Confucius, he say about Britain

The other day I was reading Vanessa Hansen's beautifully lucid monograph on Chinese history and stumbled upon a very profound quote.

"Lead them by political maneuvers, restrain them with punishments: the people will become cunning and shameless. Lead them by virtue, restrain them with ritual: they will develop a sense of shame and a sense of participation."

Although the latter statement does not touch on the horrors and vices of Victorian Britain, it does succinctly describe the better sides of its spirit. On the other hand, Blair's Broken Britain, enveloped in the tight blanket of industrially produced PR lies and world's most numerous CCTV cameras, uncannily fits the former description.

Amazing, innit: something said in the 7th century BC still holds true.

On racism and reptiles

A lot of qualities that we call human are acquired through upbringing. Empathy, logic, attention span, manners, they all are introduced and nurtured in children. On the other hand, proper upbringing conditions, subdues or entirely wipes out many inborn qualities. But for social control, we would not consider incest, cannibalism or unwarranted aggression undesirable and repulsive.

It is the so-called R-complex, or the most ancient part of our brain, that we have inherited from the reptiles that is responsible for such primitive behaviour. Our conscious mind does not have control over most of its reactions as they need to be instantaneous for the sake of our survival. Take the flight-or-fight instinct. If we had to employ all the trappings of our civilised logical conscious mind to decide whether we should escape danger or not we would not stand much chance in times of danger.

As human society develops many behavioural patterns built in the R-complex become undesirable, even counter-productive. But they do not go away without an effort. For example, rage, originally a defense mechanism, is now treated in anger control therapy. It used to help our primate ancestors assert their status in the group but nowadays we have different ways to do that.

Xenophobia is another example. It used to be necessary to identify and assault an outsider for the sake of group's or individual survival. Anyone who does not look like us is by default an enemy and has to be attacked, according to the R-complex. However, in our more developed society this is by far and large not the case any more. Real danger comes now in different shapes but our atavistic brain keeps reacting the best way it knows how. Here lies the biological premise of racism. The reptile inside of us instinctively rears its ugly head, even though as developed humans we should know better.

Only relatively recently has it become widely accepted that xenophobia, which also includes racism, is undesirable and shameful. Only a rather small percentage or population has managed to overcome this reptilian urge to attack anyone who does not look or behave like us. Old habits die hard. Most success comes where more effort is involved. Without it, we will keep behaving like dinosaurs.

The neocortex, the most sublime part of our brain, should be able to see a fellow human being beyond superficial appearances. But it only develops through the effort of education. Philanthropy, "the love of human", that transcends races, religions and customs, needs to be developed and nurtured until we are truly more humans than reptiles in what we think and do.

Anglo-Saxon and Continental mentality divide

Anglo-Saxon mentality is about individualism and personal success. As long as I have achieved, nothing else matters, I've deserved it. The wide rich-poor gap typical fro Anglo-Saxon economies testifies to that attitude. The arrogance of the bankers just recently bailed out with public money who have awarded themselves billions in bonuses wouldn't have been tolerated outside the Anglo world.

Collective good and equality are more a consideration in the Continental (Northern) Europe that includes France. Only from there could come rich people demanding to be taxed more to help the country, like it has just happened in Germany.

TV is a Hitler in your home

Have you ever visited someone, often invited, only to find your host glued to the TV too busy following another portion of Big Brother tribulations to pay attention to you, the guest?

Since when has this become acceptable? I once was at a private dinner party where the hostess fell asleep right at the dining table while watching some shite on TV over our heads. When she came to, she continued as if nothing had happened.

I think it defeats the whole purpose of inviting people over to your place and is also insulting because it shows that whatever crap they put on to have you watch commercials is more fun and important for you than your friends.

On the roots of African poverty

I found these two lines from an article about a recent election in Gabon very thought-provoking.

"Gabon is sub-Saharan Africa's fourth biggest oil producer and Africa's second biggest wood exporter, although most of its 1.4 million people live in poverty.

August's election was called after the death of Omar Bongo, one of the world's richest men, who had ruled the nation for four decades."

Now Omar's son will be calling the shots in Gabon. This reminds me of how 400 men who own Russia now keep pumping money out of the country, keeping the majority of its 150 million eking out a barely decent living.

British Victorian administrative bureaucracy model

I have never seen a more chaotic, overblown and utterly clueless bureaucracy as here in the UK and I have lived in Russia and Thailand. Trying to get anything done each time reminds me of a trip through Alice's Wonderland where I get to meet most grotesque creatures who tell me most senseless things and never fail to send me the wrong direction.

I really wonder how it all has come to this as in Victorian times a few thousands of British bureaucrats were running a global empire efficiently and with a sumptuous profit. In the India Office, a handful of public officers were managing a giant, overwhelmingly diverse state 10 times as big as Britain itself and without the help of any fancy office equipment.

I reckon that the downfall of the British administrative tradition happened during WWII when wartime ministries and state control were blown out of any proportion under the premises of "war needs". That monstrous labyrinthine system still lives on in the form of the British welfare state together with its legacy of a direly faulty management model.

I was surprised to find out that there has been no research of how the British Empire was run in its heyday. That alone would have provided an invaluable lesson to this glorious nation that is suffocating under the burden of its ineffectual government.

Britain and socialism: marriage doomed for disaster

Why socialism is failing in Great Britain?

Socialism is all about regulations. The nation's mentality should be naturally inclined towards bureaucratic excellence. National attitude and ways of organising things will manifest itself multiplied manifold in how the administrative system is put together.

Socialism can succeed only ion countries with the natural knack for planning, mostly Northern Europe and France. In the USSR socialism has grown into an oppressive dictatorship as the country had always been such.

The British with their Anglo-Saxon love of liberty and individual freedom , shun central authority. They were the first nation to curb monarch's rights with the Magna Carta. Good socialism requires a good central planning authority and that would go against the grain in Britain. That is why the welfare state in this country is in such a horrendous shambles.

Archbishop of Canterbury slams hedge fund controls

Last month, in a bid to protect London's miserably failed financial industry, Boris Johnson flew to Brussels to stop the EU from introducing new hedge funds regulations. Hiscauuse has just found itself strong supporters: the Church of England's commissioners who include the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. That comes as little surprise as the "'divine institution"has 4.4 billion pounds invested in hedge funds. Any comment would be superfluous.

Caste in Britain: Shops, Parks and Classes

Britain has a special relationship with the USA. But it has an even more special relationship with India, a love-hate relationship of mutual fascination and irritation. Those two are like two sisters who can't seem to live with each other but equally can't without.

One of the major factors in this bond must be the caste/class system. Despite the claim to the contrary it is alive and well in both countries. In Britain class mentality permeates the very grain of society and manifests itself in a multitude of things, events and phenomena.

I love parks. They are the closest approximation to nature an urbanite can find without driving too far. I love to sit on a bench and gather my thoughts together while watching the sun going down or ducks swimming in the pond. When I moved to London from Amsterdam, I right away went to look for such a place of peace and contemplation.

We all know - first-hand or from books - about London's magnificent parks: Kensington and Kew, Regent and Greenwich. But they all are situated in so called posh areas. My first encounter with a working class park left me bewildered. Straight from Amsterdam, where green spaces are meticulously planned an maintained no matter what neighbourhood they are in, I could not believe Wyck Gardens is actually a park. A rundown area with a football gate half-blocked by a graffiti-plastered concrete wall. Random, I thought. Next park I explored in the neighbourhood, Brockwell Park was just a notch better: a rather large green hill with randomly planted trees and a football gate. It looked unloved and desolate.It seemed the only purpose of its layout was to make sure that there is nowhere to lurk around unnoticed.

I tried to maxmise my chances. I googled for success. My search came up with Ruskin Park: "a large and popular Edwardian park full of heritage features". When arrived I found a huge lawn with two perfectly straight strings of trees (8 in each). So much for vegetation. The heritage features turned out a paddling pool and a gazebo. Yes, and a football gate. I guess like a hotel needs a swimming pool and a beauty parlour to qualify for extra stars, a park in Britain is only park when there is a football gate in it. The only Edwardian feature was the row houses that surrounded the park on all sides making it look like a condominium's patio.

And then it dawned on me. Parks in England are also subject to the class system. I live in Brixton, an ethnic working class neighbourhood. Even Tesco here is so depressing that I refuse to go there. Parks here are made according to the idea that working masses deserve their squalor. Anaemic unhealthy edibles in the poor people's supermarkets are what their customers deserve. The gap between more and less affluent areas in one of world's richest cities can be shocking. Some parts look straight out of documentaries about Third World misery. Council housing has despair and destitution built in from the planning stage.

When you are poor in the UK, you are constantly reminded of your ungainly status. Just like workhouses in Victorian times were made to "scare people out of poverty", proletarian areas in London are designed to look and feel horrible. Poor people are supposed to live in rabbit holes, eat junk, have bad teeth and smell funny, well, because they are poor and deserve it.

Britain escaped Enlightenment-inspired revolutions. It emerged into capitalism and further into post-modern society with the feudal mentality intact. Derelict institutions and antiquated customs are being proudly giving lease of life because the mentality that created them is alive and well.

UK ID card proof of address

I knew that Britain cherishes its traditions but I never knew just how it clings to all things whimsical and dusty. Only on observing it first-hand I come to realise how the exactingly logical and systematic French approach must be alien and even repulsive to British heart.

Anglo-Saxon idea of freedom is often used against proposal to introduce some kind of personal ID system. It is true because Anglo-Saxon rules and laws only designate the limits beyond which you are not supposed to go. On the Continent, the rules are guidlines that you are supposed to follow.

However, in modern state with it culture of fear and increasing control over more and more aspects of private lifes and actions, there is no way to do without some form of personal identification. While most Continental countries started using ID cards, the English just can't stop seeing it beneath their dignity. Instead, just not to forfeit their liberty and not to go the dreaded Continental way you need to bring your electricity or gas bill a a prove of domicile! And that is just for abiout anything for signing up at a GP's office to opening a bank account. Need to see a doctor? Where is your gas bill? Logical? Hardly, but at least we keep our freedom.

Do Actually Liberal Populations Exist?

So the gay marriage ruling has just been overturned in California. The state that presents itself as the bulwark of liberalism turns out anything but.

I am very positive that if this day gay marriage and any gay tolerance laws were put to public voting in Holland, they would be overturned just the same by a landslide. The matter of fact is that general Dutch public have never been asked what they thought of their homosexuals. In the country where tolerance traditions include a 300-year Catholic ban, a wholesale sellout of the Jews to the Nazis and a wholesale demonization of all Muslims, liberalism is a thinnest rainbow film on the surface of a deep pool of dyed-in-the-wood redneck narrow-mindedness.

The world-famous Dutch laws on gay marriage, soft drugs, euthanasia and abortion were adopted during the short period in the 90s when the Dutch cabinet was predominantly left. The bills were put forward by the hundreds-strong elite of former student extremists, so called provos (from provocateurs) who also happened to belong to the Dutch upper class. When they grew out of the protest phase, they all made it to the higher echelons of power in the Netherlands. That is how the country ended with a corpus of ultra-liberal legislation. Just a few years later Pim Fortuyn pulled down the 60-year-old taboo of inciting racial and religious hatred self-imposed as the penitence for the Dutch collaboration with the Nazis. That has effectively unleashed the true pent-up feelings of the Dutch burger and farmer, who nowadays gleefully vote CDA - the Dutch equivalent of Southern Baptist Republicans.

The point I am trying to make it that liberal ideas require good education and urban environment. They do not survive in the hicks or among the unenlightened masses. What is true for Holland applies to any human society. Even to Amsterdam which is full of what I call Amsterdam Rednecks (a good name for a baseball team!) - fresh arrivals from the Dutch countryside who moved to the capital for work together with their Bible Belt mentality.

As for ruining the sanctity of marriage and the whole moral values shebang -- leave it to heterosexuals to do it in, they have been doing a pretty good job.

Thailand Fed Up With 'Democracy'

Completely overshadowed by the Olympics and the Georgian war, Thailand's anti- government protests do not scoop much media attention. The same People's Alliance for Democracy that was instrumental in overturning Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006 now demands an end to democracy as unfit to deliver the country from its economic turmoil and social stalemate.

In Thais' living memory every new democratically elected government has unfailingly been only more corrupt, self-serving and inefficient than the previous one. Glib Chuan, disastrous Chavalit, shamelessly populist (fascist, in fact) Thaksin all legitimately came to office on a wave of popular support only to end up with a bang of huge failure and scandal.

Fed up with Western-styled democracy, Thais now demand a sort of Turkish model where the army would have an institutionalized say in national politics and the parliament would be appointed, presumably by the King. Quite contrary to Western perceptions, Turkish military has played a very progressive role in the country's political history as a republic, preventing on numerous occasions Islamist rollback and rampant political corruption.

Parallels here can be seen with the general public opinion in Russia accepting the necessity of a strong authoritarian rule in the country. A decade of lawless turmoil and oligarchic bacchanalia under Western-backed Yeltsin made Russians strongly allergic to foreign-inspired institutions artificially transplanted to their soil.

Whether there is a new worldwide trend towards dismantling democratic structured as failed because of the local social terroir remains to be seen.

Faster, Higher, Stronger... And Conciser!

If the media is the message, what is the Olympic PR machine trying to tell us? Perhaps this.

If since the age of 6 all you ever do during your waking hours is eating, sleeping and swimming, whilst devouring industrial amounts of pasta, pizza and ham sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise that amount to a whopping 12,000 calories a day, some day you will be just able to say, ‘It’s, like, cool, I mean, like, totally cool’ when you’ve won 10 gold medals in a row.

When Pierre de Coubertin set about laying the foundation of the modern Olympic movement in the late 19th century he was inspired by the ideals of Classical Greece and sports education in Anglo-Saxon colleges. Ancient Olympians - as well as US and British boarding school graduates - were gentlemen of the leisure class who on top of sportive also combined scientific and political pursuits. Coubertin became enamoured with the idea of exclusivity probably never envisaging that a century later there will crop up a a tiny specialised über-race of physical hyper-achievers giving the vicarious kicks of exercise excellence to misnourished masses plomped with a 6-pack and potato chips in front of their TVs.

Where Has All The Spunk Gone?

See also here:

• Aphrodisiac Food
• Amsterdam Without Prejudice
• Sperm Shakes Recipes
  
• Sensually Transmitted Wanderlust
• Figging: When You Thought You Knew All About Sex!
  
• One Day In Bangkok
• Morocco's Wonders
• Budapest's Turkish Baths
• New York: The Ultimate City Experience
  
• Moscow: The Splendours of the Wild East
• Prague: In The Land Of Whimsy
• Buenos Aires: Passion And The City
• Nifty Noshing - Ethnic Delights In The Privacy Of Your Home
  

Last weekend Gay Pride came to town. In Amsterdam it is a canal parade. Zonked out attention- seekers in skimpy underwear, bored looking drag queens and an occasional fag hag jadedly bobbed to the rhythm of blaring techno as the overloaded boats slowly passed under the low-hanging medieval bridges.

Year in, year out same feather boas, blue wigs and sequinned boxers are dusted out for the Canal Parade. Ostensibly a gay right empowerment event, in reality it is one worldwide gay meat market, a sure fat chance to exchange bodily liquids with someone new. There is not much going on except for beer guzzling, blowing, snorting, shagging and overpriced disco nights with the same mind-numbing music from the 90s that is supposed to be gay favourite. Even the anchorman on the local Amsterdam TV station that actually bothered to broadcast the tired fest in its entirety kept asking, 'Why has it become so lame?'



Indeed, why? If a specially organized once-a-year event is so jaw-dislocatingly boring, the rest of the year is even less inspiring. Bar proprietors blame the Euro and the net. New currency doubled the cost of going out and online dating services took over the social routine of mixing and mingling with real people. These days you can land a lay with a click of the mouse for the price of your monthly ADSL subscription that in Amsterdam is about what you pay for five Baccardi Breezers.

It may also be that when being gay has stopped being political it took away the fizz of being different and having to stand up for your rights. Now it just boils down to the same old shag. After all sex is the only thing that unites the so-called gay community.

Trying to compete with Gaydar and Chatboy.nl, all Amsterdam's gay discos have installed cruising facilities, so nowadays a lot of action takes place on the premises. The icing of the going-out cake has become the cake itself. You do not need to socialize, dance around, stay on the prowl - you can just go upstairs, pounce, shoot and go back home. The chasing has been removed from the chase, all is left is the shortcut to ejaculation. The energy that used to go into dancing and having a good time now goes directly on sex. Dance clubs offering easy solutions for the punters have morphed into semen-exchanging facilities.

Amsterdam gay night life has become as flaccid as a post-coital penis. There is no need for it to stay hard all night. It gets spent before anything starts.

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There actually is a number of ways to boost your sexual drive with food. I have collected some free tips about aphrodisiac food. Please have a read and let me know what you think!

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See also here:

• Amsterdam Without Prejudice
• Sperm Shakes Recipes
  
• Sensually Transmitted Wanderlust
• Figging: When You Thought You Knew All About Sex!
  
• One Day In Bangkok
• Morocco's Wonders
• Budapest's Turkish Baths
• New York: The Ultimate City Experience
  
• Moscow: The Splendours of the Wild East
• Prague: In The Land Of Whimsy
• Buenos Aires: Passion And The City
• Nifty Noshing - Ethnic Delights In The Privacy Of Your Home

Amsterdam Rednecks

There are a lot of people in Amsterdam who have never been there. Well, physically they are present within the city limits, in the tightly-knit continuum of work – supermarket – home – pub, which has precious little to do with the bustling cosmopolitan port of Amsterdam, a melting pot of nations, cultures and cuisines, the springboard to the world.

Even among the supposedly enlightened educated middle-class professionals I know people who have never met a gay person, have never eaten a shrimp and whose idea of a vacation abroad is going camping to Belgium in a caravan stocked with frozen Dutch food. Amsterdam may be host to 160 nationalities but most people stay in their ethnic comfort zone, hanging out exclusively with their own kind.

It must be the same deal everywhere: only a fraction of big cities’ populations are interested in international lifestyles. Tokyo may have baffling scores of authentic ethnic restaurants frequented by locals but that is as far as 9 out of 10 Tokyoites venture out in their kokusaika (move towards a more cosmopolitan society) quest. “Japanese restaurant on Monday, Indian on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Carribbean – not too spicy please” may be a New York socialites’ lunch schedule but they wouldn’t be able (and care) to locate on the map where the cuisine comes from.

Amsterdam is world- renown as a vibrant bulwark of liberalism, the beacon of tolerance and multi- culturalism but in reality more than a half of the autochtoon (ethnic Dutch) populace here are first- generation arrivals from staunch Protestant and Catholic villages where lifestyles and views are not much different from the American Bible Belt. The official Dutch social policy of verzuiling (pillarisation), still alive in practice and people’s minds today, likens the Netherlands to a sail ship, where the sails (classes, races and religious groups) hang separately on separate masts but all contribute to propelling the Dutch ship forward.

With such live-and-let-live attitudes prevalent in the city, the pressure to integrate is non-existent. Acceptance is never asked for, while doggedly cultivated indifference is marketed as tolerance. Back home in the Dutch flatland hicks, those very same recent urbanite converts would time after time keep electing Christian Democrats whose programme is a very far cry from what we think of as Dutch liberalism. In the city, tolerance exists on the level of general ideas, as the Dutch Dream, a self-image that probably cropped up as a defence mechanism against the sense of national guilt about Dutch collaboration during the WWII.

This carefully cultivated identity appears more and more divorced from reality as daily challenges of living in a racially mixed society prove too much to handle for tender Dutchness. Many burgers find refuge in their set daily routines and racist tabloid headlines. But then again, this is nothing new nor endemically Dutch.

Does A Gay Identity Actually Exist?

Does it actually exist? The only thing that binds people in gay bars is that they don’t have sex with women. Otherwise, they have as much in common as any random crowd in the street. Unlike Blacks, Asians, the disabled or women there is not a single cultural or physiological trait that unites homosexuals into a group, save the preference for certain ways of disposing of bodily liquids. That is more a hobby than a valid identity. The public image of flamboyant prancers in feather boas and skimpy underwear reflects the lifestyle of but a loud minority of attention-hungry extroverted queers, the so called scene.

Homosexual identity is as valid as heterosexual identity. You don’t hang out with other heteros just because you prefer sex with women – unless it’s a singles bar or a swingers party. Same applies to gays: they get together when they crave a cock. At all other times they have as much common ground as any randomly picked heterosexuals.

Constructed as a tool to fight for the right to have sex with one's partner of choice, gay identity now backfires at the average homosexual Joe who has nothing to do with the perceived public image of his fellow cock-lovers.

The most admirable concept of sexuality can be found in medieval Japan before stale Victorian prudery arrived there in the late 19th century. Having no biblical story of Sodom to refer to, the Japanese treated sexuality as a whole - there was no subdivision into heterosexual and homosexual. Any genitals-related activity was just sexuality, a practice, not an identity. The only taboo and persecuted practice was sexual violence and coercion. Instead of pigeon-holing every minute deviation from the missionary penis-in-vagina procreational standard, Japan embraced sex in all its manifestations. Perhaps, a lesson to learn for the West.

The Whole World Is Israel Now

There were times when enormous queues were lining up for thorough frisking and embarrassing questioning only for El-Al flights. Only Israel-bound flights had plain-cloth marshals eavesdropping on passengers’ conversations, shoe-searching and meticulous customer background checks days before the actual check-in.

What used to be an eyebrow-raising curiosity, has become a daily routine for all airline passengers. The whole world is Israel now.

The chain reaction that has put everybody’s reality on fire is like this. Great Britain sponsored a forceful removal of Palestinian Arabs in favour of the fledgling Jewish state. Courtesy of a powerful Zionist lobby the US of A took over in unconditional military and financial support of Israel. UK and USA in the eyes of the Moslem world equal the West. Effectively anyone with Europeoid features can thus be viewed now as an instigator of Palestinian suffering. The controlled explosion of the Twin Towers planted in our brains the image of Arab facial features as synonymous with terrorism.

Overnight we have the whole Western world at acrimonious loggerheads with the entirety of the Moslem world. A perfect indestructible enemy for a perfect perpetual war has been created. The whole world is Israel now.

America’s Love Affair With The Gas-Guzzler

They have been through it many times but they never seem to learn. 2008: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have to close factories and lay out thousands of workers. The reason is still the same as back in 1973, 1985 and 1992 – their cars are crap. They are too big, they eat too much gas. You’d think having been through so many petrol price hikes last 35 years would have taught you something. Well it has not and there is a good reason for it.

Japanese companies have been betting on fuel-efficient cars ever since they put out their Toyopets and Datsuns on the international market. The reasoning was logical and straightforward: in the long run, everybody wants a smaller gas bill – never mind short-lived fads when SUVs and muscle cars suddenly become hip best-sellers. The keyword here is “the long run”. American CEO’s can ill afford laying out long-term strategies that don’t bring immediate short-terms – or they get a quick sack from their shareholders at the next annual meeting.

Japanese car-makers are accountable only to their investors: mother companies who are most of time huge semi-governmental banking corporations all too familiar with the concepts of long-term gains. They are, to put it modestly, rich enough to brush off temporary losses when a promise of long-terms gains is in sight. Their portfolios are so diversified that one way or another they make profits anyway.

American share-holders are hedge funds and holdings. Their objective is to squeeze more money out whatever they invest in - the quicker the better. They need immediate profit every year to support their lavish lifestyles. They are more concerned if their wives’ custom convertibles and their children’s private prep school fees are paid for rather with what will become of the automotive industry in a 10-years’ time because by then they may have sold their Chrysler or Ford shares and invested in something else – as long as it keep paying their bills.

Thus, year in year out, American automotive CEO’s have to please their investors instead of developing sustainable development strategies for their companies. And, year in year out, Pontiac, Mercury and Dodge are losing ground in their home market. Thousands upon thousands conveyor belt operators keep getting sacked to make sure that rich men’s investment portfolios stay profitable. And one after another, packs of failed top managers leave with super fat severance packages to keep running havoc in the automotive industry.

Greenland Melts Into Independence

Greenland, a Danish protectorate since 1721, has nurtured dreams of independence that so far failed to materialize - mostly because 40% of its GDP come from Denmark’s economic assistance. In other words, between material comfort and the privilege of having your own bureaucracy Greenlanders have always plumped for the former.

Bizarrely enough, recent tendencies of polar ice melting gave world’s largest island’s freedom drive an unexpected boost. As retreating glaciers have uncovered huge deposits of mineral resources, prospectors from mining companies and metallurgical conglomerates are flooding the country. As an even more welcome piece of news, offshore, where polar bears used to roam, the U.S. Geological Survey alleges 31 billion barrels of undiscovered oil and gas.

If boring, drilling and digging go unhitched, Greenland will effectively trigger a self-perpetuating bonanza: fossil fuel extracted off its shores will speed up the global thaw, easing access to more and more natural resources. Who knows, there may even come the day when Greenland’s present colonial masters will learn to bend over backwards to bask in the kind of special relationship Britain nowadays likes to think it has with the USA.

In that light, the episode in a new BBC drama Burn Up where an Inuit activist lady performs self-immolation in protest against Greenland ice melting seems a bit far-fetched. Or she must have been anti-independence.

The Rich Can Do No Wrong

The European Commission has backed a plan to give 1bn euros (£800m) of unspent EU farm subsidies in aid to farmers in Africa. What a selfless, generous gesture! You would think.

That money would be used to boost the supply of fertiliser and seeds for African farmers, helping increase production over the next two years, said commission spokesman Johannes Laitenberger. Now would you have any doubts where that supply will be procured?

When you are rich, whatever you do you only become richer. In a well researched and written-about historical instance, the super-profits the Arab states made thanks to the 1972-3 all eventually ended up in Western banks where Arab oil barons traditionally keep their money.

Back to the African aid pledge: there is another sideline boon to the whole scheme. Now that European post-imperialism has by large abandoned Africa in favour of its own backyard in Eastern Europe, Africa's sentiment starts leaning towards China whose investment bears no demands for more human rights. Losing a market of scale and a major supplier of raw materials to the irresistible force of ever-growing China may prove to painful to the EU. A double-handed 1-billion deal may not be enough to sway Africa back to its former colonial masters but it is a nice try anyway. And at any rate Europe has nothing to lose. When you are rich, you can't go wrong.