Requirements of the law

"European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent."

 This warning appears in the editing functions of this blog and I'll be honest, I never really paid any attention to it. This bit of legal argle-bargle, to quote the late Justice Scalia, was just another example of the usual boilerplate nonsense that you have to expect in an increasingly bureaucratic society, something that the mind dismisses without ever having processed the information in the first place.  Now that I have noticed it, however, it seems more than a little presumptuous, doesn’t it? First, there is the question of sovereignty: can the European Union, which by its very name is clearly located in Europe, order me, a citizen of this our Great Republic, to do anything?  Second, how do I know which of my visitors are from the European Union and which are not? I am not some international Internet traffic cop who has the time and the energy to keep up with the people who come here and then question them about who they are and where they come from. Strange as it may seem to the European Union and the, I assume, very well paid paper pushers who devised this rule, I have an actual life here in the United States of America and that this actual life requires the majority of my time and attention and does not require me to pay attention to the European Union or its strictures about cookies and visitors.  Third, as to the question of consent, I wish to point out to the Eurodrone bureaucrats in Brussels who are behind the aforementioned bit of legal argle-bargle that nobody is forcing anyone to read The Passing Parade—the management of this blog can barely get the writer who provides the content here to write for the damned blog—and so the question of consent is largely moot, unless, of course, said Eurodrones are demanding that I get the reader’s consent, in which my response is that you can go kiss my royal Irish ass, guys.

However, in the spirit of international amity, I will point out that The Passing Parade is not terribly fond of cookies, but that we do have a very nice pineapple upside down cake that my mother makes from scratch and that on occasion we will indulge in some freshly made gourmet doughnuts from the new place across the street from the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread.  If you are ever up this way, I invite you to drop in and share a doughnut, unless you are intent on getting me to follow European Union law, in which case I will call the police and have you removed from the premises. Thank you for your time and attention.

Still thinking

These last few days I have been getting strange notices from someone named Andrew giving me all sorts of technical information about this blog that I really didn’t ask for, which leads me to suspect that our congenial host is getting tired of my ongoing battles with writer’s block and is letting me know that I either get snapping and cracking with my next bit of worldly wisdom or they are going to take The Passing Parade away from me. And we wouldn’t want that, would we? No, we wouldn’t. On the other hand, dispensing worldly wisdom requires that you have worldly wisdom to dispense, and since I don’t have any, I am more or less up the metaphorical creek without an outboard engine (I’m sorry, but I don’t paddle. I just don’t).  So what to do?  Well, I could comment on the world situation, but there are many people who can do that much better than I can and, let’s face it, the world situation is crappy, largely because the world situation is always crappy.  That’s just the way things are. A century ago, World War I was in its third year, the century before that Europe was putting itself back together after twenty-five years of war with France, and a century before that Europe was putting itself back together after fourteen years of the War of the Spanish Succession, which was a big hit with the ruling classes who cared about who got to be the King of Spain; the people who had to fight the war really didn’t care one way or the other, which is the way most wars are, you know. Does anyone, other than the Spanish, really care who the King of Spain is? No, I don’t think so, and my guess is that most Spanish people do not care either, except to check out what his wife (who is really good-looking) is wearing that week. Anyway, given how things have gone for the past three hundred years, it is a good bet that a hundred years from now that the world situation will still be crappy. So why bother talking about it?

I suppose I could talk about politics or about social mores, but I am not a politically inclined person; one of my deepest held beliefs is that wanting to run for political office should disqualify the candidate from having that office; and I am, as a person, horribly unsocial to the point of being asocial.  I am not antisocial—I understand that humans, being primates of the biological and not the religious type (unless, of course, you happen to be an actual primate of the religious type, in which case both categories apply to you. And while I have your attention, Primate, could you please explain to me why Ireland, which is not the biggest place in the world, gets two Roman Catholic primates while the United States, which is a fairly large place, doesn’t have one at all. Hardly seems fair, if you ask me), need the society of other humans or we risk madness or worse, enjoying peanut butter and liverwurst sandwiches.  I also see no reason why I should take advantage of the Vampire State’s retirement system for the perennially antisocial, which involves three bland meals a day, sharing one’s room with the not terribly nice, and unfashionable bracelets. No, I am asocial, which means that no matter how much you would like to share my company, I’d prefer that you go somewhere else. I’m just like that, I fear.  Having said that, please rest assured that I am trying to think of subjects you would find interesting to write about and that at some point I will have something worth looking at here. And I would like to thank you again for your continued support.