Still Awaiting the Chariot.

I was reading earlier of a transgender woman who’s in big trouble in Indonesia. She has a TikTok account and was recently trolled by somebody telling her to get her hair cut so she ‘looks more like a man.’ She responded with a video showing her talking to a picture of Jesus and telling him to get his hair cut. A good response, I thought – intelligent, ironic, and amusing. She’s now been found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to 2½ years in jail.

You know, the older I get the more entrenched is my view that the human animal routinely uses its superior intelligence to be the stupidest creature on the plant.

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And should I mention the British Labour Party’s latest hobby horse? I should explain for the sake of those who don’t know that the Labour Party has always been – at least since before I was born – the major party on the centre left of British politics. The Labour Party invented the welfare state after WWII, and welfare has always been a cornerstone of its identity. Now the current Labour Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer have announced their intention to wage war on welfare. They say the country can’t afford it, and they’re probably right, but only because Mrs Thatcher – a diehard right winger – switched the economic points and established the presumption that a more free market policy was necessary in order to follow the American way. (And oh how Mrs T did love the American way.) Meanwhile, the good old Labour Party, born of the need for a moderately socialist alternative and with the promise always to be its champion, still declines to touch the mega rich. So who do we vote for now?

And, of course, we have Trump stomping around casting the grenades of his crazy trade wars right, left and centre, and threatening to erase Canada from the map so the USA can be bigger.

When, I ask, will my little hill o’beans be allowed to get off this crazy world and see whether the land of the dead makes any more sense?