Month: October 2008

“The [UK] Food Standards Agency has today issued a food alert about novelty food products from China, including chocolate-flavoured ‘willy spread’, containing melamine.

Melamine is an industrial chemical that should not be present in food. Milk products containing melamine have been at the centre of a major food incident in China.

An Agency spokesperson said: ‘This is a first. We’ve never had to put out an alert before on “willy spread” – chocolate-flavoured or otherwise…….”

Read more HERE.

Filed under Organ pollution

NOTE: For those innocent North American ladies who read this blog, “willy” is British for a male sex organ. (From the comments, that innocence is more widespread than anticipated).

Sarah Palin recently told a rally of Republican supporters Obama would “bring socialism to America”. She gave graphic, if inaccurate, descriptions of the effect of ‘big’ government on people’s lives. She said that there were countries with governments like that, and the populace were to be pitied, because they were “not free”.

Over the last few weeks, since the credit and economic crises began to bite, much has been made in the media of its effects on ordinary Americans. Many have been interviewed. By far the most common emotion expressed by American citizens has been fear. Fear of the future; fear of what will happen to them.

In the UK, the crisis is even worse than in America. The British pound is losing value rapidly; the nation’s economy is now officially in recession; property values are falling; unemployment is rising.

As in the US, the British media is given to interviewing ordinary citizens for their reaction to the crisis. The most common emotion expressed is anger. Anger that the rich are once again fleecing ordinary people; anger at the government for using tax-payer’s money to bail out banks.

Fear is not a factor noticeable in the UK.

Why is this? Are the British more stalwart than Americans? Is the famed British “stiff upper lip” simply covering up the real, quivering, terror inside?

Certainly, there’s trepidation. No-one relishes the prospect of unemployment. Thankfully, for the British, they suffer from ‘big’ government. It interferes in their lives, forces social security and unemployment benefits on them in times of crisis. It ensures families are not left to the mercy of volunteers manning soup kitchens, or Christian missions seeking converts. The jobless receive the same free medical treatment as the well paid. ‘Big’ government insists on a safety net to protect those falling on hard times. Rarely will you see beggars on British streets, with boards proclaiming, “Need food, will work” .

Sarah Palin knows as much about ‘big’ government as I know about the workings of a Mars orbiter. She says she’s for the ordinary people of America, yet from the shelter of her own personal financial bastion, works to propagate even more fear.

The British are free; they’re free to be angry at what’s happening.

Americans can only fear for their future.

Filed under: Politics and freedoms

The horrifying case of baby-killer, James Howson, was highlighted today by TOB. To read more details of this case, click on the link.

Killing one’s own baby in such a hideous, apparently cold-blooded, fashion is guaranteed to diminish to minute levels any questioning of the societal causes behind Howson’s crime. It’s difficult to feel other than revulsion towards this man; the inhumanity of the crime serves to block any sympathy based on his own childhood, or adolescent, problems – even assuming there were any.

A factor society generally tends to disregard is the sheer numbers of James Howson’s that are spawned. Not all kill their baby by breaking its back, but the quantity of cold-blooded killers, or rapists, or mutilators, surfacing in our societies seems to rise remorselessly.

The hothead with a gun, robbing the convenience store, or murdering his girlfriend during a quarrel, while no less forgivable, is certainly more understandable than Howson, whose crime rates revulsion and disdain by the very nature of its incomprehensibility.

Is that, though, a reason for not attempting to comprehend what caused James Howson to commit his vile act? If we simply shrug it off as an inhuman crime, are we not, at best, emphasizing a contradiction? How can an act be inhuman, when performed by a human being?

Of course, the pedantic would argue that the very definition of “inhuman” is: ‘lacking pity, kindness, or mercy’ – attributes supposedly unique to the human race. Few, though, would dare to argue that the antonyms: piteousness, cruelty, and intolerance, are other than very human traits. One has only to view the activities of any culture on the planet to realize that. Pity, kindness, and mercy are in very short supply throughout the world today.

So we can’t wash our hands of the James Howson’s by categorizing them as, in some way, less than human. Yet this is exactly how society deals with these people. In the more barbaric nations they are killed, then forgotten. In ‘civilized’ society they’re locked away for years, and forgotten.

No-one, it seems, makes any serious attempt to a) discover what caused Howson to commit his crime, and b) question how James Howson may have been prevented from becoming a cold-blooded baby killer.

Isn’t it time we did?

Filed under: Cold blooded killers