Monday, March 12, 2007

Whaling is good for you

Just returned from a week's hols. Only one day fishing for no return but it was with a good mate from University days so that was all good. No paper for a week and that was even better.

Dipped the toe tentatively into the newsprint this morning and nothing changes does it. There is another piece of Herald pseudoscience on the front page about DVTs. I think it was something similar that started this thread months ago. Sitting at a desk is more dangerous than taking a long haul flight. There is a picture (mercifully not of an adherent clot in the short saphenous vein) to ram home this horrible truth. It is bollocks of the firt magnitude which makes it prime fodder for the front page I suppose. The quality of the science is just apalling but I guess evidence based medicine doesn't sell newspapers.

We wander aimlessly past Rudman (best thing to do with him) and there is nothing until we come to a rather strange piece about whaling on the comments page. Strange but containig some excellent points just the same. It is written by an Australian of Japanese extraction and talks about the United States empire at one point. Once I'd stopped vomiting I soldiered on and digested his entirely reasonable point as to why the Japanese populace is immune to 'international pressure' to stop whaling. Japan is a very insular country and everything there is Japanese including the language. I lived there for three months about twenty years ago and it was six weeks before I saw anything that was not Japanese (apart from a Ferrari) and that was a Bic ballpoint pen - quite taken aback I was. The vast majority of the population (north of 120 million don't forget) speak no English at all and, here is the rub, don't need to. They are a developed country and don't need ideas from the mainly English speaking West to progress let alone survive. They even surf the web in Japanese. Let us leave aside the supreme intellectual arrogance of the rest of the world telling them how they should behave over a practice that has a cultural significance to them. They cannot accede to our wishes as they have no means of discerning what those wishes may be. We really don't understand. The likes of Comrade Carter trying to foist western ideas in the English language on the Japanese public is like that tribe who stretch their women's necks with neck rings trying to persuade the rest of the world that it is a really good idea - and doing it in their tribal language.

Speaking of Carter, the passing of John Inman last week (Mr Humphries in 'Are you being served?') bought to mind a ironic situation. The chances of 'Are you being served' being screened, let alone made, in this PC society we have forced upon us today are approaching zero. At the same time Government ministers are lauded for their new ageness and progressive outlook on the world by attending one of their colleagues same sex civil union. Hypocritcal ratbags.

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