MMXI

It all began one Saturday morning three hundred and fifty something days ago. It was a quiet day, with much of the free world resting sore heads and pledging to start the new year with fresh resolve about changing or improving something in their life; a resolution most never planned on keeping past January 2.

Lots of stuff happened this year, as it seems to do every year. 2011 news bulletins showed us war, revolts, natural disasters, failing economies - all served in convenient, easy-to-forget two-minute snippets and topped off with an inspiring story of courage about a polar bear or somebody in India with an inoperable brain tumour.

Africa continued to starve due to the policies of the United Nations. So the U.N. did the only thing the U.N. knows how to do, which is to kowtow to suppressive regimes who know that the U.N. lacks any real power to do anything because it is completely ineffective and pacifist.  Although one thing the U.N. did in 2011 was to designate the year the International Year of Forests and the International Year of Chemistry, which would make one big accelerant bonfire.

Thanks to Facebook and other social media we watched the birth of Arab Spring, which resulted in most of the shitty countries of the world that have yet to discover democracy - Syria, Egypt, you name it - rioting and rampaging towards, well, who knows. All I know is there is a whole lot more anarchy in store. The criminal sect of the unemployed youth of London rioted through Tottenham, but not over a desire for change; just a desire to obtain a free HDTV.

Italy and Greece showed the world that they don't deserve to be nation states – SHOCKER - and they sure as shit don't deserve to have the rest of Europe bail them out. But the E.U. bailed them out.

The E.U. continued on their merry way of making important, yet stupid, decisions.

The Osama bin liner was expertly killed by a team of SEALs in Pakistan and the world went awesome! Except for the leftwing fools in the west who think that the U.S. government don't have a right to kill a man who is the definition of evil because he has human rights, you know. These human rights lawyers and the like don’t have a clue what life is like outside Toorak or the North Shore, let alone in a Middle Eastern country.  And they think the west killing a madman means we are just as bad.  Ah, the leftwing and their beloved dichotomy of good and evil. 

They seem to think the west is always on the precipice of crossing over to the dark side. I am always confused over the leftwing's confusion over who the bad guys are. The way I see it, the bad guys are the ones who deliberately fly aeroplanes into buildings and strap bombs to their chests and detonate themselves in packed nightclubs with the intention of killing a lot of westerners. And the good guys are the ones trying to stop them. I hope that clears up any confusion or grey area.  Same goes for Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong-il. Good riddance.  I hope their next life is everything they didn't want it to be.

Natural disasters lived up to their name.  Japan got hit with a massive earthquake, then drowned from the resultant tsunami and then had to deal with four leaking nuclear power plants. Our own Queensland and Victoria did not fair any better with unwanted attention from mother nature.

Wills and Kate got hitched. Two billion people watched. Bert and Ernie also got married, even though they are just friends. I think a bunch of confused 6-year-olds were forced to watch by their politically correct parents who are willingly destroying their kid's childhood.  

The highly reputable British trashbag tabloid, News of the World, was shutdown due to a phone hacking scandal. Apparently every other newspaper in the world is scandal free.

Barack Obama canned the 40-year-old NASA space program because it was gnawing away at funds that he preferred to spend on useless government programs that did nothing but create more bureaucracy, more socialism and more welfare dependent citizens. The U.S. space program has devoured US$196 billion over the years (around US$450 million per mission), but it was, without a doubt, one of the best things to come out of the United States.  And there goes the hopes and dreams of a generation.

Bonding with James

I have had an affinity with the James Bond genre, as I like to refer to it, since an early age.  Living in India in the very late seventies, I spent a fair bit of time bonding with James, as my mother used to take my sister and I to regular Bond screenings at the American Embassy in New Delhi.

I was always transfixed when the fictional British Secret Intelligence Service agent lit up the big screen. This probably had less to do with the plot, and more to do with the fact that television was a bit of a foreign concept in India back then, apart from the odd black and white episode of I Love Lucy, if you could manage to find the right channel on your telly.


I look tired cos I have been fighting terrorists

 Back in the day, I admired Bond’s strength, wisdom, and heroism, and delighted in watching him kick the crap out of the bad guys, time and again. I suppose I was a bit of a tomboy.

And even back then, I saw the Bond girls as talentless bimbos, and I remember pondering the point of them at all, and then working out they served as annoying distractions for Bond’s roving eye, and to provide a bit of suspense before he inevitably crushed the bad guys.

Bond is the longest running and most financially successful English-language movie franchise in history, having grossed about $12 billion at the box office. The Bond series is the spy genre. To quote a Bond movie power ballad (and the catchcry of the tawdry real estate agent, LJ Hooker); nobody does it better.

Bond knows that the only way to snatch power back from evil men who threaten to destabilise the free world is to kill them, then take their toys.

Bond has shown time and again that you save a country from destruction at the hands of bad actors with poorly Russian / Arab accents by killing them, taking away their nukes, making out with their chief nuclear scientist, who tends to look remarkably like a supermodel, and then explaining yourself to MI6. Situation handled. Sometimes Bond will simply dob in the baddies and then take their toys, but those movies are a little dull. Geez, we are lucky that Barack Obama doesn't get to write a Bond script. It would go like this:

James Bond travels to Iran to track down a psychotic mad man called…. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Wow, that name sounds familiar). Bond finds him, and learns that he is trying to sell nukes to (insert another insane Middle Eastern country), again.

The pesky and stupid U.S. President (obviously a Democrat, and obviously played by method actor Sean Penn) forces Bond to back off, by telling him we need to “negotiate” with the mad man, and that he isn’t crazy as such, he just wants to be hugged, and mad man was just kidding around when he said he wanted to annihilate the West.

By some incredible coincidence, this movie eerily resembles reality, when negotiations fail with said mad man, and the western world explodes into tiny pieces. The end.  The Bond genre is over, and we are all dead.  Not shaken, not stirred; just dead.  Yeah, thanks a bunch Barack – way to wipe out a franchise / the rational thinking portion of the human race.

How about you just stick to destroying the free world, and leave movie making to movie makers who have balls. Actually, it’s also preferable to have a President with balls, but we can’t have everything. If the international political arena were a Bond movie, the good guys would not be winning right now.