The World Cup

A vast number of  Americans claim it's boring. But then they do obsessively watch a sugar bowl every year, which they claim actually moves, although I gather that you have to be very attentive to catch the brief spurts in which it does. Meanwhile, they go to a building every Sunday to praise an imaginary sociopath and think that the best way to deal with an extreme care in the community case is to have him lead them.

A Boycott Even More Objectionable than the Former Cricketer

So this is the mess that the shit flung by the chimp across the ocean has led to. The prospect of even the World Cup being boycotted by the most significant European countries as a rather feeble economic and political sanction against Trumpistan. Except of course not one that the leaders considering it are unduly concerned about, because it's clearly never a highlight of their summer viewing anyway, and a boycott wouldn't cost their economies a penny. Whereas the twin menaces on either side of Europe would be as pleased as punch: the one to the east would see it as further proof of NATO and the democratic west disintegrating, with Russia not allowed to be involved in the competition anyway, and the one to the west could proclaim that he'd kept even more furriners out and the World Cup would then be more like the 'World' Series, although the likely attendance of many developing-world countries dependent on the favour of even this terrible iteration of the USA would make any boycott even more meaningless. Not to nention that abstention from the tournament by the European football powers would not only give the USA a chance of having a slightly less embarrassing run in an event they neither care about nor understand, and hand the whole thing on a platter to those very lovely fully-functional democracies of Brazil and Argentina.

102 Years since the Munich Beer Hall Putsch

Just like British Rail trains, British fascists have got there in the end. And just like the Sturmabteilung with Hitler, they have a foreign figurehead to rouse their slavering rabble in the form of Bond villain Musk. Of course they can't ultimately succeed in the UK, but the USA has effectively already fallen, with the KKK/MAGA/Bible Belt followers of Trump employing the standard Joseph Goebbels tactic of calling their opponents violent first in order to justify violence against them. All it's taken is the killing of a shit of the highest magnitude in America to get the cunts marching here too. Those who weren't cheered by the assassination of Charlie Kirk would also have cried when Heinrich Himmler met his maker.

I call for the Medal of Honor or Victoria Cross for whoever manages to do away with Musk. At least Trump will soon explode anyway, in the manner of Mr. Creosote, and Putin must surely eventually fall to a coup d'état as the Russian economy collapses completely, like the Soviet one did.

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 2.0

 Or the Shitcan-Fart Pact, since that is what the names of the respective leaders now negotiating it are homonyms for, after all.

Further to this, the Russian despot's next move, in the face of so much appeasement from the west, may well be to carry out Anschluss on Belarus, who they'll see as Russians even more than the Austrians could have been considered Germans.

Meanwhile, in Yanquistan, no one seems to have picked up much on the Chinese-made red hats of MAGAts being an acknowledgement of submission to impending totalitarianism in the Soviet mould, this from followers of the inexplicably named 'red' party, the Republicans, who decades back were hell-bent on rooting out the 'reds under the beds'. This is schizophrenia on a mass scale, which leads to sociopathy, which leads to not caring about anything beyond their own noses.

If the last sentence has a familiar ring, it's transparently the same progression as "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering". Yes, the path to the dark side.

Xmas

So, it's that midwinter break again where we gather with family and friends to eat and drink too much in the name of the supposed birthday of an itinerant preacher from Palestine approximately 2,000 years ago. The date was appropriated from a logically placed pagan festival, where the days clearly started becoming longer again, by a growing horde of monotheists across the Roman empire, choosing monotheism over the even more batshit pantheism that preceded it, deciding on December the 25th as put forward by Hippolytus in the 3rd century CE. The exact date continued to be disputed for centuries by the various factions of the new religion, and still is by the Eastern and Western branches, never mind their smaller offshoots. In any case, what is celebrated by both at the more flexibly timed Easter is the crucifixion by the Roman occupiers and local Jewish theocracy of a bothersome man who made them feel threatened by saying some things about social equality and being nice to each other. This wasn't enough for Christians, who had to convert the pagans of the planetary natural cycle-based festival they'd taken over to join their ranks. So they retrospectively gave the victim superpowers and, just to be on the safe side, also asserted that he was the direct son of an invisible, inaudible entity that purportedly created the whole universe, and confusingly the the entity itself made flesh. The incarnation was also necessary so that the other tenet of their fairytale, the concept of the Christ figure taking the burden of the sins of the whole of mankind on his back and then 'saving' us all through getting killed about 30 years later, would carry more weight.

I do like the tunes of many carols (if I ignore the hatstand lyrics, which can be hard to do) the idea of having a period of peace, exchanging presents and having fir trees and candles in our houses. I just wish there weren't even more of the nutjobs around spreading the 'good word' than there are normally. And I'd also appreciate it if they stopped trying to tell people to worship 'little Lord Jesus' all the bloody time. Oh well, at least they left the summer solstice alone.

Merry Christmas.

A quick summary of Abrahamic religions for Easter

Judaism: a localised faith with a sadistic deity either demanding sacrifices or committing genocide, with the idea that you get punished for eating pork or mixing shellfish with dairy products, or not mutilating the genitals of male infants. And then get sent to hell.

Christianity: a slightly better version where the god character raped a married woman and the resulting child grew up to be an itinerant preacher with a humanistic moral philosophy, and then got executed by the authorities for being popular, but the adherents to his cult gave him superpowers too just to be able to compete with the deities of the time, and have killed each other, ever since the stories about the man were compiled, over slightly different interpretations of what he may have said.

Islam: a later offshoot of the two above, with a new preacher declaring that he is on a divinely mandated mission, which then involves a lot of murderous military conquest. Also the customary punishment of people for eating pork or not mutilating the genitals of male infants, with drinking alcohol and allowing women to dress as they like as added offences leading to being sent straight to hell.

Considering all of the above, Easter may not be that bad since it now largely just means some holiday time with your family and eating a lot of chocolate, but it is still celebrating the gruesome crucifixion of a character presumably based on a real historical person, as if that were a glorious thing and could grant you absolution for anything bad that you've done. In short, at heart quite mentally ill.

Why keep a blog going?

 After so many years of not touching it, it becomes like a spring clean for the mind. I expect no readership; that's not the point of it. So, to clear all the bees from my bonnet, here goes.

Putin: now falling back on a modern-day version of Mainila, because he has nothing else left. Trying for Stalin without any actual Nazi invaders to justify being an egocentric amoral dictator.  

Trump: lies always seemed like a dependable option, as well as calling the man in charge too old when he's hardly much younger and has never been competent at anything, including business, understanding communication or the human race.

BAME: yes, right-minded people care, but every single white person isn't responsible for American slavery, so drop that if you want to be seen as a rational human being. Read some history, please.

Woke: a horrible American term again, but apparently we're now stuck with it, and it seems to have led to this. Go on, start burning books in the name of not offending anyone at all. I wonder who else burnt books to delete history?

LGBT plus all the add-ons: all the gay people I've ever known haven't wanted to be, or given a shit about being, bracketed together with people who are feeling that their sense of misalignment is not recognised.