I’ve been a bit remiss recently, and haven’t been blogging as much as I used to. Yes, the Song Of The Day feature continues unabated but where’s all the other good stuff? Well, to try and put that right, here’s another in my series of Brief Notes. This one is a bunch of news stories that have caught my eye recently, for one reason or another.
File under tolerance
A number of stories over the last few days have highlighted the lack of tolerance of other people’s views / lifestyles / religions / whatever that exists in society today. Which, really, is not a very cheerful thought and doesn’t inspire hope for the future.
A priest in London has come under fire for suggesting that all gay people should have their backsides tattooed with the words “Sodomy can seriously damage your health”. He maintains that he was being satirical, attacking the militant promotion of homosexuality by groups such as Outrage. The type of viewpoint that insists everyone is gay, they just don’t know it yet.
While Rev Mullen’s words might have been a little ill-thought out, is his stand against militant gay groups necessarily wrong? Shouldn’t those on both sides of this argument be able to see the other’s point of view?
Priests are not having a good time of it just lately; Yvonne Hobson, a parish priest in Cornwall, has received death threats simply because she’s a woman priest. Not exactly the peace and love that religion supposedly teaches us, is it? Why does the fact that Ms Hobson is a woman affect her ability to be a priest, or her ability to believe in God? I know they can be a bit insular down there in Kernow, but even so…
Once again, Muslims are getting their knickers in a twist – this time over a novel. Seems that we can’t say anything about their faith – good or bad – without them wanting to firebomb the infidels. As with so many religions, the fundamentalist view seems to be the only one that hits the headlines, and the millions of peace-loving Muslims across the world are tarred with the brush of their violent, bomb-happy brethren.
Every religion has been guilty of this at some point in history, but the modern world offers much greater capacity for death and destruction than existed at the time of the Crusades. Again, isn’t religion, belief in God, supposed to be about peace, love and understanding?
Even Corrie has had to pander to minority opinion recently, after they received complaints about a Scottish character suggesting that he could never support Rangers. Apparently, Rangers fans – being the delicate, sensitive souls that they are – felt hard done by over this, and Corrie bosses have changed future scripts to remove similar references.
Two things about this: first, it’s only television – it’s not real! Second, why is television programming being changed according to the wishes of a very small percentage of the viewing population? I don’t watch Corrie and couldn’t care less about Rangers, but what worries me is the trend we seem to have at the moment to not want to upset anyone, however much of a minority they might be. TV is already bland enough, if we continue on like this there won’t anything left to watch, no programmes out there to question what is happening in the world, no hope for the future.
We’re all green
Starbucks have come under fire again (they must be used to it by now), this time for wasting millions of litres of water every day. Apparently, staff are not allowed to turn off taps that are used to clean spoons; this helps to reduce the growth of bacteria and helps the global chain to achieve health and safety standards. I’ve never been in a Starbucks (because I have a kettle at home and know how to make a cup of coffee for myself), but I can’t imagine that the experience is worth the waste of so much water.
Lung disease is set to kill 83 million people in China over the next 30 years, according to a recent study. Mainly because of widespread use of wood burning stoves for heating and cooking and the fact that the Chinese smoke one third of all the cigarettes in the world.
China has a population of just over 1.3 billion people, crammed into a land mass of about 9.3 billion square kilometres (as opposed to the US where 303 million people live in about 9.1 billion square kilometres), so you’d think they might be glad of the extra room.
Got him at last
We all knew it had to happen some time; OJ has finally been thrown in jail. Not, as you might expect, because they’ve found some way to find him guilty of his wife’s murder after all these years, but because he committed an armed robbery.
But we all know that really he’s been put away because no-one ever believed he was innocent of his wife’s murder.
Not our fault
Apparently, the fact that they shot an innocent man seven times in the head, on a crowded London tube train, is not the fault of the officers with the guns, nor of the Metropolitan police as a whole. It’s the fault of the nation for not preventing the 21 July bomb attempts of which Mr de Menezes was suspected. And, just to make sure that we all feel re-assured, it has been said this sort of thing could happen again. Is DAC Cressida Dick living up to her name?
And finally, a Max Moseley story
Max has been in the news again, saying that Formula One needs to drastically cut costs if it wants to remain credible. Which I think is a bit much, really, coming from the one man who has done more than any other person (except perhaps for Bernie Ecclestone, who insists on taking the sport to tracks that even Ferrari don’t like) to make Formula One a laughing stock across the world.
If Max wants to make F1 credible again, then he should stand down as president of the FIA.
