God save the queen... and King George II
Now that the republicans have both houses of congress all wrapped up, if
preaty much King George II, nothing to stop them but the supreme court, and
as soon as a justice kicks the bucket it will be 5/4 the wrong way. Kiss
your personal freedom (and air) bye bye and dont mind the bar code tatoo. If
you're not worth a mil, you're not worth anything at all.
And is it just me or are they pulling an 80's style pention fund raid on the
United Corporation of America? (we're no longer anything like a union of
people, or states, just companies, so just stop pretending already)
Wonder when the world will wake up and realize 250 years later we have
become the british imperialist pigs we fought against and start tossing
their McDeath burgers, coke, and disney videos into the harbor. Wonder how
much more of this the public will take before the eminem-listening nothing
to lose poor folks get restless. The founding fathers will be so proud...
- Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
beberg@mithral.com
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ucrr/20010317/cm/yank-bashing_in_bashed_britain_1.html
Yank-bashing In Bashed Britain
LONDON -- "Britain is now the leper of Europe." So said Hugh Byrne,
Ireland's minister for marine and natural resources, last Tuesday.
It's been that kind of week. It began with the German newspaper, Suddeutsche
Zeitung, editorializing: "England is an island of sick animals. The only
thing missing is chicken full of salmonella and fish riddled with worms." It
ended with Nick Brown, the minister of agriculture here, announcing the
government's plan to contain foot-and-mouth disease: killing, burning and
burying 1 million healthy cows, sheep, goats and pigs.
The plan is to kill every farm animal within three kilometers (1.8 miles) of
farms with infected animals. It is a scheme developed during the Middle
Ages. And the reaction on continental Europe has been medieval. A French
farmer whose animals have been infected by the virus carried across the
channel by British sheep was quoted in newspapers here as saying: "Go away.
This evil has come to us from your whore of an England again."
In Paris, Le Monde said: "You never hear debates about ethics or morals in
Great Britain, just about saving money. It's no wonder the place is falling
apart." In Madrid, El Mundo said: "The shoddy state of agriculture and
cattle-breeding in Great Britain looks set to carry on giving us cause for
concern."
The anger of the "New Europe," supposed to be a bit more unified than it was
during the dark ages, is caused by the fact that the British refuse to
vaccinate farm animals, basically because it costs too much. Capitalism
above all. It is cheaper to kill them, because if infected animals survive,
which most all of them do, their production of milk (and meat) is reduced.
So are profits
There is also some suspicion that Prime Minister Tony Blair, leading his
Conservative opposition by 26 points in the latest Gallup Poll, wants the
farm epidemic issue out of the news before the elections he has called for
May 3. The tabloid Daily Mail summed it up this way in an editorial last
Wednesday:
"So it has come to this. Police in the countryside are taking shotguns away
from their owners to prevent despairing owners from turning the weapons on
themselves. ... The government seems intent on downplaying this crisis in
order to press on with the May 3 election."
It has also come to this: The British are trying to divert a little bit of
unwanted attention from their broken systems with some Yank-bashing. Or,
perhaps, just Bush-bashing.
The British, in conversation, seem to have seen through President Bush
sooner than his fellow citizens. He is discussed and presented here as just
another American knee-jerk right-winger.
Part of the British gripe with Bush's America at the moment is the U.S.
refusal, in former Yugoslavia, to commit our troops to any action in which a
soldier might get hurt. Europeans have known for quite a while that the
American plan to give weapons and support to the Kosovo Liberation Army --
as long as Slobodan Milosevic was in power in Belgrade -- would lead to
those weapons eventually being pointed at the NATO army occupying Kosovo.
Now that is happening, just as American arming of fundamentalist militias in
Afghanistan led to the Taliban's rule of that sad country -- and to more
sophisticated terrorism.
The British do not object to the policy; after all, they ruled half the
world by arming locals to fight each other. What makes them mad is that when
locals begin shooting at us, we run home. Or we bomb. Which leaves others to
clean up the mess left by the superpower.
That said, the main complaint now is Bush's claim that our CO-2 doesn't
stink. The British and other Europeans were flabbergasted when the president
announced that he did not intend to keep his promises to reduce our
monstrous carbon dioxide (actually odorless) into the warming and shredding
atmosphere. In The Guardian last Friday, our president was described as
"breathtakingly irresponsible ... spineless ... pathetic ... selfish ...
arrogant ... ignorant ... not a man of his word ... an ass on gas."
The new president, the press here quickly concluded, may or may not be a
nice guy, but he represents only his SUV superpower. Bush's Americans can do
whatever they feel like doing whenever or wherever they feel like doing it.
If you don't like that, move to a different planet!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:14:21 PDT