RATFILE ARCHIVE No1

This page is one of several for my older musings

Animal rights again.

May 3rd, 2002

I read a statement somewhere written by my young friend Genghis. He commented that after spending the better part of 5 minutes yesterday morning, debating the issue with another, they came to the conclusion that animals didn't deserve rights because they were stupid!

Aha! An interesting viewpoint if ever I heard one! The criterion for granting or withholding rights is to be the level of intelligence is it? If stupidity disqualifies animals from being worthy of rights, then why are there human rights?

Can anyone point to the cornucopia of vileness going down in various parts of the world and tell me these are the actions of intelligent beings?.......Thought not.

Reinvention and Renewal(sort of)

March 21st, 2002

Reinvention and retrenchment, two sides of the same coin perhaps. The last week has brought to an abrupt halt my rat wheel existence. Three jobs down the crapper, and now I struggle with twin demons, freetime and barely breaking even. The former is largely absorbed by job hunting, the latter means my belt is tightened to the last notch.

Sleep has been the real gainer in this reconfigured life. I'm out like a light eight hours or more a night for the first time in five years. Each day I awake with body stiffened from unaccustomed disuse. I'm like a jogger forced to stop, and aching after the event.

The South Pole is melting, we have a Labour Government that would countenance the use of nuclear weapons in warfare, and concurrently is agonising over whether or not to ban foxhunting. I'm mildly surprised that someone among their number hasn't proposed that we nuke the foxes, or the hunters depending on which side of the divide they sit side saddle. This from the PM's own mouth; a former paid up member of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise that I am compelled to focus on my own travails so much. I'd doubtlessly be foaming at the mouth more rabidly than the twisted sub-humans that take their pleasure in trivial pursuit of small red dog like creatures.

I'll survive, I'm slowly filling in the gaps in my schedule. Wish I felt more confident about the planet. If only those who lead us like lemmings could fill the gaping chasms in their Swiss cheese brains with reason and logic so easily.

Of Bankers and Brunettes in Boots

March 13th, 2002 (first of two stories)

The Clarion Hotel Bar is on a cusp; the edge of a sleaze filled scuzz-hole of lingerie pubs and nightclubs catering to the needs of sad bastards. Through the bay window, a relentless flow of office workers dodge and weave each seeking to outdo the last in acts of rudeness and mutual inconsideration.

On Tuesday at 6.40, the Blackrat is on his third Carlsberg. Not yet definably drunk, but sleep deprivation and being flayed on the gristmill for two harrowing days will render anyone unto slurring mode with but a minimum of help from Denmark's finest. He'll be in the Sheep just after 7 for a session with Purpledemon, and a visiting Slack-bladder who is in the city for a few days of recreation.

Across the mostly deserted bar, a couple padded their converging paths across the rippled carpet to a corner rendezvous. She would be about twenty, a pretty brunette in leather boots. He is a typical burnout, a middleman. Middled in age, in management probably too, wedged in the corner of some office, now ensconced with a woman surely no older than the daughter he might by some miracle of nature have managed to produce. His marriage is what some refer to as an in-house divorce perhaps. A wife, who endures him as an irritation, the money supply that should be milked but not heard. He in turn finds solace in pulchritude. Money can't buy you love, fool, but she will suck you dry anyway in more than one sense of the word.

So, when did things go to shit with the domestic goddess then Mr. Suit? I might manage to experience some degree of sympathy for you except that I'm about as likely to pay for sexual gratification as gnaw off my own foot. You are an investment banker by the look of you. So go invest fool! Put some of the passion you pour into your client base and incessant oiling up to the area manager into your marriage.

Probably about ten years too late for that though. Your wife is likely as not in bed with the tradesman from the corner store who seems to be perpetually on call. If he isn't rewiring her fuse plugs, then he will be polishing up his jump lead in readiness to harpoon her once again like a worn out flabby whale.Tiring of the spectacle, Blackrat ordered another Carlsberg and wondered whether Purple D would like his latest story or not.

What is the Point, Rat?

Why do you bother Rat? Incessantly posting these rambling discourses on a web-site that has less than a thousand readers. I've been asked that before. It's a conscious effort to draw attention to the evils of the world while keeping a firm handle on the essential beauty of life.

Marx wrote of philosophers interpreting the world, but argued that the point was to change it. I don't claim any monopoly on political acumen, I'm ignorant and I readily admit it. Nor even have I a remarkably broad understanding of philosophy. I just set down my feelings, make people angry or get them thinking. Perhaps one of you out there is the 100th monkey who will wash a potato in the saltwater of reason before taking a bite.

Kennedy urged us to "Ask what you can do for your country." So I ask you to consider what we can do for the world. Alone we are all like the Blackrat tapping away on his battered PC, gnawing in frustration at his own wrist just as eagerly as he worries the manacles that chain him to this thankless life.

Together we can spark off each other; ultimately we may rise to the occasion and just conceivably make a difference. A dreamer am I? Indubitably, but I live in hope as others might pray that we will all wake up from this slumber land of unremitting hurt and grief before it's too late to matter anymore.

The Rat and Racism

March 9th, 2002

The Blackrat returned to the nest from foraging among the filth and litter that the kindly humans left out for his sort to enjoy. The sewer gods had been kind, for a whole box of Cohiba cigars had come his way. He went online, and discovered that one of the web sites that he visited from time to time was infested with racists. At least according to his human friend Herby.

Racism? He often had trouble with the human's strange convoluted language, particularly the multiple meanings of their words. Race? Wasn't that where they all had fun running around a track and the fastest won a prize? Yes, that was it. Trouble with competition is that the losers tend to cast around for someone to blame and never actually accept that they could be the ones that need to sharpen up their act. So racism must be blaming others for your own shortcomings. Humans were so silly, he thought as he puffed contentedly on a delightful little cigar.

He observed, not that it really mattered to him, that Mrs. Rat was in fact from the Orient. Even so, her skin tone was well within the boundary of what even the racists would deem white. He recalled reading about a particularly retarded clan of humans in a place called South Africa when the Japanese were dubbed "honorary whites" during a visit. The government there had decreed that only the pale ones could vote. When they finally came to their senses, he remembered the result was the election of Nelson Mandela, surely one of the most outstanding leaders of the last century.

The Blackrat sniffed at the sunlight. Humans with the white skin seemed the keenest to disport their flabby selves under the sun, many appeared to hanker after the darker tones of those the racists deem inferior. Most of them seem to end up red rather than brown he noted with some amusement.

How could one group of humans be better than the rest anyway? As far as he could tell, they all seemed to be pretty well equally adept at fouling their nests, all were wasteful creatures who went on diets in one part of the world while many starved in others. He snuggled up to Mrs. Rat and tried hard to understand why anyone felt the need to put each other in categories and make judgments based on skin or fur colour. Then what did he know of these civilised and educated humans? He was after all only a rat.

What is Intelligent Life?

February 21st, 2002

Doctor Roger Angel, as his name suggests is one concerned with the heavens. Or more precisely, the probability that alien astronomers have already listed our little world as teeming with life as a result of their investigations. This same Dr. Angel believes it will be no more than 20 years until we are able to identify those planets on which life exists.

There is one little drawback that the Blackrat noted perusing the article he found while searching for the Helltown Observer not long ago. The aforementioned alien boffins will no doubt be seeking intelligent life. They will surely have received our news broadcasts, much as in the movie "Contact" and been able to surmise much from them. The "Arial" bomber of Israel, pounding the positions of Palestinian civilians for one thing. Or the recent daisy cutter onslaught in Afghanistan. They would go on to review the history of religious wars, or peruse the Internet shopping pages perhaps and see for themselves the rapacious desecration of our world in the name of mindless consumerist greed. In short, they will have by now surmised that there is nothing remotely intelligent about the life on this planet and be looking elsewhere to establish their close encounters of the third kind.

The Blackrat concluded his ET musings with a lighted Cohiba in hand. He glumly pondered over a more likely scenerio out there in the Universe. One where there are probably far more planets that formerly were capable of supporting life than actually still manage to continue doing so. He further surmised that unless there is radical change down here it won't be so long before the Earth could well become one of them.

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