P_______ on the Streets of London

At least some people seem to have the right idea about how to deal with England’s current woes:

Don’t believe her.

A Poetic Interlude

Normally my occasional verse takes the form of a sonnet or a ballade, but this didn’t feel like a sonnet or ballade kind of thing. Based on the circumstances of the post just below this one.

The professor offers a proof

When he declared ’twas naught but wheat
He meant it, bai gad,
And set about to prove his deep disdain:
He cut it up in pieces
(snapping pictures, taking notes);
An eighth tossed in the furnace
An eighth spun down the drain.

“It’s nothing, do you hear me? Nothing!”
They heard him.

An eighth eaten with caviar
An eighth slug down with wine (also purloined
In an act of infamy by one
Not wholly sympathetic to his views
But also not in whole against them
Who took that fell sip from the sacred cup
And held it in his cheeks to spit back out
Into a ziplocked bag under his coat;
No reason the professor had to know this,
He reasoned)

“They’re fools for getting worked up!”
An eighth stomped in the dust, four times
(The last one with a little hop)
An eighth tossed to his dog
Snapping it from the air with a lazy familiarity;
Spitting it onto the floor as unfamiliar
While the professor roared at its irrelevance

“It’s meaningless! It’s nothing, nothing, nothing!”
An eighth crushed between greasy fingers
Eyes screwed, cheeks growing red, won’t be long now until
An eighth—
An eighth.
An eighth contemplated with falling passion
A contextless piece of cracker
As he had insisted
As he had boasted.

And so, tall man, for pouring out in hatred
All your hating will,
That which you called nothing
Can remain but nothing still.

He thought he’d be happy about it,
When the thing was done,
But he was not, especially,
And so at once began to draft some charts
That would unanswerably demonstrate,
To all who dared protest, that

Nothing could have made him happier.

A stupid man

Other writers will cover this with more depth and nuance than I’m capable of providing – and, it is likely, far less spiteful fury – so I’ll just say this:

If it is the mark of a rational and freethinking “bright” to hurl insults and abuse at what he firmly believes to be a mere disc of wheat, then baby, I’m fine in the dark.  A man granting reverence to a disc of wheat because he believes it has in some manner touched the divine seems, I’ll grant, pretty weird; a man hating that disc because he knows that it’s nothing special at all is completely stupid and has no business teaching any subject, let alone science.

Vatican finance reports released

The numbers are in for 2007, and after three years of turning a modest profit the Vatican has once again posted a deficit. Although the city state itself managed a profit of $10.5 million on the year’s income of $372 million, certain elements the Vatican’s operational budget registered large losses due to fluctuating world economies and the rapid decline of the American dollar. The deficit overall is roughly $14 million.

There are a number of perspectives on this that are worth exploring. On the one hand – as some will certainly say – $372 million is a lot of money! Just more evidence of that money-grubbing church fleecing the poor to line its own pockets. On the other hand, however, a church running a deficit (and which does so frequently, at that) is hardly lining its pockets, and that $372 million comes, in the first place, from a) willing tourists (who are not to be pitied), b) legitimate business ventures and c) the 1.2 billion Catholics around the world who could, perhaps, even be condemned for their stinginess. Thirty-one cents a head is hardly highway robbery.

Indeed, according to the report, the amount would be smaller even than that; only $135 million is accounted for by donations (twelve cents a head). The rest comes from investments, the rental and sale of property, the Vatican’s lucrative publishing house and other sorts of business.

With the release of this report also came a separate report detailing the results of 2007’s “Peter’s Pence” program, which is a very fine one indeed. The story of its inception is a strange and excellent one, but the result is a highly effective annual drive designed to raise funds for charities particularly admired by the Holy Father. 2007 saw the raising of almost $80 million for disbursment to disaster relief and other causes.

In any event, as mundane as something like a finance report may be, in the case of the Vatican it can make for some very interesting reading. The myth of the Church as some monstrously wealthy entity dies hard, but die it must.

More of the same from Britain

From the land where social planning isn’t just deciding what you’re going to do over the weekend comes another bureaucratic assault on children. This time, though, rather than turning fussy (and even just typical) children into race criminals, the state is striking at them through their parents and other caregivers.

A woman was prevented from taking her own son to school because she hadn’t been screened for a criminal record.

Jayne Jones had been escorting 14-year-old severely epileptic Alex her son each day by taxi, taking specialist equipment with her in case he had a fit.

But the mother-of-two was told she would not be allowed to continue doing so until her details had been run through a Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) check.

The reasons why this should be so are obscure, although the scheme by which such checks would be required attracted a good deal of publicity when it was implemented. The measures are ostensibly meant to prevent child abuse, among other things, but for whatever little good they may do in such circumstances they stand in all other cases as an unnecessary nuisance and a scandalous insult to those who are subjected to them.

All of this might be bad enough if that were as far as it went, but, naturally, it gets worse:

The case came to light only days after it emerged that hundreds of innocent people were branded criminals by the CRB, which was set up to vet people working with children.

Figures seen by The Daily Telegraph showed that in the year to February 2008, 680 people were issued with incorrect information on their background checks by the CRB.

Results delivered with the unapologetic and sightless efficiency that only a state-run bureaucracy can muster. And these are not minor errors of notation or figures, either; one woman was quite reasonably astonished to discover that she had suddenly be branded with a criminal record stretching back almost two decades, and which included offenses like assault on a police officer and violent drunkenness. She must now submit to further inquiries and have her fingerprints checked against every unsolved crime in the country if her name it so be cleared.

Mrs. Jones herself notes with sour irony that if she were able to drive her son to school in her own car rather than having to take a taxi everyday – she and her husband, who works full time, do not have two vehicles – the local council would instead be bending over backwards to accomodate her. Because she’s taking a taxi, however, she is viewed as an escort rather than a parent and as such has been thrown under the bus of the council’s jurisdiction.

And what of that council, anyway? What do they have to say for themselves in response to this idiotic situation?

“The CRB checking is a requirement of our transport provisions in relation to adults travelling on home-to-school transport in the capacity of an escort.

“This is a standard requirement and has been for several years.

“Any adult acting as an escort will, in the public gaze, be viewed as acting with the full acquiescence of the council and hence with its implied authority.

“For the protection of the council and all vulnerable persons in its care it’s essential all those endowed with an authority, implicit or explicit, should meet the security requirements within the transport contract provisions.”

Frakking typical! We may at least commend the council members for their honesty in admitting that preserving their own authority is their foremost concern.

That third sentence is really incredible, honestly. It’s absurd that “the public gaze” could fall upon a woman taking her child to school and think to itself, “why, there goes one endowed with the full authority of the council.” The question remains, though: is this just a conceited assumption on the part of that council, or has it really arrogated to itself so very many powers and authorities that it expects to be first in the thoughts of the people it claims to represent?