Progressive policy triumphs AGAIN

What kind of a crazy question has the following as the only practical answer:

“Why, Mr. Brown, we need to send them guns: lots and lots of guns. And prayers. But mostly guns: little neat Derringers to keep under the sleeping mat in case hubby didn't get the memo; stripped-down handbag Uzis for when your brother comes around to announce the name of your newly-chosen fiancé; lots of ammo and lightweight M-4 carbines with plenty of mags and grenade launchers for when yout family decides that a brand-new piece of paper signed without the agreement of the village elders doesn't trump the Koran, Hadith and Surah and 1,400 years of sharia law.

Oh, and some anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry and supplies and training to hand out at street corners or better yet brought into the home on during Friday prayers so the right little hands get to hold and point them at their sons and bothers and cousins.”

That question, dear reader, might be: "How do we make this a reality?"

But I suppose it’s a start, by declaring that something is so, so that it might become so. It worked for God. And the next step is to believe: really believe, children, that it will be so if only we believe it strongly enough.
As Tinkerbell said.

Just assume I’m not totally evil incarnate here: work with me for a minute.

Assume if you can that I really, really want Tunisian men to stop hurting their womenfolk. Assume also that I’d like Tunisians not to die for want of medication and treatment and also that I’d like them to be able to earn a decent living and not be harmed by pollution: real or imaginary. I wish them well, I really do, but I’m not God. Or Tinkerbell.
Except that one time...

Anyhoo.

How’s this for the progressive mind-set?:

After what had at times been a slow and frustrating process, the Tunisian National Assembly on Sunday evening voted to approve what is one of the most progressive constitutions in the region, with only 12 members of the 216-member legislative body voting against. Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki and outgoing Assembly chief Mustapha Ben Jaafar signed the document on Monday morning, bringing it into effect.

Um, where have our centuries of British or American ‘progress’ after a longer and slower process from, say the Fall  [if any] of Rome through the Dark Ages and Mediaeval period to the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, the Agricultural, Industrial, Social and Information Revolutions and also all the meaty, socially-based revolutions (the ones with all those statistics involving numbers containing tens of thousands and, famously, tens of millions), tons of politics, billions of votes, got us to?

Some peace, some order, vastly better technology and material production…as well as technological unemployment, real pollution, unredeemable debt and great big areas in our cities where you can’t walk at night for fear of murder. And some pretty free, happy women, thank God.

And Tunisia’s going to get that all the good stuff very soon, during our biological lifetimes, from a piece of paper.

Of course it can’t fail because it’s not wrong at all, it’s  - what’s that word they inserted in front of ‘Ghostbusters’ when they made the cartoon version of Ghostbusters? - oh, yes: ‘real’. It’s real.

Really, really real.

Picture from here.

Reasons to be cheerful. Part Half.

As the Ranting Penguin points out just how deep, wide, thick and sticky is the mess this country’s been dropped in, linking to the Mail, I thought I’d add a positive note.

Or put the cat amongst the pigeons, if you like.

It’s going to take to the 2030’s to get national debt down to the 40% that Mister Brown prudently said would be his ceiling.

So that’s twenty-one years, or twenty-five, tops.

No problem.

Actually in the scale of things, twenty-four years isn’t so long. Time enough for my daughter to have grown up and started a family perhaps…and perhaps to have taken for granted some opportunities on the way that it took other women centuries to reach for the first time.

Below is a link is to a site extolling the…well, here’s the blurb for Ladies First:

LADIES FIRST is primarily about women who were a "first" in a career which had previously been closed to them because of their sex. However, it also includes women who were "first" to achieve something which had not been achieved before by either man or woman, women who founded institutions such as banks, clubs, magazines etc relating to women and women who were a "first" because a man could not have done it anyway.

I don’t know whether to laugh bitterly at how many of the achievements that are now available to women in our free(ish) society are open only for the first generation, or the third, or the fifth: or to be glad that it’s happened at all after all the millennia that such things weren’t available – and even to men in a lot of cases -, or to make snippy comparisons with other cultures where things aren’t even as (partially, imperfectly, relatively) good as ours is.

Take a look here anyway, and let’s imagine, hope, and maybe act to keep what is good in our country that has got us all so far up the ladder of oportunity. Eventually.

Raw Dead Plant Diet Week.

Day Two. three. I mean Day Three.Losing it.

Ketosis must be setting in now surely. All those damned seeds and leaves and roots and no bread or pasta, rice or potatoes. Or salt.

Lovely salt.

Dark, rippling shadows waver at and wave from my peripheral vision. Things writhe and skip in them; chittering and eating pizza.

Evil things; but useful by taking my mind off even my insanely collectivist Feinian colleague.

Some calories added by dried fruits – three varieties, all of which resemble in some way or other the previously-enjoyed meals of small mammals. Raisins, apricots, and especially figs.*

And macadamia nuts of course. The lady in the whole food shop recommended macadamia nuts to my hunger-enslaved, plastic willpower for protein and cholesterol control and so I bought them like a Korean War POW.

Cruel, really. It’s got to pinch when they, and…I mean what do they do with the rest of the macadamias afterwards? Release them into the wild to be the butt of whole-bodied macadamias’ cruel humour and put in charge of whatever passes for soft furnishings or children’s television in the macadamias’ lush forests, shady bowers and bosky dells? Or do they just make musical instruments out of them, like armadillos or cake stands like elephants?

I comfort myself that this is good for my muscular acidity and hence for my back.

And then comes Friday. O Friday, with its cereal-based foodstuffs and dairy products beckons to me like a siren.

A siren with a crust.

Meanwhile, the freedom directory’s beginning to be populated, and it’s slow work so I’m a little way off eBay or Amazon status quite yet…But all I want to do anyway is destroy the drooling collectivism of my countrymen. Keep the campaign ideas coming please, by the way.

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* a rich source of natural brown which the growing body needs to promote strong healthy ankle and earlobe development and in later life enables it to penetrate a vibrant, prosperous economy and sodomize it into a state of supine bankruptcy in eleven brief, fiction-filled years.