Who'da thought people who seem otherwise intelligent enough could hold the most mind-bogglingly prejudiced ideas? I was talking to someone the other day and when the subject of Israel's (disgusting in my opinion) war with Lebanon came up, she remarked that she hopes our government doesn't open our doors to refugees from Lebanon because "they are all rude and offensive".

Sheesh. It's bad enough that people might privately believe this, it's way worse that they feel it's acceptable to present it in public. I'm not disputing that there is a social problem with at least some second generation Lebanese boys, but it is jut a sub-culture, like plenty of other troublesome sub-cultures and I don't believe it reflects Lebanon as a nation, and I know that this person in particular has no evidence that it does.

We had an old fashioned pub night the other night (mental masturbation I used to call it) which mostly consists of Tim posing deliberately contrary political views and the rest of us attempting to shoot it down. It lead to the age old question (well, 50-odd year old question) of how to fix the middle east, most especially the Israeli bit of it. Of course, 4 or 5 half pissed people in a pub will be able to resolve this issue, when the diplomats and statesmen of the world have not. After having seen the raving looney behaviour of all factions living in the old city of Jerusalem, I think there is only one hope for long term peace and that is to remove that area from the control of any of the interested parties. To be fair, the Christians are the most looney, followed by the Jews and then the Muslims as it happens, but that probably has more to do with their relative levels of power than anything to do with the people or the religions themselves. I have no idea how we achieve this, perhaps while the Dalai Lama still has nowhere to call his own, we could give it to him. :)

Oh well, I should go back to sorting out my costume for Rock!