The world press and most of the world’s politicians have been condemning Robert Mugabe and all his works for quite some time now – and though in some cases there has been more than a whiff of kettles calling pots black, they have been right to do so. Mugabe is a monstrous waste of space and in any half-decent universe he would have been forced to suffer as much and die as painfully and slowly as the people and the very country he has ruled and abused for so long.

I don’t need to tell you that the universe doesn’t do decent, or just, or fair. So, most of what has happened in the Zimbabwe case is that various organisations, the media and our show-boating politicians have been making angry & hurt & concerned noises on camera – and almost none more so than the Labour party, which still forms Her Majesty’s Grossly Incompetent government.

Mostly incompetent, that is, since Britain’s Home Office have been sending a lot of letters lately which didn’t get lost in the mail, were not abandoned on trains or stored on now vanished comaputer disks – and more’s the pity, and much more’s the shame:

Letters obtained by The Observer show that the Home Office continues to order failed Zimbabwean asylum seekers to return home in the face of mounting violence. A removal letter, sent at the end of May to an exiled London-based member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, states: ‘The support that you have been provided with is to be discontinued … You should note that there is no right to appeal against this decision … You must now leave the United Kingdom.’

It’s one of those questions that keeps popping up when you look at human history: Who are the foulest creatures on earth? Monsters like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and, for the moment still on a smaller scale, Robert Mugabe, or the persons, institutions and states that tolerate, condone and sometimes even actively support them? To a certain point monsters just follow where their perverse nature and sick minds lead them. Most of them may follow these urges willingly, gleefully even, but insanity is most probably part of the whole sorry package.

There are no such ‘excuses’ for the ones who choose to live with and accommodate these bloody dictators. Hitler’s vision of a pure, Aryan race was as fatally flawed as it was murderously obscene – but how would you have described a British government at that time who would have supported this policy? Then Prime Minister Chamberlain was happy to sign an agreement which delivered some of Germany’s neighbours into the hands of the Third Reich.

What if he or his successor, like the Home Office now, would have gone further and would have written a letter to the Jewish refugees that had escaped to England, politely informing them that they had to return to Germany and to the waiting ovens, because: ‘The support that you have been provided with is to be discontinued … You should note that there is no right to appeal against this decision … You must now leave the United Kingdom.’?

History has been unkind to the memory of Prime Minister Chamberlain but it should spit on the graves of all those inside the Home Office and the rest of the government who sent these letters and rubber-stamped this despicable policy.

The dubious pop group Nazareth once recorded a song called ‘Love hurts’ which became quite undeservedly famous.

These days, it’s not just love that hurts, though – not with the cost of oil being nowhere near a barrel of laughs:

Last week Angelina Eversole, 34, from Kentucky, was charged with selling prostitution services for a $100 (£50) pre-paid petrol voucher, effectively offering herself for 25 gallons of unleaded. Mrs Eversole’s arrest marks the latest consequence of the rising petrol price, which has increased 39 per cent in 12 months.

Ah yes, the oldest of professions paying homage to the mighty oil dollar – or petrol voucher, in a pinch. The meter is running, indeed.

I wonder how this might influence the romantic world of love, or the passionate realms of sex. Will we ever be able to record post-coital conversations like this?

“Was it as good for you as it was for OPEC?”

Or:

“Did the world move for you too? No, those were US army tanks rolling into Saudi Arabia.”

Interesting times, my friends, interesting times indeed.

Ah well, this is a strange one.

You have heard of James Bond, of course, and his eternal secretary, Miss Moneypenny. So now, say goodbye to Bond – and the Money – and let’s welcome the newest spy on the block, or on the road to blockbuster status. Meet Mr Penney, the Welsh answer to some, as of yet, unpronounceable question:

A Welsh stripper who set a car ablaze in Moscow is reportedly being investigated for suspected links to British intelligence. Alistair Penney, a 38-year-old dancer from Cardiff, was detained on Wednesday as he ran from a burning Mercedes Benz in a suburb that has seen a spate of arson attacks on parked vehicles. Mr Penney allegedly told police: “I was in a bad mood. The sky was grey and it started to rain. Suddenly I saw a Mercedes. It was so old so to cheer myself up I decided to set the tyre on fire.”

Russian newspapers quoted police sources as saying that they were suspicious of the way Mr Penney had contradicted himself and suggested that there were other indications that pointed to the fact that he could be a spy. Among the possessions found on him was a map, they said.

Ah yes, the foreigner was in possession of a map! That clinches it, of course…

One thing though, rumours of Russia’s new-found wealth must not be exaggerated after all. It used to be that the poor people in Wales had no other option than to work in the mines, coughing up their lungs while singing in their justly famous choirs whenever they were allowed to pop up for a moment. In between then, Maggy Thatcher and her ridiculous socialist sidekick Arthur Scargill managed to shut down the mines – and so, for a few decades, an ever more impatient world was forced to listen to the singing of unemployed Welshmen who stubbornly refused to cough up their lungs and die on stage anymore.

Now, thanks to kind mister Putin’s efforts, the Welsh have found a new place to go to and seek their fortunes: as strippers in Moscow’s many, many clubs for the criminally wealthy and the terminally bored.

Oh yes, I almost forgot but I would like to ask Russia’s secret service to be merciful to our stripper arsonist. After all, it was an old car – and German to boot, which would, in the old days, have made Mister Penney almost automatically a Hero of the Soviet Republic.

Furthermore, it could have been so much worse. He could have been singing instead!

Now, until I read the following article I hadn’t even heard of the Comoros Islands. For those as ignorant as me: They lie off the West coast of Africa and, according to some new report, they are even worse equipped to deal with global warming than Bangladesh.

If you don’t know Bangladesh: to say a country has more to fear from the temper tantrums of mother nature is the equivalent of saying that someone has even less chance to win the Nobel peace prize than the love child of Robert Mugabe and Cruella de Vil.

So, it’s safe to say that, if even half of what most people say about global warming is true, the Comoros Islands are well and truly fucked.

Which, to be honest, will, amidst all that global warming, still be very cold comfort to be benighted people of Canada, if you can believe another finding by that aforementioned report:

Canada is the best country to move to if you want to escape the dangers of climate change. A new study of nations’ vulnerability to the impacts of global warming found Canada was the most secure, while the Comoros Islands, off the coast of Africa, are least equipped to deal with future dangers.

What, you think that is good news for Canada?

How refreshingly naïve… You do know who Canada’s neighbours are, don’t you? – and no, I’m not talking about a few forlorn polar bears that are desperately trying to hang on to the last few melting ice cubes floating around, as if they were the last straws in a sea of cocktail party despair, without even the benefit of bad disco, little fluorescent umbrellas and Maraschino cherries.

No, I’m talking about the US of A, of course – and talking of cocktails, or wodka, anyway, remember the outrage when Absolut wodka did that ad about Texas being a part of Mexico? In their ‘In an Absolut world’ campaign, they had these maps on huge billboards that showed a world in which the American-Mexican war had not happened.

What did happen then was that the USA quite liked the look of what’s now the state of Texas and simply annexed it. This, of course, is not unique in the history of countries. Countries are like schoolyard kids – and when a big bully sees that a smaller kid has something that he likes, the former will simply take it away from the latter.

Anyway, if that report on global warming is right then Canada has just won one of the most dubious sweepstakes possible: to live on the most desirable bit of real estate, next to a country that’s still one of the mightiest and greediest on earth.

Many Canadians who will be reading this report and who know their history, will now nervously look at each other – and over their shoulders, to the South, and softly murmur:

“Oh, say! can you see…?”

Race remains a tricky issue. In the States, it is often said that there is this serious offence, ‘Driving while black’, which, of course, is a joke – sort of…

These days, in most of the West, you’re as likely to get into trouble for ‘Talking while white’ as it is for differently shaded people to be discriminated against. The PC rule book is somewhat more complicated than the old Ten Commandments but breaking these PC commandments will get you into trouble a Hell of a lot faster than disregarding those old laws will.

Still, even the authors and guardians of the 1001 PC Commandments would have some trouble quantifying and qualifying the following, no doubt, grave sin:

A white man has admitted of racially abusing three white security guards. Jonathan Wicks admitted using abusive or insulting words which were racially aggravated, after calling the security men “honky wannabe cops.”

Which he did, by the way, when they caught him stealing a bike. As someone who has had a few bikes stolen as well, I’m with the new mayor of London who once said that bicycle thieves should be summarily shot – but that’s an entirely other matter.

Anyway, there’s this saying about the pot calling the kettle black. Admittedly, this is more a case of a (KKK) sheet calling another sheet white.. or no, it’s more bizarre, of course: like one lily of the field calling another lily a mofu black dahlia, or something.

Headache inducing stuff, whichever way you look at it.

Still, let this be a lesson to all those stupid white (middle class) kids who want to adopt a black ghetto look & sound. Just don’t. You will not look cool but merely incredibly silly – and you will most likely end up stealing bikes, abusing security guards and being shot to death by Boris Johnson.

Now, I’m not a vegetarian but I have to say that I do find the following story quite disturbing:

Peter Stanton bought a bag of Asda frozen ribs and chicken wings for his daughter’s birthday barbecue and found a chicken’s HEAD inside. He was about to grill the defrosted wings at the bash for nine-year-old Georgia when he glimpsed a beak. “The kids were horrified,” he said.

Now, where to begin?

Okay, let’s start with the tabloid newspaper, which seems to think we might not understand the full horror of this story unless it prints the word ‘head’ in bold CAPITALS.

It may surprise the editor of the Sun but I’m pretty sure that most people are aware that chickens do indeed come not just with wings but also with HEADS. Granted, when you aim just to buy the former you might be surprised to find the latter as an unsolicited extra but maybe not THAT SURPRISED.

Which, obviously, leads to the following. These days, most people do tend to see any meat products as being totally unrelated to the animal that’s killed to provide it. It used to be that our butcher shops had animals hanging from hooks and lying around in various states of undress. In those days, there was, to use that strangely appropriate phrase, no mystery meat. Meat came from animals and even if the people going home with bits of beast hadn’t actually killed the animal, there was at least still some connection between predator and prey.

These days, most people buy their meat in supermarkets, where these bits of beast are presented and packaged as if these pieces of meat grew from some tree in the Garden of Eden. There might be a cartoon of a happy smiling pig, cow or chicken on this highly hygienic package, just so that people can give it a name but there is no longer any serious reminder that we are dealing with the corpse of an animal that was kept and slaughtered for our pleasure.

Call me old-fashioned but I would prefer to be reminded of the truth, whenever I buy some meat. I don’t feel an urgent need to pray to the soul of the dead animal, as some of the native American tribes used to do, thanking brother bear, beaver or what have you for the meat that he or she provided for us but I do think it is fitting to acknowledge and respect the fact that real animals are indeed hurt and killed in the process of making our meals.

So, no, my sympathy does not lie with the editors of the Sun, or the angry father and his horrified kids. Me, I love the idea that, for once, those who buy these wings & ribs, these bits of mass-produced, ill-treated and industrially slaughtered animals, got the opportunity to see and acknowledge that these ‘treats’ were once part of a living animal.

In other words, more heads, wings, legs, eyes, beaks and what have you in these prissy, pretty & pristinely packaged corpses, please!

More uplifting news from the Western front:

Barbara Wilding, the Chief Constable of South Wales, has warned that gang culture is replacing family life among a generation of disaffected young people.[She] says family ties have been abandoned in place of “tribal loyalty” among young gang members, who have become “almost feral”. She said that social breakdown means violence and drugs have become a way of life in deprived parts of many larger English cities.

Well, I’m not the Chief Constable of South Wales – Hell, I’ve never even been to Wales – so I’m not in a position to comment on her findings and conclusions.

So, end of column…

Well, no.

Again, I don’t know enough about these deprived parts of South Wales and/or the ‘many larger cities’ that she is talking about. I follow the news like most other people but that is no substitute for real experience. Nevertheless, it’s almost inevitable that, whenever people talk about societal problems, the famous breakdown of the family will get a mention. This is interesting, and most probably wrong, for two reasons.

One, it assumes that ‘healthy’ or ‘functioning’ families are somehow crucial for the well-being of the society at large. Of course, when people talk about the breakdown of these smallest societal units, they mostly refer to the effects this has on the children, who then, like the Chief Constable claims, may run feral etcetera. This assumes that (in healthy/functioning families) parents are actually the only or at least the most important ones who raise their children to become functioning members of a well-functioning society.

It is, however, highly questionable whether that is true. Everybody knows examples of parents who proudly state that their children don’t get sweets at home or are forbidden to watch certain movies or play certain games. These parents suffer from the kind of delusion that most moral societal crusaders suffer from (and our Chief Constable in part.) Namely, that what these parents have created as ‘home rule’ makes a blind bit of difference to what their children will do the moment they close the front door of the family fort behind them.

If children are not allowed certain things (sweets, movies, games) at home, they are certain to enjoy them elsewhere, with their peers, if they so desire – and there lies the crux of the matter. Especially in the West, there is this shared illusion that the family unit is the place where children are raised, where values and moral and practical lessons are taught by the parents and absorbed by their children. While all of that is true to a certain extent, this almost never acknowledges a more important truth, namely, that children are also (and maybe even primarily, after they leave the house for the first time) educated and moulded by their peers.

In other words, children from poor and/or ‘failing’ families who turn to gangs are doing, more or less, what children always do: they turn to their peers for their instruction/education. Gangs, in this sense, are like any other club, be it a structured club like a sports, scouting or church organisation or the more informal ‘gangs’ of kids playing football, assembling in certain formations in the school grounds etcetera.

A second point of interest is that, when people talk about (the breakdown of) the family, they do so as if a time-honoured, venerable institution is under threat. This, however, is the strangest of illusions. The family unit (or nuclear family) as we know it in the West, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until (by and large) the Industrial Revolution there was no such thing as a nuclear family for most of the people. What existed were extended family & neighbourhood networks, which enabled people to survive. Within these structures, grown-ups associated with grown-ups and children lived with children of their age. Supervision of the smallest children was left to whatever older grown-ups (or older children) were at hand at any given time. For the rest people lived and were raised and educated in generational layers.

For various, mostly practical reasons the Industrial Revolution spelled the end of this former and looser ‘family’ life and introduced what we now know as the nuclear family. In other words, when people argue that the breakdown of the family is the cause for some, most or all of our ills, they forget that, in the West, society has been able to get by for centuries and centuries without the benefit of such a nuclear family.

This column has grown long enough as it stands now, so I won’t even try to go into what may be the real causes of society’s ills. Still, my instincts say that it is unlikely that the smallest societal unit (the family) can be the most, let alone the sole one responsible for them. As I already said, children are as much (and maybe more thoroughly and efficiently) raised by their peers as by their parents and the family unit an sich is also a Johnny-come-lately on the Western societal scene.

So, I suspect that, if there is something wrong with society that makes for all those big headlines in our newspapers and which causes our Chief Constables these sleepless nights, it must be something in the overall structure of our society that makes us ill. Think of it, perhaps, as a variant of the sick building syndrome.

So, maybe what we are doing, when focusing so much on the family unit, is no more than trying to rearrange the furniture inside a building that has much bigger, structural problems.

You have heard how the Apostles in the New Testament admit that Jesus hung out with the poor, and the sick, and the kids - and with hookers…

Well, even knowing that and being aware of the fact that our curiosity is as strong as our flesh is weak, the following bit of news still comes as a surprise:

SEX workers are bracing themselves for a rush of business next month - when thousands of devoted Catholic pilgrims flock to Sydney to see the Pope. From July 15-20, over 200,000 pilgrims will descend on the Australian city for a six-day celebration of the Catholic faith for World Youth Day. The festival will culminate in a mass by Pope Benedict XVI at nearby Randwick Racecourse on July 20.

But the city’s brothels are also celebrating at the potential flood of business. Sydney brothel ‘Xclusive’ is laying on extra workers to cope with demand and is expecting a hike of up to 200 per cent in business during World Youth Day. A spokeswoman for the Bondi Junction house said: “The World Council of Churches, when they had their congress in Canberra back in the 1990s, that was the best business period ever.

I do love the fact that the Pope will address the masses at a racecourse, by the way. Still, why it doesn’t have the same allure as the (Sermon on the) Mount, at least, when the attendants get bored they can think, ‘One pretty pony, two pretty ponies’ etcetera.

Back to those brothels.

You have to worry for these girls’ health though – and I do hope they will not fall into the temptation of accepting a bit of extra money, when all those good Catholics insist that they don’t want to use a condom, because the Pope doesn’t like them.

Here’s a strange story for you:

Police on Sunday were investigating vandals‘ spray-painting of dozens of city vehicles here, some with disparaging messages about the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Authorities think the vandalism to about 60 vehicles, estimated at $10,000 in damage, was done Saturday afternoon. The vehicles were parked across from City Hall and investigators said culprits tagged messages including “Obama smokes crack” and a racial epithet.

Don’t you love it when they say ‘racial epithet‘…? Leaving all of us to wonder: ‘Darn, now what could THAT word have been?!”

Anyway, though I applaud the political engagement of today’s vandals, I have to say that their campaigning methods leave something to be desired.

Not that there is anything wrong with negative campaigning – or to avoid euphemistic epithets: nothing wrong with lying. Politicians do it all the time. “Read my lips, no new taxes,” was a good one. As was: “I did not have sex with that woman.”

Mind you, that’s just the politicians themselves: the real dirty work is done by the ‘Swift boating’ people on both sides. So, vandalising some 60 vehicles to get over a political message is quite alright. Laudable even.

Still, one bit of advice: People don’t like it when others spray-paint their cars with slogans. So, chances are that when you spray the message ‘Eat at McDonalds’ on somebody’s car, that person will become an instant KFC convert.

In other words, if you want to campaign against mister ‘racial epithet’ and you have all those lovely spray-painting cans lying around, better make that message ‘Vote Obama!’, if you want those car owners to vote for McCain.

(Of course, if these spray-painting campaigners belong to the Obama camp, I take back all I’ve said above. Then they are, to quote the incumbent president, already doing a heck of a job – but in the spirit of Karl Rove, of course, and not of that clueless ‘Brownie’ guy.)

Norman Whitfield wrote this song, ‘War,’ asking what it was good for. ‘Absolutely nothing,’ was the answer.

Obviously, Halliburton and the arms industry at large will not agree with that sentiment – and neither will most politicians who are not doing as well at the polls as they think they should be doing.

Would George Bush have been reelected without the ‘benefits’ of 9/11 and the subsequent military campaigns? Most pundits agree he would not have been.

Talking of which: the Iraq war, to be precise, this story made it into many of the world’s papers today – and it is heart-breaking:

BAGHDAD: Iraqis love sports. Yet after five years of war, Iraq’s chances of fielding a competitive Olympic team are vanishingly small. Playing fields, pools and gyms are in disrepair. Athletes are targets for assassination. Only one, a weight lifter, qualified for the Beijing Olympics, the second Summer Games since the U.S. invasion in 2003. War and hardship, though, have not destroyed all of Iraq’s dreams for international competition. The country, which has been in three wars in two decades, has a robust Paralympic team.

Nice, isn’t it, how war is redeeming itself in this fashion? The country has been ripped in three very bloody parts, God knows how many people have been killed, or how many have been forced to flee their homes, their cities and their country. God knows how much the damage to the whole infrastructure is in petro-dollars…

… and yet, great news! Thanks to the war there are now, again, God knows how many candidates for the country’s Paralympic team.

Oh brave new world that has such headlines in it!