The recording of information has, for most of human history, been considered a helpful undertaking. But the National Trust of Britain may have taken our information age’s fixation with facts a smidgen too far. They’ve supplied their staff with GPS systems and the task of, over the next three years, mapping the location of every single flower in 80 of the Trust’s gardens. If this waste of time isn’t a British national tragedy, then the government of Italy, a doctor in Germany, and Lesbians in Greece have got their own national wrecks brewing, covering our embarrassment quotient for the week.
When lesbians aren’t Lesbians
The Lesbians have been around for thousands of years, but over the past few decades they’ve been “suffering psychological and moral rape” by the homosexual community’s co-optation of the term, ‘lesbian.’ This was the public statement of Dimitris Lambrou, the publisher of a religious magazine on the Greek island of Lesvos – Lesbos in its classical spelling, and whose inhabitants are Lesbians.
Lambrou has taken to court the Greek Gay and Lesbian Union and sought an injunction to force the group to stop using the word “Lesbian” in their title (note the capitalization). After winning this case, Lambrou will have the task of waging an assault against the entire English-speaking world.
Court papers filed in the case claim that the government of Greece is so embarrassed by what has become one of the world’s premiere conference centers for lesbian groups that they’ve actually changed the name of the island. For the inhabitants of Lesvos, the lesbian scourge is not only a nomenclature inconvenience, but also a violation of the islanders’ human rights, according to Lambrou.
I hope Lambrou and his Christian friends are successful and that the case will inspire the Hookers and Dicks of America to reclaim their names through litigation. Perhaps even the residents of Hell, Michigan could squeeze a few million from the Catholic Church or Dante’s estate.
Though the Oxford English Dictionary didn’t define the term lesbian as a sexual orientation until mid-20th century, the modern association of Lesbos with lower-case-l lesbians derives from the 7th-Century BC poet Sappho, who wrote love poems to her female students. Lambrou won’t concede even Sappho’s lesbianism, and has used as argument unsubstantiated claims that Sappho committed suicide after being spurned by a man.
This man seems to be surviving without much of a brain, so he probably could do without an appendix and a gallbladder, too.
A freshly plucked appendix, garnished with lemon juice
Most medical schools teach proper the etiquette that if you take a non-essential organ from a man, you properly treat his wounds. Lemon juice, however, is not widely considered in the medical community to be a suitable disinfectant. Tell that to the director- and doctor -at a private German clinic who has been accused of plucking healthy gallbladders and appendices from patients, then treating their gushing, gaping wounds with lemon juice.
Without consent, Arnold Pier would routinely remove an assortment of organs out of his patients while they were undergoing surgery for other matters. Prosecutors said in a statement that they believe he extracted organs to swell profits. And though he is a well known and well respected surgeon, it seems his skills were limited to cutting and didn’t extend so much to post-surgery healing.
Pier bought the clinic in 2006 after it was facing almost certain dissolution from lack of financing. Perhaps the meager budget was the reason for the scant attention paid to hygiene and the substitution of relatively cheap lemon juice for more expensive, and logical, industrial-strength disinfectants.
Seven patients have died at the incompetent doctor’s hands, and he faces charges of manslaughter and grievous bodily harm resulting in death. Three of the doctors who will also be charged by prosecutors are still actively cutting open patients. Incredibly, the clinic remains open for business, though repeat clients are rare these days.
In the good old days, when people respected each other, only those who crossed the Don got their organs involuntarily taken out.
Petulant Italian government publishes every citizen’s tax returns online
Everything I need to know about Italy, I learned from The Godfather. Moral of the story: The whole country is populated by angry, vindictive, and violent gangsters. So it comes as no surprise that Italy’s national tax office found it prudent to post the personal information of all Italian taxpayers on its website. A massive backlash has since forced the government to take all the returns down.
Did somebody claim financial insolvency as a reason not to pay his protection money? Good thing the Agenzia delle Entrate, Italy’s IRS equivalent, took the effort to alphabetize and arrange by municipality the names, addresses, birth dates and tax returns of every Italian citizen for the internet savvy mob boss to peruse at his leisure.
Of course, easy retrieval by shiftless racketeers wasn’t the government’s intent in posting the tax returns. Officially, publication was in keeping with the EU’s directive on financial transparency, as well as a move to preempt tax evasion and other money crimes.
The newly-elected centre-right government has publicly labeled this move as “an act of revenge” on Italian citizens, a nasty outgoing gesture by the centre-left against the Italians who voted in large numbers last month to oust the left from office.
While the tax office claims the move was in keeping with regulations from Italy’s privacy watchdog, Francesco Pizzetti (the head of the watchdog) claims his group was never approached with the idea.