Bob's Bulletin 3. December 07.

*The Jungle *Pandas and Hypocrisy *Koblenz Bomb

*Europe Euro Crisis

The leopard never does change its spots, does it? It’s lucky that hope, indeed, springs eternal or mankind would commit collective suicide I am sure.

You can pick up a book recording man’s social problems going back 2, 4 or 6 hundred years; there is hardly any difference in his everyday woes: housing, inflation, crime, both corporate and individual, disease and even immigration.

I just finished Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” a book that left me profoundly depressed and deeply saddened, both for the plight of the animals in Chicago’s meat packing industry, and for the fate of the exploited work force circa 1900. This must be - or have been - one of the ghastliest businesses on the surface of the planet. I don’t intend to expound on it here, I am sure North American readers are all too familiar with its horrors, despite it being lauded by Whitman, who never worked there I don’t think, although he might have been a hog in a previous life.

Poor, poor creatures. Even today when conditions are markedly better, they are there for one reason, their cruel and violent death. And by god they know it!

To paraphrase Sinclair, “One moment a hog is a hog, a creature of some bearing and importance in farmyard affairs; he is kept with his fellow pigs; eats well and has at least the vestiges of a life.” Why then is he suddenly thrust in a hot stinking truck where to loose his footing means being crushed; often kept overnight without food or water? Then his keen senses smell his fate miles from the slaughter-house gates. The rest of his short life is a nightmare in which he slowly approaches the killing floor, his squeals of fear and outrage ignored until his vital blood sloshes into a vat and his twitching body receives the skilled attention of the butchers.

I don’t know if he is still killed as he once was by having his throat cut from ear to ear after being suspended from a hook; he receives a steel bolt to the head, or an electric shock: all he knows is he is being murdered and he can’t know why, not that any reason we give him will make the situation any better.

And the steers, calves, sheep and lambs get the same short thrift. I really can’t understand how anyone can steal the lives from 3-month-old lambs all day, maybe I’m just a softie in my dotage. I do know I will never eat red meat again; I confess to hypocrisy in eating chicken occasionally and fish regularly: their lives are no less than that of the hog, they just make less fuss about it.

I realize all creatures subsist on others. Is the lion killing the deer any more guilty than the deer devouring plant life? Is the Tarantula Wasp any more shameful than the arachnid? It’s the old dilemma. The fault lies at the door of evolution for our success; our breeding and consumption of meat on the hoof. It seems easier to bear when the predator strikes its victim in the wild, at least those at the bottom of the mammalian food-chain have lived a natural life before feeling that iron bite and steely claw. Predators, too, tend to eliminate the weaker animals first ensuring the strength of the species of the creatures they rely on for food.

But it’s still “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” and we cannot completely escape it, the dictates of vegetarians regardless.

Chinese Hypocrisy. As the two giant Pandas winged their way to Scotland last Sunday, AM, British time, in a specially prepared jet leased by Federal Express, at some undisclosed, but sure to be astronomical cost, anyone with half a brain (maybe .0001 of the world’s population) must have chuckled wryly at Chinese duplicity. (I now hear the “rent” for the pandas for some years will be 700,000 pounds per year!…kick back, anyone?).

In China we have a nation which has, almost single-handedly, brought animals such as the rhino to the point of extinction in their crazed demand for powdered horns and tusks to make quack medicines for fertility. Yet they make such a huge amount of money leasing out the Pandas - in this case, for ten years to a Scottish zoo - that the creatures are insured and safeguarded to the tune of millions of dollars.

Humans are obsessed with “Cute.” Pandas possess this desired sobriquet to the nth degree; rhinos have practically none. So this rather sluggish and occasionally vicious member of the bear species is feted and celebrated, while the poor old pugnacious and par-blind rhino is cruelly shot by poachers who can get a small fortune for the powdered horn reputedly used to make nasty little yellow dicks hard.

As far as I am concerned, the Chinks can stick their overpriced bamboo chewers where the sun don’t shine, I’d rather see a rhino in the wild any old day.

The Pandas are going to love Scotland! Freezing, raining, with a bunch of hard-faced visitors in skirts filing by crapping Pandas (they shit 50 times a day), saying, “Hev ye no monners, ye Chinese bestards, will ye no feck off back to the bleddy commos! Hey, ho, great world ain’t it?

Bomb Found in Koblenz. Reports of a 1000 pound (weight) unexploded bomb found in the mud on the banks of a river in Koblenz, Germany today amused the bloke with the twisted mind (me). As if they haven’t been aware of this bomb and its thousands of brothers ever since the end of WW2. I’m sure, anyway, that is wasn’t necessary to evacuate half of the city; the danger quotient can’t have been too high from an explosive device buried under mud and water for 65 years.

But, hey, come closer, let me whisper, “Germany hates Britain at the moment for not being in the Euro; being unwilling to lend that failing state any more money; and just for our bleddy superior Brutishness.”

What better to get public opinion on the side of the administration than digging up memories of the last war of note? When the smug UK sveinhunds with their uncouth American allies had the temerity to flatten cities in the German industrial belt, such as Koblenz. This might ease the guilt as the Franco/ German power block in Europe tries to push through the Transaction Tax, said to be terrible news for London’s City traders.

Europe on the edge. I won’t wait to bring the news of the agreement to be hashed out in Europe on Friday. I expect even in the insular ’States it will get top coverage.

It is a German day anyway, with the French tagging along and the clown playboy, Sarcoma, er , Sarkozy, peeping around his statuesque wife, chanting “Oui, oui, like a kid wanting a piss, and choleric Cameron, the British bullshit Prime Minister chanting “Non, non,” to make us think he speaks French, and he has any effect whatsoever on the outcome.

No, it’s Merkel’s day and she will be delivering a speech saying, more or less, “You vill do vat you are told, or ve start the blitzkrieg by withdrawing German support for the lot of you blodes fettsack losers!”

To be honest, I admire Germany a lot. They took on the whole world in a war which they would have undoubtedly won had the US not had two years to prepare to engage them. They assimilated East Germany - a huge task - with hardly a ripple. Now they are the saviors of a Europe they nearly destroyed and are still paying the price for. What I look around at crazed, drained and rickety old Britain and its crackpot leaders, I sometimes think it’s a pity they didn’t win!

Go for it, get me in the comments! Diogenes