Is it a bird, is it a plane???

No, apparently it's Super injunction, a pair of words that the Beard is getting slightly sick of hearing... now, as you may or may not know, and almost certainly don't care, the Beard is a not a big fan of freedom... but wait, I hear you all say, with resounding echoes from the bathroom walls, we're sure we've heard the Beard use his freedom of speech to stand up for the freedom of the speech of others... and you'd be right... but let me just point out that the Beard is also a great fan of the public interest, and of society as a whole, but is a greater fan still of the great art of the compromise...

Some of us may be interested in the fact that some footballer of whom the Beard has never heard had some sort of sexual relations with some apparent celebrity of whom the Beard has also never heard... and, without meaning to sound uncynical, it does seem like a very good way to garner public interest and possibly kick start a career in Hello magazine... But sometimes common sense should prevail in these things...

Now, the hirsute one is no fan of deceit, but occasionally it can come in handy.. for instance, if everyone had been open and honest about their intentions between 1939 and 1945, the War (the one we apparently don't mention when the Germans are in the hotel) would have traced a very different course... and even now, deceit saves lives... but there are more ways than one to save a life...

I'm no fan of footballers either, but I accept that these overpaid shorts wearers have taken the place of famous generals and war heroes in our national subconcious and have become the role models for an entire generation... young men all over Britain buy overpriced trainers and support the hair gel industry as a result... which is, so I'm told, good news for everyone... if only it stopped there... but these men are role models in other ways...

The argument of the tabloid press, along with many others, is that if these role models misbehave, then they should be revealed and shamed for the public good, as some sort of object lesson in morality... which is all well and good, until you realise that it actually has the opposite effect... which the Beard feels may be deliberate, which brings us into the realms of conspiracy theory... but I digress...

When our young, tracksuited football fan learns that Strike Dribbler, or whatever our imaginary footballer is named, has messed around with someone he shouldn't, master Tracksuit immediately withdraws his support from that person, and lobbies the team to get rid of him, then determines that he won't do the same... correct?? Well, sorry, but no... more likely, young Tracksuit will still buy the season ticket and the Strike Dribbler shirt, and conciously or unconciously mimic the behaviour of his hero... especially when the oman in question is later "revealed" by the same tabloids to be a money grabbing fame hungry publicity seeker....

If the tabloids exercised restraint, however, and kept to the spirit of the law as well as its letter, then the scenario is quite different... Strike Dribbler is the clean living footballer who doesn't get drunk and smash up hotels, and is faithful to his wife and kids... now, who's going to suffer if young Tracksuit grows up emulating that behaviour..??

Of course, the whole thing would rely on discretion, particularly that of the participants... now, the beard is not laying all the blame at one door, as it most definitely takes at least two to tango, but at least half of the blame lies with the other party, the money-grabbing, fame-hungry etc etc... if they were to maybe have a quiet word in the right ear and get paid off, well, surely the better for society... but then of course they wouldn't have the fame that is theirs by right, and is of course the only thing that young women should be aiming for in their lives according to those founts of all wisdom that spread the word... as we all know, the only way to feel worth anything is to be famous...

But, I hear you all yell, wouldn't this all just be dishonest? well, the beard's favourite teaching mechanism, Lies-to-Children (of which, more later) should tell you that sometimes the truth is less important than you may think, and is certainly often less useful... and who knows, maybe some of these overpaid celebrities would see tales of their virtual, perfect lives and think to themselves, actually, maybe I could have fun behaving like that... and the problem would solve itself... but it would need people to act responsibly, and we all know the chances of that occuring...

But the beard grows shaggy, and the clippers beckon, so, with a kiss blown in the direction of Chelsea and the lovely Mrs Beard, it remains to say that until we all become responsible, and all our injunctions take on superness, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dictatorships, democracy, and other lies....

Lying is often a force for good... or so the Beard has been told several times in his life.... or possibly not... but it does remain to be said that the truth often hurts, and who wants to hurt anyone...?? As some of you may be unaware, the Beard acknowledges that the best teaching method known to what we like to call humanity is that system known as "lies to children..." for those who don't know, this involves giving deliberatley wrong answers that see to make sense simply because the truth is basically incomprehensible without first accepting the lie... for example, take gravity.... we all know as kids that it is some strong force that holds us to the ground.. as we progress, we learn that it's actually quite weak... then we find that actually, it's not a force like a magnet, but a dent in space-time that we fall into... and all because we won't be able to instantly understand from a young age that actually all it is is a probability curve of ingenious type...

But I digress.... lies are also, says the beard attempting and failing to get back on topic, the best way to govern a people... after all, as a famous man with an even more famous mustache once said, people would sooner fall for the big lie than the small one... and that the best place to hide a lie is between two truths... but who really wants to know the truth.... as that fascinatingly able civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby once said, "all the people want to know is who are the goodies and who are the baddies..."

And now we are told taht one of the major baddies is apparently dead, assassinated by the US, and dumped in the ocean... which at first glance seems a good thing... but it isn't... now, whether or not you actually believe in the official Al Qaeda story (and it's on record that the Beard, arch skeptic that he is, strangely does not) it seems very strange (to overuse the word simply due to lack of thesaurus and of willpower to get up and find one...) that the US a) decided to treat him worse than the Nazis, who at least got some sort of trial, b) made the possibly late Osama bin Laden a martyr for the cause, and c) got rid of the evidence that actually backed up their claim... leaving the door open for claims of "He has risen!" or even of "He wasn't actually dead!"

Now, thinking this strange is in itself strange... a wise-ish, but Beardless man once told me that if you want to know whodunnit just look to see who gains most... so who gains from this?? Well, on the face of it, you'd think the ranks of so-called Islamic fanatics would.. they've got a martyr or a mistake, and a reason for revenge attacks... which will just serve to alienate them even more from the people they claim to represent... lets be honest, Al Qaeda was never pro muslim... well, it was definitely anti Shiite... and the average Muslim is like everybody else.. the last thing he or she wants is to strap a bomb to themselves and kill folk... most just want to get on with the day to day business of life without causing trouble while sticking to the rules of their God... who promotes pacifism and tolerance if you read the Quran... which has got to be a good thing... and looking like a bunch of fanatical murderers does very little to swell the ranks of any faith... all it does is attract the sort of people that you really wouldn't want in heaven, regardless of any amount of sherbert and houris....

The people who really benefit from this live nice quiet lives in the USA... lets be honest, an unstable world allows them to keep oil prices low, the dollar high, and gives them a fair amount of licence to move in and mess around with "hostile" countries.... as an aside, was I the only one to notice that the US moved into Afghanistan just after a large amount of hitherto unexpected mineral wealth (molybdenum if I remember correctly) was discovered there.... but yet again I digress....

The Christian church in the US also benefits... both in new converts desperate to get saved from these fanatics, and because since the US did far too good a job on Russia, they are desperately in need of a new Beast from the East to act as antichrist... and Islam fits the bill...because as we are all told, the hordes of Islam are just waiting to rush over the world, bringing fire and the sword to the infidel, just like they did in the crusades, where Christianity only survived by the skin of its teeth and by sending thousands of bloodthirsty armed men to rape, pillage and otherwise upset those disgusting, religiously tolerant people who dared to live where Jesus did...

I think it's fairly clear from other news what most Middle Eastern Muslims actually want, and it ain't the theocratic, pseudo religious despotism preached by the likes of bin Laden et al, for whatever reasons... it would actually seem that they want democracy...

As you may know, democracy is yet another entry on the list of "stuff that the Beard don't believe in..." along with human rights, the abolition of slavery and the postman... its not that I'm against it per se, just that having never seen it in action, I fell unable to make a judgement on the matter.... it's like communism in a way.. lots of people advocate it, someone tries to instigate it, then it all gets bogged down halfway through and doesn't happen... so we all end up under despotism of one kind or another...

Not that despotism is all bad... I mean, I've lived in a despotic system all my life, and it doesn't seem to have harmed me... several of you are now rising to your feet, saying "But I've just voted! I must live in a democracy..." Sorry to disillusion you all.... although we in the good old UK have the trappings of democracy, like the vote, and a parliament etc, when was the last time you saw the majority in charge?? All we have is the dubious choice of which minority we want to dictate to us.... as a great man once said, "Government never changes... only the faces..." and lets be honest, that's as true as it gets... just because our particular despot is a group of people, some sort of gestalt being, forever mutable but essentially unchanging, rather than a single person, it doesn't make our system any fairer... even if the voting system gets changed, the same parties will be in parliament, doing the same things in slightly different ways, and nothing will really change... I think I've mentioned before that Orwell's 1984 is not a warning about some future totalitarian state, but an expose of the current totalitarian system that we in Britain live under.... so, the Beard for one hopes that the Arabs and north africans get there democracy... it will be nice to see if the system works in practice...

And to be honest, once they've got it, they'll probably realise that they don't want it... after all, true democracy includes a element of choice, and of responsibility... and who really wants that... the Beard is reminded of a man from Romania, who, after the fall of Ceaucesceau decided to emigrate to Iraq under Saddam Hussein, because he felt more comfortable under a dictator... and are the Russians really better off now they have pseudo democracy and capitalism?? Ok, there were shortages under Communism, but at least the gap between rich and poor was usually quite small... its the old lie of Capitalim, and one of the most effective... work hard, and you can be rich and comfortable... when in truth the way to get rich and comfortable under capitalism is to get others to do the hard work and skim stuff off the top... to put it the way I was told years ago, it is the constant promise of jam tomorrow, so you won't notice the lack of bread today... personally, I'd rather have the bread... the jam'll probably turn out to be cheap strawberry stuff with loads of seeds anyway...

Now, I was going to bore you with my conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories, but the time ticks on in its interstitial and interspatial way, and even those as hirsute as oneself need to sleep... so it remains only to be said that democracy is as good an aim as any, but few of us can aim at all, so until we all get the choice and ask someone to take it away again, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!