Hurrahs all round!
This sounds like it was fun. (Unlike this alternative protest...)
I particularly approve of protesting against the lack of hat wearing in public life - some blame the last few decades' collapse of civil society and boom in crime on the welfare state, some on wishy-washy 1960s liberalism. Me, I blame the decline in hat wearing and the lack of well-groomed facial hair amongst today's menfolk (and no, baseball caps and scraggly goatees most certainly do not count - a trilby or bowler coupled with a fine Kaiser Bill is very much the order of the day).
I would have joined Rachel, Justin, Tim, Davide and D-Notice, but my protest would have been that "Political protests are a waste of time and effort". That and I had work to do this evening...
Nonetheless, I eagerly await post-match analysis from all involved - though Justin already has a few pics up here
Update: A couple of screengrabs - first of our Rachel with her "7/7 inquiry now" sign, second of our Justin with his "Legalise everything" one. Both times they're on the left (fnarr fnarr) of my old friend, BBC London's Gareth Furby (the chap who interviewed me during that St John Ambulance piss-up I set up last year):
What japes, eh?
Update 2: Piccies via
Justin and
Davide.
God and the EU
Colman is spot on about Angela Merkel's suggestion that God should have a place in any new EU constitution. Merkel contests that
"[the constitution] should be connected to Christianity and God, as Christianity has forged Europe in a decisive way"
As Colman points out, this means
"we should include references to absolute monarchy, discrimination against women and anti-semitism, all of which have also forged Europe in decisive ways."
Why must we always have such second-rate minds in charge of working out where to go with the EU project?
God can only be a unifier when everyone's worshipping the same one. So let's ignore the Reformation and the countless variations of Christianity that arose following Luther's piece of petty vandalism (sparking a good few centuries of violence, bloodshed and persecution). Ignore the lack of doctrinal agreement even within the Roman Catholic Church, let alone the Church of England and all the various Protestant offshoots.
What's more, by codifying a Christian god into an EU-wide constitution, how exactly are community relations with non-Christian groups going to be helped at this time of ever-growing religiously-inspired division, mistrust and violence?
The EU is - in its idealised form - supposed to STRENGTHEN the ties that bind us, to emphasise and build upon the areas of similarity amongst a culturally-diverse continent which has seen more than its fair share of mistrust, division and war over the centuries.
All religion has ever done - and in Europe's history more than that of pretty much anywhere else in the world - is enhanced the "us versus them" idea, heightening perception of differences, and created hostility through the insurmountable believers versus non-believers dichotomy.
We already have enough alienated and annoyed non-believers in the EU - they're called Eurosceptics - let's not add to their number, eh?
A reminder
Our man Worstall reminds me that our man Barlow is still slogging away on his John O-Groats to Land's End walk in aid of the Brain Research Trust (follow his progress here) - which reminded me that I had a bunch of charitable donations from Europhobia readers from ages ago which had got frozen when my PayPal account briefly died.
That's now been fixed so, combined with advertising revenue from the last few months, I've just bunked the boy a hundred nicker. Donate yourself here (and don't forget to do Gift Aid if you're a UK taxpayer...)
Two years of near-daily blogging
And to celebrate, a redesign!
Here's where I started properly - and since then it's been near-daily updates all the way.
I liked the old design, but although it worked fine in Firefox and Safari, I'd been getting a few complaints that it didn't show up properly in Internet Explorer - the sidebars weren't working properly and ended up overlapping the posts.
This should now be fixed - although the second sidebar still doesn't sit right in IE, for reasons that utterly escape me (any suggestions much appreciated, etc.). Trackbacks and Linkbacks also never seemed to work, which was annoying - I'm going to try and add those in during the next few days, if I can work out how.
Still, not bad for a coding novice, eh? Constructive criticism in the comments, if I can get them working in the next few minutes before I go to bed (they seem to have vanished at the moment, and I don't know why...) - ta!
