(By the way, the OCD and Germans [some overlap] will be freaking out that none of the travelers are standing in the official footprints…)
Category: Travels
At Last, Some Sanity
…even if it’s coming from the French, surely one of the loopiest nations on Earth.
Smartphones and tablets have been banned from all French schools ahead of the academic year, after a new law was voted through Parliament yesterday. The phone ban will apply to all pupils in France up to the age of 15, as of the start of the new term in September.
I’ve always thought that giving kids smartphones was a recipe for disaster — similar to letting them go play all day and night in a mall, unsupervised. And I don’t want to hear whines of “What about their securityyyy?” either. If that’s so important to Mumsy (or actually, Madamesy), she can buy little Francine or Jacques a flip (dumb) phone. Calls and texts only (and only a few of those, too).
Perhaps — and I know this is a radical thought — the schools can actually keep a closer eye on the little dears for a change.
And if the kids go all whiney at the indignity and the oppressive injustice of it all, we can call it a cheap life lesson.
News Roundup
Today will be snippets of news that are guaranteed to make your eyes squint and Red Curtains Of Blood (RCOB) affect your vision. The fact that most of the items happened in Britishland makes no difference whatsoever. You have been warned.
1) “Help! My Mum’s been stabbed!”
2) “Give us your stuff or we’ll chop up your babies!”
3) Gun ban in the U.K. is still effective
4) #74
6) “You think you Brits are the only ones who can go crazy with a knife? Banzai! ”
7) And lastly, just so we know that the rozzers are going after the serious criminals, there’s this one:
Tearful pensioner, 79, slams police for ‘threatening to prosecute her for feeding her neighbour’s pet’
8) Or maybe they can go after this kid’s parents, for giving him a toy gun to play with.
Now you can all go off and clean yer guns. I know I will.
The Empire Strikes Back
That would be the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of course, or rather its modern-day major components. Fresh on the heels of Hungary’s Viktor Orban causing trouble with the Muzzies in Budapest comes this news from just over the border:
Austria’s right-wing government plans to shut down seven mosques and expel up to 40 foreign-funded imams in crackdown against Islamist ideology
Austria said today it could expel up to 60 Turkish-funded imams and their families and would shut down seven mosques as part of a crackdown on ‘political Islam’ that was described as ‘just the beginning’, triggering fury in Ankara.
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the government is shutting a hardline Turkish nationalist mosque in Vienna and dissolving a group called the Arab Religious Community that runs six mosques.
His coalition government, an alliance of conservatives and the far right, came to power soon after Europe’s migration crisis on promises to prevent another influx and clamp down on benefits for new immigrants and refugees.
In a previous job as minister in charge of integration, Chancellor Kurz oversaw the passing of a tough ‘law on Islam’ in 2015, which banned foreign funding of religious groups and created a duty for Muslim societies to have ‘a positive fundamental view towards (Austria’s) state and society’.
‘Parallel societies, political Islam and radicalisation have no place in our country,’ Kurz told a news conference outlining the government’s decisions, which were based on that law.
‘This is just the beginning,’ far-right Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache added.
I love that the Austria’s (democratically-elected) government is branded “far-right”, when a cursory examination of the parts of their platform not to do with immigration reveals that they’re about equivalent to centrist Democrats (if any such thing still exists) — i.e. closer to the sainted John F. Kennedy’s political philosophy than to anything truly rightwing.
And incidentally, please note the recent electoral victory by an anti-immigrant party in Slovenia (also once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
Anyway, needless to say that this attitude is pissing off the Muzzies, especially the Turks, who’ve been sponsoring these Islamist Fifth Columnist mullahs for decades. Too bad, fuck ’em. You’d think the “Gates Of Vienna” would have warned them, but they’re idiots.
Somebody pass the popcorn…
P.S. If any person of the Disney-lawyerly-persuasion wants to take issue with the title of this post: fuck you. The expression predates Star Wars — and for that matter the entire Disney corporation — by over a thousand years (check Cicero’s writings), so if you think you have a copyright beef with me: you don’t.
Assault Weapons
Wow… even I’m impressed by the weapons being used by the criminals in London as the crime (tidal) wave continues:
Clearly, banning the things won’t do any good, just as banning guns hasn’t worked too well.
And the violence is no longer confined to the scuzzy areas of London and the other cities; I saw from a pic in another article that one of the attacks took place where I took a stroll in London just a few months ago.
I’ve been racking my brain for some kind of solution to this — seriously, I have — and the more I look at it, there are only a few solutions:
- Flood the streets with cops — but the Brits don’t have enough cops.
- Allow the citizens to arm themselves — like that’s going to happen.
- Reinstate the death penalty (especially for scum who do things like this) and get serious about executing dangerous / murderous criminals — that ain’t gonna happen either.
- When (if) they catch the criminals, deport them to a penal colony (like France’s old Devil’s Island of Papillon fame) — wait a minute, that has promise, because if any country in the world owns a bunch of uninhabited, remote islands, it would be the Brits. Granted, it would take a few years to build the accommodations, but we’re talking concrete cellblocks, not the Ritz. And it’s not like they haven’t done it before (hello, Australia!) so there is precedent. (Escape from New York is starting to look less like a dystopian fantasy and more like a blueprint, isn’t it?)
Sadly, though, the Brits don’t seem to have the balls to do any of the above. Utter chaos is coming, if it isn’t there already. What a mess. (Although the Britcops seem to have no difficulty in dealing with hardened criminals like this bad boy…)
If anyone has any bright ideas different to mine, feel free to share them — and I’m not talking fantasies (I can assemble a few of those all by myself); I need workable solutions, because the Brits seem to be at a loss.
Wet
My wallpaper for the past few days (right-click & open in new tab to embiggen):
I know, it would be nice to show a beautiful street scene without graffiti. Good luck finding one anywhere in Europe these days.
Regardless: I need to get back to Paris, and soon.