It’s all going crazy!
Twice every year there tends to be a disconnect between the world as it normally is and a degree of weirdness, i.e. during the August (end of summer) ‘silly season’, when not much is happening, and then the second half of December, when it’s almost a case of too much going on.
It won’t have escaped the notice of attentive Rust readers that we’re now in the full-on festive season. The first sightings usually occur towards the end of November, when trailers for the big store ‘Christmas advertisements’ get leaked online but – for me – the nailed-on signal that Christmas is upon us comes in the last fortnight leading to 25th December when the newspapers issue their ‘Festive Season’ TV guides, heralding a mass national planning of main meals around the family’s choice of ‘must see’ programming, and the media begins featuring cod-serious stories about how this year Santa’s reindeer are evolving to become smaller and scientists start posting estimates of how many times the speed of sound our esteemed Father Christmas is going to have to travel around the world on Christmas Eve in order to fill up kids’ stockings in time for Christmas morning.
It is about this time that your author abandons all hope and begin hibernating.
Inevitably, perhaps, aspects of life that one tends to regard as normal – such as rationality – seem to go out of the window.
In support of my contention here are some media stories that I spotted this morning on the websites of the British national papers:
CLIMATE CHANGE
Let’s ease into the list with another ‘The End Of The World Is Nigh’ one – a piece by Damian Carrington on climate change, seen on the website of – THE GUARDIAN
POPULARITY CONTESTS
Here’s another classic from the same newspaper. On the Rust we keep pointing out – surely every UK national will have registered this point after the 23rd June EU Referendum – the absurdity of getting involved in any democratic process and/or getting het up over what are essentially ‘popularity contests’, such as the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing and Sports Personality of The Year. Nevertheless, as night follows day, we always get complaints and comments about the unfairness of the results. I caught the last half-hour of the SPOTY extravaganza of Sunday night and could tell instantly that two-thirds of the very-PC, very multi-cultural, list of 16 nominees had zero chance of winning. To all intents and purposes, three of them I’d never even heard of. In the event, allegedly, Andy Murray received double the votes of Alistair Brownlee (who came second). No surprise there, then. But – come on – what did anyone expect?
Once again the message (truth) is that “If you want to choose the best sportsman, or indeed most remarkable sporting achievement, of a particular year, you should appoint a small expert panel and let them get on with it. Once you ask the public to choose, anything might happen – so stop complaining when it does!”
That didn’t stop Brownlee getting media coverage by complaining that Mo Farah had been snubbed – see here – THE GUARDIAN
CINEMA OUTINGS
I should think I have been upon a cinema outing but two or three times in the past ten years (having become put off by the experience of paying through the nose and being surrounded by the Great Unwashed in a public place).
In that context, I suppose I should be grateful to reporter Darren Boyle for giving me an intriguing new reason for at least giving the experience one more try in his article upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL
‘BABY BRAIN’ SYNDROME
I’ve got to hold my hand up, I am a man. Which is why you’ll have to forgive me for some reluctance to accept the feminist/equal opportunity/PC Brigade’s relentless campaign to promote the cause of women at every turn.
This was such a ridiculous act in terms of sporting importance and priority that in an instant it finally drove home to me that the BBC has finally given up any semblance of attempting to be a broadcaster of record. It has been totally captured by the metropolitan liberal elite and it cannot be long now before, in these wonderful new days of the much-sneered-at ‘populism’ and ‘two fingers up to the Establishment’, it gets its rather rude awakening and come-uppance. It has become as biased in what it puts out as Fox News in the United States – and not in a good way, especially given its original lofty and justified reputation for being the greatest news organisation in the world.
Recently we’ve had media ‘liberal elite’ howls of outrage that the recent right-on move to give men ‘paternity leave’ has been taken up by a woefully small number of new fathers. What did the authors of this legislation expect?
We’ve also just had a big media discussion about women’s periods – the ‘time of the month’ and whether or not women should be given special dispensation in the workplace if they are one of those that feels regular pre-menstrual tension etc. This after the PC Brigade have been asserting for years that women should never ever be treated differently from men in the work place. Now they want special privileges. They cannot have it both ways.
Either accept – as David Attenborough’s latest brilliant documentary series Planet Earth II demonstrates so starkly and often – that the males and females of all species are very different, or else deny that, claim that there are no discernible differences between them and then demand that they should always be treated equally in every respect.
You cannot have your cake and eat it – i.e. claim that there are no differences between the sexes … and in the next breath assert that women have certain issues at certain times of the month and therefore should be given special leeway and privileges.
Anyway. That brings me to a piece by Colin Fernandez on the latest scientific research that seems to prove that the female brain (as so many mothers happily admit, laughing) to a degree goes to mush when they have a baby – see here in the – DAILY MAIL
