortunately the Imperial Haystack cannot justly be accused of regional neglect, since his previous form on the issue of climate and pollution includes the illegal poisoning of several million Londoners.

Yet Again, the Experts Horn In

Among the unspoken glories of our forthcoming Remember Who Won Sunday will be the foiling of Operation Bernhard, a shabby Nazi plot intended to foreignise the British five-pound note and cause the collapse of our robust Conservative Lend-Lease economy. Mere scientists, who always seem to get the wrong end of the stick in these matters, are threatening to involve themselves in a similar shabby plot to undermine plucky entrepreneurs dealing in rhinoceros horn. According to a rather Teutonically-named professor at Oxford university, economists believe that the price of rhino horn would drop if the market could be flooded with fakes, so the boffins have created a horse-hair forgery in the hope of removing the incentive to poach. Typically, other economists have betrayed the unanimity that is so necessary to democratic progress by claiming that the presence of fake rhino horns will simply increase demand for the real thing; while other scientists have complicated the issue yet further by trying to bio-engineer the rhino horn equivalent of a cultured pearl. So confused has the situation become that some people are advocating actual enforcement of the law and, if you please, "long-term consumer behavioural change interventions," which appears to translate into Standard English as education, and may even imply a blasphemy against choice and the free market.

Slightly Fired

Since neither Jacob Rees-Mogg nor Andrew Bridgen is a spad who can be sacked for the slipping masks of Andrew Bridgen and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Government has done the next best thing and given the builder mainly responsible for the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower a bit of a holiday. The Minister for Homelessness announced that he was overturning previous policy, which was to allow the company to continue bidding for public contracts on the grounds that corporations are always innocent until proven guilty and frequently afterwards too. The inquiry's preliminary finding that fire brigade guidelines work best in buildings that are legally safe has already been considerately re-framed by the free and cantankerous press as a condemnation of the fire brigade for giving the wrong advice; so the company should not have to wait too long before Her Majesty's Government decides that the entire inferno has been taken rather out of context. Still, it cannot be denied that the company is at least partly responsible for bringing into temporary disrepute the right-wing crusade against health and safety regulations; so it's only common sense that the builders should be made to shoulder at least some of whatever blame cannot be sustainably unloaded onto the firefighters and the victims.

Performance Theology

Someone has put an air-rifle pellet through a twelve-foot painting of the Last Supper, causing the artist much upset. Lorna May Wadsworth, who has painted Margaret Thatcher and David Blunkett and evidently has a penchant for authoritarian thugs who don't much care about the poor, interpreted the shooting as an iconoclastic act directed against her portrayal of Jesus. Wadsworth peopled her painting with young actors and fashion models as "a way of challenging perceptions", and the shootist has been careful to place their own contribution at the spot where Jesus received the last of His wounds on the cross. The anachronism, both biblical and biographical, emphasises the eternal significance of the crucifixion while harmonising with the modernity of Wadsworth's own interpretation of the scene. If her anonymous ballistic collaborator hadn't shot Wadsworth's Jesus, it would certainly have challenged perceptions if she had shot Him herself.

For the Bonfire

Eleven thousand mere experts, or rather less than the number of electors who elevated the Imperial Haystack to wear the dunce's crown of the Recrudescent Imperium, have issued a statement warning once again about the climate emergency. They suggest, heretically enough, that continually flying back and forth on business trips might be a bad idea, and that society might perhaps do better by educating girls to be something other than breeders and home-makers. They also recommend reducing the consumption of meat, which is one of the few areas where Her Majesty's Government may possibly boast of progress; albeit by the rather crude device of reducing the habit of eating generally, and this only among the undeserving classes. Unless radical change takes place, the scientists' statement warns of "untold suffering", a turn of phrase that demonstrates a healthy knowledge of the working priorities of Britain's free and cantankerous press. Fortunately, the rulers of the Recrudescent Imperium have no interest in suffering that doesn't tell on them; otherwise even the word of eleven thousand mere experts might be grounds for a bit of a worry.

Reasonable Reform Within the Bounds of Pious Moderation

Every moderate centrist's favourite Islamic fundamentalists have yet to let up on their sensibly reforming quest for British values. Since the demise of Jamal Khashoggi for being insufficiently free and cantankerous, the head-chopping House of Saud has responded to international criticism by increasing its repression of the enemy within, which at this point seems to be women. Much like a buccaneering British government pluckily conferring rights on Euro-wog citizens, the head-chopping House of Saud is concerned to ensure that the beneficiaries of its generosity don't get above their station and start demanding more than the boys are inclined to give. The head-chopping House of Saud has even adapted the good old Christian practice of selling indulgences, offering to release detainees in return for a democratising financial consideration: a flourish which has the Reverend Blair's sticky little fingerprints all over it, and may well signal an entirely new phase in this exhilaratingly moderate moral saga.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Caries lxii-lxxxiv

Despite all this, however, the Father of Teeth soon found himself among the steaming crags of the mystical east-by-northwest, where discontented peasants led sour-faced beasts of burden on implacable missions of privation, and priests in brightly-coloured robes smiled benignly and encouraged them to resign themselves to their lot.

"And do they resign themselves?" asked the Father of Teeth of one such priest, who was credited with such purity of soul that he had sat in the same place without moving for fifty-seven and a half years.
"Alas, no," said the priest, smiling benevolently. "Their attachment to the world remains as strong as if their flesh were no illusion and their poverty no virtue."

The priest had a face like a walnut that has received joyous news, and his eyes were trained humbly on the mountains and the heavens, neither of which truly existed and both of which therefore reminded him that the selfhood of others was an illusion.

"And for how many years," said the Father of Teeth, "have the peasants been taught the true nature of their flesh and the true value of their poverty?"
"I have taught them so," said the priest, smiling beatifically, "through no less than fourteen incarnations of my spiritual essence, or a little over four hundred years. Before that, of course, they were taught by the gods themselves, who eventually abandoned the enterprise for lack of due appreciation."
"Could the gods not resign themselves also?" asked the Father of Teeth.
"They resigned themselves to abandoning the enterprise," said the priest, smiling benignantly.

So the Father of Teeth chewed up the mountains and the heavens, and the land was levelled by great earthquakes and the sky became red as gums by night and black as the Father of Teeth's gums by day. Because of their attachment to the world, the peasants shrieked and fled, and the priests fled shrieking after them, demanding that they resign themselves to the gods' disinclination to help.

"Why don't the priests resign themselves to the peasants' lack of resignation?" asked the Father of Teeth; but no answer came from the old priest's benighted smile, or from the eyes protruding madly in the joyous walnut face.

Not Fewer Deaths, But Lesser

More than fifty people have been killed in a terrorist attack, but on the bright side it took place in Mali and no Britons were involved. Of course, there was that little matter of the Daveybloke Coalition pitching in with the wog-bombing of Libya; but that was all a long time ago and, as the well-known salesman Vince Cable pointed out, it is uncharitable to blame the Deputy Conservatives for cleaning up other people's mess just because they happened to make the mess bigger. In a worthier world, the wog-bombing of Libya might have stabilised the region no end; yet instead of rejoicing in their democratic opportunification the lesser breeds continue in their sinful and lazy habits of chronic migrancy and blowing things up. It is fortunate for British optimism that Mali doesn't happen to be newsworthy.

Dietetical Materialism

We are all aware, because the more ascetic elements of the Conservative Party never tire of telling us, that money isn't everything; but the message has apparently not yet got through to some of the lesser breeds upon which the Recrudescent Imperium aspires one day to inflict its uncompromising terms of trade. The case of a woman who starved on poverty wages while working two jobs, studying at university and caring for a mentally ill brother has caused an outcry among the Heathen Chinee, who seem to think there is some sort of problem with a society that encourages hard work. Unfortunately, despite suffering heart damage and difficulties with walking as a result of malnutrition, the lady suffered a relapse of moral fibre and allowed herself to be taken to hospital, where her case attracted public attention and the inevitable materialistic ideological response of throwing money at the problem. Even the government has stepped in, rather than taking the civilised and entrepreneurial course and denying that undeserved poverty exists; so doubtless Her Majesty's Government will have stern words for the Heathen Chinee about the need for a moral readjustment before they can claim the benefits of trading with Britain.