The population fight back

People are getting sick and tired of political correctness, be it in the form of this government’s pandering to religion or in their other misguided leftist actions. A read through the many sensible comments here is extremely heartening: too many good ones to quote.

On a wider note, it seems obvious that Gordon Brown’s time in office is effectively over. In my view, if the Labour Party had any sense, they would promote Foreign Secretary David Miliband (one friend away from me on Facebook ) as a replacement as soon as possible: he seems to me a bright star of the party and their only hope.

But I think really the Tories should now be given a chance. Otherwise, the way Labour are going, we’ll end up with the nightmare of the BNP instead.

Women strike back

Every time I get the tube into central London I see miserable looking women who have crammed themselves onto the train ready for the daily grind of workplace, shunning motherhood and more traditional values in favour of the pursuit of “independence” and money. They buy the drivel “Sex & the City” spouts hook, line and sinker.

I don’t like to see this - I genuinely feel sorry for them - though I would not give up my seat, of course: as one brave woman commented on the BBC site recently, equality only cuts one way:

“I am a woman and this comment will probably be very unpopular with women but you can’t have it all.

Women want equal pay and equal responsibility in the workplace - fine that is a perfectally reasonable request. BUT they also still expect, to be bought drinks on nights out, to have more maternity leave than men get paternity leave, to have doors help open for then, to get cheaper car ensurance etc…

If you want equality there has to be equality in all areas of life.”

I’ve got some news for the other women, and I’m not the only one: you’re no more “independent” as a slave to money than in a loving relationship, happy with your family, responsibly raising the next generation.

I think women should have the right to work for money, but shouldn’t be obliged to do so (I mean real women here, not the kind who are so masculine they are virtually men). Of course, some have no choice but to take this course - but I’m concerned about the many others who have been mind-washed with feminism since birth and made to feel inferior if they do not choose it.

Such decisions, along with the belittling of men, the removal of rights from fathers, the glorification of binge drinking, smoking and casual sex, not to mention rampant political correctness, are busily destroying the fabric of western society - and we’re seeing this in both the rise of fanatical Islam, to which it is handing an open goal, and in the way the youth of today are turning out.

But don’t let me do all the talking, let’s hand it over to a female contributor to the radio this morning:

“As a so-called liberated woman I often find myself longing for the repression of the 1950s - a period which I remember as a child. I remember my mother doing her housework and shopping in the morning at good local shops where people spoke to each other and knew each other. She and her neighbours then sat about chatting, knitting and watching their children play for the rest of the afternoon until it was time to start preparing the dinner.

Compare this to my experience of reading “The Female Eunuch” at an impressionable age and trying like mad to be a “liberated career woman”. The result has been a life of stress, trying to bring up children as well as work full-time and then come home to homework, cooking, cleaning, etc.

I dream of being in a room with Germaine and telling her exactly what I think of her: she condemned a generation of women to having always to do at least two jobs and never getting any time to themselves, except at the expense of their children.”

- Elizabeth, Saturday Live, Radio 4

Women are starting to fight back - they can see how they’ve been duped - and what a good job too. Maybe there is hope for society after all.

A visit to the Serpentine

This evening after work I headed along to the Serpentine gallery in Hyde Park to take a look at an exhibition by American “artist” Richard Prince, whom I later discovered has made his entire career largely out of appropriating the work of others. Since my lovely girlfriend is American I hoped to admire the work of one of her compatriots. I might have guessed that her own painting is vastly superior to what I was about to witness…

Private views at the Serpentine are very different from those at other galleries. This is immediately apparent by the presence of a large number of security guards who look as if they are protecting the President of the United States. They’re big, meaty men in their forties with curl wired earpieces and they scan their area as if… well, as if it’s something far more than it actually is.

Another difference is the visitors, who were in general far younger than I am used to, and who seemed to treat the event as more of a fashion show than an art exhibition (indeed, perhaps it was). Women wore over-sized sunglasses and one who looked like Keira Knightly spoke in a private school drawl, but punctuated with profanity, as is so common now (in both senses of the word). This particular girl, I noticed, was accompanied by a man who looked like he had never done a day’s work in his life. Of course I don’t know for sure, but I dare say he simply pushed money around or was a middleman of some kind - work would more than likely be beneath him, and he would be admired by his peers, and of course by the girl, for this fact. The women? I would guess that many of them were “in marketing” (or PR, of course). I have been meaning to point out that so many London females seem to work in marketing now (if you can really call it work) that it is a wonder there are enough things to market, or any of them left to do anything else.

There are a lot of staff at the Serpentine Gallery (which is in a beautiful park, by the way). Far too many, as far as I could tell. A lot of them seemed to know the guests, and there were a lot of “mwah!”s and “daahling!”s and all the other pretentious nonsense one associates with gatherings of people who have nothing better - nothing deeper - to say.

But what of the art? It had the usual multi-thousand pound, “life-saving hospital equipment value” price tags, so surely it had some merit? Hm, I think we know not to expect that by now. In fact, I am beginning to feel as if I am visiting the scene of a crime every time I go to these galleries now. A moral crime. The artwork here consisted of the usual enlarged photos, otherwise no more remarkable than one would find on any stock photo site, some collages involving the mandatory ugly genital shots (yawn), some muddled up words printed on very large canvases, and then some casts of car bonnets that looked pretty much as they would in your average car repair garage. This was “art”. This was what we are supposed to consider our modern day equivalent of Turner and Constable.

So what was going on? Was it that my first class degree in Philosophy and generally reflective nature were just not enough to enable me to see the deep messages in this work? Or was it just that the work was, in fact, utterly mediocre? I know what Brian Sewell would have thought (see a great video of the inimitable Sewell putting a “modern artist” straight on the otherwise trash that is Big Brother). British MP Kim Howells admirably spoke the truth too, when he wrote:

“If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold mechanical, conceptual bullshit. Kim Howells. p.s. The attempts at conceptualisation are particularly pathetic and symptomatic of a lack of conviction.”

These people point, unashamedly, to the elephant in the room. Incidentally, I rather like a lot Howells’ realistic comments on other issues too.

If you want real art, make a bee line for the Tate Britain gallery near Pimlico. It’ll enchant and humble you (well, it does me). If you want a free beer and just to keep a check on the “art-crime” scene, head along to somewhere like the Serpentine. You might be surprised - there might be something of value there (I mean real value, as opposed to monetary value), but don’t hold your breath. The most you are likely to see is the Emperor’s New Clothes; and, of course, you won’t even see them.

Orange hand me an £800 phone bill

£877.13 to be precise. Yes, I was pretty surprised too! The reason, it turned out, was data costs. I had used over 300Mb of data in a matter of two days.

I often use my phone as a modem for the laptop, either over Bluetooth or via USB. I connect to send and receive e-mail when not near a wireless network, or to use the web. Sometimes I do these things directly on the phone, not using a laptop. Had I accidentally made a rogue call, one of those that last for hours? Had I accidentally streamed an enormous video at peak time?

Well, I got onto Orange and was put through to a supervisor. He assured me my phone was set up for “push” e-mail and was constantly connecting and checking for new mail - I mean constantly. I assured him it wasn’t. He went away to look into it.

Eventually I heard back from him, and it turns out that when connecting using the laptop MSN was logging in, in the background (as I well knew). Even when not using it, if it was logged in for an hour, this would ping the server repeatedly, clocking up such massive data usage.

Now, one would think MSN would need to send only a few bytes to ping the server. I am astounded by the weight of the data it apparently used, but this is the best explanation, well - the only one, I have yet. Orange would not release the GPRS statements to me, but they did retro-actively apply a bundle, effectively waiving this bill.

Anyway, the moral: be extremely careful of MSN usage when on a cellular line unless you have a GPRS bundle to cover it!

Blade Runner at the Royal Festival Hall

This evening I had the honour of attending a first class orchestral performance of Vangelis’ haunting soundtrack for the multi-layered filmic masterpiece that is Blade Runner. The event took place at the Royal Festival Hall, and it was one of those very rare pieces of art whereby you look at it and think “this could not have been done better”. It could have been differently - Massive Attack, the producers, could have remixed the score and modernised it - but that would have been very risky. Instead the music was performed faithfully to the score. It was majestic, massive and atmospheric, and it included faultless vocal performances.

Vangelis’ score accounts for perhaps 40% of the impact of Blade Runner (and the remaining 60% easily out-ranks many other films, even without music). It aurally paints the atmosphere of the future noir, mish-mash world that we must try to avoid, and what strikes me is the way Vangelis achieved a sound of delicate humanity and vulnerability battling against mechanised, confused but overpowering modernity. He achieved this in the language of music, not words, as a pioneering genius of the synthesizer.

The skill of the orchestra and the work of all involved in this project was outstanding. A artistic success. Modern “artists”, take note: there is no substitute for sheer skill and hard work.

My only aside is that I was shocked to see “3D” from Massive Attack in print on the RFH literature saying the soundtrack was “f**king amazing”. This was totally out of place and the Royal Festival Hall should retain some idea of decency even if 3D cannot.

Orland Media site

My company website is launched, featuring the new course Applied ActionScript 3.0, which I believe is the best of its kind in the world.

Changing values

Somehow, in not so long a period of time, we have gone from this kind of look being admired:

To this kind of look being admired:

That is to say, we’ve gone from a look of debonair responsibility in men and voluptuous femininity in women, to a look of self-indulgence, coldness, malnutrition and personal abandon. Somehow this is considered cool, but I consider it to be pitiful. I actually saw Lily Cole in the Dorchester Hotel not so long ago, and she didn’t look too happy there either. That these kinds of things are happening in society is a great shame, but we are always free to reject and ignore the values promoted by trashy tabloids and in advertising and instead assert our own.

Advertising lie

Here’s another silly advert on tube cards in London currently. This one is for Dating Direct. How sites like these are managing to continue given the likes of Facebook, where people can actually exchange views and get to know each other with no emphasis on dating, is a mystery. This one says “Find love or your money back” and then “What a pity they won’t get their money back”. I’ll tell you why they won’t get their money back: they’re a couple of models hired for a photo shoot, that’s why. A little like product endorsement, this implication that models are real people is always silly and patronising!

The changing (hidden) face of Britain

Walking around a supermarket in London today I was confronted with a sight which should be unusual but is actually, alarmingly, becoming increasingly common. It was a Muslim woman in traditional clothing, a niqab and shapeless dress, hiding every part of her body except her eyes.

We all know how thin-skinned and “sensitive” religious fundamentalists are, so often “offended” by any perceived slight to their irrational beliefs. Well I was offended to see this. I was reminded how anti-social such clothing is, since we cannot properly see who is standing before us, and I was more than a little dismayed to see, yet again, such a physical manifestation of backward and irrational thought in our western society. It often seems that the irrationally faithful are duplicitous in that they are happy to take what they can from our society while secretly they would like to see it thrown back into the moral Dark Ages which are promoted by their texts.

Many certainly should not like us according to the Qu’ran - the only thing worse than non-believers is aspostates - and it is difficult to “integrate” when you can see only a person’s eyes, you are unsure whether they even speak English, and they are likely to be beaten for even speaking to a man who they do not know. A greater physical symbol of self segregation could hardly be designed.

It occurred to me that the unfortunate and incongruous state of this woman was really a kind of abuse. She had probably been mindwashed into Islam from birth and there was little hope of helping her now. But there was an even more sad and alarming aspect to all this: the woman pushed before her a child in a pushchair. I wondered what kind of baseless dogmas and myths were being impressed upon this child as “truths” and rules he must follow. Daily he was having his freedom of thought, freedom to come to his own decisions based on evidence, eroded and compromised. He stood little chance.

It occurred to me also that it was a kind of abuse that this child was being brought up unable to even see his mother’s face. Infants learn so much from expressions, and even if she showed her face in private, this child was being brought up to believe there is something shameful about a woman showing her face in public and was denied observing and learning from his mother’s facial reactions to public events.

Only the most naively politically correct, the most hypocritical and cowardly, and the most amoral and apathetic still fail to see Islam, and the other Abrahamic religions, for what they essentially are: death cults. That they are allowed (indeed encouraged) to flourish in what should be a civilised society here in the West is a constant source of concern to me, and it should be to all other moral people too.

Yes, we have a serious problem with decadence in the West, and this is a concern, but the problems presented by religion are more fundamental and of even greater concern. It would be nice to think humankind will one day look back on religious belief as a teething period, a slightly embarrassing phase of human infancy. This may happen (provided the instability introduced to the world because of religion doesn’t kill us all first), but it will not happen unless decent people have the confidence to speak out against the oppression of political correctness, saying what they know to be true - because Edmund Burke was right.

U2: Original of the Species (remix)

A successful amateur reworking of this great track, I think:

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