For better or worse?
I discovered an anti-marriage website the other day: www.nomarriage.com. It's written by a single American in his thirties. At first glance, it's easy to dismiss as a piece of ranting misogyny, but the statistics and arguments he marshalls in his case deserve serious thought.

The US divorce rate is around 50 per cent. Some will point out that many divorces occur to people who have divorced before, so a single thirty-year old with no previous marriages shouldn't take it that he only has an even money chance of staying hitched. But as the author points out, many of those who remain married are those from religious backgrounds - either the protestants of the bible belt or the catholics, especially hispanics. So if you are not in that category, you might do well to be on your guard.

The author blames two things. The first is unrealistic and unachievable expectations by single women. The other is that the divorce process is biased against men, giving unsatisfied women almost no reason to stay in the marriage. The fact that most divorces are initiated by women seems to support this. In the vast majority of custody cases, the woman gets the children, with fathers having limited access. Divorce is often a financial disaster for men too.

If you are a young man considering marriage then it doesn't take too many horror stories from older men to deter you. And the evidence is that men ARE being deterred. The age of first marriage continues to rise.

The blame he places on women is actually on American women. In his intro page, he states:

Foreign women from South America, Eastern Europe, and Asia make much better wives than American women. An American woman has several fundamental problems that will never go away and that will get much worse a few years after she is married:

Her inherent anti-male bias and pre-occupation with fairness that was drilled into her at high school, college, and through the media. Her constant confrontations and trying to prove herself and to make a point. Her self-centeredness, her ridiculously high expectations, her sense of entitlement, her high-maintenance, superficial, and stuck up attitude, her snootiness and her sense of superiority. This "princess" syndrome means that she will always think that she is better than you, and that she deserves and she is entitled to whatever she wants from you. Her general mental instability and psychological disorders. Her using sex as a weapon and reward to get things.

Foreign women generally don't have any of these problems. Marrying an American woman simply does not make sense. The ONLY reason men stay with American women is because they did not have enough exposure to foreign women. Any man who spent a few months in Brazil or Russia will not even look at American women again.

And I can't argue much with the last point, as I know four men of my age range who have married Russian women and all are extremely happy. They seem to have found women who accept them for what they are. The problem for me is that I find myself in agreement with him, except that I'm thinking of British women while he's thinking of Americans. I have found American women a breath of fresh air by comparison and the snootiness he derides seems to be mainly a metropolitan thing - think of Ally McBeal (set in Boston) or Sex and the City (New York).

Ally McBeal provides an useful example. In the first episode she announces: "Here I am, a victim of my own choices". One can't help wondering what she's talking about. A victim?!? She is in one of the most highly paid professions (law) in the richest country in the world and she's young and of above-average attractiveness. Yet somehow, she's convinced herself that she is a victim. How on earth is she ever going to be happy with that attitude?

I know that Ally McBeal is fiction, so don't write letters but she has many real life sisters. For a true to life insight, I recommend Toby Young's (no relation) 'How to lose friends and alienate people'. In it he describes how despite the fact that single women outnumber single men in New York, the women he encountered in the Conde Nast offices where he worked in his brief journalistic career could barely bring themselves to look at him.

A few years ago, I went out with a women who had a highly paid job in the City. One day she lent me a book called 'Mr Maybe' by Jane Green and told me that she identified with the story's heroine, Libby.

She might as well have said 'RUN, DON'T WALK!'. I read the book and was horrified at the incredible shallowness of Libby. She loves a man named Chris, who is a stuggling author and is surprised when after a couple of weeks he leaves to focus on completing his book, as he's totally broke and it is his only hope of a future.

Then she goes out with someone called McMahon, who is rich and influential. He's also a nervous virgin and their first sexual encounter is awkward. Rather than calmly and maturely suggesting new techniques, she erupts with rage.

She bumps into Chris again and on this occasion summons up enough interest in his ambitions to actually ask him what his book is about!!!!! Incredible as it seems it takes her until about page 300 to do this. Needless to say at the end of the story she rejects McMahon, gets back with Chris (who is suitably apologetic for not staying with her) and then in the last line, we learn that Chris has just struck a deal for his book; the message being that Libby is to be financial rewarded for her decision too.

Utterly sickening it was too and I gave it back to my girlfriend and casually enquired whether she was aware that the heroine was actually the villain of the story. We didn't last much longer, though we are still on friendly terms.

But what would the author of nomarriage.com make of all of this? Well one page of the site is titled 'American women are fucked, they priced themselves out of the market' and that pretty much sums up the attitude of the men whose correspondence he quotes. But the page that terrifies me is the one titled 'Marriage means you become a slave to your job. Quotes from readers include:

"I'm Living the American Dream and Hating Every Minute of It. I'm a 38 y/o male who is married to a beautiful woman and have 1 kid with 1 more on the way. We have what many consider to be the ideal life. Nice house, good jobs, SUV and a overall nice lifestyle. Problem is I hate my life. I feel trapped and destined to live the life of a corporate warrior and familyman when I really long for something else. I've been married for 9 years now and while I love my wife, I feel that I need more space and to be honest long for some variety. I wish I could walk away from it all."

And he's one of the happy ones.

I don't want anyone jumping to conclusions about my parents by the way. Both worked. They are VERY happy and have been so for over 35 years.

But something seems to have changed in that time in the way that the sexes relate. Almost every television advert I see presents men as being stupid and unworthy of the women they know or love. I often come away agasp at the sheer rudeness and condescension of many women I talk to. I can't be bothered with it, frankly.

I stand by my conviction that it is men who are the romantics. Take a look at the personal columns of any newspaper and you'll notice that many if not all of the women want a man who is 'solvent' (I just about qualify here). Then try to find one man who expects earning power from a potential wife. I've never seen it.

Online nipping.
If you've played on Pokerstars in the last three months, you will have noticed an annoying new phenomenom: online nipping. Ever since the site introduced the facility whereby players can transfer money from one account to another without writing e-mails to the support department, a new form of begging has appeared in which players write in the chat box that they just need $1 to get into a game.

There is nearly always a story and often a promise to repay double the amount the next day. Refusals offend and often lead to insults. I have taken to reporting it to the support department every single time it happens and I state this in the chat box in case any other potential 'nippers' are waiting in the wings.

The support department always thank me for bringing it to their attention and tell me that they have either warned the player not to do it again or that their chat privilege has been revoked.

But the situation isn't improving. The threat to bar chat isn't a strong one if people can open new accounts with ease. Something else is required to nip the nipping in the bud.

So I have written to support with a proposed solution: Raise the minimum transfer to $50. This would have little effect on those who genuinely wish to help out friends but it would make most cold-call nipping an impossibility since few people are willing to give $50 to a complete stranger. And most online nippers know this.

If it gets adopted, you heard it first here!

Charles Kennedy can shut the @*^& up.
Earlier this year, one mainstream British political party stood out as being opposed to the war against the Iraqi leadership. It was the Liberal Democrat party. Its leader, Charles Kennedy even went as far as to go to a protest in Hyde Park and marched under the banner 'Not in my name'.

Later in the party's annual conference he gave this speech:

Click here for the transcript of the speech

in which he says:

"But we also have in mind another very important group of people - the innocent civilian population of Iraq. They have suffered terribly under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. There is no question about that. But war could so easily make their plight so much worse. There are no bombs sufficiently sophisticated, sufficiently smart, to avoid causing civilian casualties. And bombs aren't the only danger they face.

Any war will cause a refugee crisis of huge proportions - not to mention the dangers of famine and disease.

There are concerns nearer home. There is a real danger that the war could alienate British Muslims. Many moderate Muslims already feel that they are victims of prejudice. Action against Saddam could fuel that prejudice and leave the law-abiding Muslim population of Britain feeling excluded and aggrieved.

Those are factors which have to be weighed very carefully in the balance before any decision is taken to go to war. They're factors which I fear haven't been considered nearly hard enough.

Well he was proved wrong on almost every score.

1. Where is the refugee crisis? Where is the humanitarian catastrophe? There simply isn't one. There is of course a problem of looting and terrorism. The former is aggrevated by the fact that Hussein released many criminals before abandoning Baghdad. The latter is the actions of people who want to be the new slavemasters of the Iraqi people and who hope that they can bully their way to power.

I haven't seen the figures for the UK, but I do know that asylum applications for Iraqis wanting to go to Germany have fallen off a cliff since the start of the war.

Click here to see a graph of applications to Germany in 2002 and 2003.

Notice the huge fall in such applications since February. Iraqis are staying in Iraq to make a go of it. The refugee camps that were set up in Jordan to cope with the human flood are empty.

Where is the famine and disease, Charles?

2. The British muslim population has remained entirely peaceful. Although he doesn't make an outright prediction that they will riot, he clearly uses language designed to lead us to that conclusion, so that he can say 'I told you so' later on if rioting occurs. Well it didn't, perhaps because the people he's talking about have more common sense than he does.

3. There were civilian casualties and every one was a tradegy but the Hussein regime was killing 200 people per week - and that's not including the numbers killed in the wars against Iran and Kuwait. If we take 10,000 as the number killed by the US invasion, we are left with the conclusion that after only 50 weeks, the invasion will have SAVED lives. Every week thereafter, another 200 people will have been spared.

So, having demonstrated that he knows nothing, Kennedy should be expected to keep his stupid mouth shut. Instead he comes out and says that it's great that Hussein is captured.

What, Charles? You didn't want this to happen. If you march under the banner 'Not in my name' then you have nothing to say. So say that instead.

Lisbon.
I went to Lisbon for the weekend of the 5/7 with a cousin. I've been to Portugal before when I was 13 but that was on a two week holiday to the Algarve. I have only heard good things about the city, but had no plans to go until he suggested it. We only went for three days, so I can't claim any authority, but I would recommend it for a pleasant city break.

The people all seemed really friendly, which straight away marks it out from London and Paris. However, there didn't seem to be many people of my age around. The tourists were also of a far higher calibre than is normal. I didn't see public drunkeness or loutish behaviour.

The city is full of small cafes - all selling the exact same pastries, doughnuts and cakes. In fact the shops all reminded me of the 'Lisboa Patisserie' on King's Road, which I like to visit every few months or so. What is really unusual are the 'ginjinha' booths. These are small shopfronts, like the the newsagents you see in railways stations, only smaller, which sell a cherry liquor that is 20 per cent alcohol. They are ideal for alcoholics as all that is necessary is to stick your money on the counter and you are rewarded with a little plastic cup of the drink, with cherries in the bottom for extra flavour. Nowhere have I seen the act of drinking so reduced to its bare essentials. It's a very nice drink too.

Many of streets are covered in mosaic - using small stones roughly square with sides the length of an adult thumb. They don't always stay in place and there are many patches where they have come loose. The city is on several hills and probably isn't ideal for wheelchair users.

I wish we had studied Portuguese at school instead of French. The former is spoken in Europe, South America (Brazil), Africa (Angola and Mozambique), India (Goa) and Asia (Macau). Nearly all the continents are covered. What does French teach you? How to read the menu in pretentious restaurants. Time to change the national curriculum.

Veni, vidi, vici?
I have received an email from James Butler informing me that his blog has been deleted. He didn't clarify whether this was due to a technical hitch or of his own doing. Although I disagreed with some of what he wrote, I am grateful that there are bloggers who have escaped the rat race and for whom there is more to life than the purely material. Please come back!

When Pundits attack.
James Butler has responded to my post below. It helps to read his piece or the rest of this won't make a lot of sense. He has paid my arguments a compliment by resorting to personal insults. These start with: His view of the world is American because of a constant diet of American television and food from what I last saw of his waistline. James' abilty to deduce the national origin of my food by merely glancing at my stomach must make him a strong candidate for a detective's job in Scotland Yard. By stating that my outlook on life is `American' he means that I am incapable of perceiving the truth in the impartial way that he does. In the court of Armchair Angst, you are innocent until proven American.

He claims that I oversimplify life. I have learned from past history with many people over many arguments that this is coded language for `David doesn't agree with me and when I try to retreat into grey, he sticks his ground.' James professes not to understand the world and thinks `those with at least half a mind don't either'. It's difficult to argue with someone who thinks that if he does understand the world he must have gone stupid.

He calls me a `typical Wannabe yank'. I won't take that as an insult, though I am perfectly happy being British. There is much that I admire about the US and I frequently wish that US levels of service and organisation applied here. America is a cultural exporter. If you see a standard of living portrayed on US TV that exceeds your own, then you might feel that your life is worthless. But that isn't the end of the matter. We are free people in a free country and if we decide that a lack of coffee shops a la Starbucks is a blow to national prestige then the solution isn't to go into a funk about it. You can instead open your own chain and try to do better. That's what Coffee Republic, Caf? Nero, Caf? Uno and numerous other operators have done. We are also perfectly capable of selling products and ideas to the US. "Who wants to be a Millionaire?" & "The Weakest Link" were both sold to the US networks after their success here. "Late Night Poker" pioneered the idea of televised poker with under the table cameras showing the cards. For a while American poker writers were jealous of what we had!

The remainder of James' rant concerns the decadence of the US. He manages to compare the killings in the circuses of Rome with the ownership of cars that have poor fuel economy. The fact that he sees these as being morally equivalent tells us far more about him than either `empire'. The basic outline of his argument about the US is that of `imperial overstretch'. It's not a new theory. Several years ago I was worried about it too. I even went as far as to buy a bestselling book about it: Paul Kennedy's `Preparing for the Twentieth Century'. And nicely gathering dust it is too. In the four or five years since I've bought it, I haven't read more than one paragraph. I did however read another doom-and-gloom book by William Rees-Mogg and James Davidson called `The Great Reckoning'. So worried was I by the predictions of its chapter about urban America (titled `Drugs, delusions and the imperial culture of the slums') that when I needed to prepare something for a presentation course at Midland Bank, I delivered a talk on `The Decline of the United States'.

I cringe now to think that in the decade or so since I gravely told my audience of the forthcoming collapse of the US, the country went on to record nine consecutive years of economic growth. Didn't they know that they were supposed to suffer economic disaster? The cheek of those damn yanks! And I was so solemn too.

After the briefest of recessions, the US economy is now growing at over 7 per cent! For an advanced economy, that is a truly incredible result. I guess in part, I'm trying to spare Butler the embarrassment I now feel. Don't dig any deeper James, you'll only regret it! He writes: `But how much longer will it last? When the money runs out and the heathens batter their doors down then they won't be as happy as their TV persona would suggest. Yet again he is obsessed with the decline of empires. In particular the one he has read about the most. In James' world, all odes lead to Rome.

Concerning the middle east, he falls into the trap of the `undistributed middle'. This is the logical fallacy that goes `All dogs have four legs. My table has four legs. Therefore it's a dog'. When writing about the attack on the WTC he says that they were `an attack on capital. An attack on those who will not accept that there are some in the world who do not want to drink Coca Cola, eat McDonalds and wear Nike sports wear'. Apart from the fact that Coca Cola is famously headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, I want to scream when I read this drivel. No James NO! That's why YOU would attack the US. It's not why they have. They are not the same as you.

Al-Qaeda's philosophical underpinnings come from the writings of the late Egyptian theocratic writer Sayyid Qutb. His most noted works are "Milestones" and "In the shade of the Koran". It was he who popularised the idea of jihad and martyrdom in the latter half of the twentieth century. I intend to write about him another time but in essence what he hated most from his visits to the US in the 1940s was the separation of church and state, as well as the very act of independent thought outside the strictures of the Koran. He thought that all human misery in the west stemmed from the Christian idea of `render unto Caesar'. In his mind, happiness could only be achieved if we all returned to following God's orders. It's not just about not wanting Coke or Pepsi. It's about not wanting to think for yourself or tolerating others doing so.

Bizarrely he continues `...an attack by those who want nothing to do with the way that the US sees the world, who have no other course of action, because they do not have a state that champions their cause.' This is all great rhetoric, except that it's total bollocks. They did have a state. It was called Afghanistan and it became more corrupted by bin Laden's millions than any Central American nation ever was in the wildest dreams of United Fruit. The country was used as a terrorist training camp for years.

I stick to my assessment that the troops should remain in Iraq longer. James says `We can't keep fighting this anti-terror war forever'. I don't think we can afford to stop fighting it. Of course the US will leave Iraq eventually but there is much work still to be done, just as there was in Japan and Germany after WW2. Those countries have become free and prosperous. So too will Iraq.

In a recent update to his site, James picks on an incident in the US and concludes that it's another failure for multiculturalism. His ability to draw conclusion from to specific and apply them to the general is undiminished. Personally I prefer to look at the bigger picture. In the last decade or so, the US economy has grown by leaps and bounds. While over in mono-cultured Japan there has been a recession of about the same length. There's nothing like facts to spoil a good rant, eh James?

Throwing the baby out with the Baath Water.
What do you call someone who sets out to prove one thing and usually succeeds in proving the opposite? Over at Armchair Angst (http://james.butler.name/weblog/blogger.html), fellow poker-playing blogger James Butler talks of `making sense of a senseless world', yet more frequently succeeds only in expressing his inability to make sense of things that make perfect sense to most people.

A recurrent theme is his very own brand of Anti-Americanism. Not for him the burning of the US flag or wearing a Bush face mask while standing on stilts in a protest march. No, instead he writes of the country as an empire sure to fall, spreading a decadent anti-culture to the rest of the world, which we absorb at our peril. In his article of November 23, he appears to suggest that he emigrated from Britain to Ireland to get away from people using American terminology in day-to-day parlance. Way to go, Jim-boy!

James despairs of the popularity of American culture and can't seem to grasp why it's accepted so readily. The answer, which I understood when I was about 7 years old, is that Americans look like they are having more fun. As a child I couldn't understand for the life of me why anyone would want to watch Coronation Street when there was the Six Million Dollar Man. Why voluntarily depress yourself?

Every visit I have undertaken to the US has underlined this. The people there are far more cheery and seem to want to enjoy life without any of the existential weltschmerz that so many people on this side of the Atlantic seem to think is necessary to affect in order to be taken seriously. Miserable Europeans should take heed of what I saw the hostess of an Indian music channel tell her viewers: "You only live once!" (thereby rejecting thousands of years of her culture's belief in re-incarnation).

Now Damn the man, he's only gone and outlined the reasons for his mixed views on the US while I'm half-way through writing this! Oh well, I shall press on and cover another point he makes. Elsewhere, also on November 23, he asks:

Should the troops return from Iraq now? Yes, they should. The job is done. Saddam is no longer a threat to Iraq and Iraq is no longer a threat to the rest of the region. The foreign troops are only there through altruism now and it is getting them nowhere. More troops have been lost since the Iraqi army was defeated than during the war. The country is in chaos as the various factions fight each other and the fundamentalists target foreign soldiers. We can safely leave the country and let it get on with destroying itself. If it becomes a threat to the region in the future then we just bomb it back to the stone age again. Sorry to speak out in a non-Liberal way but if the Iraqis are not interested in our way of life then that is ok.

Since he has taken the trouble to explain some of the assumptions in his view, I can respond to them. Firstly he seems to take it as a given that the fact that more troops have been killed since the end of the defeat of the army than were killed in the war, is somehow a meaningful criticism. I'm not sure why the latter figure is taken as the denominator though. It's a small number compared to the numbers killed in the sort of terrorist outrages that the whole neo-con project is designed to prevent happening in the future. Two hundred Africans were killed in the two embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Roughly three thousand were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001. And note that it was the World Trade Centre, not an `American Trade Centre' that was destroyed. A very large number of non-Americans were killed that day, including people from Muslim countries like Pakistan.

A lot of people assume that the WTC was filled with Wall Street Types - the `masters of the Universe' bond traders and such wheelers and dealers. In fact the buildings were mostly filled with small companies - branches of Taiwanese banks and lots of little freight forwarding and import-export companies. It was an attack on all of us.

James also states that Iraq is in a state of chaos. This just isn't true. Most of the attacks happen in the so-called `Sunni Triangle' and it's not surprising that this is so. The war shattered the master-slave relationship within the country and that area contains a large concentration of former masters. Their reaction to the arrival of US troops is not indicative of a cross section of national opinion.

The fundamentalists who are attacking soldiers in Iraq would merely switch to attacking civilians in Europe, Israel or the US if the troops left. As things stand, they are attacking armed professional soldiers instead. What price would any bookmaker has given on September 12th 2001 that after two years there would not have been another major terrorist attack on US soil? Twenty to one? Forty? I don't know, but it's likely to have been in double figures, that's for sure.

The wider benefit of the entire war would be missed if we were to abandon it now. The whole idea is to create one successful Arab capitalist democracy in a country that borders Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Something needs to be in place before the Saudi Royal family loses control. The Saudi youth, who are the region's other Weapon of Mass Destruction need to see an alternative to the theocratic madness of Iran, the death-cult hell of the Palestinian West bank and the despotism of Syria and the former Iraqi regime.

And the worst thing possible would be for us to do as James suggests and leave the country to the Arab world to sort out. That's like letting the school bullies take charge of the sick bay. The whole point of the undertaking is to shatter the status quo,thus giving hope to the masses, so that they are not drawn to the madness of al-Qaeda or the Baath party.

Let's see it through for the benefit of all our futures.

A new name.
I bought the domain name www.sleeplessinfulham.com yesterday, so now I don't have to write out a long string of characters if someone asks me for my site address. I've set it up so that it points to this site. It works already.

I must stress how easy it is to establish a blog. This Lycos Tripod service is completely free. There are paid-for upgrades available but I don't generate anywhere near enough bandwith, nor do I use up anything like enough discspace to warrant spending the money. Perhaps this could change, but I can't see it being necessary for a long time to come.

The domain name has cost me #21 for two years and the redirection to this site was free. It was when I realised that this cost nothing that I decided to get my own name. I guess I will have to stick with it even if I leave Fulham.

Suffering for my beliefs.
On the day that George W. Bush visits London, I thought I should point out that I have suffered for the sake of my convictions. The war to depose Saddam has had one disastrous outcome for me personally.

There are lots of recreational players missing from the Victoria.

One notably bad (but very nice) Iraqi player, a tribe leader who had previously fallen out with Saddam, returned to his homeland and hasn't been seen since the statue was dragged down. By common agreement, his losses alone paid the table money for about half the room per week. He was there almost every day!

And it's not just him. The omaha action isn't anywhere near as lively as it was a while ago and what seems to be missing are the Arab faces - the many occasional visiting players who knew the rudiments of omaha, but didn't really understand what hands to play. The action they gave is what is missing from the room. Two years ago the place was packed full of Iraqis. While I'm writing this I've just thought of another very bad Iraqi player whom I haven't seen in months.

I'm also against Britain joining the euro. I don't think that the European Central Bank's record of managing its currency since 1999 is as good as that of the Bank of England's since gaining independence in 1997. Why change?

However, as a poker player who likes to travel to Europe from time to time, it would be a great benefit to me if the UK shared the same currency as the majority of Western Europe. I just don't think it would benefit the UK as a whole, only my selfish interest.

Memories from Amsterdam.
As planned, I went to Amsterdam for three days during the Master Classics Festival in the first week of this month. I played one ?300 satellite for the ?3,000 event and when I was knocked out in a meaningless 4th place, it was the end of my poker action for the trip. I had gone there with the intention of not playing any cash games because of the ridiculously high rake and I'm pleased to report that I stuck to it. There were a few times when I wanted to dip my toe in the water, but on balance I am glad I didn't, as I saw all the things that annoy me about the festival. There is still no blackboard to assist in the running of the cash games. Players must look for the person with the clipboard. Empty seats in cash games were not filled quickly.

Instead I had a great time by going out to the local bars and restaurants with lots of people I know. I had a pleasant surprise when I met American Marty again for the first time in a year. He used to be very overweight. In fact he was almost spherical. But this time when I saw him, he had lost a huge amount of fat. I asked him how he had lost the weight and his reply was one word: `Atkins'. In total, he had lost 125 pounds. For British readers, this is 9 stone! I don't think I have ever seen such a change in one person's appearance. His blood sugar level had dropped from very dangerous levels too and he had managed to narrowly escape diabetes. Seeing a success like this really wants me want to slap all those stupid people who claim Atkins is a fad and that low-fat diets with lots of complex-carbohydrates are the answer. The low-fat diet IS the fad!

But anyway, the highlight of the trip was my second annual thrashing of Julian Quance at chess in the local `Chess Pub'. Things didn't start well, as I lost the first game of our challenge and the beer was starting to make me lose concentration. It didn't help that a passer-by hissed when I played one move in a sensitive situation and encouraged JQ to look deeper for a winning attack. Watching us was Miss Victoria Coren. Noticing that I tend to play the early moves very fast, she commented `Firm wrist action' ... or something similarly suggestive.

Despite these distractions, good triumphed over evil in the second match and Vicky suggested that we return to the casino with the score at 1-1. So we did, but later Julian wanted a chance to go in front and we ended up going back for two more games, both of which I won.

Rejoice rejoice.

No marks for Lennon.
I watched one of Channel 4's "100 greatest" shows last night. It was the 100 greatest Number One singles. The show was actually a repeat. As I hadn't seen it when it first came out, I didn't know the rankings, but as the show went on, I began to get nervous about the song I hadn't seen. Number Four was 'Dancing Queen' by Abba. Number Three was 'Hey Jude' by the Beatles. Number Two was 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen and inevitably, Number One was 'Imagine' by John Lennon.

Such lists are of course entirely subjective but I can't help hoping for a "worthy" winner. I found it hard to swallow that anything by Madonna could appear higher on the list than Marvin Gaye's 'I heard it through the Grapevine' but perhaps I'm just keen on the latter because it was Number One on the day I was born.

It seems to be some sort of modern heresy not to put Lennon and his music at the top of any of these lists. When MTV did a list show of 'Rock's most shocking moments', his murder was top of that list too. He was even in the top ten of the Greatest Britons - a BBC show that aimed to discover the people considered to have made the greatest contribution to the country. I felt that his inclusion (and that of the late Princess Diana) made a mockery of the whole thing. It would have been so easy to have had a rule prohibiting the inclusion of anyone born after 1900, in order to allow for some sense of perspective.

Lennon seems to be regarded as some sort of visionary of fairness and equality. I don't know how this is, given that he wrote one of the most sexist pieces of music ever written: a song called 'Norwegian Wood'. It's a song about a man who is invited back to a girl's house only to discover that she doesn't want to sleep with him. Naturally he sets fire to her living room the next day.

A conspiracy theorist even wrote a book claiming that Lennon was killed in a CIA plot, to prevent him organising a rally against Ronald Reagan's policies. While it's believable the CIA was monitoring him, it's hard to see that Lennon would be a serious threat to a president who had just comprehensively crushed Jimmy Carter. One site that promotes the idea of a conspiracy quotes a now-dead DJ as saying: "It was a conspiracy. Reagan had just won the election. They knew what kind of president he was going to be. There was only one man who could bring out a million people on demonstration in protest at his policies -- and that was Lennon."

I find this ludicrously far-fetched, but to a radio DJ it probably isn't. Who else thinks that pop stars have that kind of influence? Who else thinks that pop music is that important? If you want to check it out for yourself, go to:

http://www.shout.net/~bigred/Lennon.htm

or Click here

As for 'Imagine', I guess it's a reasonable song. I have to agree with its first verse:

"Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky, Imagine all the people living for today... Imagine there's no countries, It isn't hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, No religion too, Imagine all the people living life in peace..."

But I have my doubts about verse two where he sings:

"Imagine no possesions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man, Imagine all the people Sharing all the world... You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope some day you'll join us, And the world will live as one."

'Imagine no possessions"???? Hey John, nobody forced you to buy a Rolls-Royce!

Going to Amsterdam.
I'm off to Amsterdam for three days today. I'm treating it as a social event as much as a poker trip this time ... that is unless I feel up to playing a satellite for the ?3,000 event and get in. I did it two years ago and got in on the first attempt.

Sadly, I only lasted about three hours, as I got low-stacked and having found a flop of A K 10 to suit my A K, discovered that my sole opponent had the Q J to send me home. Last year I didn't bother.

One of the pleasures of the Amsterdam trip for me is the chance to meet my American friend Joe Reinhardt. He lives in Florida but comes over to Amsterdam every year for this trip. It is he who inspired me to be better informed about atheism and to see it as a positive choice. He knows the bible back-to-front and can argue any issue from both sides using biblical quotations. When he first mentioned this, I challenged him to think of one verse that supported homosexuality. To this he replied `Nothing that entereth the man shall defile him'.

And there's really no answer to that!

A couple of months ago, I got involved in a discussion about the horrors of the New Testament on Vicky Coren's website forum. I mentioned that in the book of Revelations, Jesus promises to murder children (Chapter 2 verse 23, in the message to Thyatira, concerning Jezebel). It's one of the dirty secrets of Christianity that you won't hear about on Songs of Praise.

Afterwards, I wondered how Christians who have actually read the bible accept this and I did a search for "Jezebel of Thyatira" on Google. I found this Australian site, which had the courage to mention the verse about killing her children. Most religious sites I looked at didn't confront the issue at all.

http://members.datafast.net.au/sggram/f571.htm

The site says that the children are not 'of the flesh' but her 'spiritual children'. It goes on to say that God would never kill children for the sins of their parents. I spluttered when I read that because it happens many times in the bible. In fact I would go as far as to say that the punishment of the innocent for the crimes of the guilty is the basic theme of both Testaments. I wrote to Joe to see what he though of this `spiritual children' explanation. Below I show my questions and his answers.


1) What is a spiritual child?

Hi, David. I haven't the faintest idea.

2) Where on earth does this Aussie crackpot get the idea from, apart from the need to save face?

The raw materials for religion are simply a vivid imagination.


3) Even if you can prove it's a metaphor, isn't it in very poor taste?

It is in poor taste, but the real clincher is having the apologist explain how we can reliably discern the allusion from the literal. Since there is no reliable way to do this, the book is by definition unreliable based on the apologists' own argument.


4) How does he get away with claiming that children are never killed for the sins of their parents? Were all the children saved in the flood? What about the killing of the first-born in Egypt?

There are many other examples, the slaughter of the Midianites, in Numbers, or this one,

1 Samuel 15:3 Now go, attack the Amalekites...Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.

This was retribution for something the Amalekites did 400 years prior to the slaughter.


5) Do these people think we are stupid?

They think we are sheep.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I'm going to write about the dark side of the new Testament in the run up to Christmas. There are things in it that will totally shock most people. The true message of Christ's own words is the polar opposite of what most people think it to be. You may be horrified!

I'm also aware that I `owe' my readers a long piece about Iraq. I must apologise for this and again stress that I mainly write on this site when I have something more important I should be doing. I'm afraid that blogging has been light lately due to the total lack of anything more important to avoid.

Wish me luck!

Festivals.
When I first started playing poker, I was excited by 'festivals' - those week-long programmes of daily tournaments culminating in a 'main event'. The first one I ever saw was the Victoria casino's 'Octoberfest' in autumn 1995. The main event was won by David Gardner, father of Julian. It cost #500 to enter and first prize was about #20,000.

The next one I attended was the Master Classics of Poker in Amsterdam. I loved it and didn't want to go home afterwards. In recent years, the number of festivals has increased enormously and they are taking place in locations as far away as the Ukraine, Estonia, Slovenia, Australia and Aruba (a Caribbean island). They can still be fun, but increasingly I think that they are becoming a distraction, not just for me but for the casinos that host them.

At the Master Classics for instance, the casino now adds about ?80,000 to the prize pool and spends a fortune on broadcasting equipment so that viewers can see the finals from TV monitors. What does the casino get back? It gets more punters in the house for an otherwise quiet week in November. It gets some very rich players who might lose a lot on the pit games. But does it get much else? I think not. The high-stakes players don't come back at any other time of year, as the games aren't as big as they are in Vegas or London. The mid-stakes players like myself don't come back because the rake in the cash games is ludicrous. So instead we all just come along for the annual jaunt and leave afterwards without returning to play in any of the next 51 weeks of the year. How exactly is this a showcase for their poker games? The Master Classics seems to serve no purpose other than to be bigger and better than the previous year.

There is another concern I have, which is that the increasing number of 'main events' with buy-ins in the #1,000 region sucks money out of play. When someone wins #5,000, they are likely to play with it in bigger cash games or comps, but when they win #50,000, they are likely to use it to change their lives. They might buy a car or do some building work on their house. This is all very sensible but it's a lot of money lost from the poker economy. It is made worse by the growing number of satellites, which further increases the amount of money that is sucked out of the pockets of the many into the hands of the few. This idea has already been covered by Andy Ward in his diary, so I won't labour it (see www.pokersoft.co.uk).

I am also noticing a lot of festivals that are not festivals in the sense that I used to understand them. I don't consider a series of comps starting at 9pm with no afternoon cash action beforehand to be a festival. How can you justify the expense of going somewhere and paying for hotels when there is nothing to do before 9pm? Not now when you can play 24 hours per day online. My ideal festival is one where I can play cash in the afternoons (or mornings in the US and Austria), then either play the comp in the evening or just go out eating and drinking instead.

The migration of the top professionals to Vegas every spring brings to mind another point - that the calibre of opposition can sometimes be higher in the festival week than during a normal week. My friend Dominic says the best time of year to be in the Vic is when all the great players are in Nevada for the World Series. You can play the recreational players all by yourself! Because of this I coined a phrase 'Festivals are great value, provided that you don't go to them'. I have missed many this year. I quite enjoyed the summer one at the Vic, as there were #250 hold'em games several times during the week. The autumn one had no such games, so I didn't go in as much.

The week before last, Brighton had a festival. I had told everyone beforehand that it would be a big week for me, as I intended to stay in a hotel there and play most nights. When it came to the crunch, I only went twice. On the first night, the organisation of the cash action was so bad that I considered not coming back. The game I got into was far worse than the usual line-up there. I was looking at several other professionals who had all been eliminated early from the competition.

I've decided that I am only going to this year's Master Classics in Amsterdam for three nights. I will take a shot or two at getting into the biggest event (?3,000 No Limit Hold'em) through the one-table satellites and if it doesn't work out then I will treat it as a purely social trip and go out with friends from Europe and America. I can't see the point of playing the pot limit omaha cash games, even though the standard is poor, as I can't face seeing the house take ?20 out of every pot. Once you have gotten used to the lower rake and faster pace of online play, you feel that you have moved on and don't need to be conned like that any more.

The ultimate manifestation of this was when I was at home playing on Pokerstars and found myself playing David Colclough. Nothing strange about this, except that I knew for a fact that David was in Dundee for its festival. I asked him how he was playing online while up there for the festival. He explained that he had taken his laptop to the hotel and was able to pay a fixed fee for internet use. I asked him why he wasn't playing the cash games in the casino, which was 100 metres from his hotel and he replied 'I can't bear getting only 12 hands per hour any more'. I can't think of anything that illustrates the futility of most festivals than that.

I still want to travel around to play. My mind needs variety, but I hope that the clubs start to realise that they need to get better at generating cash action during the festival weeks. Most do a bad job of it. Amsterdam is terrible. You need to hire a private detective to find the person who is managing the cash game lists. Empty seats go untaken for ages or are taken by people not on the list who merely happen to be passing by. It's a total joke.

So there you have it. I'm sceptical of their value. But if you want a change of tune and to read a love letter about the tournament circuit, check out www.pokerpages.com, www.pokerineurope.com, www.thehendonmob.com or just about every other poker site in existence.

A bittersweet moment.
I had a moment of pleasure and pain on Sunday. I was driving down to Brighton to play in the 7-card stud tournament and was listening to Radio 4 when the announcer declared that the next programme would be 'Amongst the unbelievers' - a show featuring well known atheists talking about their lack of religious belief.

I can claim to have had some input here. A friend of mine works for BBC Radio. We have talked many times about the dangers of religion and some of my atheist arguments prompted her to pitch the idea of a programme about atheists to Radio 4. It was accepted. While it's a welcome counterpoint to the supernatural touchy-feely drivel of Thought for the Day ('Yes, God does nothing to help the sick, the starving and the war-torn, but isn't that a beautiful sunset'), the final product is different to what she originally envisaged.

The show I heard was the last of three. The previous two had featured one atheist raised as a Jew and one raised as a Christian. The last show featured a non-believer who grew up in the Muslim world. That's the good news. The bad news is that it was Tariq Ali. He started off quite well, explaining that his atheism came through instinct rather than through philosophical inquiry. He explained how Mullahs were regarded with suspicion when he was young, rather in the way that Chaucer portrays monks in his tales. He speculated on why, unlike Judaism and Christianity, Islam had not undergone a 'reformation'. This is a horrible clanger to drop. It was quite clear from the context of everything else that he said that he meant 'enlightenment'. I know that my friend's blood boiled when she heard this. There is a huge difference.

But what incensed me was when he dived off the deep end and starting describing the 1991 Gulf War as the 'Third Oil War'. He then explained that the 1967 Six-day war was really 'the Second Oil War'. I don't think he elaborated on what the first one had been, so I was left free to guess. The War of Jenkins' Ear? The War of the Spanish Succession? They all have about as much relevance to oil as the 1967 war.

So while I can take some pleasure in having planted the germ of an idea, I am nevertheless a bit depressed to realise that in some small way I have helped give this moron a platform for his left-wing rantings.

Eureka!
For some months now, I have been getting increasingly annoyed at the negative reporting of the situation in Iraq. Most of it seems to lack any sense of historical perspective. I have waited and waited for the mainstream news organisations to attempt some sort of comparison between the situation of Iraq in 2003 and that of Germany in 1945.

None has been forthcoming so I have had to rely on my memory of various historical documentaries to recall that the Germans resorted to using cigarettes instead of money and that there were stories galore of German women trading sex with Allied soldiers in return for rations. By comparison, the Iraqis have continued to use paper currency and have now got new bank notes without Saddam Hussein's face. I have not heard of any sexual scandals.

But is the good news of Iraqi revival getting through to your television screen? Of course not! The same people who insisted that the Turks would invade the north of Iraq (they didn't), that the Republican Guard would put up a vicious fight (they didn't) that there would be a humanitarian catastrophe (there wasn't), that the final struggle for Baghdad would be a bloodbath (it wasn't), that the National Museum was being looted (it wasn't) are now telling us that we are losing the peace.

I know what's been said. 'We've lost the peace' .... 'Never has American prestige in Europe been lower' ... Instead of coming in with a bold plan of relief and reconstruction, we came in full of evasions and apologies' ... 'The taste of victory has gone sour' .... 'The army kicks the civilians around'.

Oh wait a minute, I'm sorry. That was Life magazine writing about Germany in 1946. You know, the US occupation that led to the longest continuous period of peace in Europe in centuries.

EVEN IF YOU NEVER READ ANYTHING ELSE I EVER LINK TO, PLEASE PLEASE READ THIS:

Click here!

You will see all the same misplaced fears there. Now remember that Iraq now is far better off than Germany ever was post war ... and this is before Bechtel and Halliburton turn up and spend $300 billion!